Death Match (2003)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 18 Clancy

  "I don't want you to be uncomfortable about this," Winter said. "If you feel you can't in good conscience be involved in an operation of this kind, even tangentially, I'll understand. Yet at the same time it's a unique opportunity to make sure that the forces we suspect are moving in on spatball don't get a chance to consolidate a choke-hold on the sport at large. The money coming into spat means that all the levels of play, especially the more amateur ones, can funnel their share of the funds into the community projects they love...and keep their sport clean and alive in its present form. But a loss to the organized crime people moving in on them now will suggest that the rest of the sport is weak as well, and can be covertly suborned by illegal payments and shady influence...."

  Catie stood silent for a few moments. "Mr. Winters," she said. "George is a friend. I'm not going to lead him on. But what he tells me freely--"

  "That's all we'd want to hear about," Winters said. "I wouldn't think of asking you to betray any confidences. But any indication that George was uneasy about what was going on inside his team would definitely help us work out how best to keep the damage that we suspect is about to happen, from happening at all...."

  He stood up, too. "Obviously you're going to need to talk to your parents about this, and so am I. But there wasn't any point in talking to them until I'd spoken to you first. This isn't likely to be a dangerous business, which is one of the reasons I'm willing to involve you. At the same time, you're going to need to keep your eyes open. We are going to be sniffing around people who are intent on making sure no one finds out what they're doing...and when they begin to suspect that that's happening anyway, things are likely to get uncomfortable. That's the point at which you're going to excuse yourself and let the Net Force operatives handle things."

  She nodded. "That's fine with me. I'm a quiet type at heart."

  He didn't quite snort. "Then what you're doing asking Mark Gridley to do maintenance work on your computer is beyond me," he said. "But we'll leave that aside for the moment. Anyway, when I find out where Mark is, I'll ask him to come talk to you about the 'sealed' game servers, so that you know what kind of things to listen for when you talk to George Brickner. Meanwhile, please talk to your folks soon, Catie. And let me know when you have. I'll be in touch with them shortly thereafter to answer any questions."

  "I will, Mr. Winters."

  He gave her a wave, then headed back through the door into his office, which sealed behind him.

  Catie stood there gazing down at the chessboard and trying to decide what to do next.

  5

  Eventually she got offline and went looking for her dad. His studio door was open a crack, which meant it was all right for him to be disturbed--"as if I'm not disturbed most of the time" was his usual line, "at least, to judge by what your mother says." Catie pushed the door open a little and found her father standing in the middle of the studio, the CNNSI artwork on its easel pushed off to one side for the moment, while he stood under the spotlight with the digitizing camera on its tripod, apparently changing a lens.

  "You busy, Dad?" Catie said.

  "Just thinking bad thoughts about Zeiss," he said. "Come on in."

  "What's the matter?" She came over and looked curiously at the lenses her father had laid out on the small table nearby, big, black-cased, knurl-edged things.

  "Aah, the new lens is still showing chromatic aberration around the edges," he said.

  "The one they just sent you as a replacement?"

  "Yeah," her father said. He looked with distaste at the lens he was holding in his hand. "There are two possibilities, and neither of them is great. Either the replacement suffers from the same problem as the original wide angle--which is just possible--or there's something wrong with the camera. Naturally that's what Zeiss is going to claim when I send this lens back to them. And the second camera's in the shop, so I can't test the lens to see if it fails in the same way." He frowned. "And I need the wide-angle for this--the other lenses can't get the whole painting in one shot. And I refuse to waste time trying to shoot this picture in pieces. It never matches up perfectly, no matter how hard you try...."

  "If you'd done this in virtual space, in Pinxit or one of the other rendering programs," Catie said, knowing perfectly well what the response was going to be, "you wouldn't have this problem."

