He also studied the exact spot on the floor where he had interrogated Isabelle. The memory of her reading his misplaced airline ticket was all too vivid.
Nine stood motionless when he noticed a self-portrait photo of the exotic Frenchwoman on the wall. His mind was in turmoil as he inspected her gorgeous, yet slightly melancholy face. If he was going to terminate her, this was the perfect time. There were no other options. Providing his scheduled rendezvous with the Chinese MSS agent went as planned, he was due to fly out to the Marquesas Islands the next evening.
There was no point in delaying. If he left Isabelle alive for Kentbridge and the other Omega operatives to interrogate, his safe haven in the South Pacific would no longer be a secret. He knew he may never get another chance like this to disappear and if he didn’t terminate Isabelle right now he might as well just blow his own brains out.
Still Nine hesitated. C’mon you pussy, he chastised himself. Just do the deed then you’re home and hosed. You’ve killed over a hundred people in your life. What’s one more? You’re going straight to hell anyway, so just pull the trigger and you’re a free man.
He turned his face away from the self-portrait of Isabelle and tried to picture her as just another target he needed to terminate. It’s nothing. Just do it. Innocent people die every day. This woman doesn’t deserve to die, but at least she has lived a life. You’ve never lived at all. Nine’s resolve hardened. It’s a necessary evil. Just pull the trigger.
Casting out all doubts from his mind, he reached for the pistol he carried in his coat pocket. From another pocket he withdrew a silencer which he screwed on to the end of the weapon. Without hesitation, he tip-toed to Isabelle’s bedroom door and quietly opened it. He moved soundlessly, like a Ninja.
From the now open doorway, he could hear faint rhythmic breathing that indicated Isabelle was asleep. He was relieved to find his intended victim was alone.
Light from a streetlamp seeped through a gap in the curtains, revealing Isabelle was lying on her side. Her perfectly-shaped face was visible in the faint light.
In three short strides Nine was beside the bed. As he stood over Isabelle, with his pistol aimed at her head, he noticed a framed photograph of a group of young children. It appeared to have been taken at a kindergarten. As Isabelle wasn’t in the photo, Nine assumed she must have taken it. The innocent faces of the children caused him to hesitate.
His previous doubts began to resurface. He found he was sweating and his hands trembled. The normally super-cool operative froze when Isabelle suddenly rolled over in her sleep. Nine found his eyes drawn back to the photo on the wall.
Inexplicably, he began to shake. Emotions that he was normally able to keep a lid on started to well up inside him. Before Nine knew it, he was crying. Tears streamed down his face. He worried something terrible was happening to him, but couldn’t quite make sense of it. He felt as though he was falling into a black hole.
A million thoughts coursed through his mind at breakneck speed. He tried to control them, but couldn’t. Images from his past flashed in and out of his memory like small brain explosions. Images he thought he’d expunged from his mind forever.
Amidst all the confusion, Nine realized he could be having a nervous breakdown. Alarmed by the feelings that welled up from deep inside him, he tip-toed out of the bedroom as quietly as he’d entered.
12
Still weeping, Nine closed Isabelle’s bedroom door and shuffled, zombie-like, through the apartment. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he entered the dining room and sat down at the table. He remained there, in the semi-dark, completely still except for his hands which trembled violently. The stress symptoms he’d experienced outside returned with a vengeance. He was perspiring profusely and his skin now itched more than ever. A rash was beginning to form on his cheek.
Nine still couldn’t work out exactly what was happening to him. The realization he was experiencing some sort of meltdown was frightening. Having had total control over his emotions for as long as he could remember, this sudden loss of control was akin to a nightmare. Added to this was the knowledge he’d failed to terminate Isabelle – the one person who knew his intended destination and who stood between him and freedom.
Nine instinctively knew he could not kill the woman now. Somehow he’d lost his resolve. The ability to terminate someone, without emotion, had deserted him at the most crucial juncture in his life. Because of this, he slowly came to understand that his days were numbered. The gold-for-freedom plan now seemed doomed.
He became even more despondent. You’re just one man, he reminded himself. One lone orphan. What made you think you could ever escape from Omega?
He recalled the time when, as a twelve-year-old, he’d briefly escaped from the Pedemont Orphanage. Tommy hunted you down then and he’s gonna hunt you down again. He hesitated. Tommy. Just thinking of Kentbridge brought so much emotion to the surface. Teacher, protector and mentor to the orphans since birth, Kentbridge was the one who, in Nine’s opinion, had betrayed him the most.
Nine looked longingly at the pistol he held. Slowly, he raised it. His arm felt heavy, as if it were weighed down. Shaking, he released the safety and held the pistol to his head. His finger tightened around the trigger. He stayed like that, frozen, for several minutes.
As he debated whether to pull the trigger, Nine remembered the ruby necklace around his neck. With his other hand, he removed the necklace and stared at the ruby. Once again, painful memories from his youth came flooding back. All the old feelings of abandonment and loneliness resurfaced and threatened to sweep him away.
