Death Match - Diane Duane [73]
“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