The Orphan Factory (The Orphan Trilogy, #2) (7 page)

Standing directly behind Naylor, Nine looked out at his stunned audience over his hostage’s shoulder. Kentbridge and the other orphans stood directly in front of him. Behind them, seated along one wall, were the Omega founders and staffers whose number included Marcia Wilson, Nurse Hilda and Doctor Pedemont.

“Listen up, you sick bastards,” Nine shouted triumphantly at the adults. “You’re going to give us our freedom!” He looked pointedly at his fellow orphans, expecting them to join him. Only Twenty One, the emotional boy who had sobbed himself to sleep the previous night, joined Nine. The others remained rooted to the spot alongside Kentbridge, including Seventeen who shook her head. Undeterred, Nine kept his knife at Naylor’s throat.

Kentbridge cautiously approached Nine. “Don’t do anything stupid, son.”

“Free us now, or you’ll be searching for another director.” Nine pricked Naylor’s neck with the knife. Its point drew blood. Naylor appeared close to collapsing.

“How far do you think you’ll get?” Kentbridge asked. “Even if you get out of Riverdale, or Chicago, or Illinois, we have you microchipped, remember?” He pointed to Twenty One. “And what about him?” Kentbridge glared at the younger orphan who wilted under his master’s gaze.

For the first time, Nine felt a stab of apprehension. He glanced sideways at Twenty One and cursed the microchip Omega had embedded in the forearm of each orphan.

“Even if you performed a miracle and escaped for a while,” Kentbridge continued, “we’ll catch Twenty One and he’ll pay for your transgressions as well as his own.”

Defeated, Nine lowered his knife and released Naylor. Two burly staffers leapt on Nine and wrestled him to the floor. Doctor Pedemont then jabbed a needle into Nine’s shoulder to quash the rebellion once and for all.

Strangely, the doctor kept jabbing him in the shoulder with the needle.

Nine opened his eyes to discover his friend, Ten, tapping him on the shoulder. “You’re going to be late for breakfast, sunshine.”

Looking around wildly, it dawned on Nine he’d been dreaming.

“Can’t afford to be late this morning,” Ten added as he watched Nine climb out of bed and pull the neuromagnetic helmet off his head.

Nine tried to put the bad dream out of his mind, but it wouldn’t go away. He pondered its meaning for a second, before noticing Ten was still watching him. The orphanage’s resident joker grinned at him mischievously. Nine wondered how he could almost always conjure up humor out of their miserable existence.

“Our Omega founders are visiting today,” Ten mimicked Kentbridge’s voice as he quoted their master almost verbatim. “We’ll need to put on a darn good show for them!”

Despite his depressed state, Nine couldn’t help but burst into laughter.

11
 

In the Pedemont Orphanage’s basement, the children performed various demonstrations for the benefit of the Omega Agency’s twelve founding members. These were designed to display the youngsters’ superior skills and intellects.

The orphan prodigies had been split up into groups by Kentbridge who orchestrated proceedings, ensuring everything ran like clockwork.

Nine was one of a group of six who played chess in pairs. These were rapid-fire matches known as
Lightning Chess
in which entire games were completed in ten minutes or less – an achievement only possible because of the personal tuition provided by two chess grandmasters recruited by Omega. Some of the moves were completed so quickly they were a blur to the eye of any onlooker.

Other small groups of orphans demonstrated skills ranging from mastery of languages to memory exercises to the solving of complex mathematical equations.

The agency’s founders circulated around the basement, closely watching the various activities. Naylor, who was one of Omega’s twelve founding members, accompanied the guests. Playing the role of host, he was determined the ruling council’s annual visit would be a total success.

Between chess moves, Nine had one or two seconds to observe the man who had featured in his dream of only a few hours earlier. He couldn’t help noting Naylor strutted around like he was a Roman emperor. Nine despised the Omega director and wished he really was holding a knife to his throat.

Completing a chess move that put his opponent in check, Nine glanced over at Kentbridge, Marcia Wilson, Doctor Pedemont and Nurse Hilda whom he could see were all very tense. They were obviously eager to impress the VIP’s. Kentbridge in particular wanted his young charges to put on a good show.

