The Orphan Factory (The Orphan Trilogy, #2) (37 page)

Of average height and very average appearance, thirty-six-year-old Milburn was so inconspicuous she was one step away from being invisible. That had stood her in good stead: a sharp brain and bulldog determination combined with an ability to remain unnoticed all contributed to her reputation for being one of Washington State’s most respected private investigators.

Milburn was forced to use the stairs to the building’s fifth floor as the elevators were under repair. She carried a bulging leather briefcase in each hand. The cases contained papers relating to an investigation on one of Seattle’s top judges – an enquiry so sensitive she’d not yet mentioned it to anyone.

On arrival at her floor, she strode brusquely along the corridor leading to her apartment. She glanced at her watch as she walked. It was not yet four o’clock. She’d left work early to study the contents of the briefcases in the privacy of her home.

Milburn unlocked her apartment door and stepped inside. A quick inspection of the neat, one bedroom apartment confirmed it was as she’d left it. A faint musty smell, pleasantly reminiscent of camphor, was testament to the fact the occupant left the place closed up for long periods. Milburn was a workaholic who spent considerably more time at work than at home.

The P.I. dropped her cases on the carpeted floor of the living room and walked to the nearest window, as she always did, to admire the view of Seattle, or
Jet City
as she called it. It wasn’t often she got to see the view by day as she usually left for work before dawn and returned after dark.

Across the street, hugging 4
^th
Avenue’s busy sidewalk, was the splendid Fairmont Olympic Hotel. Milburn never tired of looking at this
grande dame
of Seattle’s hotels. As she studied its delightful contours, she’d have been perturbed to know she was being observed at that very moment by one of the hotel’s guests. Even if she had sensed it, it was doubtful she’d have spotted anything untoward. The guest was observing her through binoculars that protruded through a narrow gap in the curtains of his fifth floor room.

At that same moment, in the luxurious fifth floor room of the Fairmont, the owner of the binoculars turned away from the gap in the curtains and sat on the edge a king-sized bed.

It was Nine.

The orphan’s right index finger trembled over a red button on top of a black device he held. The radio-controlled device, which was smaller than the palm of his hand, was something Kentbridge had given him to pull off this Seattle assignment.

Feeling out of sorts, Nine put the device down and rubbed his temple. He had another splitting headache and cursed the unfortunate timing, occurring as it did at this moment – the single most important moment of all his training years with Omega. In fact, his current assignment would mark the end of his training, so long as he could complete it successfully.

Nine looked down at the room’s sumptuously carpeted floor and tried to psyche himself up. He reminded himself this was the final initiation he needed to pass before graduating from the Pedemont Project. Kentbridge had promised him once he completed this mission he would be a fully-instated operative. As such, he would be sent all over the world to carry out assignments for the Omega Agency.

For some reason, that still didn’t make him want to press the button on the device that remained next to him on the bed. He didn’t know whether the hesitation was due to his conscience, or the continued throbbing in his head which almost made him feel faint.

Nine’s headache wasn’t helped by Kentbridge’s voice, which reverberated in his mind over and over.
Stop procrastinating and complete the mission, Sebastian.
The voice in his head was so loud it was as if his mentor was in the hotel room with him. The orphan knew Kentbridge was back at the orphanage in Chicago, waiting to receive confirmation the mission had been completed, but still the voice persisted.

Nine touched the small ruby attached to the silver necklace he wore and attempted to think things through. He remained in two minds. Part of him wanted to give up and walk away, while part of him was pumped to carry out the mission and move on to international assignments. After all, that’s what he’d been training for his entire life.

Deep down, though, he realized there was actually no decision to make. The decision had been made for him before he was born when his Omega masters had created the Pedemont Project and selected his genes. Nine understood now it was his destiny to become an operative, just as Kentbridge had said. Even if he refused to carry out this mission, his mentor would just keep setting him new assignments until he eventually graduated. 

