Thirty-five
The 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.”