Nine turned his attention to the Omega founders for the first time. He noted they looked at him and his fellow orphans as if they were robots or performing seals at best.

Among the agency’s twelve founders present were a member of the British Royal Family, an oil executive, a media tycoon, a senator and a pharmaceutical billionaire. All were American males, except for the British Royal, an attractive middle-aged lady. Together, they had established the ultra-secret Omega Agency in the Seventies with the sole intention of world domination.

Their modus operandi revolved around placing personnel of their choosing undercover in various government departments, intelligence agencies and major corporations. It was anticipated these moles would one day allow Omega to steer global affairs to help achieve the agency’s ends and establish a New World Order.

To achieve this NWO and expand the super-secret Omega Agency, the founding members knew they needed to create enormous wealth in the quickest possible time. The easiest way to do that, in their view, was to siphon as many mineral riches as they could out of Third World countries. It was an age-old practice, tried and tested, but never before attempted on the enormous scale Omega was gearing up for.

Everything revolved around the Pedemont Project. If the orphans could reach their ultimate potential, collectively they would be Omega’s greatest asset by the start of the 21
^st
Century, if not before. Operatives of this ilk, with their superior genes and unprecedented education, had never been seen before.

Omega’s ruling council felt certain each of the orphans would return their investment a thousand fold.

Naylor led the founders to a group practicing linguistic skills. These orphans were speaking fluent Spanish. Kentbridge quickly joined the group and switched the conversation to Norwegian. The orphans’ Norwegian was as flawless as their Spanish. In the next few minutes, they displayed fluency in more than a dozen languages ranging from such diverse dialects as Vietnamese and Swahili to Hebrew and Russian.

At a nod from Naylor, Doctor Pedemont stepped forward, interposing himself between the founders and the children he’d created.

“Our orphans exist on the frontiers of modern science,” the doctor said proudly. “They each have two more chromosomes than the average person. For all intents and purposes, they are post-humans. Superior in every way to the rest of the population.”

Nearby, Nine strained to hear Doctor Pedemont above the orphans who were still demonstrating their linguistic skills. His inattention to the chess board before him almost saw him lose. He recovered in time and soon had his opponent’s King under threat.

Bill Sterling, one of the Omega founders and one of the world’s most celebrated computer software designers, looked critically at the orphans. The bespectacled, thirtysomething gent shifted his beady eyes to Doctor Pedemont. “How are the clones coming along, Doc?”

“We are getting there,” Doctor Pedemont replied hesitantly.

Through putting his inquisitive nature to good use, Nine had learned he and his fellow orphans were but the first batch of orphans Omega had planned. There would be five additional batches, all clones of
the originals
as the first group were referred to. As Omega had lost access to the Genius Sperm Bank, which stored the deposits of many of the world’s most intelligent men, it had been decided the only way to create equally brilliant orphans was by cloning the existing ones. The plan was to create five clones of each orphan so there would eventually be one hundred and fifteen replica orphans.

Although human cloning did not yet officially exist, the reality was it had been happening in secret laboratories since the 1950’s. It was an example of the wide gulf that separated official science from suppressed science. Like almost every other important scientific breakthrough, the technology was withheld from the public by government and private organizations which had long since been conducting cloning for their own agendas.

Once the orphans were cloned, the intention was each original would teach their own replica selves everything they knew. Essentially, the orphans would act like older brothers and sisters to their own mirror selves.

“It’s a complex procedure, Bill,” Doctor Pedemont added, “and it will take a little more time to perfect.”

Sensing Sterling and the other founders weren’t totally satisfied, Naylor interjected. “The main thing is these kids here.” Naylor pointed to the orphans as if they were merchandise on a shop floor. “Once they’re adults we’ll have the finest team of operatives, spies, assassins or, indeed, all of the above, on the planet. Beyond that, any clones will simply be gravy for us.”

