Mercy

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

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 below average height, 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 that Esther Olsen had given his father and 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 judgment.

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

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 numbers, 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.”

He slid the two yearbooks across the desk to her. They were both open on the double page spreads of the relevant class photographs, one Dorothy’s junior year, the other her senior.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“First, take a look at the junior year in the 1997 yearbook.”

“Okay.”

“Right, now what do you see?”

“A bunch of teenagers looking pleased with themselves.”

“Do you see Dorothy Olsen?”