Death match, p.16
Death Match, page 16
part #18 of Tom Clancy's Net Force Explorers Series
That's--that's--! The first word that occurred to Catie was illegal, though the word was faintly comical, used in this situation. Nonetheless, it was accurate; Catie was positively indignant at the sheer fraudulence of it. You can't just change the laws of physics! And Catie couldn't think of anything more basic to the way that objects in this particular frame of reference would operate.
And it'd be easy to miss. After all, who thinks about the gravitational constant? It's a constant!
...I've got to call Mark!
She checked her watch. It was eight in the morning. Any other time she would have thought "It's too early." Now, though, Catie thought, If he's not up, it's about time he was! But she wasn't comfortable about calling him from in here.
"Space," she said.
"Listening."
It's gotten so it feels weird not to be insulted, Catie said, and couldn't quite repress a smile despite the seriousness of the situation. "Save this configuration for me, voiceprinted again. Then close everything down."
"Done." The glowing tower of text vanished.
"Door," Catie said. Her gateway back to her space appeared before her. She slipped through it, waved it shut.
The first morning sun was glinting through the windows around the top of the reading room dome as Catie made her way back to the Great Hall. "Space!" she said.
"Now what?"
She grinned again. "Get me Mark Gridley, right now. Flag it urgent."
"Is he even going to be up yet? Growing boys need their rest." The tone of voice, if not the voice itself, was almost exactly Mark's.
"Get on it," Catie said, and picked up from the floor beside the Comfy Chair the piece of paper which stood for the virtmail she had been intending to send James Winters. "And see if James Winters is available, while you're at it."
There was a pause. A second later Mark appeared a few feet away.
"Oh, good," Catie said. "Listen, do you know what I found? There's--"
But Mark was speaking. "--not available right now, and I'm not sure when I will be. If you'll leave a message, I'll get back to you as soon as I'm free."
Oh, great! Catie thought. It was a recorded message again. It froze in place when it was done, leaving Mark standing there and looking slightly vague. Now what? I can't tell James Winters about this! I wasn't even supposed to be in that space!
But then Catie burst out in a sweat. If Net Force wasn't told about this right away, there was no telling what might happen during the play-offs. It wasn't just a matter of whether or not South Florida might win or lose. It was a matter of basic fairness, now, to all the other teams as well.... Not to mention not letting the bad guys get away with it!
And I have to talk to him anyway.
No point in putting it off.
Suddenly James Winters was standing there looking at her. "Uh, Mr. Winters," Catie said. "I have--"
"--apologies for leaving you a canned message. Unfortunately I'm away from my desk at the moment. If you'd kindly leave a message for me, I'll return the call as soon as possible. Thank you."
"Uh," Catie said. "Mr. Winters, it's Catie Murray. Please call me back as soon as you can. It's very urgent. Meanwhile I'm also sending you a report on a conversation I had with George Brickner. This is urgent, too...please get back to me soon. Thanks."
The image of Winters vanished. Catie glanced over and saw that the one of Mark had taken itself away as well.
"Wonderful," Catie muttered. There was nothing she could do now but go offline, go to school, and try to get hold of both Mark and Winters from there if she had time.
Chapter 7.
In a huge darkened space filled with the rustle and breathing of expectant people, one man in a dark All Over suit stood at a "virtual podium," a reading window floating about chest height and tilted toward him. Off to one side, two other people stood by a table on which was a large cut-crystal bowl shaped like a spatball and containing a number of small opaque plastic balls.
"If our guests would go ahead and stir the choices--"
The two celebrity guests, a handsome tall dark man in a formal kilt and jacket with jabot and a blond woman wearing an electric-blue dress that covered her completely and yet left absolutely nothing to the imagination, both plunged a hand into the crystal bowl and started stirring. From somewhere a dramatic drum roll started to fill the space.
The stirring went on long enough and energetically enough to convince the most skeptical viewer that there was no way either of the celebrities in question could have picked a specific ball on purpose. "First choice, please!" said the ISF president, who was acting as the master of ceremonies.
The woman and man each came up with a ball and handed it to the ISF president. This worthy, a short earnest-faced gentleman of Eastern extraction, proceeded to crack the balls open one at a time. From the first one a small spark of light burst out, floated up into the air, burning and growing, spinning and throwing off sparks like a Catherine wheel, and gradually turned into the famous red M and owl logo of one of the play-off teams.
"First to play in the quarterfinal series: Manchester United High--" A roar went up from the gathered Man United fans as the ISF president cracked open the second ball. Another spark of light shot out of it, leaped up into the air, and after a certain amount of shining and spinning, turned into a stylized flame surrounded by the letter C.
"--plays the Chicago Fire!"
Shrieks of delight from the Chicago contingent. The two logos charged at one another in the air, did a brief waltz around one another, and finally settled down to hang above and to the left of the ISF president.
"Second choice, please!"
The celebrities stirred the bowl again, each picked a ball, and once again handed them to the ISF official. He cracked the first of the two balls.
A streak of light arched up out of it and exploded into a miniature fireworks display overhead; after a few moments the fire faded away to show a stylized green grass-hopper and the letters XZS. "In the second match, Xamax Zurich--"
The ISF president cracked the second ball open. The fireworks that went up were white at first, then turned yellow and black, leaving a yellow oval with two black spots at one end of it. "--plays South Florida Spatball Association!"
"Well, good," Darjan said, sitting back in his implant chair with a satisfied expression.
"Listen," Heming said to him, from nearby in the darkness of their joint experience of the lottery draw. "Didn't you hear what I said? They've been in the server!"
Darjan waved one hand in a languid way.
"What's the matter with you!" Heming said in an angry whisper. "If Net Force should find--"
"They nosed around for four days straight and didn't find anything," Darjan said, unconcerned, as he watched the draw for the third team to play begin. "We own somebody on the ISF's server maintenance team. He was looking over the Net Force geeks' shoulders the whole time. They went right through the system structure and couldn't find a thing wrong with it." And Darjan smiled.
"That they told your guy about, maybe!" Heming said. "What if they just want to catch our ops actually using the 'flipflop' instructions?"
"That's not going to happen," Darjan said. "The server issue is handled. Stop worrying about it, and just make sure those conditionals get used properly."
"And in the third match, the Rio de Janeiro Rotans--" said the ISF president.
"You saw the tests," Heming said.
"Tests are one thing," Darjan said. "Just make sure your people function at least that well on Thursday. What about those 'repairs' to the South Florida team's Net boxes?"
"--play the New York JumpJets--"
More shouting came from the selection ceremonies. "Which means that the Los Angeles Rams play Sydney Gold Stripe in the fourth match. And here's the play-off schedule--"
Heming scowled and waved the volume down. "Almost all done," he said. "The only ones not done now are the captains and two of the forwards. They'll be done today or tomorrow...plenty of time."
"Good." Darjan's smile persisted, and it wasn't particularly pleasant. "Not that they're likely to be a problem again in play. Xamax should wipe them up nicely even without help. But some of the principals want them out of the play-offs right away...they're still pissed off at the 'Kiwanis kids' having the nerve even to get into the same volume with Chicago last time, much less draw with them."
"Fine...we'll take care of it. What about your invigilator?"
"I have a call to her scheduled for this afternoon, just before she goes to pick up her little honey from school. She'll play our side, I think."
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."