Still eavesdropping, Nine observed Naylor and the others spoke as if he and his fellow orphans weren’t even in the basement. Not for the first time that day, his thoughts turned to escaping from the orphanage. He thought of Helen momentarily and suddenly remembered she had left Riverdale. Nine quickly pushed her from his mind, for it was too painful otherwise.

“Your move,” his opponent said, bringing him back to the present.

Nine moved his Queen to within one move of checkmating his opponent, Eight, a pretty Asian girl. While Eight sought a solution to her latest dilemma, Nine looked around at the other orphans. He instinctively knew none of them shared his thoughts of breaking free from the Pedemont Project that so dominated every single aspect of their lives. Even though they were already trained killers and arguably the equal of most adult operatives in the field, they appeared totally accepting of their lot.

The ninth-born orphan switched his attention to the senior Omegans in the basement. Of the sixteen present, only Kentbridge and Marcia had been trained in combat, while Nine and his fellow orphans amounted to twenty three fighting machines. He knew if they had the will, they could easily overpower their masters and take control of the orphanage.

Slowly, Nine came to the realization that he alone had the desire for freedom and the balls to act on it. Only he had that spark of independence and he knew if he didn’t act on it quickly, he’d lose that spark and become as submissive as his fellow orphans.

It’s now or never
.

He had no idea how he could do it alone. They’d been taught it was impossible to flee from the orphanage. Accept your fate, Kentbridge had always told them. Given the far-reaching tentacles of Omega and the microchip implants in each orphan, Kentbridge’s logic was hard to argue with.

Nine couldn’t accept the prospect of forever being a number. He had to attempt something. He’d rather die trying than remain an Omega slave.

12

The Omega founders seemed satisfied – for the moment at least. They indicated they’d seen and heard enough, and a relieved Naylor led them from the basement. 

Behind them, Kentbridge busied himself organizing the orphans for their day’s lessons. “C’mon people. Move it. We have a full day’s work to cram into half a day.”

Nine and the other orphans seated themselves before a whiteboard in one of the basement’s partitioned-off lecture rooms. Kentbridge reappeared moments later in the company of one Professor Charles Lidcombe, an elderly, bearded gentleman whose field of expertise was history. As part of their classical education, he had been lecturing the orphans for the past seven years.

As with all outside tutors brought in to lecture the orphans from time to time, the professor understood he must never mention the orphanage, or what went on within its walls, to anyone. Not that he knew much about it or its orphans. Nevertheless, he was under no illusions what could happen to him if he so much as mentioned the orphanage to anyone. Naylor had made it clear he could have a very serious accident.

Without preamble, Professor Lidcombe launched into a lecture on the history of war and military strategies dating right back to Alexander the Great. 

“Alexander never lost a battle despite often being at a numerical disadvantage,” the professor said. The orphans hung on his every word. Of all the lecturers recruited by Omega to instruct them in a multitude of subjects, Professor Lidcome was one of their favorites. Dry and humorless though he was, for Nine and many of the orphans he brought history alive.

The professor didn’t miss a beat as Doctor Pedemont and Nurse Hilda entered the lecture room carrying the familiar trays of phials. As unobtrusively as possible, the pair circulated among the orphans with practiced ease, dispensing the phials to each. And one by one the orphans ingested their afternoon dosage of White Gold Powder without hesitation.

So usual was this three-times-a-day routine that Professor Lidcome continued his lecture as if the doctor and nurse weren’t even in the room. Marker in hand, he sketched an intricate flanking technique Alexander used in some battles. “No other general in history can claim so many victories.”

As the White Gold dissolved under their tongues, not one of the orphans gave the substance a second thought. They’d been taking the powder all their lives and gave it no more consideration than they gave drinking water or breathing air.

Doctor Pedemont, however, remained fascinated by the extraordinary substance even though he had been working with it for over a decade. He knew it as
ORME, or Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements, a complex concentrate of chemical elements. The non-scientific name White Gold Powder referred to the fact that when processed its appearance was reminiscent of cocaine powder, although it was many times more expensive than cocaine, and even gold for that matter.