Skin Game (29 page)

“I can’t stand to look at those things,” she said. “It must hurt.”

I bit down on a sharp reply. She wasn’t looking for that by standing near me. “Yeah, pretty much.”

She fiddled with her gear and licked her lips. “How long, do you think, before you can take them off?”

“No idea,” I said. “Depends on Ascher, I guess.”

There was a loud snapping sound and a squeal of parting metal from below, and Ascher half snarled, “That’s right, bitch,” and began putting her manacles back on in a businesslike fashion.

It had taken her less than three minutes to slice an opening large enough to admit a big guy into the reinforced wall.

She smeared the circle with her foot, and the excess energy of the spell dispersed into the air to be immediately smothered by the falling water. Then she put her hand on the cut section and began to push.

Grey slid in front of her and said, “Best let me go first, Miss Ascher.” He set his shoulders and almost casually shoved the cut section of wall down, and it fell through to the hallway beyond with a satisfying boom—and was instantly echoed by the hollow, coughing blast of a shotgun from the hallway beyond.

Grey was flung off of his feet to the ground, where he promptly became the origin point of a growing puddle of blood.

Ascher let out a choked sound and flattened herself desperately to the side of the opening, into the shelter of the unexposed side of the stairwell.

The shotgun boomed twice more, and then Deirdre was through the opening. The shotgun went off again, and then a man screamed.

Then silence.

I snarled wordlessly. I rushed down the stairs to check on Ascher, and then peered through the hole in the wall. Deirdre crouched beyond it, on all fours like a wary cat, her hair spread out around her and moving slowly, like strands of kelp in a gentle current. A fourth guard lay
unmistakably dead on the floor in front of her, his shotgun still gripped loosely in his hand.

“Grey,” Nicodemus said, his voice tight.

Of course he was worried about Grey. Grey hadn’t done his job with the retina scanner yet.

Ascher was shaken but untouched. I gave her shoulder a quick squeeze and turned to Grey, trying to remember what I knew about first aid and tourniquets.

I needn’t have bothered. Grey had already begun sitting up even before I turned around, and his hair was mussed. Other than that, and the bloodied clothing, he looked entirely healthy. His expression was annoyed. “Damn, that hurts.”

“Whiner,” I said. “One little load of buckshot to the chest.” I offered him my hand.

Grey stared blankly at my hand for a second, as if it had taken him a moment to remember what the gesture meant. Then he took it and I pulled him up to his feet. He wobbled once, and then shook his head and steadied.

“You okay?” I asked.

He gestured at all the blood on the floor. “Hit my heart. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

“Man,” I said, impressed. “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”

Grey showed me his teeth, then turned, poised and contained once more, and stalked through the doorway after Deirdre.

Hannah Ascher got slowly to her feet and stood staring down at the smeared puddle of blood on the floor. She swallowed and started back up the stairs.

I put out a hand and stopped her. “It’ll take the cops time to get here, but you probably don’t want to be standing around on the first floor when they do,” I said.

“Too right,” said Binder, coming up behind Valmont, still at the stairway’s top and nudging her down like a bulldog herding a hesitant child. “Bullets are no respecters of persons. Go on, girl. And Ash, love, don’t forget to fill my pack.”

Ascher had a couple of empty black backpacks slung over her shoulder. “I know, I know. The red ones.”

Nicodemus came to the top of the stairs, dragging the unconscious guard, and came down the steps, taking the guard along none too gently. Once he had the man to the bottom, he interlaced his handcuffs with those of the men already on the floor and cuffed him there.

“Well-done, Miss Ascher,” Nicodemus said. “We’ll secure the hallway and you can repeat your excellent performance on the second door. Miss Valmont, if you would accompany us, please—I’ll want you working on the main vault door the moment we have access to it.”

Anna Valmont tensed beside me, her fingers fretting over the surface of her tool roll, constantly wiping droplets of water away.

“Michael,” I said, “why don’t you go on in and make sure Valmont has everything she needs?”

Michael arched an eyebrow at me, but nodded, and came down the stairs to Anna Valmont’s side. He gave her an encouraging smile, which she returned hesitantly, and the two of them went on through in the wake of the others.

“Dresden,” Nicodemus said, his tone amused. “Surely you don’t think I’d do anything to the woman simply because her purpose had been served?”

“Not if you want that Way opened, you won’t,” I said.

Nicodemus smiled at me. He had buckled on a sword belt bearing the long blade he’d used earlier and a curved Bedouin dagger. “There, you see. You can learn to play the game after all.” He vanished through the security door. A moment later, a huge shadow moved through the narrow stairway. I never saw the Genoskwa go by, but I felt the brush of patchy fur against the skin of my right hand, smelled a faint reek of its odor in the air, and bits of ash and the scent of burned hair came from the edges of the torched opening as the huge beast squeezed through it.