* * *
Growing up in the Pedemont Orphanage, a nondescript facility tucked away in Chicago’s inauspicious suburb of Riverdale, was no ordinary childhood. For Nine and the other children, there was no such thing as just doing things for fun. Everything had a purpose. That purpose was to accommodate the ultimate agenda of the Omega Agency.
Nine and the others were taught to be entirely self-sufficient. Relying on anyone else was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Without even the minimal level of support provided in the worst orphanages, the twenty three Pedemont orphans had to be friends, siblings and sometimes even parents to each other. As a result, they became a very tight-knit group.
Tommy Kentbridge, who kept an emotional distance between himself and the orphans, was the closest they had to a real parent. As head of The Pedemont Project, Kentbridge’s sole mission was to train them to become the ultimate spies. The senior agent designed an integrated education program that gave his charges all the tools required to master the multi-faceted, complex profession of espionage.
It was a case of nature and nurture with the orphans. Nature, in that Omega had selected perfect genes for them before their births. Nurture, in that Kentbridge was always pushing them to be the best they could be. As soon as they could walk and talk, he gave them activities designed to open up as many neural pathways in their brains as possible.
With the help of virtual reality and biofeedback technologies, the orphans were taught how to guide their minds to reach certain brain frequencies – like Alpha, Theta and Delta – at will. The purpose of slipping into these particular frequencies was to allow the right brain to take over, as opposed to the left-brained consciousness dominant in most people. Whenever the orphans needed to access their higher intelligences, they would enter a daydream and simply intuit the answers. That way, they could bypass thinking, and just know. Within the Omega family, intuition was favored over logical thought patterns.
Wanting his charges to be able to take on various guises, and to become one with the people they were pretending to be, Kentbridge had them study the great character actors of film and theatre. He also taught the orphans the Method style of acting, stemming from Stanislavski’s teachings, as well as traditional British stage techniques incorporating vocal dexterity, body projection, foreign accents and make-up.
To increase their physical prowess, the orphans were taught the martial ar
t Teleiotes, which was an invention of Kentbridge’s. Derived from the Greek word telos, meaning to make perfect and to accomplish, it was a combination of all the Oriental martial arts as well as Western fighting arts like boxing, fencing and wrestling. Kentbridge and the other Omegans considered Teleiotes to be the ultimate martial art.
Speed reading was another subject in this radical education program. In fact, it wasn’t so much speed reading as mind photography – a technique where the practitioner taps into the brain’s innate photographic memory.
The orphans were taught how to use their eyes and open their peripheral vision to mentally photograph the page of a book, magazine or newspaper at the rate of a page per second. Then they’d consciously recall every detail as if they’d read the material at normal, everyday reading speed. Tens of thousands of books, on all manner of subjects, were sent to the Pedemont Orphanage to keep up with the children’s prolific reading habits.
Even at night, their education continued through hypnopædia, or sleep learning. Audio courses played through headphones into their subconscious minds while they slept.
The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields. Whether they were studying the sciences, languages, international finance, politics, the arts or martial arts, they would not stop until they’d achieved complete mastery of that subject. Kentbridge himself had encyclopedic knowledge about almost everything, and expected nothing less from his orphans.
In the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci and history’s other great polymaths, the children were taught how to fully understand anything by using an advanced mental technique where they would simply life their minds into comprehension.
* * *
In the semi-dark of Isabelle’s dining room, as he’d done a million times before, Nine stared at the ruby he held as if it would help him make sense of his unusual upbringing. It never did. He silently cursed that he was a product of The Pedemont Project, for that’s how he thought of himself – a product, not a person.
With the pistol still held to his head, more memories came flooding back to him.
* * *
Throughout his years of study at the Pedemont Orphanage, Nine was the standout student. He began polymathing at a very young age. The other kids had extraordinary IQ’s in the 170 -190 range, but Nine was truly exceptional with an IQ of 203 by his early teens.
Kentbridge took a shine to him and taught him everything he knew. Against his better judgment, he found himself conversing with Nine almost as if the boy were his son. This closeness between teacher and student caused jealousy among the other kids.
The blonde female orphan, Seventeen, was especially envious. This manifested itself in the form of competitiveness. She was always looking for an opportunity to outperform Nine. Even as a young girl, her personality was cold and calculating, and she would do anything to win. Although Nine wanted no part in this intense rivalry, he had little option but to engage in it. Seventeen was always right behind him, looking for a way to prove to Kentbridge she was every bit as good as his favorite protégé.
Her opportunity came during the hunting expedition in Montana when Nine was unable to finish off the wounded deer. Seventeen completed the mission instead.
That was the one and only occasion during their childhood that Nine was bettered by another orphan. Seventeen took it as a personal victory. From that point on, she viewed herself as the best orphan in the program, or at least the equal of Nine. She now realized that although Nine was superior to her in terms of strict espionage skills, he had one weakness that could be exploited: his heart. Nine had sympathy for things Seventeen didn’t care about. He had sensitivities operatives weren’t supposed to have.
* * *
Still seated at Isabelle’s dining table, Nine thought of Kentbridge and wondered who the senior operative had sent to search for him. He imagined one of his fellow orphans would have been tasked with that job – and he had a fair idea who that would be.
