“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.