Death Match nfe-18

by Tom Clancy

  Heming chuckled. “Well, then, we’ve got everything sorted out. This should be an interesting week….”

  Catie came home from school in a most unaccustomed rush. Normally she took her time on the combined ride and walk, letting herself depressurize after the day’s work. Today, though, she came plunging in through the side door as if she were being pursued by wolves, and ran straight into Hal, nearly flattening him.

  “Hey, look out, what’s the matter with you?” he yelled at her. “Hey, not in there, I was going to go online, you can’t—!”

  Catie never heard what he said. She was in the implant chair, her implant lined up, within a matter of seconds. A few breaths later she was standing in the Great Hall. “Space—” she said.

  “There you are,” said her workspace manager. “I’ve been worried sick. There’s a virtcall waiting for you. James Winters.”

  “Oh, thank heaven. Mr. Winters—”

  He stepped straight through into her space. “Catie. Sorry I couldn’t talk to you this morning. There were some things going on in the office.” He glanced around. “Are we private at the moment?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Do you have encryption?”

  “Yes,” Catie said, “I use DeepSatchel—”

  “Would you turn it on?”

  “Space?” Catie said.

  “Listening.”

  “Go to encrypted mode and match to the remote encryption protocol.”

  “Done.”

  “Thanks,” Winters said.

  “And give Mr. Winters a chair!”

  The same one he had used last time appeared. He seated himself. “Did your mother tell you she was going to speak to me, the other day?” Winters said.

  “Uh, yes,” Catie said. “It’s been kind of busy — we haven’t had a chance to touch base since then. We keep missing each other.”

  “The curse of modern life,” Winters said. “We’re more connected than we ever were, but no one seems able to keep in touch, even in the same house. Well, anyway, she’ll have told you that she and your dad were happy enough for you to be working on this business, as long as due care was taken. Which obviously I promised her it would be.”

  He bent a rather thoughtful look on Catie. She instantly broke out in a sweat.

  “Uh,” she said. “Mr. Winters, I have a couple of things to tell you. But first of all, did you read what I sent you? It’s really important.”

  “I read it,” he said. “We’re handling it. Some of our people are not too far from Karen de Beer’s house right now. We’ll be watching carefully to see if we can identify any visitor she has today…and whether they can be immediately identified or not, we’re going to have a little talk with them after they leave. Nothing to do with the visit, of course. There are very few people on this planet who’re perfect drivers, and some of our best operations on this continent start with the assistance of police officers who all of a sudden get very interested in someone’s broken taillight, or the thickness of the tread on their tires.” He smiled a very small smile. “Meanwhile, do you have anything else to tell me? My people and I have a busy evening ahead of us.”

  “Uh…Yes,” Catie said, after what felt like one of the longest pauses of her life.

  And then Catie told him about her access to the ISF server, and what she had found there.

  During the fifteen or twenty minutes it took her to describe what had been going on, Catie watched Winters’s face with increasing concern and could see nothing there at all. He might as well have been a carved statue, for all the reaction he showed. It was rather terrifying. Some change of expression might at least have given Catie a hint as to how to slant her story to her own best advantage while still telling him the truth. But Catie realized very quickly that Winters was not going to help her out that way, not by so much as a millimeter’s worth of shift in the set of his face. So she told him the truth, as dryly as she could, with as little embellishment as she could manage; and then, when she ran out of truth, she just stopped.

  Winters looked at Catie for a while without saying anything. It was probably only a few seconds. It felt like several years. And then he spoke.

  “The gravitational constant,” he said. His tone of voice, to her astonishment, was almost admiring, and not of her, as far as she could tell, but of the people who had sabotaged the ISF server. “Talk about hiding something in plain sight.”

  Catie, unable at the moment to do anything else, just nodded.

  “So,” Winters said. “Where do you think this takes us?”

  Catie gulped, then got control of herself again. “Sir, George said the changes in the way the ball was behaving weren’t constant. He said sometimes it seemed to act oddly, and sometimes it didn’t. That, taken together with all those different ‘definitions’ of the constant, makes me think that there’s someone, outside the server, using a remotely connected routine that acts as a kind of a switch. They watch the game, and throw the switch when it’ll do the team they’re backing the most good. Then they immediately put the constant back the way it should be again, so that no one will notice.”

  Winters nodded. “It does seem likely.” He sat there brooding for a moment. “It would require some sophisticated programming calls to communicate with an outside source, probably some kind of mirror server, without triggering the ISF space’s own alarms that its home server is being tampered with. But it could be done. Certainly it can be done, because it would seem it has been.”

  He looked at Catie then. “The one good thing about all of this,” he said, “is that you’ve succeeded, through a combination of persistence and sheer dumb luck, in isolating a problem that our whole investigative team, and even Mark Gridley, couldn’t find.” Then the look turned chillier. “While also trespassing into a private server space, accessing copyrighted material without the copyright holder’s permission, tampering with proprietary software, and possibly contaminating a crime scene.”

  Catie gulped again as the face she had been wishing would show some kind of expression, a few minutes ago, now showed one all too plainly.