“This stinks,” Binder said a moment later, his voice pitched low. “This stinks all to hell.”

“Hah,” I said. “Maybe it’s just the furball.”

He snorted, and we waited in silence for another three or four minutes, until Ascher reappeared, newly muddy with ashes and soot from
burning through the second wall, wearing the manacles again. “That big thing creeps me out,” she said.

“Too right,” Binder said. “Gotta wonder what something like that wants with jewels, eh?”

He wasn’t wrong about that.

“You’re right,” I said. “It smells.”

Ascher traded a long look with Binder. “Should we leave?”

Binder grimaced. “And leave Old Nick unable to get through his fiery gate? He’d take that personal, I think. What is Uncle Binder’s Rule Number Two?”

“Keep your eyes on the money,” Ascher said.

“That’s right,” Binder said. “Don’t take things personal, don’t get emotional. We’re professionals, love. Do the job, get paid, get gone.”

“There could be more than money at stake here,” I said quietly.

“Nick and his cup?” Binder asked. “Been a lot of bad men and a lot of powerful artifacts since this ball started spinning. It’ll spin on.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. Nicodemus is connected like few others. What if I could make you an offer?”

“Cash?” Binder asked.

I grimaced. “Well. Not as such.”

He made a tsking sound and glanced at Ascher. “What’s Uncle Binder’s Rule Number One?”

“Money or nothing,” she said. “Anything else costs too much.”

He nodded. “So don’t offer me favors, wizard, or lenience from the White Council, or power from a Faerie Queen. Those things aren’t payment. They’re pretty, pretty things with strings attached, and sooner or later you’re all wrapped up like a bug in a web. Money or nothing.”

“What about freedom?” I asked him. “The cops are going to have this place surrounded by the time we get back. Do you think you’re going to fight your way out past an army of CPD?”

Binder let out a low belly laugh. “Look at you, Dresden. Damn, but you’re a Boy Scout. This is a mob bank, belongs to your local robber baron. Eight minutes since the silent alarm went off, and where are the sirens? Where are the uniforms?”

I grimaced. I’d noticed that, too.

“You really think the alarms call the gendarmes?” He shook his head. “Twenty to one, it’ll go to his people first. Then they can decide if they want to call in the coppers or handle the matter themselves.”

Yeah. Marcone’s people.

Gulp.

Binder busied himself making sure the groaning, stirring guards had been thoroughly disarmed and relieved of their handcuff keys. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, odds are good if this Marcone of yours is so savvy, someone will start playing circle games with me. I’ll need to be ready to counter them.” He pointed a finger at Ascher.

“For the hundredth time, the red ones,” Ascher said, quirking a slight smile.

“I’ll buy us a nice tropical island with a nice beach, and get you a new swimsuit,” he said, winking.

“You should be so lucky,” Ascher said back.

“I’ll hold the door for you lot. Don’t be too long.” Binder went up the stairs, his beady eyes sparkling, fairly bristling with energy.

“Huh,” I said.

“What?” Ascher asked.

“You and Binder . . . not a thing?”

Ascher’s mouth turned up bitterly at the corners. “Not for lack of trying.”

“Well,” I said, “kinda hard to blame him. You’re damned attractive.”

“Not
him
, trying,” she said. “Me. He’s turned me down.” She looked up the stairs for a moment and sighed. “Rule Number One. He’s not into entanglements.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to imagine Ascher coming on to Binder and getting turned down. Granted, I’d turned her down too. Which . . . now that I thought about it, just couldn’t have been awesome for her self-image.

Doesn’t matter how pretty you are. What’s important is how pretty you feel. No one feels pretty when they hear “no” often enough.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but you would not believe how many times I’ve had pretty girls who would have eaten me alive, like, literally, make a pass at me. Makes a guy a little tense about it.”

Ascher scratched at her nose with one finger, making the manacles
jingle. She grimaced as the thorns dug at her wrists. “Wait a minute. You’re saying I’m
too
pretty to be attractive.”

“To a guy in my business, maybe,” I said. “Someone as alluring as you, there’s a high twitch factor. Binder strikes me as the type to have the same kind of wariness.”

Her voice turned thoughtful. “So if I’d been a little older and a little dumpier, maybe I’d have had some luck with you—like Murphy.”

I scowled. “Murphy’s made of muscle. You just can’t see it under the suit and the body armor,” I said. “And she hasn’t gotten lucky with me either.”

