Death Match

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 virtuality, and let Hal have the machine without even arguing about it,