The Boston sprawl had been something of a quiet town for shadowrunners until the last couple of years or so. It was the location of the East Coast Stock Exchange ever since the earthquake that had devastated New York City years before Hammer was even born. The importance of the stock exchange to the economy sustaining all of the megacorporations was enough to make the major multinationals declare Boston "off-limits" to the usual kind of shadow operations the corps routinely conducted against one another. Boston had become a city of "corporate pride" that the megacorp bigwigs could trust as "neutral ground" for their dealings with their rivals. The cutthroat business of Boston was conducted in board rooms and on the stock exchange, not in back alleys like it was in cities like Seattle, New York , and Atlanta.