searchingfordistraction

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Jim is . . . more or less himself today. He could easily drop into character if necessary, but he's recognizable enough to anyone who knows him.

In front of him on his table is a deceptively dated-looking laptop, with a small box of chocolates perched on top of it.

He might be waiting for someone. There's no guarantee, but Milliways tends to be good about these sorts of things.

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That is, he knows, not a compliment Matilda would bestow lightly. He smiles in acknowledgment of that.

"You are an excellent student," he tells her. "I might reconsider being a professor if I could be guaranteed more like you."

She beams.

"If all professors were like you I think I'd go to college right now."

He smiles again, more abstractly, and says,

"Do you want to get down to business or do you want a break first? I'm going to have to set up a connection before we can get anywhere."

Which will only be slightly more complex than it would be at home. Wireless is convenient, but not required.

"I think I'll get a snack," she decides. "D'you want anything?"

"No, thank you," he says, already distracted by the task ahead.

(It hasn't even been all that long since he last ate, anyway. He remembers with reasonable regularity for the most part, especially now Seb has thought to threaten him with getting Molly in on reminding him to. Less annoying all around just to do it himself.)

Matilda takes him at his word and skips off to the kitchen, returning several minutes later with a glass of miscellaneous juice and a rapidly disappearing sandwich.

Jim, fully absorbed in what he's doing, doesn't even look up.

The disappearance of the sandwich accelerates. She stays well out of his way until she's found somewhere to put down the juice, but watches in fascination.

The connection is easy; give Jim Moriarty a phonejack and a computer and he can go anywhere he wants. It's ensuring the security of it that he's spending extra time on. After all, if they are traced back to here, it won't be the six-year-old who will fall under suspicion, and he doubts Matilda would be inclined to forgive him if Jenny ended up in federal prison.

Eventually, when he's satisfied they're invisible, he sits back and says,

"There we are."

It's fascinating.

And okay, she kind of gets a certain mischievous enjoyment out of breaking into the FBI from her comfy couch. Take that, mean federal agents everywhere.

She's boiling with questions, but half of them answer themselves as she watches Jim work.

When they find the appropriate records, she giggles. "Oh good, they haven't found them yet. It said in the movie where they went, right?"

There are a lot of ambiguous pronouns in that sentence, but if Jim can't disentangle the correct referents—the feds, her family, and her family again, in that order—then what good is being a genius anyway?

"Guam." He draws the word out, voice dipping low on the first part of the syllable and rising again on the second.

(It was the only thing in the movie he'd laughed at, just a low chuckle in the back of his throat but enough that he'd felt Seb exhale relief up on the sofa.)

"I told you Daddy was bad at being a crook," she says, giggling again, then sobers a little. "Well, they can stay there. If he gets caught it's just a big problem for everybody. Let's make this whole thing disappear."

"No need to drag it all back out again," he agrees.

The process is a little more complicated than the few keystrokes movie hackers make. When he's finished, he says,

"There. Safe as houses. Between this and the hash those idiots made of gathering evidence, the FBI will be just as happy to quietly let them go and avoid the inevitable embarrassment of a mistrial."

"Thanks, Jim," she says happily. "You're still the best bad guy."

He looks up from the screen for the first time since he started splicing the connection together and grins at her.

"I know."

She beams back.

"That was fun."

Jim is such a terrible influence, isn't he?

Well. Such an influence, anyway.

He is.

"Was there anything you wanted taken care of while we're at it?"

"I can't think of anything," she says. "Like what?"

Now there is a chance to be a terrible influence.

There it is indeed.

But Jim is in a (perhaps not-so-surprisingly) benign mood right now. The only suggestion he offers is,

"We could see what they've got on Agatha Trunchbull. Make sure she's staying put wherever she is."

People like Agatha Trunchbull, in Jim's experience, are too proud to quietly accept humiliation and too stupid to disappear when they've been beaten.

She wrinkles her nose in eloquent distaste.

"Probably a good idea," she proclaims. Miss Trunchbull is high on the list of people Matilda would rather not think about ever again, but unlike her parents Miss Trunchbull is also dangerous. If she's found another school full of kids to terrorize, Matilda is just going to have to track her down and terrorize her right back.

There is very little available on the Trunchbull, as it turns out. She has an animal's instinct for covering her tracks; if Jim had a few days and his own network at his disposal, he could find everything, but he doesn't, so he settles for hacking a few more governmental databases until they've determined that she's fled back to England.

"An entire ocean away," Jim muses. "That's not bad for a start."

"Can we find out if she's working at a school again?" she wonders. "I don't want her working at a school."

She doesn't quite not-want it badly enough to sign Jim on for handling the situation, but she definitely wants to know.

"We can try," says Jim, who started doing just that as soon as the question came out of Matilda's mouth. "If she's working somewhere where she's not being paid under the table, she'll be using an alias, she's got just enough sense for that. A woman of her description will stand out, though you'd be amazed how many large and terrifying women end up teaching small children, especially in England . . . all not finding her at a school will mean is we've not found her."

It frustrates him a little, a reaction he notes with disapproval. He can't afford to get too reliant on his network; from there it's just a small step to complacence, and complacence is as good as a lobotomy as far as he's concerned.

Matilda makes a disapproving noise, but leans in to watch him at work.

"I'd rather know," she says. "If we don't find her, I'll... think about it."

Lots of problems seem to just solve themselves once Matilda starts thinking about them.

Jim doesn't look up from the screen, but he does give a faint, knowing smile.

The searches he runs come up empty, with the women who do match the description all with easily found records that haven't been falsified. (Of course he can tell. He even takes the time to explain it to Matilda.) It wouldn't be unreasonable to conclude that Agatha Trunchbull is highly unlikely to be working at any school in the UK at the moment, but that's not quite the same thing as a guarantee.