Mercy

He was just glad she didn’t have a gun.

12:31 PDT (#ulink_f80e7144-3983-5464-88a2-2e19a9610720)

The young man sat cross-legged on the floor before the shrine in his apartment in Daly City, his eyes closed. He was trying to remember Dorothy, remembering her kindness toward him even when he was at his lowest ebb. He remembered one time when she had faced particular brutality. He had watched from a safe distance but had been too frightened to say a word. Afterward he had run into her arms crying and it had been she who had comforted him. There were tears in his eyes now as he opened them.

He looked at the clock on the wall. It wouldn’t be long now. Soon he would have closure. In his pocket he had a piece of paper that was most precious to him. It was a spectator’s pass that allowed him to go to San Quentin and witness the execution.

The TV was on in the background. But the sound was turned down. He wanted to be left alone with his thoughts until it was time to go to the penitentiary. But at the same time, he wanted to stay in touch, to hear about further developments on the case.

Clayton Burrow had a very savvy and tenacious lawyer, he had heard. And a smart and savvy lawyer wasn’t going to give in until the fat lady sang.

He wondered how Burrow was feeling as he awaited execution. What was going through his mind? Was he afraid? Terrified? Or maybe he was just resigned to it. Maybe he just didn’t care. Just like he didn’t care about others or how much pain he had caused them.

Stop it! he ordered himself.

But he couldn’t stop it. It had been in the news so much these last few days that it was hard to think about anything else.

On the rolling TV news, Dorothy’s face appeared for the umpteenth time. It gave way a few seconds later to that of Martine Yin, with the governor’s San Francisco office as her backdrop. Jonathan would have ignored it, but the words ‘breaking news follow-up’ flashed up, causing him to grab for the remote control. In haste he pressed the button to turn the sound up.

‘So far the governor’s office refuses to confirm even that there is an offer on the table. But we can confirm that Burrow’s lawyer Alex Sedaka visited Burrow in prison right after his meeting with the governor and left the prison less than half an hour later. At this time we have no information on whether Burrow has accepted the offer.’

The young man’s face was dissolving into confusion as he struggled to understand what Martine Yin was saying.

Offer? What offer?

‘Similarly, we have been waiting outside the governor’s office for any word of the outcome from this quarter. One thing we do know is that even if Clayton Burrow were to reveal where he buried the body, they would still have to dig it up and confirm that it was the body of Dorothy Olsen before granting him clemency, but—’

‘No!’ the sound echoed from the young man’s mouth, partly the plaintive whine of a frustrated child, partly the angry roar of a wounded lion. Blinded by rage, he picked up the nearest object and hurled it across the room. The telephone landed against the wall with a smashing sound, and bits of plastic flew off in all directions.

The picture changed to that of the steps of the Federal Supreme Court with a legion of reporters milling about trying to interview a man who looked like he didn’t really want to talk.

‘These latest developments follow on from the valiant efforts of Burrow’s lawyer Alex Sedaka to secure a stay of execution and a re-trial for his client.’

It was recent footage of Alex emerging from the Supreme Court, despondent after his failed attempt to get the original trial verdict overturned.

‘Only a few days ago, Mr Sedaka was in Washington DC, arguing before the Supreme Court that his client didn’t have a fair trial because of differences in two obscure court rulings.’

The lawyer was flanked on one side by his assistant who was holding Alex’s briefcase and looking down in a somewhat bashful, self-effacing manner. Alex was speaking silently, answering the questions as they were thrown at him. But the sound of his voice was absent. Only Martine Yin’s voiceover could be heard.

‘Once these arguments were rejected, Sedaka had no choice but to throw himself upon the mercy of Governor Dusenbury. And Dusenbury’s mercy appears to be carrying a price tag. The question remains: is Clayton Burrow—who has always maintained his innocence—able and willing to meet that price?’

The young man smiled now as an idea flashed into his head.

He walked across the room to the phone and picked it up. No dial tone. The impact with the wall had damaged it. He would just have to find another handset.

12:40 PDT (#ulink_9e50a795-5486-5ce6-99ed-61ff747b9336)

David Sedaka had to pull strings to leapfrog the queue for the scanning tunneling microscope at the Berkeley lab. But he was an old hand at university politics and he knew which strings to pull. There had been a bit of grumbling about this. One aggrieved PhD student pointed out that Sedaka was a theoretical physicist not an experimental one. Theoretical and experimental physicists regarded each other with mutual disdain: the thinkers and the stinkers was the way the former group liked to describe it.