  “That said,” Winters added, in a tone that was just slightly milder, “without what you’ve done, we wouldn’t have any way to prove it was a crime scene. So that weighs down the scale a little in your favor. But I wouldn’t get overexcited about that at the moment. Catie, this is not how we do business. This kind of stunt all too often results in criminals walking free when they would otherwise go for a long healthy sojourn in a residential facility with bars on the windows. Evidence must be acquired legally, right down the line…not just because that’s how we get useful results in our business, but because it’s right to do it that way. You follow me?”

  Catie nodded, dumb.

  “Now I have to work out how best to proceed here,” Winters said, and looked down at his folded hands, and was quiet for a few moments.

  Catie stood there and said not a word. The silence in the Great Hall became deafening.

  “The audacity of it,” Winters said then, “is just admirable. God knows how many virtual sports might have been subverted by this simple technique. But these guys have rolled it out too soon, on someone’s orders. Somebody with a favorite team got a real big bug up their — got very annoyed about something, and insisted that this big gun be deployed here and now…in a spatball tournament?” He shook his head. “I would have waited for the Fantasy Super Bowl. There’s real money in that. Spat’s barely taken off yet, by comparison.” Winters fell silent again.

  “But what do we do now?” Catie said. “If we remove the instructions, that’s going to be great for South Florida, maybe, but it’s a one-time fix. Whoever put the altered instructions there will know we’re on to them, and go straight underground. You’ll never find out who did it, and they’ll just try it again, somewhere else, somewhere that’s not as well policed.”

  “Yes,” Winters said, rocking back in his chair. He was silent for a moment, and then finally he said, “Best case would be
to let them trigger their ‘switch’…while we have a tracer routine in place to catch them in the act. If indeed we can install such a thing. If there’s time. And assuming it won’t somehow invalidate the whole tournament.”

  Winters sat still, looking into space for a moment. “I think we don’t have much choice this time,” he said. “We’re going to have to call in a big intervention team…and Mark as well, I think; his dad won’t be wild about it, but even he’s going to see the necessity, I would guess. And even with him, and all our best people, this is going to be a mess. A very, very lively day or three.”

  “Can’t you just plug in standard variables to replace the bad ones?” Catie said.

  “I wish it were that simple. If there wasn’t going to be anyone watching to see whether their carefully installed ‘fix’ was working properly, I’d say yes. Unfortunately we don’t have that option. It’s almost certain that they’re watching the server closely to see if anyone tampers with it, and it’s equally certain that they’ll have booby-trapped their own routines to alert them if anyone messes with them. The one good thing is, they’ll have been watching our earlier investigation, and will have assumed that we didn’t find anything. Correctly.” His look was momentarily grim. “It would be nice if that makes them a little careless. But we can’t count on that. And meanwhile everything has to seem to be working just as they want it to until the very last minute, until they put their own people in place to throw the switch….”

  He fell silent again, musing, for a few moments. Then he looked up at Catie. “On to other things…You told me,” Winters said, “that your friend’s been very cooperative.”

  “More than that,” Catie said. “He knows who I’m working for.”

  “You didn’t tell him—”

  “Of course not!” She got control of herself immediately. “But I’m sure he knows, all the same. He’s a smart man. And, if the information he’s been passing me is any indication, he’s absolutely willing to help.”

  “That’s useful,” Winters said. “We’ll see how useful in a while.” He looked up at Catie again. “But the most important thing. He didn’t give you any sense that there’s anyone on his team who’s been involved with this?”

  “Not at all.”

  There was a long silence. “All right,” Winters said. “We’ll have to take it that way for the moment.” He sat back, folding his arms.

  “I should say,” Catie said, “that I’m sorry.”

  There was a long silence, one that froze her heart. “Yes,” Winters said. “You should.”

  Catie swallowed.

  “A question, though…I would have thought,” Winters said, “that it was mostly the imagery end of things that you would have been looking at.”

  “I thought so, too,” Catie said. “That’s how I started. But it all looked just as it was supposed to. And once I got started, I—”

  “Couldn’t let it go,” Winters said in unison with Catie.

  She fell silent again.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s a familiar theme. I have about ten thousand coworkers with the same problem. It has its place. But that urge has to be controlled, that stubbornness, and used wisely, used responsibly.” He frowned. “Catie, you overstepped the mark. And more, you may even have manipulated Mark into letting you do it.”

  “I manipulated—?” she started to say, and then stopped herself. If anyone was doing the manipulating, she thought, it was that little Squirt of a Gridley! But that probably wouldn’t have been a tactically advantageous thing to say at this point, even if she could have worked up the nerve.

  “Which takes some doing, it has to be admitted,” Winters said, in a less annoyed tone of voice. “Mark’s precocity tends to blind people to his own weaknesses…of which he has a few. But we’ll leave that to one side for the moment. The problem right now is to work out what to do with the information you’ve found. May I use your system to make a couple of calls?”

  “Please feel free. Space?”

  “Just waiting for you to tell me what to do, boss.”

  She saw Winters’s eyebrows go up. “Please make Mr. Winters a privacy space, and connect to whatever address he asks you for.”

