Free You Think You Know Me Pretty Well by David Kessler Page A

rage, he picked up the nearest object – the phone – and hurled it across the room. It landed against the wall with a smashing sound, and bits of plastic flew off in all directions.
    The picture on the TV 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 subtle differences and contradictions 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
     
    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