door where he inserted the thinnest end of the crowbar and popped it open. Holding it open with his back, he did the same with the wooden door, which should have been more difficult but wasn’t, though it was noisier, which required him to work more carefully.
When he pushed open the door he found himself in a bare kitchen, and immediately noted the stale smell that a house acquired when it was long unoccupied. There were no tables or chairs, and there was nothing on the cabinets except a coffeemaker, its pot washed clean and sitting in its receptacle. A dish towel was folded beside it with a coffee mug turned upside down on the towel. The kitchen was separated from the adjoining dining room by a small bar and through the dining room Graver saw the soft glow from the light that he had seen come on earlier. He put down the crowbar on the kitchen counter and went through the dining room which was also bare except for a few cardboard boxes scattered in one corner. He continued into the living room. Here a few pieces of furniture were clustered together, an old sofa, a couple of armchairs, the lighted lamp on an end table beside one of the armchairs, and a coffee table with a few magazines neatly stacked in one pile in its center. Graver went over and picked up one of the magazines. They were all old issues of Newsweek. He put down the magazine and stepped around the coffee table to find the wall plug for the lamp. As he had guessed, he also found the electric timer that automatically turned on the lamp at irregular intervals.
The house was hot and stuffy, but Graver remembered seeing a window unit on the end of the house opposite the garage. He entered the hallway that opened off the living room and came immediately to a bathroom. Reaching around the corner in the dark, he found the light switch and turned it on. Again the room was empty except for a towel on the towel bar beside the sink, and on the rim of the sink, a bar of soap that was well used but cracking from the heat in the house. A packet of paper towels was torn open and sat next to the sink. There was a half-used roll of toilet tissue on the spool beside the toilet Nothing in the medicine cabinet.
Leaving on the light, Graver continued to an open door on his right, a bedroom. Empty. There was one more door at the end of the hallway, on his left It was closed. That would be the room where he had seen the air conditioner unit in the window. He went to the door, opened it, and flipped on the light.
In the center of the unfurnished room, with Venetian blinds pulled tightly closed over its windows, was a sizable computer setup. Graver stared at it with a mixture of dread and hope. This clinical-looking piece of hardware, the smell of its heat-warmed plastic filling the closed room with an odor distinct from the rest of the house, represented simultaneously a potential disaster and, perhaps, his best hope of dealing with it.
The work station itself was a flimsy-looking, L-shaped structure of thin metal and pressed wood, laden to overloading with what appeared to be a substantial computer system and laser printer. Graver walked over to it and surveyed the books on the single shelf above the monitor. They were only operating manuals for the hardware and the software. He looked at the system. Though not totally ignorant regarding computers, he was far from being proficient enough to be able to walk into a room, sit down at an unfamiliar system, and puzzle out its operation. He knew he would be lucky if he could even bring up the menu.
Still, just by looking at it, he could tell that this was a fairly large system-that much was given to him on the front of the CPU-and that it had a hard drive, two disk drives, and a port for a back-up tape. Graver pulled out the chair under the desk and sat down. He looked over the shelves and found the two tapes Tisler used for backup along with a small spiral pocket notebook where he recorded the alternating tapes and dates. Tisler’s last backup had been the day before he died. Graver flipped on the computer and waited for it to clear. When it was ready, he began tapping at the keyboard. After fifteen minutes he had used everything obvious and still hadn’t gained access. He began to have the uncomfortable feeling that he shouldn’t be pressing his luck.
Hoping that Tisler had not toyed with the backup procedures, he pecked around for a few minutes, found the parameters, and copied them down, knowing he would need them to access the backup tapes on another system. He double-checked his notes, suddenly afraid he was going to transpose some of the characters in the paths. After he was satisfied, he took the older of the two tapes and used it to run another backup of the hard drive.
While he was waiting, he went through each book on the shelves and found nothing. By this time Graver thought he knew Tisler well enough to know that anything significant was going to be on the tape, and that it would be well protected by a labyrinthine cryptosystem. The loose ends-and there were always loose ends-all seemed to have been kept neatly swept into an unseen corner of what once had been Arthur Tisler’s mind.
When the backup was completed, Graver retrieved the tape, put each of them in his pocket, and turned off the computer. The two tapes would give him everything that had been in the computer files the day before Tisler died, and everything that was on it now. If there were any discrepancies between the two, then Graver would know that someone other than Tisler had access to the computer. If there were no changes, he couldn’t be sure. The question was, did he now erase the hard drive to prevent anyone else gaining access? He decided to wait until he knew the two tapes were good. He took one last look at the computer, not entirely sure he wasn’t making a mistake by walking away from it, turned off the lights, and walked out of the room.
Leaving the house the same way he had come in, he made sure both back doors were firmly closed even though their locks were broken. As he was pulling out of the driveway another light went on in the house, this time in the empty bedroom across the hall from the computer. Arthur Tisler was very thorough.
He stopped at a convenience store and called Arnette from a pay phone.
“You’re damned impatient,” she said, hearing his voice.
“I’m not checking up,” he said. “I’ve got something for you.” He told her what it was.
“Did you get the parameters?”
“I did.”
“This is going to take some crypt work,” she cautioned, “and crypt work, baby, is not what it used to be. These days, sometimes its simply impossible to get where you want to go.”
“I’m bringing them over.”
“We’ll be here,” she said.
Chapter 26
It struck Burtell as an odd place to meet, but he paid his three dollars in the lobby, asked the location of the Modern Israeli Photography exhibit, and ascended the north foyer steps of the Museum of Fine Arts. Tuesday night was not the usual night for the museum’s late hours, but the hours had been extended this week because of several special exhibits. Even so, the viewers were sparse as Burtell ascended another tier of stairs to a maze of exhibit panels set up in the largest exhibition hall.
He crossed his arms and began looking at the photographs. In less than five minutes he rounded a set of panels and met Panos Kalatis, a program rolled up in one hand, the other hand in his trousers pocket, leaning slightly forward to study a photograph among a series taken in a kibbutz. He was wearing gray dress slacks, a pink shirt opened at the neck, and a navy linen blazer with a gold crest on its breast pocket.
Kalatis continued to study the photograph as Burtell stood there.
“Sometimes parts of the Israeli coast remind me of Greece,” he said, straightening up, but keeping his eyes on the photographs. “Harsh. Olive trees. Rocks. You can’t really tell in these black and white photographs, but the light is the same too. Especially in the late summer.”
He moved to the next photograph. A young couple in khaki walking shorts and sandals were moving just ahead of him, talking softly. He said nothing more until, after a few moments, the couple rounded the exhibit panels to the other side. Burtell came up beside him again.
“I thought we ought to talk, just the two of us,” Kalatis said. “Without Faeber.” He stepped close to another photograph, but then moved quickly to the next one. “You don’t much like him, do you?”
“Not much,” Burtell said.
“Why is that?”
“He’s a little too ready to please.”
“But that’s what I pay people to do, to please me.”
“Do you want them to lie to you?”
“Is Colin Faeber lying to me?” Kalatis asked, backing away from a photograph to see it better. He didn’t seem to be too concerned about his question.
“He’s the one who advised you to come down on Tisler, wasn’t he?” Burtell said.