  "I hate Pinxit," her father said, with some relish. "Its user interface is a complete waste of time. And if I'd never married your mother, I wouldn't have you standing here making fun of me while I'm going insane in the name of art, either. So let's not play the If game." He gave her a rather dry look, but it was still affectionate. "Meanwhile, did you come in here just to make fun of my creative genius being stymied, or was there something else?"

  "Uh, yeah." As briefly as she could without leaving out anything important, Catie described to her father the visit she had just had from James Winters.

  While she was talking, her father plopped himself down on the paint-spattered couch and sat there turning the offending camera lens over and over in his hands. When Catie finished, he looked up at her for a few moments and didn't say anything.

  Catie stood there and tried to conceal the fact that she was twitching slightly.

  "And?" her dad said.

  "And what?"

  "What do you think you should do?"

  "I want to help," Catie said.

  Her father started turning the lens over in his hands again. "Your mother's attitude," he said. It was something of a joke in the family that Catie seemed to take a whole lot more after her mother than her father. "You think you can make a difference?"

  "I think I might be able to," Catie said. "It's worth a try."

  Catie's dad raised his eyebrows and gave her a look she couldn't quite decipher. "Is this opinion entirely motivated by the desire for justice and fair play," he said, "or does it have something to do with George?"

  Catie flushed. "Naturally it has something to do with him," she said, "but, Dad, it's not what I think you're thinking. If you are thinking that."

  "What," her father said, "that he's a little old for you?"

  Now she laughed at him. "Of course he's a little old for me. It's not that kind of interest, Dad. Maybe--" The sudden realization brought her up short. "Maybe it's that I feel a little sorry for him."

  "Huh...?" Her father looked surprised. "Why? When he's suddenly becoming a national celebrity, and he could be rich if he wanted to?...And probably will be, no matter what his intentions are," her father added. "They have a way of getting to you, the sponsors, the big money...if they want you. Time is on their side."

  Catie filed that thought away for consideration later. "It's more like that he's a little lonely," she said. "He has friends, there's no problem there...but I get a feeling that he doesn't discuss the stuff that's going on with the team with them all that much. If he suspects there's a problem, maybe he's afraid of involving them."

  "But not afraid of involving you," her father said, suddenly sounding a little fierce.

  "If I hadn't made it plain I was interested," Catie said, "he wouldn't have taken the issue much further. I'm sure of that."

  Her father sat there for a few more moments, turning the lens over in his hands. "Well," he said eventually, "your mom'll be home from the library in a couple of hours...she and I will have a talk then." He gave Catie another of those undecipherable looks. "Hold off on talking to George for the time being, okay?"

  "Okay," Catie said. "But we're playing chess. If a move comes through--"

  Her father allowed a slight smile to emerge. "All right," he said, "deal with that, obviously." He got up. "Mean-while I have to get on the Net and try to get some satisfaction out of Zeiss, who will doubtless tell me that I'm out of my mind, and why should they replace this optic again...." The smile turned into a very sour grin. "'Customer service'...another of the great implied oxymorons of our time. Go on, honey, scoot out of here."

  Catie scooted.

  She paused long enough to
make herself a tuna sandwich, and while she was making it, considered her options. I might have to hold off on talking to George for the moment...but there's nothing to prevent me talking to Mark Gridley. Assuming I can find the little twerp.

  Catie finished the sandwich and had a Coke, then went off to the family room and sat down in the implant chair, and just vagued out for a moment or so. Her eye fell on the crack in the corner of the room, by the bookcase. Is that thing getting bigger? she thought. Really must mention it to Mom. Her father might do repairs and so forth around the house, but it was her mother who usually noticed such things needed to be done, and got them organized. She was, in most ways, the silent power in the family. Though Catie's dad might come down hard in one direction or another, he rarely did so without consulting her mother first, except as regarded small things. And how's she going to take this business with George? I wonder, Catie thought. Her mom could be unusually protective, sometimes. A little too much so, by Catie's way of thinking. But then, if as Dad says we're so much alike, it would seem that way to me, I guess....