Ascher stared at me for a second and blinked slowly. “You’re . . . serious, aren’t you?”

“We’re complicated,” I said.

“Because you’re twitchy?”

“And she’s had a couple of divorces. And her ex-boyfriend kind of shot me.”

“What?”

“I asked him to,” I said hurriedly.

“What?”

My mouth just kept running. “Plus there was this whole initiation rite with Mab, except I think that only happened in my brain or something. Traumatic—like getting it on with a hurricane. I think it’s kind of put me off sex in general.”

Ascher stared at me for a second more, then shook her head and turned away. “Man,” she said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Dresden, but thanks for turning me down. Kinda dodged a bullet on that one.”

“Hey,” I protested.

“Seriously,” she said. “Way too much drama there for anyone sane.”

“We’re not dramatic,” I said. “Just—”

“Complicated?” she asked. She shook her head. “It isn’t complicated. You just open up and let someone in. And whatever comes after that, you face it together.”

“It isn’t that simple.”

“The hell it isn’t. You had a chance for that and you turned it down? You’re a fucking idiot. I’m not making the same mistake.”

Footsteps came from the hallway beyond the security door and Michael appeared,
Amoracchius
in hand. The Sword was glowing with a faint, angry light.

“Harry,” he said. “Trouble.”

“What’s happening?”

“Nicodemus is about to kill Anna Valmont.”

“And you’re here?”

“Four of them and one of me,” he said.

I got out the key to my manacles and made sure it was handy.

“Dresden,” Ascher said, her voice tense, “if you blow out the electronics, you’ll blow the whole job!”

“I love it when a posh bird talks dirty!” called Binder merrily, from upstairs.

I ground my teeth, took my staff in my right hand, and said to Michael, “Come on.”

And then I took off down the hallway.

T
he hallway beyond the first security door ran for a bit less than a hundred feet, and I found the mental shields against my various pains fluttering as I put more demand on my body. I ground my teeth and got through it, while Michael moved with effortless, well,
grace
at my side, even steadying me once when I wobbled.

At the end of the hall was another security door with a hole scorched through the wall beside it—and again I was treated to the stench of burned Genoskwa hair.

I ducked and went through the hole with Michael right behind me, and found myself in a room that was walled on two sides with what at first glance looked like lockers and which I realized a second later were security-deposit boxes. Minimum security, I guessed, where people stored copies of their important paperwork and such, from the size of them.

The third wall was made of obdurate, unjointed steel, broken only by a large steel door with a relatively small, unobtrusive control panel in its center. The panel didn’t look like cutting-edge tech to me. It was simply a keypad, a large combination wheel, and a small LED display.

Anna Valmont stood in front of the control panel with her tool roll splayed out on the floor beside her feet, all her equipment at the ready. She had what looked like a small flashlight in her hand. She was facing not the door, but Nicodemus.

The leader of the Denarians stood off to one side, his little automatic
in his hand, pointing it steadily at Valmont. Deirdre stood on his right, and Grey on his left. The Genoskwa was a giant blur against the wall behind them and a stench in the air.

“I still don’t see the problem,” Nicodemus said.

“The problem,” Valmont said, her eyes flicking nervously to me, “is that this
isn’t the door from the plans you gave me
.”

“My information sources are impeccable,” Nicodemus replied. “They assure me that the door I showed you was the one installed when the bank was built.”

“Obviously, they aren’t as smart as they think they are,” Valmont replied tartly. “Marcone must have had the door changed out secretly after it was installed.”

“Then open
this
door,” Nicodemus said, and gestured with the gun. “Now.”

“You don’t get it,” Valmont said. “With the blueprints and a day to plan, I might have been able to crack the door. Maybe. This one is another Fernucci, but it’s a custom job, and it could be designed completely differently. Not only that, but
this
door . . .”

A horrible instinct hit me. “Hell’s bells. It’s wired, isn’t it?”

Grey scowled at me. “How did you know that?”

Because my brother’s girlfriend had seen Marcone defending one of his strongholds with her own eyes a few years before, against an angry Fomor sorcerer. He’d had the place rigged with mines and defensive strong points and booby traps. Thomas had told me about it. But all I said to Grey was, “How? I’m a freaking wizard, that’s how.”

Valmont gave me a grim nod, and jerked her head toward the hole in the wall where we’d entered. “We’re lucky Ascher didn’t set them off on the way in.”

I padded over to the wall and examined it. At the edges of the scorched hole, I could see the melted plastic edges of shapes I recognized from previous horrible experiences—claymore antipersonnel mines. They’d been set into the wall, between the concrete and the drywall, facing into the room.