  “Done.”

  The air around where Winters was sitting went opaque in the swirling blue pattern that Catie had designed for her mother’s “hold” function. For about five minutes she sat there and castigated herself for rampant stupidity, while the blue smoke swirled. Finally it evaporated, and Winters walked out through the blue smokescreen. “Thanks, Catie.”

  “You can kill that, Space,” Catie said.

  “Yes, O Mistress of All Reality.” The smoke vanished.

  Catie scowled, furious. Winters looked startled, and then suddenly started laughing, and didn’t stop for some seconds. Catie lost her anger, while at the same time wondering whether she was off the hook.

  “This is what you get for letting Mark Gridley near your machinery,” James Winters said, when he finally found his breath again. “I wish you luck getting rid of the ‘improvements.’”

  “I can see where I’m going to need it,” Catie said.

  Winters looked around him. “You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I leave without taking this discussion much further. I have a lot to do…. We’ve got to independently verify what you found in such a way that it can be salvaged as evidence. I may disagree with your methods, but I’m thankful for your findings, you know.”

  “I understand. I’m sorry I caused you trouble.”

  “I accept the apology,” Winters said. “But, by the way…I quote, ‘What do we do now?’…”

  Catie stood silent again, completely nonplussed.

  Winters smiled again…a small, dry smile that was nonetheless a great relief to Catie. “The attitude,” he said, “is possibly an augury of things to come. We’ll see how you shape up. Talented image wranglers are valuable, yes. And they’re a dime a dozen. But what we can always use are people who’re willing to stretch outside their specialty and take a risk because they just can’t let the job at hand alone, when they know it has to be done.”

  Then the smile flashed out fully. “And between you and me,” James Winters said, “we can always use people who are followed around by plain dumb luck. There’s never enough of that to go around…though by itself, it’s fairly useless. Even the best bullet needs a gun barrel around it.”

  Catie nodded.

  “Time to get to work,” Winters said. “With any kind of luck, someone’s knocking on Karen de Beer’s door right now, and some of my people are going to be wanting to talk to me shortly.”

  “Oh, no…!” Catie said.

  “It’s all right,” Winters said. “She won’t be home. What, did you think we were going to sit around and allow her to be intimidated? That the guy shows up is going to be enough for us to act on. George Brickner will certainly testify, later, that he knew about it beforehand. Meanwhile I have other things to do. That server is going to have to be debugged so that the play-offs can go ahead, while still preserving the contaminated version of the code. We’ve got our work cut out for us, and not a lot of time to get everything done. If in fact it can be done in time at all. Frankly, I have my doubts.”

  He looked at Catie keenly. “But a question for you before I go. Identify the famous graphic artist responsible for this quote: ‘There is hope in honest error…none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist.’”

  “Uh,” Catie said, and then closed her mouth again, becoming suddenly aware that this was not intended merely as a quote.

  Winters held up his index finger. “One honest error,” he said. “All my people know I’ll allow them that much. Twice, and you get really yelled at. Make a note.”

  “Noted,” Catie said, in a somewhat strangled voice.

  “Thanks, Catie,” James Winters said, turned, went hurriedly through the door that opened for him in the middle of the Great Hall, and vanished.

  Catie got out of her space, and out of virtual
ity, and let Hal have the machine without even arguing about it, and went on down to her room and just sat there for a while, with the door shut, feeling terrible. I can’t believe how completely I’ve screwed everything up! Yet as a little time passed, and she started to recover from the shock of what had just happened, Catie was forced to admit to herself that the screw up hadn’t been total. Winters had actually been slightly pleased with her…which, frankly, was a better outcome than she had hoped for. It wasn’t that the bouquet he’d handed her hadn’t mostly been thorns, but they were ones that she deserved, and the two or three rather shredded blossoms concealed among them were, Catie supposed, worth it in the end.

  She came out of hiding after three-quarters of an hour or so, to find her brother still using the Net machine in the family room. Catie knew she was going to have to talk to George Brickner shortly, but she wasn’t in any hurry about it. She wanted to make sure her composure was back in place. She rooted around in the fridge briefly, came up with a couple of chicken breasts, and made herself a fast meal that was a favorite of her mother’s: the chicken breasts sauteed with butter and a chopped-up onion, and the whole business “deglazed” with balsamic vinegar. In the middle of her cooking, Hal came out of the family room looking slightly glazed himself.

  “You seen the news lately?” he said.

  Catie shook her head. “I’ve been busy.”

  “You’d better go have a look at it.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  “The sports news. Take my word for it.”

  “What?”

  Hal just shook his head. “I’ll watch this for you. Go take a look.”

  She blinked at that, for it was usually hard to stop Hal from giving you a nearly word-by-word narration of whatever news he’d heard recently, whether you wanted to hear it or not. Catie handed Hal the spatula with which she had been stirring the sauce around while it boiled down, and went in to sit down in the implant chair again.

  Once into the Great Hall, she said, “Space?”

  “I told him everything,” her workspace manager said. “If you leave now, you may still have time to get out of the country before they seal the borders.”