  Catie sighed and lined up her implant with the Net box, activating it. A moment later she was standing in the Great Hall, looking at her beat-up comfy chair, along with piles of e-mails and art projects that she hadn't yet finished filing. It'll have to wait. "Space--" she said.

  "What, you again?"

  She smiled grimly. "Get me Mark Gridley."

  "Checking his space for you now."

  She stood there looking at the various pieces of completed and half-completed artwork lying on the floor in their "iconic" forms. When was the last time I sat down and actually did some art? Catie thought. She could think of about fifty things that needed to be done to the Appian Way piece, especially after the talk she'd had with Noreen the other day. She hadn't even had time to unshell the Luau lighting program--

  Her own space suddenly dissolved away to darkness. A second or so later that darkness began to lift again, like a slow dawn, but though the ground under her feet, a dusty, pockmarked surface, began to pale, the "sky" did not.

  A moment later Catie saw why. The sky was black, and full of stars that burned, unwinking, unhampered by any breath of atmosphere. The dusty, pale ground was more than just pockmarked. It was scattered with little chunks of rock, something porous and light-looking, like pumice, and the pockmarks weren't just potholes, they were craters. The nearby ones were small, but there were bigger, walled ones further off--ancient impact craters, their insides impossible to see from where Catie stood, though here and there a "splash peak" from some ancient gout of lava caught in the act of recoalescing with its crater's briefly molten bottom still stood up above the rim.

  She looked around her, very impressed. Off to her left, nearly new, there was the Earth, a bright, blue-burning crescent, and ever so faintly its dark side, North America and the Pacific mostly, was lit by moonlight, the old Earth in the new Earth's arms. Catie smiled slightly, and finished her turn.

  There, off to one side, in the bottom of a crater about the size of a football field, stood a half-circle of white columns, in the fluted Doric style--Catie had done more than enough columns in her Appian Way piece, and knew Doric from Ionian when she saw it. Some of the columns were broken at their tops, and their capitals had fallen here and there. Other columns which should have completed the circle lay higgledy-piggledy on the ground like felled trees, shattered in their fall. In the middle of the circle, where the fluted remains of several columns lay across one another and left a little space, Mark Gridley was sitting on one column, as if on a bench, and leaning back against another. In the empty space before him a display window hung, and he was watching a football game.

  Catie strolled over to him, raising dust, and stood by him for a moment, looking at the image. "Is this preseason," she said, "or post?"

  Mark snorted. "Who can tell anymore?" He looked over his shoulder at her. "Sorry I've been hard to find lately."

  "Don't sweat it, Squirt, I've been busy, too."

  "So I hear." He waved at the viewing window, and it went blank. "James Winters said you needed to talk to me about some things."

  "Yeah." She sat down on another of the columns, making herself as comfortable as she could on the ridges. "At the moment, I need to know just what makes a 'sealed' server sealed."

  He grinned at her, an entirely happy look. "Want to break into one and find out firsthand?"

  Catie had to sigh. "Mark, has anyone ever investigated whether you might possibly have some piracy in your background somewhere?"

  "Might be, on the Thai side," Mark said cheerfully. "There were some funny things going on in the Malay Straits late last century...."

  "Don't tell me. I don't want to know."

  "And my mom told me once that she was related to Grainne O'Malley...."

  Who? But Catie refused to ask him if this relationship was a good thing. Once you got Mark started on some subjects, there was no stopping him.

  "I'd prefer not to break in anywhere we're not wanted," Catie said. "Life is complicated enough at the moment. But I also need to talk to you about some structural issues."

  "That's what Winters said," said Mark. "So, shoot."

  "Well, first, the spatball servers. 'Sealed' how, exactly?"

  "Triple-redundancy controls on access to the code," Mark said. "And safe-deposit type security on the physical servers themselves--three-key access, with the highest officials in the organization holding the keys. It's sort of like the way they used to handle missile launches last century. However," Mark said, and smiled a completely unnerving smile, "any security that human beings devise, human beings can defeat. With time, and care, and enough brains."

