Mercy

face wouldn’t attract any attention. But when there were fewer people, it was the exact opposite. And some of the people who were about, were security people. They didn’t just guard the entrances: they patrolled the corridors.

He had to get to the staircase and down to the ground floor where the microscope was situated.

And the question was what he did when he got there. How would he get what he had come for without David noticing?

He started walking down the central staircase. This was relatively safe as any suspicions that anyone might have would be allayed by the fact that he was walking down the stairs and was therefore apparently leaving.

However, once he got to the foot of the stairs on the ground floor, he turned not toward the exit but toward the lab housing the microscope. On the way he saw two people walking the other way to him in a corridor: a middle-aged woman and a security guard. He was worried that his eyes would give him away so he mumbled something toward the woman and nodded in her direction as he walked past her. He hoped that this would allay the security guard’s suspicions. But, just to make sure, he glanced down at his watch as he got close to the passing point with the security guard.

When he got to the end of the corridor, he turned left and walked up to the doors of the lab. There were two glass port holes that enabled him to look inside. He saw a man with curly hair working alone there — a man whom he assumed to be David Sedaka.

But the problem was what to do now.

Should he go in and challenge him? That would lead to a physical confrontation. Or should he try to lure him out? Or wait for him to leave? He couldn’t just stand here outside watching. He had to act now.

21:33 PDT

Lee Kelly was staring at the passport trying to figure out its implications.

He realized that if Nathaniel had the passport, he had quite likely taken it off Dorothy Olsen. The question was, how … and when? He flicked through the pages and looked for the visa stamps. There was only one. It showed that she arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport on May 25, 1998. Alex had said something about her booking a plane ticket for the 24^th- one day earlier. The difference in date was presumably due to the time difference or the length of the flight.

But the interesting thing was that there was no exit stamp to indicate that she had left England.

He knew that some countries don’t stamp the passport on exit, only on entry. Was that the policy in England at the time?

It was before 9/11, so it might have been that they didn’t stamp the passport on exit. The United States didn’t, even now. Did that mean that she had come back to the USA? Either way, the question was when and how did Nat get her passport? Had he stolen it from her? Had he killed her? Had he gone to England and killed her there and then stolen her passport so that she would not be identified? Could that be why they never found a body? Because she had been killed in England and it had been classified as a death of an unknown person? Could he have killed her, taken her passport and then also planted false documents on her so that she had been wrongly identified in England? That would further reduce the likelihood of the body being identified as that of Dorothy Olsen.

But then again, why assume that she was dead? If her passport was here was there not a more obvious answer?

He was hiding her! She was staying here at his place in hiding, unable to go out.

But then why wasn’t she here now? Had she heard him breaking in and run away, thinking he was the police? There was no sign of any open windows, other than the one he had prized open in order to get in. Was she hiding in the house? It was hard to imagine where. He had looked round in all the places large enough.

Or had she been in hiding here until recently until it got too hot for her to hang round? And had she now run away altogether or merely found somewhere else to hide?

Whatever the explanation, one thing was sure: the visa stamp in her passport offered documentary proof that Dorothy Olsen had arrived in London on or about the time she had disappeared. And that was what Alex Sedaka wanted. Lee closed the passport and was about to put it in his pocket when he noticed that something had fallen out.

It was a piece of thin white cardboard.

21:35 PDT

Jonathan made his way to the basement and sought out the closet where the electricity supply was controlled. It was locked, but with nothing more than a cheap padlock. He didn’t know much about picking locks, but he’d brought a large screwdriver with him. Instead of going for the lock itself, he looked at the flimsy plate on the closet door. Without much difficulty — and with surprisingly little noise — he prized it open.

He found himself presented with a dazzling and somewhat confusing array of circuit breakers. Eventually he found one marked “main lab.” He was about to throw the switch when he realized that this wasn’t enough. Throwing the switch might cause David Sedaka to leave the lab in consternation, but he would still be hovering about outside, leaving Jonathan no way to get in undetected.

He looked at the top and bottom of the cupboard, eventually finding three large switches at the top. These evidently controlled the main flow. The lab presumably had three-phase wiring and each of these master circuit breakers controlled one phase. To black out the lab entirely he would have to throw all three switches.

But then he realized that even that wouldn’t work. The emergency battery would kick in and the temporary lighting would come on. This wouldn’t be enough to operate the lab equipment, but it would be enough to supply lighting which, again, would render untenable any effort to sneak into the lab.

He struggled to come up with an idea. What could he do that would get David out of the lab and give him free access to the lab? A phone call telling him that something untoward had happened to his father? Forget it! David would simply call his father’s office to verify it.

A fire? That would be a very serious thing to -

Of course! That was it!

Not a real fire, of course, just a fire alarm. The button was there staring him in the face by the basement exit to the parking lot. It couldn’t be simpler.

All it took was a lighter held to the fire and smoke detector and in an instant the klaxon rang out.

He heard voices, questions, puzzlement and heard scurrying footsteps. The footsteps were retreating. No one was coming down to the basement. At some point, they could probably check where the alarm had been set off. But they hadn’t done so yet. He still had time.

He waited a few seconds longer and then started running up the stairs. But he felt self-conscious about the lights being on and so he ran back down and threw the three circuit breakers, plunging the building into darkness. It felt surprisingly long before the emergency lighting came on — although he realized in retrospect that it was barely more than a second.

Again he ran up the stairs to the ground floor, but this time he did not stop. He raced straight into the lab where he had seen David Sedaka working. He saw the computer, but he realized that he didn’t need it. David Sedaka had opened up the casing and taken out the hard drive and dismantled it. It was the platters from the hard disk drive that he needed and they were right there by the computer that David had been using. But that other computer wasn’t Dorothy’s computer. It was a laptop and it was connected up to the scanning tunneling microscope, presumably to control the operations.

Jonathan scooped up the platters in one hand and ran. As he ran out, he felt a hand push against his chest. He felt himself being hurled back and when he had regained his bearings he looked up to see a curly-haired man