I swallowed. One claymore, when detonated, would spew hundreds of ball bearings out in a broad arc in front of it, a giant’s shotgun. I
counted eight of the devices, stacked vertically, one per linear foot. I think the things were about a foot across.

So. Assume Marcone wanted anyone who tried to force their way into his vault reduced to salsa. Assume he was perfectly well aware how hard a lot of supernatural beings were to hurt. How would he handle it?

Overkill, that’s how.

I was guessing he’d installed one claymore mine per square foot of wall. Multiply that by, for simplicity’s sake, three hundred ball bearings each, and you had a whole freaking
lot
of round pieces of metal waiting to tear us all to shreds. They would bounce around the steel walls of this room like BBs rattling around the inside of a tin can and render any physical body in it to churned meat sauce.

“Fun,” I said. I turned to Nicodemus and said, “Looks like this party is over. You weren’t sufficiently prepared.”

“We aren’t stopping now,” Nicodemus said, staring at Valmont. “Open the vault, Miss Valmont.”

“It would be stupid,” Valmont said. “I think I could have done the first one. This is a door I know nothing about. Even if I do everything right, I could run into something that trips the circuit just because I don’t know it’s there.”

“I’m going to give you three minutes to open the vault, Miss Valmont. After that, I’ll kill you.”

“Are you insane?” Valmont demanded.

“Hell’s bells, man,” I said. “Calm down. The target isn’t going anywhere. You aren’t getting any older. What’s the rush?”

He bared his teeth. “Time is relative, Dresden. And, at the moment, it is running out. We open the vault, today. Either Miss Valmont does so or she dies.”

“Or she sets off the mines and we
all
die?” I blurted. “Have you lost it?”

“Feel free to wait outside if you are frightened,” he said calmly.

And I realized that I could. I could back out of the room and pull Michael with me. Valmont would have nowhere else to go, no other options, and I knew exactly what she would do, facing certain death—she’d blow the system in an attempt to take Nicodemus and Deirdre with her. Or
maybe she would pull off a minor miracle and open the door, in which case we could proceed just as we had before. If she died, the raid was blown and Mab’s obligation to Nicodemus was met or at least delayed—and if I got lucky, maybe it would put paid to a roomful of bad people at the same time. If Valmont survived, I was no worse off than before.

And all I had to do was throw a woman to the wolves. The math said it was the smart move.

“Math was never my best subject,” I muttered. “Michael, get clear.”

He ground his teeth, but Michael had worked with me long enough to trust me when things were tight—and we both knew that not even
Amoracchius
and the purest intentions in the world would save him from a blast like the one Marcone had rigged. He left.

“I’m not frightened,” Grey said. “I want to make that perfectly clear.” Then he also left the room.

“What are you doing, Dresden?” Nicodemus asked.

“Helping. Stop the shot clock and let us work,” I said, and made sure the manacles were locked tight against my wrist as I strode over to Anna Valmont. “Okay,” I told her. “Let’s do this.”

She widened her eyes at me. “What are you doing? Get back!”

“I’m helping you,” I said. “I’m helping you open this door without blowing anyone to hell. Especially yourself. Also me.”

She whirled the little flashlight up and shone it on the ground at my feet. “Stop!”

It was an ultraviolet light. I barely managed to stop my foot before it came down on a circle of vaguely Norse runes painted on the stone floor, invisible to normal light but picked out by Valmont’s flashlight.

“Stars and stones,” I breathed. “It’s a ward.”

She shone the light around the floor in front of the vault door. There were at least a dozen wards the size of dinner plates in the immediate area around it.

“That’s why the door is different,” I said. “They’ve got passive spells running all over the damned room.”

“I didn’t see the first one until I’d already trampled all over them,” she said. “That suggests, to me, that I’m not the right sort of person to set them off.”

“Give me the light again,” I said, and she shone it at my feet. I bent over and peered down at the ward, examining it carefully. “Good call. These are built to react to a practitioner’s aura. Not real strong—there’s no threshold to base them on. But enough to put out a surge of magical energy.”

“Enough to break a circuit, you think?”

“Definitely.”

“So a practitioner walks on one of them and . . .” Valmont opened the fingers of her left hand all at once, an elegant gesture. “Boom.”

The chatter of automatic gunfire came from upstairs—one of the suits had opened up with an Uzi. Valmont and I both flinched at the sudden sound.

“Christ,” she breathed.

“We have no time,” Nicodemus said. “Open the door, Miss Valmont.”

She swallowed and looked at me.

“Shine the light at my feet, so I can see the way,” I said.

She did, and I picked my way over the wards until I reached her side. “Okay,” I said. “Three things. One, I’m not going to run off and leave you here alone. Two, I’m not going to let him shoot you. And three—you can do this.”

