The address Smith and Jones had left for Serrin was in Charterhouse Street, among a warren of tiny registered offices in the heart of the city. Most of them consisted of no more than one man with a dozen telecoms and wall-to-wall datastores.

Registration Services PLC was the name assigned to the address. That could mean anything: a fast-license service to deal with the Lord Protector’s Administrative Bureau, a business-data investigation franchise, maybe only a drop address. He engaged the browse program, cursing the names Smith and Jones. If they were McAllister and Hendrick, they’d be a damn sight easier to find.

The icon of the little browse clerk had just reached the fat Jones file when a subfile slipped neatly out of the folder and whipped through the datastore’s far node. Deleted, headed for limbo. Geraint followed it, the clerk puffing and panting beside the icon of his knight. Hell, I ought to reconfigure that program, he thought idly. Make it a squire or something more appropriate.

Limbo he perceived as a mortuary, a little flourish of his occasionally morbid sense of humor. The clerk checked name tags, flipped back a sheet, and jotted down a swift note. In the distance, the white-coated attendants were immobile. Datafiles would only be permanently erased at the end of the working day, and from the dated tags on the slabs it looked as if Registration Services hadn’t made its final deletions as promptly as they should have. He made his way hack to the main datastore, where the clerk hummed and hawed as he flicked through the Smiths and Joneses. Geraint made another mental note to upgrade his browse program sometime.

It had taken under a minute. He gave instructions for data compilation and left the laser printer to its work. That took less than a minute too. By the time Francesca and Serrin had journeyed as far as Cairo in their talk, Geraint was back at the table, leafing through the 129 entries.

The entry that got deleted just as he’d entered the datastore was one of the possible candidates. “Jones, Melvin Aloysius.” Aloysius? "Opened an account with Registration Services PLC two days before you were approached, Serrin. Only one other Jones from the start of November, and he’s got a very plush address in Hampstead. Anyway, Mellie-boy simply used the place as a dead-letter drop. Nothing else received that’s been recorded. Oh ho! Surprise, surprise, look at this. Package received at eleven forty-four this morning.” It was the other entry below that which was really making his mind spin. "When did you send it off, Serrin?”

“Just before eleven."

“And you got paid-when?”

“Money was there when I checked out. Just before noon." The mage frowned, unsure or unwilling to discover where all this was leading.

“Does that tell you something?” The elf’s face betrayed no insight.

“What it means is one of two things. If they weren’t expecting anything else and didn’t want to check the package you sent from the Crescent, they made the payment by electronic transfer. Or else they collected the package and then paid you. If so, they collected it within, oh, say, ten minutes. No way would Registration Services have been able to deliver it that fast. Someone must have been there waiting."

“Maybe Registration Services checked it for them, then notified them and paid me.”

"No way. These people get paid precisely because they don’t check packages. Strictly monkey see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. For one thing, checking the package would risk having to deal with the official licensing hassles." Geraint stood again and strode back to his console. “Let’s have a look at the record."

The printout took two seconds, since he knew exactly what he was looking for in the data. "Well, I never. Package is recorded as delivered by hand and received at eleven forty-four. Same time receipt and dispatch. Someone was there to collect it. Now, don’t tell me they were hanging around all day on the off chance you might come up trumps after a no-show at yesterday’s meeting. Seems to me like someone knew when you would be delivering."

There was a long silence, broken by Serrin’s next query. “Is there an address in the file, a forwarding address of any sort?"

“No forwarding address. They have to give a home address, though, for administrative purposes." Geraint sounded almost scornful. “Good old-fashioned British red tape has its uses for deckers sometimes. All that admin needs a lot of data storage. Unfortunately, it’s somewhere in Goiania.”

“Where the frag’s Goiania?” Serrin said.

“It’s a tiny oasis of, oh, about six million down the road from Brasilia.” He remembered it because he’d gotten lucky with transactions on some of the last of the minerals down there. “Did, um, Smith and Jones strike you as, ah, South American in any way?"

“Are you kidding? About as much as your old granny.” Francesca joined in the smiles at that.

They were stymied for the moment. Geraint suggested that one of them could visit Registration Services with a hefty bribe, but that probably wouldn’t work. One whiff of indiscretion and such an agency was dead. On the other hand, their ilk sprang up like weeds every day. If one got a bad name among the corporations, all they had to do was relocate somewhere else in the city under a new one. Maybe there was a chance after all.

The one final worry was that Serrin’s employers must, at the very least, have had a spy at the Crescent Hotel. Seeing the elf arrive there, or maybe just bribing a hotel clerk to alert him to that fact, the spy could have gotten over to Registration Services by the time the package arrived.

They were stuck again, and sat looking at each other blankly for a bit. Finally Serrin shrugged and began to ask Francesca what she’d been doing while he and Geraint were getting shot at over the weekend. After a long pause, she described her encounters with the bizarre figure in the Matrix, but she was obviously avoiding the details.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before. After the first time I thought about hunting him down, but after the second, 1 think I’d prefer not to see him again.” She gave a little shiver. “I haven’t analyzed my deck to find out where he went the second time. I was so busy hunting I didn’t really register the SAN I’d passed. My deck will have the information, though. The first time the bastard went into the Transys Neuronet subsystem, which is not somewhere I really want to stick my pretty little nose."

Just then Serrin had a moment of complete illumination, almost an epiphany. Slapping one hand to his forehead, he shushed Francesca, then leaned back dramatically in his chair. Spreading his arms wide, he managed to avoid falling backward solely by the expedient of getting his feet stuck under the table. As he struggled to regain his balance and composure, the other two broke into gales of laughter. When they finally stopped, the mage revealed what he’d understood at last.

"Look, this is important. I just realized something. I told you that what I was doing at Cambridge was a waste of time, yes? Astral checks, watchers, detections around all the places-Fuchi, Renraku, ATT, Parawatch, blah di bloody blah. But why was I watching those people? What I should have seen was who 1 wasn ‘t watching.

“Transys Neuronet is out at Over, just north of Long-stanton. I wasn’t asked to check them.”

The druid shaman’s words floated back into Serrin’s mind: bad energies, a place north of the Fuchi complex. Same place?

It didn’t take Geraint long to download maps and files. They spread them out across the table, pushing the swath of greasy plates onto a service trolley and rolling back the linen tablecloth.

Serrin pointed out various locations on the first map. “Look at this other stuff. Strictly small time. And right on the edge of the Stinkfens and who the hell would want to be there? Cost a fortune in detox if you wanted anything serious. Fly-by-night places. Probably making demitech and dodgy cyberware.” Serrin’s mind was beginning to race now. "Transys is the only important target I wasn’t asked to check. Now I’m beginning to wonder.”