Death Match - Diane Duane [49]
He sat down again, hunched forward a little, his hands folded. “Normally they’d shy away from this,” Winters said, “for fear of detection. But if they do this now, and manage to pull it off successfully, then they’ll try it again, in other sports…and the effects down the road could be very bad. Everything from the various ‘fantasy leagues’ that play casually around the world to the ‘real’ leagues that play under virtual conditions could be affected, if we don’t get a handle on this and stop it now. We want to catch the perpetrators with their hands in the cookie jar, conclusively. And the rest of the intervention must be complete, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that we are completely on top of this problem before it really gets going.”
Catie sat there quietly thinking for a moment. “So,” she said, “it would be good if Net Force actually was completely on top of it.”
Winters gave Catie a long, level look, and she abruptly broke out in a sweat, wondering if she had gone a little too far. Then the Net Force Explorers liaison cracked a small and appropriately wintry smile, no more than a couple of millimeters’ worth and only on one side of his mouth, but enough to relieve Catie of the impression that she was in trouble.
“It takes time to put an operation together,” Winters said, “and there are times you concentrate on one aspect of it to the detriment of others. We’re trying to remedy that problem right now.”
“That’s why Mark was asking about meeting George Brickner, wasn’t it.”
Winters sighed. “Whatever else we might seek to accuse Mark Gridley of in the real world,” he said, “subtlety wouldn’t be on the list. Well, never mind, he makes up for it elsewhere. Catie, one of our concerns is whether this attempt to fix the ISF play-offs might extend into the personnel of the teams themselves. ‘Big sports’ are already vulnerable for any number of reasons, and we’re looking into all the professional teams involved in the spatball play-offs as a matter of course. Rio, in particular, and Chicago, have some potentially unsavory connections, which have been sliding around just under the surface. But a nonprofessional team like the Banana Slugs is vulnerable in all kinds of other ways. South Florida, as you know, is composed of fairly ordinary people with fairly ordinary jobs—the most exciting employment any of them holds down is probably the K-9 work that the center forward does for the U.S. Customs office at the Port of Miami—and in such a situation, the prospect of a big payoff for doing something that you would almost certainly never get caught at would tempt most anybody.” He sighed. “Heck, it would even tempt me at the pay my grade pulls, except that I’m widely known to be incorruptible, and besides, I’m sure there’s someone taking a look at my bank account now and then.”
“I’m not sure I’d believe that any of the people on that team would be involved in throwing games,” Catie said. “But I’ve only known them for a couple of days….” Then she glanced up. “One thing you should know, though. When we were having lunch, George Brickner heard me say that I was in the Net Force Explorers. I wouldn’t say the conversation changed tack after that…but I caught a couple of odd looks from him.”
“Odd, how?”
“It’s hard to say,” Catie said. Indeed, she was still trying to analyze them to her own satisfaction.
“Did he look suspicious of you in some way?”
Catie thought about that. “No,” she said. “Whatever was on his mind, I don’t think it was that. I’m still not sure what he wants, but he’s definitely more attracted than repelled.”
“Hmm…” Winters brooded for a moment. “Well,” he said, “let’s get to why I came to see you.