David was a member of the Joint Particle Theory Group at Berkeley, where he was developing exotic theories on anti-matter and gravity. He had recently published a paper called ‘Unilateral anti-matter decay in an accelerated expansion universe,’ in which he had advanced the revolutionary prediction that anti-matter possessed neither gravity nor anti-gravity but was subject to the gravity of matter and could decay into photons on its own without needing to collide with matter.

In appearance, he was the epitome of a nerd: slightly short, wearing glasses—even though he could afford laser surgery—and with dark hair so curly that it was rumored that he used hot rollers and foil to keep it that way.

He had removed the hard disk from the computer and had carefully separated the platters, removing them from the spindle. Then he had placed the first platter in the chamber under the head of the scanning tunneling microscope.

There was an old and ongoing debate in the computer industry as to whether it was possible to recover overwritten data from a computer hard disk with a scanning tunneling microscope. One of the more common scaremongering rumors was that the data was never deleted completely because the magnetization that overwrote it ‘was not in exactly the same place on the disk as the original bit’ or because the ‘magnetization levels varied.’

There were even rumors that the National Security Agency was routinely recovering erased data in this way. In fact, a number of computer companies had made an awful lot of money, at the expense of gullible and paranoid computer users, by selling them products that promised to overwrite their deleted data with ‘multiple passes’ and offering them ‘military level’ security.

The reality was that it was practically impossible to recover overwritten data from the newer computers, or data that had been overwritten with more than one pass. With older computers, where each ‘bit’ was spread out more than on modern computers, you might be able to recover data that was overwritten with a single pass. But that was about it.

The good news for David Sedaka was that this computer was about ten years old and the hard disk was only five gigabytes and so the bits were spread out over a larger area. The other piece of good news was that the data had been wiped with only one pass, as far as David could determine. That meant that he could recover it—in theory.

The trouble was, there was so much of it. Where to begin? The reality was that data recovery was as much an art as a science. You could start off by looking at the directory and the tables that allocate file space, but they too may have been changed or overwritten. And also, a file that was created and then changed a few times, might be ‘fragmented.’ In other words, different parts of it might be stored on different parts of the disk.

In practice, what this meant was that even if part of the task of recovering data could be automated, a lot of it was a hunt-and-find exercise. And that had to be done painstakingly, using subjective judgement.

David knew that it was going to be a long day.

But as he looked at some of the data he had recovered, he felt as if he might have found something interesting already. He decided to tell his father. The trouble was, he’d had to leave his cell phone outside the lab in case it interfered with the sensitive electronic apparatus. Now he went to get it—and he was walking briskly.

12:46 PDT (#ulink_dce0e90a-32f9-565f-839b-51ba804ed2d9)

While Alex and Juanita waited for Nat to return and David to report back, they sat on opposite sides of her desk looking through the old high school yearbooks. Juanita had already been online, looking at legal records of name changes. And Alex, in desperation, had taken it a stage further by looking at a website describing the meanings of names, in a futile effort to try and work out what Dorothy might have changed her name to. He hadn’t come up with anything plausible—and he knew it was an outlandish idea to begin with—but he was desperate for anything that might help.

Right now, they were looking for anyone who could tell them anything about what was going on when Dorothy disappeared. The trouble was, most of the phone numbers were old and out of date. Of course Alex and Juanita could look up the numbers elsewhere, but some of the numbers were unlisted. In other cases, they were able to find a landline number, but it was daytime, so most of the people were out at work. All they could do was leave messages and hope that the people would call them back while there was still time.

As Alex pored over one of the yearbooks, he realized that he had spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the class photographs, as if hoping to find some clue in the faces of Dorothy or Clayton. Dorothy looked sad, her doleful eyes staring out at the camera, as if her sad life were written into them. In some ways she reminded him of his daughter Debbie. They would have been practically the same age in fact.

Not that Debbie’s life had been sad. Perhaps that was why the eyes stood out as a point of difference. But Alex tried not to think about Debbie’s eyes. They were Melody’s eyes too, and to look into them was to see his late wife resurrected before him. That was why it was so much easier with Debbie living across the other side of the country. The memory of his late wife twisted like a knife inside his gut. But he had to put it out of his mind for now. Today was not the day to dwell on his own misery.

It was then that he noticed something strange.

‘Juanita?’

‘Yes, boss?’ She spoke irritably.

‘Will you stop calling me that?’

‘What do you want me to call you? “Master”?’

‘You don’t have to call me anything.’

‘Are you ever going to tell me what you wanted to say a second ago or are we going to spend the rest of our lives discussing what I should call you?’

He sighed with irritation. The truth of the matter was that they were both in over their heads and feeling the pressure.

‘Take a look at these pictures.’