Fighting hard to calm himself, Nine took some deep breaths. He tried to slow his brainwaves into alpha, just as he’d been taught to do. Gradually, it worked, and even though the headache persisted, it became duller.

The orphan picked up the device again and looked down at the red button, willing himself to press it. 

Kentbridge’s voice still reverberated in his head. This time however, it strengthened his resolve.

An operative is never without fear. He fears as much as anyone else. Yet the operative is able to ignore his fear to complete the mission.

Nine became focused and singular-minded.

He walked over to the window and looked through the gap in the curtains at the apartment building opposite. He was relieved to see P.I. Milburn was still close to the window of her apartment. Using his binoculars, he could see her face clearly.

Finally, he pressed the red button on the black device he held.

A second later, in Milburn’s apartment, her telephone rang. She turned away from the window, picked up the phone and put the receiver to her ear. “Hello?”

The P.I. blinked as a fine jet of some foreign substance shot out from the telephone’s mouthpiece, much like Ventolin from an asthmatic’s inhaler. Her first impulse was to drop the phone. Sensing something terrible was happening, she hastily retrieved it and prepared to dial 911. Before she could dial, her chest constricted and breathing became progressively difficult; her face contorted in pain and blood began trickling from her nose.

Milburn instinctively knew what was happening to her, but could do nothing about it. Even in her distressed state, now only seconds from death, her keen mind processed her situation. As she slumped to the floor, twitching violently, she guessed she’d inhaled some kind of lethal nerve gas. She even guessed, correctly, it was sarin, the extremely toxic gas used so effectively in the Tokyo subway terrorist attack in 1995 and by the Serbs during their ethnic cleansing campaign around the same time.

What Milburn couldn’t guess was who had done this – and why.

As her life ebbed away, the last thing she saw was the two briefcases on the floor nearby.

In the fifth floor room of the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, Nine pulled the curtains across so they were completely open. He had no reason to hide now. There was nothing to connect him to P.I. Milburn’s death – except for the radio-controlled device he’d activated sixty seconds earlier to explode the compressed gas dispenser he’d inserted into the woman’s telephone mouthpiece. Besides, it would be hours, if not days, before anyone found her body.

Mission accomplished, Nine stared into space. It took him a while to comprehend that, at the age of eighteen, he’d just graduated and he’d just killed a person.

The orphan turned his back on the view and walked away from the window. He knew the woman he’d terminated had been investigating the death of a prominent Seattle judge aligned with Omega. Her termination had been ordered by the agency. Unfortunately for P.I. Milburn, she had been getting too close to the truth for comfort, and Nine’s superiors had sent him to shut down the problem. 

As he packed up his gear and prepared to vacate his hotel room, he realized that even after killing somebody he felt nothing.

Nothing
.

He couldn’t believe killing a fellow human being left him feeling no different than swatting a fly or standing on an insect. At the very end, he hadn’t even seen P.I. Milburn as a person. She was just a target.

Nine shook his head in disbelief. Never having killed anyone before, he didn’t know whether it was normal to feel as he did now – numb and totally without remorse. What he did know was he was quite capable of killing again.

As he walked out of his hotel room, suitcase in hand, he wondered whether Kentbridge’s carefully crafted training over the years had desensitized him.

68

Naylor was convening an emergency meeting of the agency’s founders. The venue was the boardroom in Omega’s underground headquarters in rural Illinois.

All twelve founders were present, although Lady Penelope, the British Royal, was attending more in spirit than in the flesh: she was participating courtesy of a live holographic video feed from her estate in Walton-on-Thames, just outside London. The holographic technology made it seem as if she was actually in the conference room. It was only on close inspection that it became evident she was not physically present.

Also in attendance, in accordance with Naylor’s orders, was Marcia Wilson. Given the relatively senior position she still held within the CIA, Naylor had invited her, recognizing she could be helpful in resolving Omega’s current financial crisis.

Up to this point, Marcia had not contributed to the discussion. As the only non-founder present, she knew her place and wouldn’t speak unless spoken to.

