Free The Orphan Uprising (The Orphan Trilogy, #3) by James Morcan, Lance Morcan Page A

level. Satisfied, he switched on the light and motioned to Naylor to sit down.
    By now, Naylor had recovered some of his composure. As he sat down behind his desk, he looked pointedly at the machine pistol levelled at his gut. “Any shots from that thing will be heard for miles around. My men outside will be onto you like a ton of bricks.”
    “There’s only one man outside,” Nine countered, “and you’ll be dead so it won’t matter a damn to you what anyone else may or may not do to me.”
    There was a long, drawn out silence as the two arch enemies surveyed each other. Scanning the den, Nine’s eyes rested on a small, framed photograph of a young, blonde woman on a bookshelf behind Naylor. The woman seemed familiar. Looking closer, he realized he was looking at Seventeen. What the hell? He guessed the photo would have been taken around ten years earlier. It dawned on him that Naylor must be carrying a torch for his fellow orphan-operative. You dirty, old man . Finally, Nine returned his attention to his captive. “Okay, where is he?”
    Resigned to giving his rogue operative some information, Naylor started talking. “Francis has been taken to one of our medical labs.”
    “The Black Forest lab?”
    “No, we shut that operation down years ago.” Naylor said.
    That made sense to Nine. He guessed Naylor wouldn’t have risked doing anything to prompt him to release the incriminating evidence he’d gathered if the Black Forest lab was still operating.
    “We have secret labs in Greenland and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Naylor continued, “so he’ll be interned in one of those.”
    “Which one?” Nine was losing patience.
    “That I don’t know.” Ignoring Nine’s disbelieving look, Naylor hurried on. “A lot has changed since you were with the agency.”
    “I don’t doubt that, but let’s not pretend you don’t have your finger on the pulse.”
    “The chain of command has shifted.” As Naylor spoke, he slowly opened his desk drawer and reached for the loaded pistol he kept there. “Our operation is now run by Omega splinter groups and other shadow organizations which have links to elite, secret societies.”
    As Naylor’s hand closed around his pistol, Nine leaned across the desk and slammed the draw against the old man’s wrist. Naylor yelped in pain. Nine then reached into the drawer and pulled out the weapon. Extracting the cartridge, he threw the pistol into a wastepaper bin and continued as if nothing had happened. “Exactly where are these labs?”
    “I can show you,” Naylor grunted as he massaged his injured wrist.
    “Okay, but no more tricks. You can’t fool me, so don’t even try.”
    Naylor stood up and walked to another desk that supported a computer. He booted it up, entered his personal password and brought up two files marked Confidential .
    Nine looked on over Naylor’s shoulder as the Omega boss opened the first of the files. It related to the agency’s lab in Greenland and was headed Medical Laboratory #3 . Nine immediately pointed that out to Naylor. “You said there were only two labs.”
    “There are now that the Black Forest lab has been closed,” Naylor said. “The Greenland lab was established while the one in Germany was still functioning.”
    Nine studied his opposite closely. For once, he seemed to be telling the truth. He motioned to Naylor to move over. The old man gave up his seat for Nine who resumed reading, scrolling through the file’s contents at the rate of a page a second just as he’d been taught to do as an operative-in-waiting at the Pedemont Orphanage.
    With every page, his concern for Francis grew. The document contained a litany of medical horrors that ranged from never-before attempted organ and face transplants to unsanctioned cloning procedures and flat-lining experiments. Medical and scientific text was supported by graphic photographs of subjects – children and teenagers – who had been subjected to these experiments.