in this context, it leads to very interesting conclusions.” Savich
pulled three pages from his jacket pocket and read:”Vasili Krimakov
has lived in Agios Nikolaos for eighteen years. He married a Cretan
woman in 1983. She died in a swimming accident in 1996. She had
two children by a former marriage. Her children are dead. The oldest
boy, sixteen, was mountain-climbing when he fell off a cliff. A
girl, fifteen, ran into a tree on her motorcycle. They had one child, a
boy, eight years old. He was badly burned in some sort of trash fire
and is currently in a special burn rehabilitation facility near Lucerne,
Switzerland. He’s still not out of the woods, but at least he’s alive.”
Savich looked up at all of them in turn. “We’ve had reports on some
of this, but not all of it presented together. Also, they had drawn conclusions,
and that’s what was really interesting. I know there was
more, probably about their plans to act against Krimakov, but I
couldn’t find any more. What do you think?”
“You mean you have those programs encoded so well you
couldn’t get in?”Thomas asked.
“No. I mean that someone who knew what he was doing expunged
the records. Only the information I just told you was left,
nothing more. The wipe was done recently, just a little over six
months ago.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Adam said. “I thought it
would be like fingerprints. They’d be there but there was no clue
when they were made.”
“Nope. I don’t know how the Greeks got ahold of it, but this
system, the Sentech Y-2002, is first-rate, state-of-the-art. What it
does is hard-register and bullet-code every deletion made on any
data entered and tagged in preselected programs. It’s known as the
‘catcher,’ and it’s favored by high-tech industries because it pinpoints
when something unexpected and unwelcome is done to relevant
data, and who did it and when.”
“How does this hard register and bullet code work?” Becca said.
Savich said, “What the system does is swoop in and retrieve all
data that the person is trying to delete before it can be deleted. It’s
funneled through a trapdoor into a disappearing ‘secret room.’ That
means, then, that the data isn’t really lost. However, the person who
did this was able to do what we call a ‘spot burn’ on the information
he deleted, and so, unfortunately, it’s really gone. In other words,
there was no opportunity to funnel the deleted data to safety.
“Now, the person who supposedly wiped out the bulk of Krimakov’s
entries was a middle-level person who would have had no
reason to delete anything of this nature, much less even access it. So
either someone got to him and paid him to do it or someone stole
his password and made him the sacrificial goat in case someone discovered
what he had done.”
“How long will it take you to find out this person’s name,
Savich?”Thomas asked.
“Well, MAX already did that. The guy was a thirty-four-year-old
computer programmer who was in an accident four months
ago. He’s dead. Chances are very good that he was set up as the
goat. Chances are also good that he knew the person who stole his
password. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy talked about what he
did to someone who took it to Krimakov, who then acted.”
“And just what kind of accident befell this one?”Thomas asked.
“The guy lived in Athens, but he’d gone to Crete on vacation,
which is where Krimakov lived. You know the Minoan ruins of
Knossos some five miles out of Iraklion? It was reported that he
somehow lost his footing and fell headfirst over a low wall into a storage
chamber some twelve feet below where he was standing. He
broke his neck when his head struck one of the big pots that held
olive oil way back when.”
“Well, damn,” Adam said. “I don’t suppose Krimakov’s former
bosses in Moscow have any information at all on this?”
“Not that MAX can discover,” Savich said. “If they have any
more, and that’s quite possible, they’re holding it for a trade, since
they know we want everything they’ve got on Krimakov. You