  "Fishing for compliments, Mark?"

  He didn't deign to answer that. "As regards the ISF servers, though," Mark said, "I can save you some time and worry. Net Force has already been through those with a fine-tooth comb."

  "Meaning you, I take it."

  "I went along for the ride," Mark said. "Nothing showed up."

  "Did the software people who normally maintain the code know that you were coming?"

  "No. Well, yes," Mark said after a moment. "Upper management knew, since we were doing a physical-equipment assessment as well. In fact, the ISF asked us to come in as soon as Net Force contacted them."

  "Then we can assume that 'lower' management knew about the inspection, too," Catie said. "Wouldn't you say?"

  "Seems likely enough. Assuming 'worst case,' anyway."

  "I think you may as well assume it. I suspect your dad would have, anyway." Catie thought for a moment. "Okay...so they'll have had time to hide things from you, if anybody on the 'inside' wanted to.... Even though you've already been in there, I'd like a quick look around in that server. Can you finesse it?"

  Mark looked at her for a few moments, a very speculative expression. "Catie, I'm not sure this is strictly the kind of help James Winters had in mind when he brought you on board."

  Catie swallowed. "I can't help that," she said. "There are things I need to look at before I can figure out what questions to ask George Brickner. It's no use wasting his time and mine running down one blind alley after another. And anyway, if I don't understand the inside of the server technology well enough to know what to listen for, I'm going to be wasting my own time, too...not to mention that I won't be able to help your friends at Net Force in what they're trying to achieve."

  Mark thought about that for a moment. Then his face cleared. "All right," he said. "I know you can be trusted. And there's no time like the present. Come on!"

  He jumped up and led Catie off to one side, away from the fallen pillars. "Yo, cousin," Mark said to his workspace management program.

  "Working."

  "Access doorway. Crapshoot."

  "Opening access now, and logging." A blue outline appeared in the empty "vacuum" before them, and filled itself with darkness.

  "Logging to my storage only," Mark said hastily.

  "Logging limited," his wo
rkspace management program said, and the blackness in the doorway shimmered. A different quality of darkness, with a vague bloom of light in the background, was all that Catie could see through it at the moment.

  "That's so my dad won't find out about this immediately," Mark said. "But, Catie, he's going to have to know sooner or later. So don't do anything that's going to make Net Force look stupid later on."

  "As if I would," Catie said.

  "I know. But I have to say it anyway." The look he gave her was surprisingly fierce, and it amused Catie a little to find that he was so territorial...and pleased her as well. She knew some of the older Net Force Explorers who were friends with him had an idea that Mark might be slightly uncontrollable, even unprincipled, but plainly there were things that mattered to him...and for Catie, this was a source of some relief.

  They stepped through together. Inside the doorway was a wide dark plane, all ruled with green parallel lines crossing one another and stretching to infinity in all directions: a naked Cartesian grid, unfeatured, like a space that hadn't even been configured yet, and with only two dimensions detailed.

  "This is kind of minimalist, isn't it?" Catie said, looking around.

  Mark nodded. "The ISF's senior programmers seem to like it that way. No obvious cues."

  "I'll say," Catie said.

  "However," Mark said, "I am not one of their senior programmers. I prefer my programming a little more objectified. And between you and me, so do their more junior programmers...as you'll see."

  He reached into the darkness, and then in one gesture flipped a panel of the empty air up as if it were a little door. Under the panel, hidden in the same way that a car's gas cap might be hidden under the fueling flap, was a square of light, and in the square, Catie saw a big obvious keyhole.

  "No use in having a back-door key," he said, "if you can't use it occasionally." He reached into his pocket and pulled out an unusually large key, apparently made of some metal that was green in the same way gold was gold-colored. Mark pushed the key into the keyhole, and turned.