Jack liked the former course better. Tomorrow he'd try hanging out on the Communing level at about the same time he'd been there today. If Johnny Roselli was a creature of habit, Jack might be able to create his own coincidence.
Out front, Esteban smiled and held the front door open as Jack exited. As he started walking toward First Avenue he realized he hadn't seen Gia all day. He had a few minutes. Why not pop in?
10
Gia smiled as she glanced through the peephole. Jack. Just the tonic she needed.
She pulled open the door. "Howdy, stranger." He grinned. "Hey, it hasn't even been twenty-four hours."
"I know." She pulled him inside and threw her arms around him. "But it seems like a week."
As they hugged she felt some of the day-long tension uncoil within her. It had been a long, long morning and she was only partway through the afternoon. She'd intended to work on her latest painting today—a new angle on her Fifty-ninth Street Bridge series—but had found herself too weak to stand at the easel for any length of time. Still feeling that blood loss, she guessed.
But even if her energy had been at its usual high level, she doubted she could have done much. She felt too down in the dumps to paint, and not just because of the blood loss.
She'd almost lost the baby. Dr. Eagleton had reassured her that everything was fine, but that didn't mean it wouldn't happen again. She'd miscarried her first pregnancy, the one before Vicky. Who said this one wouldn't wind up the same way?
This baby may not have been planned but he was here—she didn't know that he was a "he" but couldn't help thinking of him that way—and she couldn't wait for the day she could hold him in her arms and look into his little face. She'd felt his first quickening two weeks ago and he'd been kicking up a storm ever since. Especially so since the bleeding, which was wonderfully reassuring.
But still she couldn't help feeling that a sword was hanging over her.
"How're you doing?" Jack said.
"Fine. Great."
Truth be told, she was feeling a little dizzy, but she wouldn't tell Jack that. He'd be all over her, hiring a housekeeper, insisting she stay in bed… She didn't want to deal with that.
"You look like a ghost."
"It's going to take me a while to build up my blood count. Dr. Eagleton's got me on extra iron." Which wasn't sitting too well with her intestines.
Concern was writ large on Jack's face. "Why don't we sit down?"
I thought you'd never ask.
"Sure. If you want."
They moved to the cozy living room, decorated in old English aunt style because the townhouse was still listed in the name of Vicky's aunts Grace and Nellie. Those two dear old souls were no longer among the living, but no one but she and Jack knew that.
"Thanks for taking care of Vicky," she said as she sat down.
"First of all, you never have to thank me for doing anything for Vicky. Anything."
"I know. I just—"
"And second, she took care of me. She's one amazing kid."
"That she is."
They snuggled together on the couch, but she sensed the tension in him.
"You've got to go, don't you."
He nodded. "Regrettably, yeah. Gotta see a man about a disk."
She hugged him closer. "Okay, but be careful."
"I'm always careful."
"No you're not. That's why I worry."
And she did. Always.
11
"You want to wreck a CD?" Russ said. He was wearing the same T-shirt and jeans as on Jack's last two visits. "Easy. Stick it in a microwave and cook till it's all cracked like an old mirror."
Jack had started the digi-head talk as soon as he'd arrived—before Russ could start bitching about his latest reading assignment. The six-pack of Sam Adams Jack had brought along further distracted him from academic matters.
"But, Russ, the idea is to make it unreadable without the owner knowing it's been tampered with."
"Oh, well, that's a different story." He sipped his beer. "I'm assuming we're dealing with a CD-R here and that's a good thing, because they're more easily ruined than the commercial kind."
"I thought a CD was a CD."
"In a way, yes. They both use a laser beam to read ones and zeroes from the disk, but—"
"What about music?"
"Same thing: ones and zeroes. Binary code, my friend."
'Wait a minute. You mean when I'm listening to, say, Jack Bruce doing his bass runs on 'Crossroads,' it's just a series of ones and zeroes?"
"Exactly. The music was translated into binary code that's inscribed on the disk, and the player translates it back."
Jack shook his head in wonder. "I always thought…"
And then he realized he hadn't really thought about it. He put the CD in the slot and hit play. He hadn't needed to know anything more. Until now.
"Let me give you a quick course in CDs and CD-Rs. They both have a single, uninterrupted spiral track, half a micron wide, running from the inside toward the periphery."
"The opposite of a vinyl record."
"Exactly. On a full CD, that track is three-and-a-half miles long. A commercial CD codes its ones and zeroes with bumps and lands: The bumps are ones and the lands—the flat parts—make up the zeroes. The laser reflects off the bumps onto an optical reader that sends them straight to your computer if they're data or to a digital-analog converter if music. All this at 450 rpms."
"Yow. Complicated."
"The tracking makes it even more complicated, but we won't go there."
"Thank you."
Russ smiled. "That's the commercial CD. The homemade CD-Rs use a slightly different technology. Instead of bumps and lands, they take a stronger laser and heat up a series of spots on a dye layer in the plastic. The heat changes the spots' reflectivity, creating virtual bumps."
"So where does that leave me?"
"Well, since you don't want anyone the wiser, that leaves out scratching or marking with a pen or dipping in acid. So I can see only two options. The first is to take some sort of X-Acto knife and use it to enlarge the central spindle hole—just a little. Won't take much. Just a small change in the diameter will cause a wobble in the disk as it's doing its 450 rpms, and that wobble will cause the tracking system to mess up, which will mean the laser's reading bumps and lands off multiple tracks—they're only a micron and a half apart—which will completely confuse the optical reader. The result will make Jabberwocky read like Dick and Jane"
He made a dramatic flourish with his free hand while he drained his beer bottle.
"But the data's still there, right?" Jack said. "So if someone could fix the spindle hole, they could get their data back."
"If they knew the hole had been tampered with, and if they could make a perfect restoration. Both highly—highly—unlikely."
"But not impossible."
Russ sighed. "No, not impossible."
"What's the other option?"
"Bring along a hot plate and heat up the disk just enough to give it the slightest warp. A sixteenth of an inch, even less, will do it. The laser beam will reflect all over the place, hitting the optical pickup only by chance."
"But what about—?"
"Fixing the warp? Never happen."
He popped the top from another Sam and offered it to Jack who waved it off.
"You're sure?"
Russ gave a vigorous nod. "Once warped, that plastic will never be perfectly flat again, the tracks in the dye layer will never line up just right again."
Jack liked it. Just his thing: simple and low tech.
"You wouldn't happen to have a hot plate sitting around, would you?"
12
Maggie moaned with relief in the dark kitchen as she removed the red hot crucifix from her thigh. She'd thought the pain might become easier to take with successive burns, but this had been the worst. And the day-long anticipation of the coming agony had been almost as bad as the pain itself.