Julian was one of King’s special series trainees. His gaze lingered on the boy’s height, the line of his jaw, his dimples. Handsome. And admirably self-possessed. Often the young, inexperienced ones got nervous and clumsy in King’s presence. He found it annoying.
Today, he was in a benevolent mood and giving his full attention to Zoe, the young woman across the table. She’d earned it for her smooth handling of the Howard Parr affair. Or her part of it, anyway. It was not her fault the rest of it had gone so unexpectedly sour.
Zoe was one of his oldest operatives, from his first crop. In fact, she was the only one left alive of her pod. The cull rate had been much higher in the old days. It was impossible to pinpoint her exact age, since she had been scooped out of the slums of Rio de Janeiro as a toddler, in contrast to his younger trainees, who had begun their training in utero. Zoe had no last name, no birth certificate. Despite the deprivations of her early childhood, she’d shaped up beautifully. And like all his operatives, she was invisible, ready to assume any identity convenient to him. She was his, body and soul.
He’d kept Zoe waiting for this debrief dinner for almost four hours, primped and ready. It had been a busy day, and it was well past midnight, but when he finally walked into his private dining room, she’d leaped up in barely controlled delight.
Ah, yes. Control had always been Zoe’s issue. Even so, he was cautiously pleased with her. Babysitting Howard had not been an easy assignment, requiring specialized training and years of tedious undercover work at Aingle Cliffs. But things had ended well. When Lily Parr institutionalized her father, he’d been very tempted to have Howard put down then and there. But something held him back. He hated to go back on a decision. And Howard was truly cowed. And a hit should always be matter of last resort. King wasn’t a ham-fisted Mafia thug, even if he was compelled to do business with them. He conducted his affairs with more delicacy than that. The extra cost was worth it.
Howard had been committed shortly after Zoe had almost bungled one of her assignments. She’d been in disgrace and in need of a long, teeth-grinding purgatory. What better than babysitting Howard? It was static, boring, possibly endless. Just the thing to teach Zoe a lesson in control while she put in the hours of hard reprogramming time.
His scheme had paid off. He had salvaged a multimillion dollar investment. Zoe had been patient, vigilant. She had executed her orders flawlessly, with only a few minutes’ lead time. No one at Aingle Cliffs suspected foul play. He’d analyzed the issue of the word-rec bot and had judged that the technical delay had not been altogether Zoe’s fault. Equipment failure. It was impossible to anticipate everything.
He studied her with pleasure as she chattered blithely on. She was giving him too much detail, but he was not inclined to be harsh. He lifted his eyes from contemplation of her décolleté—bony, but the lush swell of bosom was appealing, surgically enhanced though it probably was; he didn’t remember from her file. And her gold skin tone and lush lips were lovely. He lifted his gaze to her animated face.
“. . . thing that I was concerned about was my physiological responses, right after the job,” she confided earnestly. “I tried, but I couldn’t control my heart rate or my body temperature, and I started to sweat. It didn’t affect my performance, but still . . . I’ve been doing the Group XIII Advanced KAM Biofeedback course again, both the A and B sections, but I wondered if you had any other suggestions for—”
“I’ll tailor a new program for you personally,” he said.
She flushed with delight. “Oh,” she breathed. “I . . . I wasn’t thinking that you should . . . I just—”
“I would be pleased,” he told her. “I would consider it an investment well worth the time and thought.”
“Oh, thank you!” she gushed. “It’s the one thing I feel uneasy about, and I was hoping to find a permanent solution. In a way, the excess emotion came in handy, when it came time to discover the body. I needed to have a huge emotional reaction, so I channeled it all there.”
She was over-congratulating herself, but he would let it pass. “Of course,” he said. “Well, my dear. There you go. Balance is key, and positive attitude as well. You took what you thought was a weakness and turned it into a strength. Brava.”
His phone made a discreet burble at that moment, while Zoe carried charmingly on about how she didn’t want to waste his valuable time. The ring tone was muted, chosen not to be intrusive or irritating, but when he looked at the name on the display, he was irritated. Reggie. From his first special-series pod. He was so angry with Reggie. He gave Zoe a dismissive gesture that shut up her babble. “Yes?” he said into the phone.
“We’ve located Lily Parr.” Reggie’s voice was flat, but there was an underlying tension that hinted at relief. As if he thought by redressing his mistake, he’d be off the hook. How innocent of him.
