Blood and Fire by Shannon McKenna Page A

now.”
    “Don’t trust those apps so blindly, Reggie,” King lectured. “They’re no substitution for human intelligence. Though you yourself might give that theory a run for its money.”
    He paused, waited for Reggie to come up with a reply.
    Reggie coughed, hemmed and hawed miserably, until King’s patience came to an abrupt end. He did not want to kill Bruno Ranieri. Yet. Not while there was still a chance to eliminate the danger of exposure that sneaky bitch Magda had threatened him with, years ago.
    He loathed loose ends. Lily and Bruno could solve the puzzle Magda had set, tie those ends off for him, close that issue definitively.
    But those two could not be out there loose, in circulation. Not now that they’d made contact. “Take them, and bring them to me,” he said. “Do not injure them. And don’t make any more mistakes.”
    “Sir, we’ve done all we could since she vanished, and we—”
    “We? What’s this ‘we’? You were in charge, Reginald. You were team leader. Take responsibility. Say ‘I.’ It’s what you would have done if things had gone as they goddamn well should have. Am I right?”
    “But we . . . ah, but I—”
    “One girl, alone,” King mused. “No weapons but a can of Mace. And she evaded two of my agents, with their incredible training, their bottomless budget, their limitless resources. For forty-two days. Do not expect a pat on the back for fixing this. Be grateful to stay alive.”
    King closed the connection, remembering Zoe’s presence. Her eyes were speculative over the rim of her wineglass.
    “So they found her,” she said softly. “At last.”
    “At last,” he said. “In Portland, at Ranieri’s diner. Unbelievable incompetence. After decades of intensive training. So disappointing.”
    Zoe preened, perceiving the criticism of her peers, by reverse association, as a compliment to her. He decided to encourage the impression. Ias a delicate balancing act, the application of carrot and stick. His elite cadre of operatives were spectacular specimens, but they required deft handling. Zoe had been a good girl. This time.
    “I told them that Lily Parr was unusual,” Zoe mused. “She struck me as extremely capable. Perhaps I didn’t state it strongly enough. It was in the file. I made a report after every one of her visits.”
    “I should have sent you after her,” he said. “Not those idiots.”
    Zoe’s bare shoulders twitched in a modest shrug. “Reggie isn’t an idiot,” she murmured. “And I could only be in one place at one time.”
    “Pity,” he said. “Your performance was truly exceptional.”
    Her face glowed. He became aware of a pleasant tingling sensation. He hadn’t been consciously planning sexual indulgence in this debriefing session—in fact, he very rarely indulged, being naturally ascetic. But Zoe deserved a treat. He could exert himself for her.
    He took pains not to consider his agents as sexual objects. It seemed extravagant to utilize an instrument in which he had invested tens of millions, decades of his life, for what amounted to a plumbing task that could be performed by a call girl for a few hundred dollars.
    But Zoe’s eyes were dilated. Her bosom heaved. She had emotional and physiological control issues, his critical diagnostic eye could not help but note. But now wasn’t the time to scold her for them.
    Zoe was as skilled as any courtesan, and he’d worked all his life to inculcate her fervid desire to please him. No call girl could provide that, no matter what she was paid. Since toddlerhood Zoe had been immersed in Deep Weave programming, a virtual world that was a product of his own psychological and pharmacological genius. Designed to augment and develop certain characteristics, and suppress others. Entirely free of any inconvenient ethical or moral oversight.
    His experiments hadn’t always worked out, but they had worked often enough for the project as a whole to be considered a resounding success. He had a