“Barring anyone manipulating time on us between here and there,” I put in.
Nicodemus gave me a sour frown and said, “We shall be finished in one hour—one way or the other.” He pointed to a portion of the floor plans. “Here is the master vault door. That, Miss Valmont, is your responsibility—”
“Hang on,” Binder said. “If you leave me playing doorman, how am I supposed to collect my backpack of jewels, eh? I can’t go off to the Nevernever and leave my lads here behind me. That’ll cut the connection between us. I’m not doing this job on salary.”
“I suggest your partner carry and fill two packs,” Nicodemus said. “I will undertake to carry your pack out myself and give it to you upon my return. As I am, with the possible exception of Grey, the one most likely to survive to escape, this arrangement would give you a greater chance of successfully receiving your payment than anyone else here.”
Binder squinted at Nicodemus and sat back in his seat, obviously thinking it over. “What do you think, Ash?”
Hannah Ascher shrugged, which any red-blooded hetero male would have found utterly fascinating. It wasn’t just me. “If you’ll trust me to pick your share, I’m willing.”
Binder grunted and then nodded slowly. “I like the red ones.”
“I’ll remember,” Ascher promised.
I idly scratched at an itch on the back of my neck. “So what’s the big deal with Valmont cracking the door? And why drag poor Harvey into this?”
“Poor Harvey,” Nicodemus said, with all the sympathy of a bullet in flight, “was our principal’s factor in Chicago. He had exclusive access to the vault in question, which is kept shut by the best vault door money can buy in combination with what is known as a retina scan. A retina scan—”
“We know what a retina scan is,” Ascher said impatiently. “But why do you need it? Why not just blow the vault instead of going to all the trouble of getting Grey to duplicate the guy?”
“Same deal as before,” I said. “We’re trying to get into a secure vault, not one that’s been blown the hell open already. If we alter the place in the real world too much, we screw up the Way to the one in the Nevernever.” I glanced at Nicodemus and thumped a finger on the blueprint. “Our target has a private vault here?”
“Precisely. An inner security room inside the main vault. This location is one of several in which he acquires additional items for his collection by proxy,” Nicodemus said.
I had to give Nick this much: He’d thought this business through, lining up like to like, the way you needed to do to make magic work. “So first we have to get to the main vault?”
“Through two security doors, which Miss Ascher will see to with her newly practiced spell,” Nicodemus said, “the better not to activate the seismic sensors in the vault that will lock down the building more thoroughly and force us to take much more destructive measures to gain access.”
I nodded. “Then Valmont does the door on the main vault, and Grey does the private security room with the retina scan.” I blinked and eyed Grey. “Right down to his retinas, seriously?”
Grey looked up from where he sat in the shadows and gave me a modest smile.
I shuddered visibly. “You are an extremely creepy man,” I said. I looked back at Nicodemus. “I can see a possible problem.”
“Yes?”
“Marcone is not a dummy,” I said. “He’s gone up against supernatural powers more than once. He knows that sooner or later, he and I are going to get into it. He doesn’t make mistakes often, and he never fails to learn from them. He’ll have supernatural precautions as well as physical ones.”
“Such as?” Nicodemus asked.
“If I was him,” I said, “I’d have something rigged to shut down all the electronic gizmos and close off the vault as soon as the building’s power got disrupted—which just might happen when Ascher and I start throwing magic around. In fact, I’d set it up to happen as soon as any amount of magic started flying.”
“It would be smart,” Binder said in agreement. “Don’t think it’d be too hard to fix, either. Have circuits set up around the place, something delicate that would go out without too much trouble.”
“Like the ones in cell phones or something,” I added. “Those things go to pieces if a wizard looks at them funny.”
“Yeah,” Binder said, nodding. “I can use one, but only just. Had to start keeping it powered off when I took up with Ash, here.”
“Assuming such a . . . wizard alarm, I suppose, exists,” Nicodemus said, “how shall we defeat it?”
“Not a problem for me,” Binder said. “It wouldn’t even blink. These two, though, we’d have to . . .”
I eyed Binder sourly and rubbed at the itch on my neck again.
“Sorry, mate,” he said. He sounded genuine about it. “Thorn manacles,” he said to Nicodemus. “You know the ones?”
“I have some in stock,” Nicodemus said. “Though mine are svartalf make, not faerie. Steel. I suppose they’ll keep the talent of you and Miss Ascher suppressed as much as possible. Simpler than keeping running water flowing over you both, in any case.”
He gave me a small smirk when he said it. He’d once had me chained up under a freezing-cold stream to prevent me from using my talents to escape or make mischief. If another good man hadn’t given himself in exchange for me, I might have died there. Thorn manacles were uncommon but by no means unattainable magical bindings that accomplished the same thing, dampening a wizard’s powers to the point of uselessness.
And they hurt like a son of a bitch. In fact, if he had some that worked the same way but were made of steel, they were going to hurt me to an outstanding degree, given how they functioned.
I returned Nicodemus’s smirk with a wintry smile.
Binder continued, either ignoring or not noticing the look between Nicodemus and me. “Once the two of them are inside, get them into a circle before the manacles come off,” Binder said. “That will contain the excess energy when they work their mojo. It should help.”
“Mmm,” Nicodemus mused. “We’ll have to change the entry plan. Dresden won’t be able to provide a distraction. We’ll have to use more”—he glanced toward the Genoskwa—“overt means.”
In the darkness, a faint gleam of yellow appeared beneath the Genoskwa’s eyes.
Hell’s bells, the thing was smiling.
Karrin shot me a look. She was thinking the same thing I was: The Genoskwa wasn’t going to distract anything, except by ripping its head off. Depending on when we went in, God only knew how many people might be in that bank—people with absolutely no knowledge of its provenance. Even the building’s security forces wouldn’t necessarily know they worked for the outfit. And hell, when you got right down to it, I wasn’t willing to feed even a mobster to something like the Genoskwa at Nicodemus’s behest.
I rubbed at my neck again and said, “Nah, I got it still.”
“Excuse me?” Nicodemus said.
“Noisy distraction? I’ll handle it. No sense showing our secret weapon early if we don’t have to do it, right?”
Nicodemus smiled faintly. “What, wizard? Without your talents?”
“I hadn’t planned on using them anyway,” I said. “Could be someone was going to get hurt during this. The White Council takes a pretty dim view of magic used for that kind of thing—and I have to think about my future. You want loud and obvious? Not a problem.”
The Genoskwa’s voice came rumbling from the shadows. “He’s soft.”
“He’s smart,” I said in harsh rejoinder. “The harder you hit things on the way in, the harder Marcone’s going to be ready to hit back on the way out. Hell, if you make a big enough stink, you’ll have the cops there, too. There are only about thirteen thousand of those guys running around Chicago, but I’m sure the eight of us can handle them. Right?”