I was just gathering my empty plate to show my compassionate, humanitarian side when one of the hotel staff touched my arm and said, “Pardon me, Mr. Oberheit? You have a telephone call, sir. There’s a courtesy phone right over here.”
I looked up at the woman, wiped my mouth with a napkin, and said, “All right. Show me.” I nodded to Ascher. “Be right back.”
I got up and followed the staffer over to a curtained alcove by one wall, where there was a phone. We were more or less out of the way of everyone else in the room there.
“Miss Valmont,” I said to the staffer, once we were there. “Nice to see you again.”
Anna Valmont turned to face me with a small and not terribly pleasant smile. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been a peroxide blonde. Now her hair was black, cut in a neat pageboy. She was leaner than I remembered, almost too much so, like a young, feral cat. She was still pretty, though her features had lost that sense of youthful exuberance, and her eyes were harder, warier.
“Dresden,” she said. “‘Mr. Oberheit,’ seriously?”
“Did you hear me criticizing your alias?” I asked.
That got a flash of a smile. “Who’s the stripper?”
“No one you know, and no one to mess with,” I said. “And there’s nothing wrong with strippers. How’ve you been?”
She reached into her tunic and carefully produced a thickly packed business envelope. “Do you have my money or not?”
I arched an eyebrow at that. “Money?”
That got me another smile, though there was something serrated about it. “We have history, Dresden, but I don’t do freebies and I’m not hanging around for chitchat. The people I had to cross for this aren’t the forgiving type and have been on my heels all week. This envelope is made of flash paper. Cough up the dough or the data and I turn to smoke.”
My mind was racing. Nicodemus had set up a job for Anna Valmont—it was the only way he could know that she would be here, and that she would be meeting the guy with the sunset-colored rose. So it stood to reason that whatever information he’d had her take, it might be valuable, too.
I checked around me quickly. I couldn’t see the table from where I stood, but Ascher wasn’t in sight. “Do it,” I said, turning back to Valmont. “Destroy it, now, quick.”
“You think I won’t?” she asked. Then she paused, frowning. “Wait a minute . . . What’s the con here?”
“No con,” I said low. “Look, Anna, there’s a lot going on and there’s no time to explain it all. Blow the data and vanish. We’ll both be better off.”
She tilted her head, her expression suddenly skeptical, and she drew the envelope up close against her in an unconscious protective gesture. “You give me a hundred grand up front for this with another hundred on delivery, and then tell me to wreck the data? It’s not like this is the only copy.”
“I wasn’t the one who hired you,” I said intently. “Hell’s bells, you stole my car once. You think I’ve got that kind of cash? I’m just the pickup guy, and you don’t want to be involved with this crew. Get out while you can.”
“I did the job, I get my money,” she said. “You want to trash the data, fine. You pay for it. One hundred thousand.”
“How about two million?” Ascher said. She eased into the alcove, holding a champagne flute with no lipstick marks on the rim.
Anna looked at her sharply. “What?”
“Two million guaranteed,” Ascher said. “As much as twenty if we pull off the job.”
I ground my teeth.
Valmont looked back and forth between us for a second, her expression closed. “This job was an audition.”
“Bingo,” Ascher said. “You’ve got the skills and the guts. This is a big job. Dresden here is doing what he always does, trying to protect you from the big bad world. But this is a chance at a score that will let you retire to your own island.”
“A job?” Anna said. “For who?”
“Nicodemus Archleone,” I said.
Anna Valmont’s eyes went flat, hard. “You’re working with him?”
“Long story,” I said. “And not by choice.” But I realized what Ascher had been talking about before. Nicodemus had picked Anna Valmont and sent me to get her because he’d been calculating her motivations. Anna owed me something, and she owed Nicodemus something more. Even if she didn’t pitch in to help me, she might do it for revenge, for the chance to pull the rug out from under Nicodemus’s feet at the worst possible moment. He’d given her double the reasons to get involved. The money was just the icing on the cake.
Valmont wasn’t exactly a slow thinker herself. “Twenty million,” she said.
“Best-case scenario,” Ascher said. “Two guaranteed.”
“Nicodemus Archleone,” I said. “You remember what happened the last time you did a contract with him?”
“We tried to screw him and he screwed us back harder,” Anna said. She eyed Ascher, as a couple more hotel staff flitted by the alcove. “What happens if I say no?”
“You miss the score of a lifetime,” Ascher said. “Nicodemus has to abandon the job.” She looked at me. “And Dresden is screwed.”
Which was true, now that Ascher was here and had seen me trying to derail the job. Unless I killed her to shut her up, something I wasn’t ready to do, she’d tell Nicodemus and he’d put the word out that Mab’s word was no good anymore. Mab would crucify me for that, no metaphor involved. Worse, I was pretty sure that such a thing would be a severe blow to Mab’s power in more than a political sense—and Mab had an important job to do.
All of which, I was certain, Nicodemus knew.
Jerk.
“Is that true?” Valmont asked.
I ground my teeth and didn’t answer. A crew of four caterers carrying a large tray went by.
“It’s true,” Valmont said. “The job. Is it real?”
“It’s dangerous as hell,” I said.
“Binder is in,” Ascher said. “Do you know who that is?”
“Mercenary,” Valmont said, nodding. “Reputation for being a survivor.”
“Damn skippy,” Ascher replied. “He’s my partner. I’m along to keep Dresden here from getting all noble on you.”
“That true?” Valmont asked me.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
Valmont nodded several times. Then she said, to Ascher, “Excuse us for a moment, would you?”
Ascher smiled and nodded her head. She lifted her glass to me in a little toast, sipped, and drifted back out of the alcove.
Valmont leaned a little closer to me, lowering her voice. “You don’t care about money, Dresden. And you aren’t working for him by choice. You want to burn him.”
“Yeah,” I said.