“I don’t know if I can,” she said in a low whisper. “What if this door is more complex than the first one?”

“It can’t be,” I said.

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “Because of the way magic interacts with technology. Marcone’s got all these low-grade wards spread out around the door. Whatever electronics or mechanics are inside it, the more complex they are, the faster the magic in this room would break them down and trip the circuit.” I pointed a finger. “That door has got to be assembled out of simpler parts and far simpler electronics than the original. That’s why it got installed secretly—not to stick an even meaner door on, but to hide the fact that the door has to be less complicated than the original.”

Valmont looked at me for a moment, frowning. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, you know. In theory.”

“God, Dresden,” she said. “What if you’re wrong?”

“Well,” I said, “if I am, neither one of us will ever know it. Because I’m not going anywhere.”

She stared up at me uncertainly.

I put a hand on her shoulder and said, “This is what happened to the audacity of the woman who stole my coat and my car after I rescued her from certain doom? I remembered you with a little more attitude than that.”

A spark of some kind of defiance, or amusement, or maybe both, flickered in her eyes. “I don’t remember it happening that way.”

“Probable doom,” I allowed, and felt myself grinning like a loon. “Highly possible doom. Look, Anna, you robbed the
Vatican
when you swiped the Shroud. How tough can it be to handle the pad of a schmuck gangster from Illinois?”

She took a slow, deep breath. “You make an excellent point,” she said seriously, and bent to her tools.

She moved with swift, precise professionalism. She had the cover off the control panel in half a minute, and was getting into the wires behind it seconds later.

“You were right,” she reported. “There are no chips or microcircuits at all.”

“Can you open it?” I asked.

“If I don’t make any mistakes. Yes. I think. Now hush.”

More gunfire erupted from upstairs as she worked. It wasn’t answered by anything I could hear, but I was pretty sure Binder’s goons wouldn’t be firing off their weapons for fun.

Grey slid back into the room and reported, conversationally, “They’re using suppressed weapons. There are enough of them to make a great big mess of this entire operation, but so far they’re just probing us.”

“Heh,” I said. “Probe.”

“Wizard,” Grey said, a trifle impatiently, “are you sure you want to keep pushing it like this?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Think so.”

“Grey, stand by,” Nicodemus said. “Should Valmont open the vault, we’ll need you to handle the scanner.”

Grey grunted and said, “Guess I’d better put my game face on.”

And once again, he seemed to quiver in place, a motion that I couldn’t
quite track with my eyes, and suddenly Grey was gone and poor Harvey was standing there, looking nervously through the scorched entry of the vault. More gunfire rang out and Grey-Harvey flinched, darting quick glances behind him.

Huh.

“Bloody hell,” Valmont muttered, reaching for another tool. She started operating the combination lock, watching a bobbing needle on some kind of sensor as she did. “Impossible to work with all this jabber.”

“I could make some white noise for you,” I said helpfully, and followed by saying something like, “Kssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

“Thank you, Dresden, for that additional distract—” Her eyes widened in sudden terror and she stopped breathing.

I felt my spine go rigid with anticipation. If those claymores went off, there was no way my duster was going to save me from that much flying metal. I clenched my teeth.

Valmont looked up at me, abruptly showed me a tigress’s smile, and said, “Gotcha.” Then she pushed a final button with a decisive stab, and the vault door made an ominous
clickety-clack
sound. She turned the handle, and the enormous door swung ponderously open. “Schmuck gangster from Illinois, indeed.”

“Get that UV light on the wards again,” I said.

“On it,” Valmont said.

“Grey,” Nicodemus said.

Grey-Harvey hopped rather nimbly through the wards as Valmont illuminated them, and went through the vault door.

I went with him, my senses alert to any other bits of magical mayhem that might be waiting for us inside Gentleman Johnnie Marcone’s vault.

It was huge. Fifty feet wide. A hundred feet long. Barred doors that looked sufficient to keep out King Kong stood at intervals along the walls. Each of the barred doors had a steel plaque on it bearing a number and a name. The first one on the right read:
LORD RAITH—00010001
. The room behind it was piled with boxes of about the right size to hold large paintings, strong-box-style crates, and several pallets bearing bricks made of bundles of hundred-dollar bills, stacked up in four-foot cubes and wrapped in clear plastic.

The strong room on the other side of us had a plate that read:
FER
ROVAX—00010002,
and it was filled with row upon row of closed, fireproof safes.

And there were eleven more rooms on each side of the vault.

In between the barred doors were storage lockers, shelves loaded with precious artwork, and more of those giant cubes of money than I really wanted to start counting.