It had only taken Luppas a few months to work a back door into the Fuchi systems after he’d signed on with the corp. The link had come through a brief liaison with a female decker who’d been charmed by his looks and the charm he’d manufactured for her. Once he’d found her weakness—the fact that she was running a utility that diverted corporate scrip through the payroll by jinking with the shipping accounts to offset hospital expenses incurred by her young son and costing Fuchi another thirty thousand nuyen a year—Luppas had exploited it. He’d blackmailed the woman even though he was sure the Fuchi security systems had already discovered the graft and decided that the woman’s skills as a programmer were worth the extra pay. A few weeks after Kossuth had established a new back door into the system that was much more complex and more low-profile than hers, the woman had died in a fire at her doss. Luppas had made sure of it.