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.

“Best-case scenario,” Ascher said. “Two guaranteed.”

“Nicodemus Archleone,” I said. “You remember what happened the last time you did a contract with him?”

“We tried to screw him and he screwed us back harder,” Anna said. She eyed Ascher, as a couple more hotel staff flitted by the alcove. “What happens if I say no?”

“You miss the score of a lifetime,” Ascher said. “Nicodemus has to abandon the job.” She looked at me. “And Dresden is screwed.”

Which was true, now that Ascher was here and had seen me trying to derail the job. Unless I killed her to shut her up, something I wasn’tready to do, she’d tell Nicodemus and he’d put the word out that Mab’s word was no good anymore. Mab would crucify me for that, no metaphor involved. Worse, I was pretty sure that such a thing would be a severe blow to Mab’s power in more than a political sense—and Mab had an important job to do.

All of which, I was certain, Nicodemus knew.

Jerk.

“Is that true?” Valmont asked.

I ground my teeth and didn’t answer. A crew of four caterers carrying a large tray went by.

“It’s true,” Valmont said. “The job. Is it real?”

“It’s dangerous as hell,” I said.

“Binder is in,” Ascher said. “Do you know who that is?”

“Mercenary,” Valmont said, nodding. “Reputation for being a survivor.”

“Damn skippy,” Ascher replied. “He’s my partner. I’m along to keep Dresden here from getting all noble on you.”

“That true?” Valmont asked me.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

Valmont nodded several times. Then she said, to Ascher, “Excuse us for a moment, would you?”

Ascher smiled and nodded her head. She lifted her glass to me in a little toast, sipped, and drifted back out of the alcove.

Valmont leaned a little closer to me, lowering her voice. “You don’t care about money, Dresden. And you aren’t working for him by choice. You want to burn him.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Something hot flared in Valmont’s eyes. “Can you?”

“The job is too big for him to do alone,” I said.

“A lot of things could happen,” she said.

“Or you walk,” I said, “and it doesn’t happen at all. He’s out millions of bucks he’s already paid, and there’s no job.”

“And he just crawls back into the woodwork,” Valmont said. “And maybe he doesn’t come out for another fifty years and I never have another chance to pay him back.”

“Or maybe you get yourself killed trying,” I said. “Revenge isn’t smart, Anna.”

“It is if you make a profit doing it,” she said. She clacked her teeth together a couple of times, a nervous gesture. “How bad is it for you if I walk?”

“Pretty bad,” I said, as a second crew of caterers went by with another huge tray. “But I think you should walk.”

A hint of disgust entered her voice. “You would. Christ.” She shook her head. “I’m not some little girl you need to protect, Dresden.”

“You’re not in the same weight class as these people either, Anna,” I said. “That’s not an insult. It’s just true. Hell, I don’t want to be there.”