Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

“Not if we do it smooth,” Ascher said.

“You’re going to have to trust me on this one,” I replied. “There’s always something. It doesn’t matter how smooth you are, or how smart the plan is, or how plain the mission—something goes wrong. Nothing’s ever simple. That’s how it works.”

Ascher eyed me. “You have a very negative attitude. Just relax and we’ll get this done. Try not to look around so much. And for God’s sake, smile.”

I smiled.

“Maybe without clenching your jaw.”

The doors opened and we walked down a hallway to the grand ballroom. There were a couple of security guys outside the door dressed in the hotel’s colors, trying to look friendly and helpful. I breezed up and presented them with our engraved invitation and fake IDs. I’d say this for Nicodemus—he didn’t do things halfway, and his production values were outrageous. The fake driver’s license (in the name of Howard Delroy Oberheit, cute) looked more real than my actual Illinois driver’s license ever had. They eyed me, and then my license, closely, but they couldn’t spot it as a fake. Ascher (née Harmony Armitage) gave the guards a big smile and some friendly chatter, and they didn’t look twice at her ID.

I couldn’t really blame them. Ascher looked like exactly the kind of woman who would be showing up to a blue-chip evening event. In me, the hotel’s thugs recognized another of their kind—and one who was taller and had better scars than they did. But with Hannah on my arm, they let me pass.

The interior of the ballroom had been decorated in a kind of Chinese motif. Lots of red fabric draped in swaths from the ceiling to create semi-curtained partitions, paper lanterns glowing cheerfully, stands of bamboo, a Zen garden with its sand groomed in impeccable curves. The hotel staff was mostly women in red silk tunics with mandarin collars. Caterers in white coats and black ties were just getting a buffet fully assembled. When we came in, I couldn’t see them, but I could hear a live band running through a number—seven pieces of brass, drums, and a piano, playing a classic ballroom piece.

I scanned the room slowly as we entered, but I didn’t see Anna Valmont standing around anywhere.

“So this thief we’re meeting,” Ascher asked. “What’s her story?”

“She used to belong to a gang called the Churchmice,” I said. “Specialized in robbing churches in Europe. Nicodemus hired them to swipe the Shroud of Turin for him a few years back.”

Ascher tilted her head. “What happened?”

“The three of them got it,” I said. “I suspect they tried to raise their price. Nicodemus and Deirdre killed two of them, and he would have killed Anna if I hadn’t intervened.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “And now Nicodemus wants her to help him?”

I snorted softly through my nose. “Yeah.”

Ascher studied me for a moment with her eyes narrowed. “Oh.”

“What?” I asked her.

“Just . . . admiring the manipulation,” she said. “I mean, I don’t like it, but it’s good.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Don’t you see?”

“I try not to think like that,” I said. The caterers uncovered the silver trays holding the meat, and a moment later the smell of roasted chicken and beef wafted up to my nose. My stomach made an audible sound. I’d been cooking for myself over a fireplace for a long, long while. It had been sustenance, but given my culinary skills, it hadn’t really been food, per se. The buffet smelled so good that for a minute I half expected to hear the pitter-patter of drool sliding out of my mouth.

“If you don’t, someone else will,” Ascher said. “If nothing else, you’ve got to defend yourself . . . Hey, are you as hungry as I am?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And we’ve apparently got some time to kill.”

“So it wouldn’t be unprofessional to raid the buffet?”

“Even Pitt and Clooney had to eat,” I said. “Come on.”

We raided the buffet. I piled my little plate with what I hoped would be a restrained amount of food. Ascher didn’t bother. She took a bit of almost everything, stacking food up hungrily. We made our way to one of many tables set up around the outskirts of the ballroom while the band went through another number. I picked one that gave us a view of the door, and watched for Anna Valmont to arrive.

She didn’t appear over the next few moments, though a few of Chicago’s luminaries did, and the numbers in the room began to slowly grow. The hotel staff began taking coats and drifting through the room with trays of food and drink, while the caterers began to briskly move back and forth through the service entrances, like a small army of worker ants, repairing the damage to the buffet almost the moment it was done. It seemed to mean so much to them that I was considering doing a little more damage myself, purely to give them a chance to repair it, you understand. I try to be nice to people.

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.