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.”