The Ninth Orphan (31 page)

As Kentbridge drew level with the Renault, t
he driver's door suddenly flew open, catching him side on and knocking him to the pavement. His cell phone went flying. Before Kentbridge could recover, Nine was on to him. A swift kick to the head knocked the older man out. Nine bundled him onto the Renault’s rear seat, then jumped in behind the wheel and took off in a squeal of tires.

Seconds later, Seventeen emerged from the DST headquarters. Her sharp eyes locked on to Kentbridge's discarded cell phone on the pavement. There was no sign of its owner. A young couple nearby were pointing down the street. They looked agitated.

Seventeen approached them and quickly established that a man had been attacked and abducted by a younger man driving a blue Renault. They hadn’t sighted the car’s registration number. Seventeen retrieved the cell phone and ran back inside the building.

Meanwhile, Nine drove onto a motorway leading south-east out of Paris. Nobody appeared to be following him. On the back seat, Kentbridge lay face-down, his hands tied behind his back. Now conscious, his face was cut and bruised. He tested the bonds that secured his hands. They held fast. The bindings Nine had used cut into his wrists, causing his hands to go numb. Nine had employed a knot that automatically tightened if pressure was exerted.
Something else I taught you
, Kentbridge recalled. The pain was unbearable.

“
I can’t feel my hands,” the senior agent said.

The words fell on deaf ears. Nine looked straight ahead as he drove. Kentbridge wasn’t prepared to plead. He’d suffer in silence.

Now that Isabelle had been taken hostage, Nine wanted to give Naylor a taste of his own medicine. He
’
d decided to take Kentbridge to a place where Omega was hiding a dark little secret. There, he hoped he
’
d be able to negotiate Isabelle
’
s freedom
–
and his own for that matter.

The fugitive agent thought of Isabelle as he drove through Champagne, Lorraine and other provinces of eastern France. He was heading for the German border. Nine stopped only to top up the fuel tank from a large can of petrol he’d purchased earlier. By then, Kentbridge had lost all feeling in his hands.

#

With dusk falling, Nine sped along a highway in a remote area of Baden-Württemberg in south-west Germany. Kentbridge still lay face-down in the back. Apart from the odd truck, there were no other vehicles on the road. Pine forests pressed in on either side of the highway.

Kentbridge couldn’t begin to guess why Nine had brought him so far from Paris. Although not exactly sure where they were, an educated guess told him they were in Germany’s Black Forest. Lying on the back seat, he could just make out the tops of conifer trees flashing by for mile after mile.

Finally, Nine drove the Renault into an isolated rest area and stopped out of sight of the highway. He climbed out and stretched to ease the stiffness of a long trip. With his Glock pistol in hand, he opened the rear passenger door and pulled Kentbridge out.

The senior agent, whose hands were still tied, landed face-first on the ground. Nine pulled him to his feet and pushed his former mentor along in front of him, directing him toward the nearby forest. He noted with satisfaction Kentbridge was limping.

“
Where are you taking me?” Kentbridge asked.

“
Just walk.”

Light rain began to fall as the pair entered the forest. They stopped when they were confronted by a four-foot high fence. A sign on the fence read:

WARNING! TOXIC WASTE AREA. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED!

Kentbridge looked expectantly at Nine. Reading his mind, the rogue agent untied the knot that bound the older man’s hands. Kentbridge winced as his numbed hands adjusted to the sudden inflow of blood.

Keeping his pistol trained on Kentbridge, Nine impatiently motioned for him to climb the fence. The senior agent obliged. Although the fence wasn’t that high, it caused Kentbridge some problems.
He was stiff and sore after long hours trussed up like a turkey.

The pair ventured deeper into the forest. Above them, a cathedral-like canopy of trees obscured the sky.

As darkness descended, Nine produced a torch to light their way. They trekked further into the forest. Kentbridge found it hard to make headway in the dense foliage. He stumbled and fell. Without ceremony, Nine lifted him to his feet and shoved him onwards.

#

At the same time, just three miles away, a Jaguar sports car sped along the same highway Nine and Kentbridge had traveled on not long before. Seventeen was behind the wheel. She adjusted the Jag’s windscreen wipers as the rain momentarily intensified.

A laptop sat, open, on the seat next to her. Seventeen periodically glanced at it. Using a combination of satellite technology and video camera surveillance footage that had been relayed to the computer from the various towns Nine had passed through, Seventeen had been tracking him since he’d left Paris. She had also alerted Naylor who was now on his way to the Black Forest by air.

While there were many thousands of blue Renaults using French roads at any given time, the one Seventeen was trailing was the only one that had departed the DST building in Paris at speed. Fortunately for her, that had all been captured on camera. Seventeen knew for sure the Renault’s driver was Nine.
What she didn't know was why he was forcibly taking their superior to Germany and exactly where he was heading.

Seventeen pulled off the highway to check out the rest area Nine had driven into and immediately spotted the abandoned Renault. She parked alongside it, climbed out and approached the Renault cautiously. Gun in hand, she threw open the driver’s door and quickly established no-one was inside the car. Producing a torch, she checked the car’s rear seat and noted blood spots on the upholstery.

A quick reconnoiter of the vicinity confirmed nobody was around. By torchlight, Seventeen spotted fresh footprints leading from the Renault into the forest.

#

Deeper in the forest, Nine and Kentbridge emerged into a small clearing. Nine placed a hand on his former mentor's shoulder. A weary Kentbridge turned and faced his protégé. Nine was tense. Mystified, Kentbridge looked around, but saw nothing unusual.

Soft rain continued to fall. A faint mist descended, adding to the eeriness. Nine put a finger to his lips, indicating they should be quiet. He cautiously signaled for Kentbridge to resume walking. Unsure of what was in store for him, the older man advanced hesitantly.