Further images from his past came to the fore including the now-blurred faces of all the people – some innocents, some not – whom Kentbridge and Naylor had ordered him to terminate over the years. As the guilt he’d tried to suppress for many years rose to the surface, he felt nothing but self-loathing.
Nine was abruptly brought out of his reverie when he heard the door to Isabelle’s bedroom open. He sat there, immobile, as Isabelle emerged. Yawning, she walked right past him and into the kitchen without bothering to turn the light on. There, she opened the fridge door and pulled out a carton of orange juice. Light from the open fridge momentarily illuminated the kitchen and adjoining dining room.
As Isabelle closed the fridge door, plunging the apartment into darkness again, something briefly caught her eye in the dining room. She turned on a light and screamed when she saw the bearded stranger at her dining table.
The man didn’t react. He remained as still as a statue, which frightened her even more. She screamed again when she saw the pistol which now lay before him on the tabletop. Her first instinct was to run, but she couldn’t move. She could only stand there, as if rooted to the spot.
The Slavic-looking stranger just stared at her. More accurately, he seemed to be looking right through her. Isabelle wondered if he even knew she was there.
13
Nine was first to recover. He quickly placed the ruby necklace back around his neck and motioned to Isabelle to sit in the chair opposite. She remained frozen, like a deer caught in the headlights.
“Sit,” Nine commanded. Maintaining his masquerade, he spoke English in a thick Russian accent that would have fooled a Moscow native.
Still, Isabelle didn’t move. Nine picked up the pistol and used it to motion once more to the chair opposite. Isabelle immediately moved toward the chair.
“Turn off the light,” Nine added, realizing light could draw unwanted attention to the apartment.
Isabelle stopped in mid-stride. Unable to take her eyes off the pistol in the bearded stranger’s hand, she backed up to the light switch and turned it off. In the semi-darkness, she hesitantly approached the table and sat opposite Nine. All she could see of him now was his silhouette. Light from a streetlamp reflected off the barrel of the pistol he still held.
Sensing her fear, Nine placed the pistol back down close to him on the tabletop.
Something about the bearded stranger chilled Isabelle to the bone. She shivered involuntarily then pulled her winter dressing gown tight around her.
For several long moments, neither spoke. Finally, Isabelle could stand it no longer. “What do you want?” she murmured in French.
Nine looked at her uncomprehendingly, pretending not to understand the language.
“What do you want?” she repeated in English. Although her English had strong French inflections, it was perfectly understandable to Nine’s ears.
Nine averted his eyes to the wooden tabletop. He couldn’t trust himself to speak again. Not yet. The fugitive agent needed time to process his inner pain and turmoil – to work out what the hell had just happened to him. He was more certain than ever he was experiencing some sort of meltdown. Possibly a nervous breakdown. He wasn’t sure.
His mind searched frantically for a solution to his predicament. He still couldn’t get his head around the fact that he’d been unable to terminate this woman. What on earth am I going to do with her?
Such questions were giving Nine a headache. He felt like his brain would explode and he was having trouble breathing. It seemed as if there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room. Desperate for fresh air, he grabbed his pistol and stood up. Isabelle recoiled, afraid he was going to shoot her. Ignoring her, Nine lurched to the near window and flung it open. He stood there breathing in the cold, night air.
Isabelle watched him as he fought to regain his self-control. She realized he was in difficulty but, like him, had no idea what the problem was. �
�Do you need help?” she asked, slowly standing up. “I can call an ambulance.” She took a step toward the kitchen.
“No, devotchka!” Nine motioned to her to sit back down. She reluctantly obeyed.
Nine continued taking deep breaths. Eventually, this brought his breathing under control, but did nothing for the pounding in his head. His heart was hammering away, too. Finally, he closed the window and rejoined Isabelle at the table. He noticed she was also shaking. Not sure whether she was cold or fearful, he put the pistol back in his pocket.
Isabelle’s shaking continued. “May I get a blanket?” she asked hopefully.
Nine shook his head. A look of anger flashed across Isabelle’s face. In the semi-dark, Nine sensed rather than saw this. He felt a glimmer of admiration for the woman. For the first time, he thought of her feelings, not just his. He realized she must be terrified, yet despite her terror she had found it within herself to feel anger. As well as impressing him, this pricked his conscience. He immediately forced it to the back of his mind.
As Nine continued to ponder his predicament, he studied Isabelle’s hands. Long and slender, they told him a lot about her. Through years of observing people, he’d learned a person’s hands often reflected his or her personality. Isabelle’s were well-manicured, as expected of a politician’s daughter, and very feminine, too. Her nails were painted white, which contrasted nicely against her caramel skin tone.
But what really interested him was the shape of her hands: they looked resilient. This further supported his growing realization that there was a hidden strength in Isabelle.
“Who are you?” Isabelle suddenly asked, interrupting his thoughts. “What do you want?” Nine remained silent. “What is your name?”
Nine shrugged his shoulders. “I go by every name and no name,” he said at last.
The Ninth Orphan Page 6