One of Addison’s cronies, a Lisa Miggs, had made unauthorized use of Jiro Tanaka’s cyberdeck to take a run at the Wall. Like most deckers at Renraku, Addison and friends had no idea what lay behind the Wall. They knew any attempt to find out was a breach of security, but they tried anyway. Tipical hare-brained decker stunts. Always meddling where they shouldn’t. The episode hadn’t resulted in anything more than a test of the AI project’s defenses, but Addison didn’t know that. He only knew that he and Miggs had broken rules that could get them canned. It was the man’s terror of that that put him in Crenshaw’s pocket.

He had become useful even though he hadn’t fulfilled her hopes of linking Verner to something underhanded. At the moment, he was employed in helping her find out what the AI project team was hiding. It was a sweet irony that what he was doing for her was exactly what he feared she would expose him for doing before. But she wasn’t so stupid as to send him directly up against the IC that shrouded the project and those working on it. She wanted a lever to find out what kind of breakthrough the team had made. Something that would force one of them to tell her what she wanted to know. To get that lever, she had set Addison to snooping around the Matrix for dirt. He had called her this afternoon to set up this meeting. He must have found something she could use.

The door slid open and Addison darted in, head craning to check the corridor behind him. He palmed the panel shut, then saw that the room was still dark. “Drek, she’s not here.”

“Wishing won’t make it so, jackhead.”

Addison jumped at her voice. “Drek! Don’t do that, Crenshaw!”

She stepped up to him and ran her fingers under his chin. The alloy blades she wore for fingernails creased the skin but brought no blood. “You don’t give orders. I do.”

“Sure,” he stammered. “Whatever you say.”

She tapped the switch that brought the lights up. “See that you remember it. What have you got for me?”

“I’m not real sure. Let me slot it and you can decide for yourself.”

He popped a chip into the console and stared expectantly at the screen, waiting for it to light up. She didn’t want to wait. “Cliber?”

“Naw. The old biddy’s clean as a one-room schoolmarm. She’s a real ice maiden. Lives for her machines.”

“Frag it. I was hoping you’d turn up something on her. it would be a pleasure to lean on the bitch.”

“Better her than me,” Addison muttered.

Crenshaw heard him perfectly well but decided not to let it show. “Which one then, Hutten or Huang?”

Addison flashed a brief smile, trying to hide his tension. “Maybe both. They’re both hanging onto the meat. I copped a list of the use records for the playrooms on Six. Both H’s are on it, and old Huang a married man, too. Wanna bet his wife don’t know?” He finally got the data he wanted on the screen and stepped aside with a magician’s flourish.

Ignoring his theatrics, Crenshaw stared as the data scrolled by. She frowned. “That’s not much. And it’s a pretty standard pattern for a salaryman. What are the details?”

“Details?” Addison echoed. “Well, um, you can see that Huang’s got a regular routine.”

“A mistress, then. That might give me a hook if she’s pliable. Anything else?”

“Well, maybe. But I’m not sure.” Addison wilted under her glare, his voice becoming unsteady. “I think I spotted an erasure in the records.”

“What’s the connection?”

“It was one of Huang’s regular nights and there ain’t no record of him paying a visit that night.”

“And our president is certainly skilled enough in the Matrix to arrange his own erasures. Was Hutten there that night?”

“Naw. His visits started about a week later. Every three or four days after that, but no regular night.”

“You’ve checked the visual records?”

“Frag it, Crenshaw. There’s tight ice on those files.”

“You’re supposed to be an expert,” she sneered. Crenshaw knew it was too much to expect him to act on his own initiative; he didn’t have the guts.

“Even I can only do so much. I don’t like this stuff, Crenshaw. You’re messing with important people. Any one of them could get me fired. And, drek, messing with Huang. He’s the fragging president.”

She stared at him, letting him squirm. “Addison, you have a lot more to worry about from me. They’re too busy to notice a third-rate electron jockey like you. So just do what I tell you and you won’t have any trouble.”

Addison backed away. “Sure, Crenshaw. Whatever you say.” When he bumped into the console, he seemed to remember the program he had running. Terminating it, he popped the chip. His every motion was hesitant.

“I can see you’ve got something else on your mind. Spit it out.” She was tired of the slug’s spinelessness.

“It’s that Werner guy.”

“Verner.”

“Yeah, him. He was terminated, wasn’t he?”

“Dismissed. Two weeks ago.”

“Yeah, I thought so. Well, I was checking on some of the strange stuff in the Matrix. You know, the stuff that we think is AI. There was a log of his icon in one of the nodes where the fuzz had been real strong. Just that one node, though. Real weird.”

“You didn’t report it?”

“Drek, no! I wasn’t supposed to be there, either.”

“Good.”

So, Vemer had sneaked back into the Renraku architecture and was sniffing around the AI project. What a fragging snake! She had known that little drekhead was trouble the minute he’d thrown in with Tsung’s gang during the hijacking. But nobody would listen to her. Marushige said Verner was a nothing. Sato said that he wasn’t important enough to waste resources on. Well, Verner may have fooled them, but she had the punk’s passcode. From what Addison said, it was obvious he hadn’t been able to take whatever he wanted when he bolted the arcology. If that slime was stupid enough to come back, she’d have his balls. To think that she’d almost started to believe he was harmless.

“I want you to forget the playroom records for now. Check out the system around that node where you found Verner’s icon logged in. I want to know of anything unusual. Anything. You just report it to me; don’t try to interpret it. Got that?”

Addison’s eyes were wide and he swallowed convulsively a couple of times before nodding. The slime mold was as afraid of her as ever. But his fear was good; it meant he’d do her work.