Binder swallowed.
At that, Ascher stood up. “Hi,” she said, smiling brightly. “You don’t know me. I’m Hannah. Back off my partner before you get hurt.”
“I know who you are, hot stuff,” I drawled, not standing. I set my staff down across the table. “And I already backed off your partner. You can tell from how there aren’t any splatter marks. Play nice, Ascher.”
Her smile vanished at my response, and her dark eyes narrowed. She drummed her nails on the tabletop exactly once, slowly, as if contemplating a decision. A smirk touched her mouth. “So you’re the infamous Dresden.” Her eyes went past me, to Karrin. Ascher was a foot taller than she was. “And this is your bodyguard? Seriously? Aren’t they supposed to be a little bigger?”
“She represents the Lollipop Guild,” I replied. “She’ll represent them right through the front and out the back of your skull if you don’t show a little respect.”
“I’d like to see her try,” Ascher said.
“You won’t see it,” Karrin said softly.
The room got quiet and intent for a moment, though I never heard Karrin move. I knew she’d be standing there, not looking directly at anyone, watching everyone. That’s a scary look, if you know what really dangerous people look like. Ascher did. I saw the tension start at her neck and shoulders, and make her clench her jaw.
“Easy, Hannah,” Binder said, his tone soothing. He knew what Karrin could do on a fast draw. She’d dispatched some of his minions for him the last time he’d been in town. “Dresden’s given a truce. We’re all professionals here, right? Easy.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Nicodemus said in a patiently strained paternal tone. He went to the head of the table, of course, and seated himself. “Can we please settle down and get to work?”
“Fine with me,” I said, not looking away from Ascher and Binder, until Ascher finally sniffed and returned to her seat.
“Would you care to sit, Miss Murphy?” Nicodemus asked.
“I’m fine,” Karrin said.
“As you wish,” he said easily. “Deirdre?”
Deirdre picked up an armful of folders and came around the table, passing them out to everyone seated. She rather pointedly skipped Karrin, who ignored her. I opened my rather thin folder, and found a cover page that read: DAY ONE.
“Everyone here knows the general objective,” Nicodemus said, “though I’m going to be leaving specific details vague, for the time being. I trust that I need not emphasize the need for secrecy to anyone here. Our target has a great many ways of gathering information, and if he gets wind of our venture from any of them, it will certainly come to an abrupt and terminal conclusion for all of us.”
“Keep your mouth shut,” I said, loudly enough to be a little annoying. “Got it.”
Nicodemus gave me that not-smile again. “In order to make clear to you all the potential gains to be had in this enterprise, you shall each be paid two million dollars upon our successful removal of my particular goal, guaranteed.”
Karrin’s breath stopped for a second. My stomach did an odd thing.
Man. Two million dollars.
I mean, I wasn’t gonna take Nicodemus’s money. I wasn’t doing this for the money. Neither was she. But neither of us had ever been exactly wealthy, and there were always bills to pay. I mean, stars and stones. Two million bucks would buy you a lot of ramen.
“In addition,” Nicodemus continued, “you are welcome to whatever you can carry away from the target. There is an unfathomable amount of wealth there-more than we could take away with a locomotive, much less on foot.”
“What kind of wealth?” Binder asked. “Cash, you mean?”
“For what that is worth,” Nicodemus said, an edge of contempt in his voice. “But that is collected more as a curiosity than anything else, I suspect. The real trove contains gold. Jewels. Art. Priceless artifacts of history. Virtually every rare and valuable thing to have gone mysteriously missing over the past two thousand years has wound up there. I would suggest that perhaps filling a few packs with precious gemstones might be the most profitable and least traceable course of action for each of you, but if you simply must have something more distinctive, you are welcome to take it if you can carry it and if it does not slow down our egress. I think it easily possible for each of you to beat the cash payment by an order of magnitude.”
So, not two million each.
Twenty-two million each.
That was so much money, it almost didn’t have a real meaning. . which was a real meaning all by itself.
“And what are you after?” Ascher asked, openly suspicious. “If you’re willing to dish out two million to each of us, you certainly aren’t hurting for money. You don’t need a backpack of diamonds.”
Her reasoning made me like her a little more. Her tone doubled it.
Nicodemus smiled. “I’ll make that clear to you before we go in. For now, suffice to say that it is a single, small article of relatively little monetary value.”
Liar, I thought.
“As I said to Dresden before, he has known me only as an adversary. Much of my reputation has been made from those who have opposed me-those who survived the experience, that is.” He smiled and took a sip of coffee. “There is another side to that coin. One does not operate for as many years as I have by betraying allies. It simply isn’t practical. Certainly, one uses every weapon one has when dealing with foes-but when I work with associates, I do not turn aside or leave them behind. It is not from any sense of sentiment. It is because I do business with many people over the course of centuries, and treachery is a bad long-term investment. It simply isn’t good business.”
Liar, I thought. But maybe a little less emphatically than I had before. What he was saying made sense. In the supernatural world, there were plenty of people and things that counted their life spans in centuries. Wrong a wizard when he’s young, for example, and you could wait three hundred years to find out he was never able to put it behind him-and has been working to gain the clout he needs to make it clear to you that your actions were unacceptable. Cross a vampire, and it could haunt you for millennia.
A certain degree of cutthroat pragmatism was what made any kind of alliance between various supernatural entities possible. I’d seen it between my grandfather and a professional assassin called the Hellhound. I’d seen it when squaring off against various bad guys, over the years, most of whom were willing to make a deal of some kind. Hell, I’d done it, with Mab, and she was doing it again with Nicodemus by sticking me here.
So it was entirely possible that he was on the up-and-up. Or at least that he was as sincere as I was about following through on the whole alliance thing. We had to get his McGuffin and get out again. Until then, I was betting, he might be good to his word.
And after that, everything would be up in the air.
On the other hand, Nicodemus had gone out of his way to remove as much memory of himself as possible from the human race, by destroying records of his deeds over the centuries. Guys who are on the up-and-up don’t go to those lengths to hide what they’ve done.
Not that it mattered. Mab had given her word. I had to play nice until we had grabbed the loot from Hades, or until Nicodemus tried to stick a knife in my back.
Fun, fun, fun.
I flipped to the second page of the folder and found a photo of a woman I knew, and hadn’t seen in. . Hell’s bells, had it been almost ten years? She hadn’t changed much in that time, except for maybe looking leaner and harder. I wasn’t sure she’d be at all happy to see me, and I knew for damned sure what she would think of Nicodemus.
And since when had I become the guy that things happened to ten years ago?
Nicodemus continued in his lecture voice. “Entry to the target in the Nevernever requires us to find a matching site here in the mortal world. That means breaking into a high-security facility in the real world before we can even get started in the Nevernever.”