Riptide

They could have told her when she was eighteen or when she
    was twenty-one. How about when she was twenty-five? Wasn't
    that adult enough for them? She was an adult, a real live independent
    adult, for God's sake, and yet they'd never said a thing, and now
    it was too late. Her mother was dead. Her mother had died without
    telling her a thing. She could have told her before she fell into
    that coma. She would never see them together now. She wanted to
    kill both of them.
    She remembered many of those times when her mother had left
    her for maybe three, four days at a time. Three or four times a year
    she'd stayed with one of her mother's very good friends and her
    three children. She'd enjoyed those visits so much she'd never really
    ever wondered where her mother went, just accepting that it was
    some sort of business trip or an obligation to a friend, or whatever.
    She sighed. She still wanted to kill both of them. She wished
    they were both here so she could hug them and never let them go.
    Savich said, "I've got the latest on Krimakov. A CIA operative
    told me about this computer system in Athens that's pretty top-secret
    and that maybe MAX could get into. Well, MAX did invite
    himself to visit the computer system in Athens that keeps data on

the whereabouts and business pursuits of all non citizens residing in
    Greece. It is top-secret because it also has lists of all Greek agents
    who are acting clandestinely throughout the world.
    "Now, as you can imagine, this includes a lot of rather shady characters
    that they try to keep tabs on. Remember, there was nothing
    left in Moscow because the KGB purged everything on Krimakov.
    But they didn't have anything to do with the Greek records. This is
    what they had on Krimakov. Now, recognize that we've already
    learned most of this, that it was pretty common knowledge. However,
    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