“Really,” King said. “Where?”
“Tony Ranieri’s diner, in Portland.”
“Ah.” King made his voice crystal sharp. “So they have already made contact. You were not able to prevent that from happening.”
“No,” Reggie admitted. “They’re together now. Inside.”
King made the adjustment for the time difference. It was early morning in Oregon. “And are you therephysically?”
“No,” Reggie said, after an infinitesimal pause. “I’m driving from Seattle. But I’m close. I’ve sent people. Tom, Cal, Martin, and Nadia.”
Oh, God. King stifled a groan. Cal, Reggie, and Nadia were all special series. He would not have chosen to bunch those three on this particular assignment, but it was too late. There were no other operatives close enough to replace them. “How did you find her?”
“It was a word-recognition app we rigged at Ranieri’s diner. We got the signal about a half an hour ago. She was talking with Ranieri there, and some key words popped up. The bot caught them, and, ah . . .”
“A bot? A word-recognition app? You’ve been conducting a
passive
surveillance on Bruno Ranieri? With Lily Parr on the loose?”
Reggie struggled to reply. “I, ah . . . I had people following him for four weeks straight,” he explained. “Then we decided to shift the focus of our search, so I redistributed manpower, and we—”
“Do you have a visual?” His voice chopped off the puling excuses.
“I will in a few minutes. I have people arriving in less than—”
“Is his car under surveillance?”
“Of course. Car, condo, diner, his business, everywhere,” Reggie assured him. “Everything he says has been snarfed and sifted. He hasn’t tripped the word-rec bots once since we rigged them. Until 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 winning recipe, now. After much trial and error.
Zoe’s lashes fluttered. “May I ask a question?”
He chuckled. “I may not answer, but you can always ask.”
“Why did you wait so long, sir?” she asked, eyes wide. “To finish Howard and the girl, and Bruno Ranieri?”
The question was not an unreasonable one, since Zoe might well end up replacing Reginald as team leader, tonight’s results pending.
But she was not yet entitled to the whole truth. He lifted his glass, smiling. “Let us talk about you, my dear.”
She flushed in embarrassment at her overstep. “Yes, of course. Please excuse me. I just wanted to be up to date, so that I’ll be—”
“Ready to serve?” he supplied silkily. “Oh, but I have no doubt that you will be, my dear.”
His throaty tone made her brown eyes dilate to pools of black.
Julian served their panna cotta, set out tiny cups of espresso.
“You may go,” Neil told him.
Julian vanished. Zoe stirred a spoonful of sugar into her coffee. He listened to the sputter of the candles while Zoe’s heavy lashes swept low over her flushed cheeks, fluttering, shadowing the perfect curve.
“Shall I, ah, lock the door?” She sounded hesitant, girlish.
The glow upped to a throb. “No one here is stupid enough to open that door. And if they are, their death will be no great loss to us.”
She giggled and rose to her feet, stumbling. Performance anxiety. She peeked, to see if he’d caught it. He smiled, letting her know that, of course, he had. But it was all right. No one was perfect. And with his help, she’d come closer to perfection than any other human creature.
But there was always room for improvement. Effort. Striving.
Her breath sped up. Her excitement was very real. He was an attractive man, youthful for his late fifties. Trim, fit, and strong. Aware of how attractive the mantle of immense wealth and power he wore was to women. Men, too, of course, but he’d never been so inclined, aside from some insignificant adventures involving drugs and group sex, back in his wild youth. The idea of using drugs in such a haphazard way now filled him with disgust. Drugs were an instrument of such power, such precision. Not to be flailed around like berserker idiots with a battle ax.
She took an unsteady step in his direction.
“The dress,” he said.
She glanced down, artful locks of hair dangling around her face as she reached to struggle with her zipper. Bosom straining. The dress dropped, slowed by the lush curve of her hips, then fell around her ankles. She was naked beneath it, clad only in stiletto-heeled sandals and diamond drop earrings. The earrings were a gift given to all his female agents upon the occasion of their first outside assignment. The girls all treasured their earrings. Her breasts were full, high, and perfect. Her pubis was trimmed to a delicate swatch, as carefully shaped as an eyebrow. Her musculature was almost overly defined. Lean, taut.