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

grown into. Every day, he’d assured his granddaughter that she reminded him of Annette.
    Seventeen’s gaze went to the faded color portrait photograph of her mother that had pride of place on the dining room mantelpiece. She never tired of looking at it, and wished she’d known the beautiful, dark-haired woman whose striking green eyes seemed to look right into her soul.
    As she often did when she looked at her mother’s photo, Seventeen looked wistfully at the index finger of her left hand. It had once displayed a ruby ring – the only thing she’d inherited from her mother. She couldn’t remember what had happened to it.
    Omega boss Andrew Naylor had given Seventeen the ring in another lifetime. That was back when she was the agency’s golden girl. Naylor had told Seventeen it was her mother’s. He’d also told her that Annette had died of a drug overdose a year or two after giving birth to her.
    The first part at least was true: the ring had belonged to her mother. However, Annette hadn’t died of an overdose. She’d been terminated on Naylor’s orders .
     

 
    10
    Although Seventeen hadn’t a clue what had caused her memory loss, her meltdown or her dismissal from the Omega Agency, there was someone who did.
    Andrew Naylor knew very well what had gone down. It was on his orders that Seventeen and all her fellow orphans be subjected to an insidious mind control program while still only children. Known as MK-Ultra , the program allowed the orphans’ controllers to put their young charges into a mind-controlled state by using voice-commands. The same program was widely reported by mainstream media to have been used by the CIA, using American soldiers as guinea pigs – a fact the firm later admitted.
    As it transpired, MK-Ultra was never actively used long-term on any of the Omega orphans – with one notable exception: Seventeen.
    Naylor, who had always lusted after the seventeenth-born orphan, had misused his powers and treated the blue-eyed blonde as his personal sex slave. He’d resorted to using the MK-Ultra voice-commands to induce her to do whatever he asked. No-one else was aware of this. Not even his victim. In the process, after years of abuse, Seventeen had finally cracked. In medical terms, she had suffered a mental breakdown; in truth, she’d become yet another victim of MK-Ultra, and of Naylor.
    Although he was the cause of Seventeen’s miserable state, Naylor had not a shred of conscience. In his own words, he didn’t do conscience.
    After Seventeen had botched her last two assignments for Omega, Naylor’s first instinct had been to order her termination. Only the timely intervention of Marcia Wilson had dissuaded him. That was back when Marcia was Naylor’s second-in-command at Omega and before she took over directorship of the CIA from him. Marcia had cautioned that Seventeen could be useful should her brother, Nine, ever come out of hiding and cause Omega any problems.
    Naylor had immediately seen the wisdom in that, and took steps to release Seventeen into the custody of her grandfather whose existence he’d known of since he’d recruited the orphan’s mother for the Pedemont Project . Using MK-Ultra for the last time, Naylor programmed Seventeen so she would remember her grandfather’s Glen Ellyn address even though she’d never been there and had no knowledge of the old man’s existence.
    Thus it had been almost inevitable that Seventeen would end up at 123 College Avenue, Glen Ellyn.
    Naylor hadn’t thought about Seventeen in a while. Only the unexpected reappearance of Nine had reawakened his interest in the woman. Truth be known, he still harbored lustful feelings for her.
    For now, though, his focus was on Nine and his son Francis. Three days had elapsed since the boy’s abduction and two days since the last sighting of Nine at Papeete’s Faa'ā International Airport. Isabelle’s whereabouts were unknown also as she hadn’t been seen since she and Nine checked in at