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“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.


Skin Game Chapter 35, Page 289-295