Blood and Fire (McClouds & Friends #8)(151)

His teeth clenched. His hands fisted. He carefully did not look at Melanie so as not to lose control completely.

How had a specimen so defective, so inferior, managed to get through his culls? He was tempted to initiate the sniveling cunt’s mortal command sequences then and there. He forced himself to stop. He was down to a bare minimum of three functioning agents, one of whom was not even fully trained. He’d called back others from outside assignments, but it would be days before they came home.

He could get rid of Melanie when his rankshe attendants swelled to an acceptable number. Until then, distasteful though it was, he needed her. Which meant he had to hold his nose and manage her.

He softened his voice. “Melanie. Forgive my sharp tone. It’s an act, for Hobart and Julian’s benefit. Would you really want to leave me all alone here, with no one to back me up? As you so intelligently pointed out, Julian hasn’t even completed his training program. Call me selfish, but if I’m going to have the support of only one sole operative, it has to be the best one.” He gave her a conspiratorial smile. “And you can imagine why I can’t say that in front of the others. Can’t you?”

Melanie blinked away her tears. Her face illuminated. She stood up straighter, with a tremulous smile. “Of course, sir.”

“Come here, Melanie,” he said, keeping his voice soft.

Her face turned pink. She moved toward him, eyes shining. He smiled at her, trying in vain to remember her command sequences. He prided himself on knowing every operative’s command codes by heart, but nothing was coming to him today. Too tired, too stressed. It irritated him. He grabbed his handheld organizer. Melanie waited, eyes wide and expectant, while he punched them up from his private database.

Ah, yes. Medieval Georgian. Melanie’s whole pod had been command coded in that language. Why he hadn’t been able to recall it was beyond him.

“Give me your hand, my dear,” he purred. Her slender fingers were ice cold, though her face was pink, eyes exalted.

He recited a Level Eight reward sequence, and Melanie convulsed with a shriek, eyes rolling back. She sagged against him.

He caught her by the armpits and held her, cursing long and bitterly at the indignity of his situation. His creations were not supposed to fall apart on him when he needed them most. They were not supposed to lose consciousness when he gave them a reward sequence. They should not be so jealous, so competitive, so distastefully oversexed. It should not be so easy to destabilize them. This problem went beyond Zoe’s breakdown. It was a general defect in DeepWeave that he had to address before he began with the new, fresh ones.

But first things first. He let Melanie drop to the floor. Took ten seconds to let his temper cool. He crouched and slapped her.

She moaned, opened her eyes. They were fogged with devotion.

“Get up, my dear.” He kept his voice gentle, by brute force of will. “No time to wallow! We have work to do.”

She scrambled ungracefully to her feet, still panting.

King clicked on the video interface until he found Parr’s cell. The woman was sitting in the corner, on the floor, positioned in such a way that he could not see her face, it being below and behind the camera’s eye. Just jeans-clad legs and pale, bare feet. There was a dusting of scattered white dots around her on the floor. He peered at them, then at the movement of her fingers. She appeared to be picking at some piece of paper. Shredding it. “Did you send Howard’s video archive to play on the monitor in Parr’s room?” he asked Melanie.

“Oh, yes. She’s probably seen the whole loop three times by now.”

“I want to know what she thinks of it,” he said. “Bring her to me.”





“Lemme get this straight, mon.” The dreadlocked Jamaican cabbie crossed his arms over his chest, releasing a pungent cloud of patchouli and weed. “You want me to drive your car to the Urgent Care, alone. Grning and cursing. Park in the ambulance zone, where they will tow your ass away. Take two cell phones into the emergency room and put them in the garbage can. And then walk back to get my cab.”

“That’s all,” Kev said.

The man stared at the eight hundred-dollar bills fanned out in Kev’s hand, clearly tempted. “That’s f*cking weird as hell, mon.”

“Yeah, sure. But you have to go now,” Kev said. “This thing’s time sensitive. It times out in a minute. And so does the pay.”

The man shook his head. His eyes were slitted with suspicion, but sharp. “What other kind of sensitive? I don’ wanna go to jail, mon. I don’ want no trouble with nobody.”

“You won’t be doing anything illegal,” Sean told him. “You’ll be helping save innocent people from criminals. I swear it, before God.”

“Swear all you want, mon,” the man said. “These bad guys, they gonna be mad, and I don’ wanna talk to them ’bout it, after. I don’ want to be caught on no security camera. I got me a woman, a baby girl.”

Kev reached for his wallet again, peeled out four more hundreds. “This is for your woman.” Another four. “This is for your baby girl.” He pulled out two more. “These are for making your mind up, fast.”

The guy shook his head again. “Fast is not good, mon.”

Kev sighed through clenched teeth. “It is today.”