The Orphan Uprising (The Orphan Trilogy, #3) by James Morcan, Lance Morcan Read Free Book Online

discarded travel bag in one of the vacant cubicles. It was stuffed full of the former operative’s discarded clothing. A quick inspection of the contents revealed Nine had replaced his shirt, jacket and even his shoes.
    Nine had vacated the restroom ten minutes earlier. Not as himself, but as an elderly man. Five minutes was all he’d needed to effect his new guise. Making full use of the disguise aids he carried on his person and in his travel bag, he could now pass for an eighty-year-old. His smart casual gear had been replaced by grey trousers and matching grey cardigan, which he wore over a white shirt and striped tie; his fashionable slip-ons had been replaced by black lace-up shoes; he wore spectacles, and colored contact lenses ensured his distinctive green eyes were now brown.
    To top off his disguise, Nine walked with a stoop and appeared reliant on a walking-stick he used with practiced precision. It was a telescopic stick he’d secreted into the restroom in his travel bag.
    Cursing, Twenty Three hurried from the restroom and frantically searched the faces of people in the Public Lounge. He didn’t realize it, but he’d looked straight at Nine as he emerged from the restroom earlier.
    While Twenty Three was pursuing a lost cause in the Public Lounge, Nine had already checked himself in again, but this time as a Mister Charles Morris, the fictional resident of a Los Angeles rest home for the aged. And this time he was booked to fly to Honolulu, not Los Angeles, and he was flying Air New Zealand, not Air Tahiti Nui.
    While Nine was anxious to get to mainland America to pick up his son’s trail, he knew Omega would be expecting him to do exactly that. So he’d opted to fly to Honolulu first. It would add a few hours to his flight, but it would help keep Omega off his scent.
    Minutes later, as a frustrated Twenty Three unsuccessfully tried to identify Nine among the passengers boarding the Air Tahiti Nui flight to Los Angeles, the former operative was boarding the Air New Zealand flight to Honolulu.
    Twenty Three realized he’d been duped. Fishing his cell phone from his shirt pocket, he speed-dialed a number. Omega boss Andrew Naylor answered the call. Twenty Three proceeded to deliver the bad news to Naylor. He had to hold the phone away from his ear until Naylor finished shouting at him.
    Meanwhile, aboard the Air New Zealand plane that was now preparing for take-off, Nine allowed himself to be assisted to his Business Class seat by a pretty Maori hostess who was keen to ensure the elderly traveler didn’t have a mishap. Safely seated, he thanked the hostess and smiled to himself: he considered the sacrifice of the empty suitcase he’d handed over at the Air Tahiti Nui check-in counter, and the travel bag he’d left behind, a small price to pay for his anonymity.
    As the Air New Zealand flight took off, Nine had no way of knowing his sleeping son was being stretchered aboard a private jet that was about to depart Honolulu International Airport at that very moment.
     

 
    9
    While Francis and his father were being whisked across the Pacific in separate aircraft, Nine’s former colleague and fellow orphan, Seventeen, was sitting down for dinner with her elderly grandfather in the neat bungalow they shared in Glen Ellyn, in Chicago’s upmarket western suburbs.
    Eighty eight-year-old Sebastian Hannar had aged alarmingly since Seventeen had arrived unannounced on his doorstep on a windy winter’s evening four years earlier. Frail then, he’d deteriorated to the point where his doctor considered he should now be in a rest home. However, Seventeen, now thirty-five, wouldn’t hear of it. She credited her grandfather with saving her life, and had vowed she wouldn’t hand over responsibility for caring for him while she was still able to draw breath.
    However, looking at him now as he pecked at the dinner she’d lovingly prepared, she knew his days were numbered. Sebastian suffered Alzheimer’s and had