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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"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.

And she thinks about it.

And concludes that this isn't a five-minute problem, or a ten-minute problem, or even an hour-long problem. It's a pretty big one.

But now that she knows how to do all this, she can keep checking while she works on a solution.

"Okay," she says. More seriously than last time: "Thanks, Jim."

"You are most welcome, my dear."

His words and tone are flippant, but he looks up at Matilda as he speaks, and his expression is entirely sober.

She smiles without her usual edge of mischief.

Does she need to say it again? No she doesn't.

Jim is the best bad guy.

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