Never trust an elf

"Appropriate," Neko murmured. The Matrix returned, and Neko's viewpoint now included the biker girl's spun-silver hair. He tried looking down to see his own chrome paws, but found that he could not. His viewpoint was slaved to that of the decker. Her hair remained as a visual reminder that he was there only as an observer. "Where to?" Jenny asked.

"Let's start with double-checking some of the earlier data."

"Don't trust me?"

"It's not that. There are some ramifications in the Laverty files that I'd like to investigate." "Chilled enough. Let's fly." They did, soaring above the Seattle Matrix construct. With a dizzying shift in perspective, they dove, pulling out to whip along a datapath. They screamed along for barely a second before the Matrix winked off and then on again. As they rose up from the datapath, Neko could see that the Matrix landscape had changed. The Aztechnology pyramid, so prominent a moment before, was nowhere to be seen. Some of the others were still there, but seemed changed in size.

New icons had appeared, among them a cluster of crystalline structures that looked like glittering snow-flakes.

"They look like ice."

"And ice they are," Jenny confirmed. "IC-type ice, intrusion countermeasures. The kind of ice that'll burn you if you touch it the wrong way.''

"But it's so beautiful."

"Sure is.". "We're moving toward them."

"That's were you wanted to go. Second one to the right is Laverty's."

"Then these are the council's data systems."

"Fast boy."

They slid around the edges of the first iceflake and dropped down toward the second. Their point of view continued down, sliding around the major axes and gliding past the interwoven sub-branches, until the multifaceted arms of the structure stretched over them. Neko expected to slip into shadow until he remembered that the only shadows in the Matrix were the ones that had been designed into someone's interface. They halted before one of the lowest arms. It was plain compared to most they had passed.

"Laverty's public office system," Jenny said.

Then they were inside. It seemed like they were standing inside a glacier, but no earthly glacier had ever been composed of lattice walls. A pair of black-gloved hands appeared before Neko. The hands stripped off their gloves and flexed long, tapered fingers of chrome.

"Pick and choose, Neko. The files look clean."

"Let's start with a correlation of multiple locations for public activities by anyone named Laverty."

"You ain't got the bucks and I ain't got the time for that."

"Can you confine it to the last hundred years and weed out anyone with no connection to the old United States or the Tir?"

"Sure. That narrows it down some, but it's still big."

Neko frowned. "So ka. Then start with Scan Laverty himself. Where does he spend most of his public time? Only pull locations he's visited more than once in a year or where he has a business interest." "Null perspiration."

A scrolling list of locations superimposed itself over Neko's view of the crystalline lattice. With only a few exceptions, all of Laverty's public appearances were in Australia, England, Ireland, the former United States of America, and the former Dominion of Canada. "What about the business interests?" "Doesn't have any direct connections," Jenny said. "Supports a lot of charity organizations, though." "Same places?"

After a moment, Jenny said, "Yeah." "What kinds of charities?" "See and learn, curious cat." Flashes of news reports replaced the Matrix imagery. They flew by too fast to absorb, but Neko got a sense of Laverty's involvements. Disaster relief, medical charities, work with the underprivileged, relief for the SINless. It all had a curious ring. The man had seemed too wise to the ways of the shadows to be a squeaky-clean philanthropist.

"Jenny?" The images stopped. "This Xavier Foundation shows up a lot. Let's look into that." "It's guarded."