Where do you go when the world's wealthiest criminal order is feeling for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza, so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles? The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse.

Molly had an answer: You hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle, where any outside influence generates swift, concentric ripples of raw menace.

You hide in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above Nighttown, because the Pit's inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own filament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, black-market cigarettes dangling from their lips.

She had another answer, too.

'So you're locked up good and tight, Johnny-san? No way to get that program without the password?' She led me into the shadows that waited beyond the bright tube platform. The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.

'The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contra autism prostheses.' I reeled off a numb version of my standard sales pitch. 'Client's code is stored in a special chip; barring Squids, which we in the trade don't like to talk about, there's no way to recover your phrase. Can't drug it out, cut it out, and torture it. I don't know it, never did.'

'Squids? Crawly things with arms?' We emerged into a deserted street market. Shadowy figures watched us from across a makeshift square littered with fish heads and rotting fruit. 'Super conducting quantum inference detectors. Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.'

'Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid'll read that chip of yours?'