Outside the boardroom, all available Omega HQ staff were on duty. Leave had been cancelled and it was all hands to the grindstone inside the ultra-secret, high-tech command facility. Among the hundred and twenty staff present were three Latin America experts and an advisor on the British Monarchy. They would be especially busy before this day was out.

In the boardroom, the mood was grim. Naylor and the others had spent the past hour discussing Omega’s critical financial situation. There was general agreement the organization was on the brink of insolvency. They desperately needed a game-changer if the agency was to survive and achieve its end goal of establishing a New World Order.

Having analyzed their predicament from every possible angle and agreed on a strategy to try to buy some time to get cashflow moving again, they’d turned their attention to a large map of South America, which was spread out over the length of the table they sat around.

“Christ, I hate South America,” Naylor cursed. “It’s the hardest region to conduct any operation.”

Federal Reserve majority shareholder Fletcher Von Pein, his head buried in a classified document, nodded sympathetically. “Remember the Bogotá fiasco,” he said without looking up. He was referring to a botched Omega assignment in Colombia over a decade earlier involving cocaine smuggling into the United States.

“Don’t remind me,” Naylor mumbled. The agency director wasn’t thinking about Colombia or cocaine, however. His focus was on Guyana, the small republic sandwiched between Brazil, Venezuela and Suriname.

Von Pein’s focus was on the document he’d been studying for the past few minutes. Headed
Quamina Ezekiel
, it contained photos and detailed information about the document’s subject, Quamina Ezekiel, a fiftysomething Amerindian Guyanese. It also contained gruesome photos of the Jonestown massacre, Guyana’s mass suicide of 1978 that claimed the lives of over nine hundred followers of American cult leader Jim Jones.

Naylor looked up from the map to the hologram of Lady Penelope whose life-size image was directly across the table from him. “Where do we stand with the family at this point, ma’am?” he asked.

Everyone present knew
the family
he referred to was the British Monarchy, otherwise known as the House of Windsor, which Lady Penelope was distantly related to.

“The family has run out of patience,” Lady Penelope answered as clearly as if she was physically present. “If we cannot destroy this bloody Jonestown element still operating in Guyana, the family will cut all ties with Omega.” 

“I understand.” Naylor returned his attention to Guyana on the map before him. His lazy eye was threatening to start twitching like crazy – as it always did in times of stress. And stressed he was. In less than five seconds, Lady Penelope had confirmed what he and the others already knew: the Omega Agency was a hair’s breadth away from losing the financial support of the British Royals.

Everybody in the boardroom understood the sudden importance of Guyana to the Omega Agency. Recent events, and others not so recent, had conspired to put Guyana to the forefront of their plans to salvage the agency, or to try at least. As the only Commonwealth country in South America, the Republic of Guyana needed protecting. Not for the Guyanese people’s sake, for nobody present gave a rat’s ass about them. Rather, it was about protecting the British Monarchy’s extensive business interests there.

Like most Third World countries, Guyana was susceptible to interference by influential nations. In this case, it was Britain which was intent on capitalizing on the wealth – such as it was – of one of its former colonies.

Every Omegan in the room was also aware that as Queen Elizabeth II remained the Head of State of Guyana, the Monarchy had major involvement in the republic’s industrial and financial affairs. The House of Windsor’s business activities were, of course, under the radar and not reported, just as its operations in larger Commonwealth nations like Australia and Canada were also under the radar.

When he’d received a phone call from Lady Penelope hours earlier expressing concerns about developments in Guyana, Naylor had instantly recognized the opportunity for Omega to put the British Monarchy in its debt. More importantly, he’d come to the conclusion the Guyana mission they were now considering was their one and only shot to save the agency and continue their NWO aspirations.

Along from Naylor, Von Pein finally finished with the file he’d been reading on Amerindian Guyanese Quamina Ezekiel. He passed the file to his fellow founding member, pharmaceutical magnate Lincoln Claver, then stared across the table at Lady Penelope’s holographic form. “I assume there have been other attempts on Ezekiel’s life over the years?”