Mercy

23:45 PDT

In the high security block at San Quentin, the witnesses to the execution were filing in to the special room adjoining the execution chamber. These were officials of the courts, the governor’s office, the state legislature and several journalists who were there to witness the event in their capacity as the representatives of the people.

Although no photography was allowed of an actual execution, there were several press artists at work. At the moment there wasn’t much they could do because the curtain was drawn across the window on the side of the execution chamber itself.

As the surviving immediate relatives of the victim, Esther and Jonathan Olsen had both been given passes to witness the execution. But even before she had been overtaken by ill health, Esther had decided not to attend. It was not revenge she wanted, it was closure. And closure for her meant not witnessing the execution of her daughter’s murderer, but finding the body so that she could give her daughter a proper burial.

And this had been denied her.

Jonathan Olsen, in contrast, had yearned for the day when he would see Clayton Burrow strapped down to a gurney and put to death by lethal injection. But now, when the time had come, he was nowhere to be found.

The guards at the prison didn’t know what the real Jonathan Olsen looked like, so they had no way of knowing that the man who had obtained entry using Jonathan’s pass was in fact Nathaniel Anderson.

23:47 PDT

“Call them right now, Juanita! Demand to speak to someone in authority and don’t let up. See if you can speak to that nurse again!”

“Okay, boss! Right away!”

Alex was driving to the prison. He knew there wasn’t much he could do there unless they could get a stay of execution, but he had a duty to be with his client. Even if he couldn’t save him, even if he couldn’t comfort him, he still had a duty to be with him.

It was a strange thought. Racing to the prison to comfort a man of whose innocence he was now convinced, in the event that their last-ditch efforts would fail. If there had still been time, he would have petitioned the Federal District Court to grant a stay on the grounds of the passport being found at Nat’s place. But the trouble was that the only evidence he had as to where the passport was found was the word of a career criminal.

Aside from that, he didn’t have time to get to the District Court now. The truth of the matter was that all he could do now was get to San Quentin and see his client for what might be the last time.

Clayton Burrow’s fate was in now in the hands of Juanita.

23:48 PDT

The building that housed the scanning-tunneling microscope was quiet but not completely deserted. David was now more sensitive and alert to any sound in the background, despite the promise the security staff had made to be extra alert. In truth, now that the attacker had been identified — his father had phoned him and told him — he wasn’t unduly worried about the possibility of a repetition.

But the survival instinct is linked more closely to the emotions than the cognitive faculty. And so every footstep, creaking door or distant voice disturbed him. But it didn’t undermine his resolve. Indeed, quite the contrary. The violent attack had made him all the more determined to find something that could help to save the life of Clayton Burrow.

He didn’t know if his father had retrieved the other two platters of the hard disk from Jonathan, but at this stage there was no time to get them. For this reason he had spent the last hour or more scouring recovered files on the one remaining platter. He had looked for word processing files initially, reading just enough text to determine if a file showed any promising signs before moving on to the next.

But that had proved fruitless. So he had been pleasantly surprised when he found an MP3 file. Because of its size, it was spread over several sectors and it was painstaking work recovering it little by little using the scanning tunneling microscope. But he had persevered.

The MP3 file itself was simply called “I cannot be.” That was enigmatic enough to have caught his attention, but that alone would not have justified the amount of work that he was putting into recovering this audio file when the clock was ticking so loudly.

The reason was that every audio file, in addition to the music or speech itself, was also accompanied by a sort of mini-file containing something called “metadata.” Metadata was a set of fixed pieces of information about the audio file, like artist, year, genre, comment. And this one stated in the comment section: “Poem about Daddy.”

23:49 PDT (07:49 BST)

The nursing station in the ward at the Finchley Road Medical Centre was coming to life as patients woke up. But the office staff had not yet arrived, so the calls were still being diverted to the nursing station when Juanita rang again. Nurse Michaels answered.

“Is Susan White there?”

“Look, I’ve already told you she’s off duty. She finished at two in the morning and she’s probably asleep. I don’t know if you know this but we work bloody hard here.”

“I know and I’m sorry. But this is really important. I wouldn’t be calling all the way from America if it wasn’t.”

“All I can do is leave her a message for when she’s next on duty, which’ll probably be in just over two hours.”

“No, wait! There’s something I need you to do.”

“What?” asked Nurse Michaels, through gritted teeth.

“Did Susan White go home?”

“Yes, a few hours ago.”

“Does she live nearby?”

“Yes.”

There was a heavy sigh at the other end of the phone.

“Okay, now listen, I wouldn’t normally ask you to do this, but, like I explained before, we have a client who’s going to be executed in just over ten minutes unless we can save him. From the information she’s given us, we think we may be able to save him. We just need some urgent paperwork. And she seems to be the person who knows where it is.”

“But like I said, she’s not here.”

“I know, and what I want you to do is call her. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it wasn’t a matter of life and death. Get someone else to cover your post if necessary.”

“Leaving my post isn’t the problem! I can’t just wake her up because someone calls up from America and tells me about someone on death row.”

“She’d want you to do it!”

“What do you mean?”

“She tried to help us before. I think she even sent us something. But we have a problem with our fax