Death Match - Diane Duane [38]
They all headed for the door, where George was handed his ElectroWallet by Wendy. There was a little crowd of the diner staff all waiting there with her by the door to shake George’s hand, and as they went out to the street, Hal muttered to Catie, “We ought to come back here later in the week and see if the service is still this good.”
She smiled slightly as Mike said his good-byes and headed for his car. He would be driving George to the press conference.
“Listen,” said George, shaking Hal’s hand, “it’s been good meeting you.” To Catie, as he shook her hand, he said, “I really enjoyed this. Stay in touch.”
“Sure.” She smiled politely enough, while at the same time thinking, I bet you say that to all the—
“I mean it,” George said, and once more there was something about the way he said it that brought Catie up short. It was not exactly urgency in his voice—but at the same time, she couldn’t get a handle on just what it was.
“Look, wait a second,” George was saying. He fumbled around in his pocket and came up with a business card, one of the kind with a Net-readable chip embedded in it: you dropped it onto your Net machine’s reading pad, if your machine had one, and it read the embedded address automatically. Or you could always simply read it into your machine off the card.
“Here’s my Net address,” George said. “It’s always nice to run into someone who likes the sport for itself, and isn’t blinded by the surrounding hype. If you have time, I wouldn’t mind chatting with you occasionally. Or alternately, having the occasional game of chess. I don’t have time for tournament play, heck, I don’t have time now for proper meals, most days…but move-by-move would be fun.”
Catie looked at his card, looked at him. “Sure,” she said. “Any time.”
George waved a little salute at them and headed off toward Mike’s car, got in. The two of them drove off. Catie and Hal walked in the other direction, toward the GWU tram station, and found the tram that would head toward home waiting there on layover. They climbed on, and Catie sat down, feeling strangely weary, and yet aware of something at the back of her mind that was poking her for attention, trying to find a way to explain itself and not yet succeeding.
Hal, though, was shaking his head, looking astonished. “Am I completely out of my mind,” he said as the tram started up, turning out of the layover loop and into traffic, “or was he making a dive at you?”
Catie reached into her pocket, took out George’s card again, glanced at it. “I don’t think so,” she said after a moment. “I think something else may be going on. He might just want someone to talk to who doesn’t automatically see him as a spatball player, or a media figure…”
“Or a serious hunk.”
“I don’t know,” Catie said.
What she did know, though, was that as soon as she finished up whatever else her mom wanted her to take care of around the house, she was going to go have a talk with Mark Gridley.
4
Why, when you needed to talk to somebody, was it always so hard to find him? Mark was online so much of the time Catie sometimes wondered how he got enough sleep and sufficient calories for fuel. But when Catie got online that evening and sent a call to Mark’s space, all she got was an image of Mark standing by himself, spotlit in the darkness, saying, “I’m either not online right now, or I can’t talk…so leave me a message, okay?”
And so she did. But the other thing she found, around noon on Sunday—for she got involved in a long debrief with some of her soccer buddies over the game they had played on Saturday afternoon, after the “celebrity lunch”—was in her workspace, in the middle of Catie’s mock-up of the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, when she went in to tidy things up before going off to watch the South Florida–Chicago–Moscow Spartak game. It was a simple text message in a window, just hanging there and glowing in the early afternoon light, and it read:
1
P-K4
-
Catie just stood there, smiling slightly, when she saw it. Pawn to King Four. It was the first move