Death Match - Diane Duane [75]
“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.”
Then the smile flashed out fully. “And between you and me,” James Winters said, “we can always use people who are followed around by plain dumb luck. There’s never enough of that to go around…though by itself, it’s fairly useless. Even the best bullet needs a gun barrel around it.”
Catie nodded.
“Time to get to work,” Winters said. “With any kind of luck, someone’s knocking on Karen de Beer’s door right now, and some of my people are going to be wanting to talk to me shortly.”
“Oh, no…!” Catie said.
“It’s all right,” Winters said. “She won’t be home. What, did you think we were going to sit around and allow her to be intimidated? That the guy shows up is going to be enough for us to act on. George Brickner will certainly testify, later, that he knew about it beforehand. Meanwhile