Through the trees, the darkness was pierced by a narrow shaft of light. Nine pushed Kentbridge toward it. The light appeared to be shining out of the ground. As they approached, they saw it came from a large air vent. Murmured conversation and other sounds of activity also came from below ground.

The pair froze when they almost literally stumbled over an armed guard. The man had his back to them and was less than ten yards away. Motioning to Kentbridge to remain still, Nine crept up behind the guard and employed a sleeper hold to render him unconscious. Glancing back to ensure Kentbridge was where he’d left him, Nine dragged the sleeping man into the cover of the trees then rejoined his prisoner.

Nine and Kentbridge approached the air vent. Their faces were gently lit by the warm glow of light coming from below ground. Nine already knew what to expect. He'd discovered Omega’s dark little secret during an earlier visit.

Peering down through the vent, Kentbridge couldn't believe his eyes: the vent opened up into an underground base occupied by children – boys and girls. No
more than five or six years old, they seemed to be hypnotized and moved around like zombies. As some moved out of sight, others came into Kentbridge’s line of vision. Dozens of them.
The senior agent looked aghast at Nine, then returned his attention to the macabre scene below.

45

“
Remember that Berlin journalist Naylor ordered me to assassinate last year?” Nine whispered. Kentbridge nodded, unable to tear his eyes away from what was unfolding below ground. “He’d discovered this orphanage and was about to file a report to Reuters before I terminated him.” Nine spat on the ground as if to expunge the disgust he felt at his own actions.

Kentbridge tensed as white-coated scientists appeared below. They flashed psychedelic lights into the children’s eyes, putting them into even more of a trance-like state. To his horror, the senior agent noticed the orphans had bizarre defects on their bodies. Some had multi-colored skin; others had adult-like facial hair; one young girl had the face of an elderly woman.

Nin
e went on to explain the notes he’d recovered from the journalist left no doubt Omega was manufacturing a new breed of genetically-superior orphans.

Kentbridge's mind was racing as Nine brought him up to speed. The program had obviously changed out of sight since The Pedemont Project.
Why wasn't I told?
Now, it appeared, the emphasis was on radical medical experimentation.

“
Mother of God!” Kentbridge exclaimed when he recognized two children as clones of two of the original twenty three orphans spawned by The Pedemont Project. The whole venture had
obviously grown into a larger experiment which somehow involved cloning the first batch of orphans.

The pair were clones of Pedemont orphans One and Eleven. The nearest, a Native American boy, was identical to Number One, the firstborn Pedemont orphan. Identical, that was, apart from
a club foot and one yellow eye that appeared to be sightless. The other child, a pretty girl, was identical clone to Pedemont orphan Number Eleven except that her normally pale skin had been turned a permanent golden brown.

Kentbridge gasped as he recognized three more clones.

Looking pitifully at the children below, Nine moved closer to Kentbridge. “The bastards cloned me and all my fellow orphans.”

“
I thought that part of the experiment failed?” Kentbridge recalled attempts to clone the Pedemont orphans years earlier had been unsuccessful.

“
At the time, it did fail. They kept samples of our original cells and bided their time until the science of cloning caught up with their plans.”

Nine didn’t specify who
they
were. He’d assumed they were Omega and hoped Kentbridge could verify that for him.
But judging by his reactions, the senior agent knew nothing about this.

The pair resumed their surveillance of the scene below. They noticed a young boy. Aside from his hunch back, the boy was the spitting image of Nine at that age.

Nine felt saddened by the sight of his clone. It reawakened the horrors of his own childhood. “These kids are lab rats,” he murmured. “They'll never know freedom.”

Kentbridge looked solemnly at Nine.
“I knew nothing of this.”

“
You ran Pedemont for years,” Nine snapped back accusingly. “This is what it led to. You must’ve known!”

Kentbridge shook his head. “This isn't a legitimate Omega operation. The Pedemont Project began and ended with you and your fellow orphans. I never knew this place existed.”

“
I told Naylor about it. Are you trying to tell me he never said anything to you?”

“
Naylor doesn’t tell me everything.” Kentbridge looked back down at the underground orphanage. “I’m certain this is the work of the Bilderberg Group. Most of the bigwigs in the agency are also Bilderbergers,” he said, referring to his Omegan superiors. “Bilderberg pulls the strings of every government and intelligence agency in the Western world.”

Nine had heard whisperings that the secretive Bilderberg Group was effectively
the
World Government, undermining democracy by influencing everything from nations' political leaders to the venue for the next war.

He recalled certain media reports which claimed the Bilderberg Group had such luminaries as Barack Obama, Prince Charles, Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, Tony Blair, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Bush, Sr. and George W. Bush. Losing patience, he shoved Kentbridge to his knees. “I don't care who's running it,” he hissed. “I just want two things – Isabelle Alleget’s freedom and mine.”

“
I can’t help you on any count. I’m an Omega pawn just like you.”

“
You’re nothing like me!” Nine kicked Kentbridge hard in the ribs, winding him. He looked down at the mutated orphans then back to Kentbridge and pointed his pistol at his former mentor’s head. “Call Naylor and tell him to free Isabelle or else I’ll blow your brains out and alert the world’s media to this orphanage.”

Kentbridge, whose face was still lit by the glow of light coming from the air vent, appeared to be concentrating hard. Almost as if he was trying to recall something. As his protégé flicked the safety off the pistol, Kentbridge looked up at him gravely. “Sebastian George Hannar,” he recited. “Activate MK-Ultra Program. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.”

Nine's eyes glazed over as he heard these voice-commands. They appeared to activate some dormant program in his brain over which he had no control.

Noting he now had total coercive influence over Nine, Kentbridge stood up. “Your mission is to give me the weapon and drop to your knees.”