Nika Novak wrote:A lot of travel and donations, codenames and skipped payments... They were clearly up to something but what exactly escapes her. Who or whatever Victorious is seems to be some kind of spy or source but on who? And why? The charities and organizations are clearly being used to obfuscate the money trail but are they in on it in their entirety? Aside from their general political and social stance, what do they have in common? Who owns or runs them? At least some of them have the public support of the Karkov's. How deep does this go? And what the hell is she supposed to do about any of this?
She carefully tucks away all the paperwork and looks at the USB stick. Why bother with electronic files if the potentially damning stuff is on paper? Maybe there's something else to this. She starts the car again and goes about finding an internet cafe or copy shop that's open to check the contents of the USB stick.
The electronic financial information are all officially above board and whatnot -- they're what the Svozilov's are officially, publicly doing. The fact that they differ from the hard copy is part of the point -- the Svozilovs were hiding their activities from the general public, but keeping records for...why, exactly? Their own reasons, one presumed. And the Concerned Citizens, whoever they were, were trying to steal this information for...why? Were they going to turn it over to the King? Why would King Stefan need more justification after they had attacked his daughter. Were they using it for blackmail? Were they some kind of secret police, off the books, so blood couldn't be tracked back to the Karkovs? Nika hadn't heard of such a thing, but then, I suppose you wouldn't go telling anyone else about your secret attack squad.
It doesn't seem like the charities RECEIVING the money is in any obfuscated; it's just that a lot of work had been done to obfuscate WHERE the money was coming from. As far as the charities themselves were concerned, they were getting lots of individual donations from a wide variety of sources; it wasn't all the Svozilovs. Or whoever was giving the Svozilovs that money, because as Nika checked the main books, she could see there was just no way that this particular royal house was just sitting on gobs and gobs of cash somewhere. If they were secretly sending this much cash somewhere, they had to be
getting it from somewhere, and the official, main books on the USB couldn't account for that in any way. It was just...not in any sort of official record whatsoever; the physical paper was the only proof that it existed. And now Nika had that, which was interesting. If only she knew what to
do with it.
As for the charities themselves, a cursory Google search wouldn't show anything in common about them other than their general mission at shunning Western ideals and desires. Hell, "There are no gay people in Symkaria" was practically the slogan of the Symkarian Family Association. But they weren't, like, terrorist groups or something, and while they may have had too much of King Stefan's ear at times, they seemed harmless enough, right? And they worked in different ways, too -- the Brighter Future Society was more about promoting positive role models and working with schools to help with cultural and social education, while the Concerned Women for Symkaria were more about pointing and shunning. The SRI were a bunch of data scientists; the SFA a bunch of religious moralizers...not a lot in common with methods anywhere along the line. The one thing they
did have in common was that none of them existed before the civil war that brought Katarina's grandfather to power 50 years ago, but that wasn't
too surprising, right? It was a fairly stark line in Symkarian history.
But the USB also contained much of the
rest of the contents of the Svozilov computer; it wasn't just an excel sheet with some numbers in it. Chat logs, internet history, documents from the Svozilov's security team and their advisors, photographs and video clips -- quite a haul of, well,
stuff, for someone who might know what they were looking for.