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out, Charlie,” Yardley interrupted. “You’re getting a bit out of hand.”

      “I’m out of hand? I’m out of hand?” Charlie said, the second time much louder. “Jerry here is playing games, and I don’t know what this is all about. A woman named Anne Pedersen contacted me. She gave me this file,” he said, holding up his USB key. “I looked her up in the corporate directory. She works for you, Jerry! For you! And you don’t know a thing about this? Come on!” Charlie slammed his open palm against the polished mahogany table with a resounding thud that shot through the silent room like a clap of thunder.

      “That’s enough! Enough!” Leon Yardley stood. He pointed to Charlie’s empty chair. “Mr. Giles, it is in your best interest to take a seat now.”

      Charlie did as instructed as Yardley turned to speak to Jerry.

      “Jerry, you stand behind your claims? You never intended to discredit InVision today. And Anne Pedersen is not your employee.”

      “I do,” Jerry said.

      “Let’s get to the bottom of this, then.” Yardley grabbed the conference room Polycom and dialed the operator. He asked for Gail Lyndon in Human Resources. The moment she answered, he asked that she look up Anne Pedersen’s employment history.

      “We don’t have any employee named Anne Pedersen,” came her reply over the speakerphone.

      Yardley spelled the name, looked to Charlie for confirmation. Charlie nodded. For a moment, the only sound was that of a keyboard typing on the other end of the phone.

      “I’m sorry,” Gail said. “But we don’t have any employee with the last name Pedersen.”

      Yardley clasped his hands tightly together and looked over at Charlie. “I’m listening,” he said.

      Charlie stammered, “I told you what I know. A woman named Anne Pedersen, who claimed to work for Jerry, gave me the file. She was an employee. She had a badge. Leon, she gave me the file!” He sounded desperate. Of course it happened, Charlie thought. It was as real as this nightmare was now.

      “How do you account for her not existing, Charlie?” Jerry said.

      Charlie thought for a moment. “I’ll show you how.”

      He stood and walked to the computer and opened the PowerPoint presentation that Anne Pedersen had given him. The title slide was projected on the screen.

      “Each PowerPoint file has associated properties. These properties tell when a file was created, modified, and who made it. Any file created by a person on the SoluCent network will list that person’s name as the author. This is your file, Jerry, so I’m guessing your name is the listed author.”

      Charlie clicked the file menu in PowerPoint, moused down to the properties entry, and opened the pop-up window. He clicked on the summary tab in the pop-up.

      Charlie stared at the screen but couldn’t register what it said. Several attendees coughed, and at least one person let out a gasp of surprise. It wasn’t Jerry’s name that was listed as the author, or even Anne Pedersen’s. And the file hadn’t been created days ago, as Charlie had claimed. According to the file’s date and time stamp, it had been created just yesterday morning. And the name in the author field was Charlie Giles.

      Chapter 7

      Charlie’s walk from the main entrance to his BMW, parked in an early bird front lot space, felt interminable—as though he were stepping through molasses along an ever-expanding horizon of asphalt. The once energizing campus had morphed into something ominous and foreboding. Glancing behind him, at the tall brick-and-glass buildings of SoluCent, Charlie’s mind flooded with questions.

      Rising above that noise, the most consistent and resounding of these jumbled thoughts was the need to get away as fast as he could.

      Once inside his car he felt safer, cocooned in the familiar. He stared forward, through the spotless windshield, and reconstructed her face from memory. As her image came into sharper focus, he felt a calming sureness that Anne Pedersen was real, even though all logic seemed to lead to the conclusion he refused to believe. Anne Pedersen did not exist.

      The image faded. He thought of Leon Yardley. The CEO had been kinder than Charlie had expected, or deserved. His only insistence was that Charlie leave for the day as he and other managers tried to get some clarity and perspective on the situation.

      A little distance might be the only way to figure out what was going on and how he could clear his name. As Charlie turned the ignition, the BMW fired up with a quiet hum. Monte’s pillow in the backseat was empty, and Charlie had never felt more alone. The InVision system spoke in soothing tones from his newly installed Polk speaker system.

      Each of the early prototype models of InVision had been code-named after famous explorers. This dovetailed with the Magellan code name of his executive team, while exploring new territory was a running operational theme throughout his organization. The system in his car was the Columbus prototype—a top-of-the-line model and only two generations removed from what he believed would be the first mass-produced line.

      “Hello, Charlie. I hope you’re having a great day,” it said.

      “I’m having a fucking fantastic day,” Charlie said. “Jim Hall, ‘Alone Together,’ please.”

      Soft chords from Hall’s guitar spilled out from the speakers, rounded out by Ron Carter’s mesmerizing, but wandering bass line. Charlie sat motionless and waited for the distinctive melody of Jim Hall’s guitar solo to follow. He focused on Hall’s playing in particular, picturing each note in his mind, while his fingers danced against an imaginary fret board. The stress of the SoluCent acquisition had inspired him to pick up his guitar again. Thanks to muscle memory, it had taken months, not years, to return to his past fluency. And because his fingertips had quickly callused over, practicing had stopped hurting after a few days of regular playing.

      Of all the jazz guitar greats whose style and compositions he had mastered, Hall was an elusive favorite. “An undiscovered gem,” his father once called him, Hall had a gift for improvisation, which Charlie himself was unable to exemplify in his own playing. Imitation, it turned out, was Charlie’s musical specialty, while spontaneous creative expression was not. His lack of looseness had kept him out of the recording studio and away from live gigs. Technical precision was fine for the living-room player, but on a CD or when playing live, it was all about feeling and improvisational ability. Someday he would become that player, Charlie promised himself—free and unencumbered by his over-thinking each measure and demanding perfection. All he needed to do was to keep listening to Hall.

      Charlie pulled out of the driveway and onto the main thoroughfare that would lead him to Route 128 and eventually onto Route 2 toward Boston. In his head he replayed events from the last several days, hoping that something would jar a memory or give him some direction.

      The small green car icon displayed on the InVision street map screen—the color indicating that he was “on course”—should be red, Charlie thought. If InVision were a mind reader, it would be red.

      “I met Anne Pedersen last Thursday. It was twelve thirty. We were in the Omni Way cafeteria,” he muttered. With little effort he could see her face; her fine porcelain features; the lean, long legs; dark brown, shoulder-length hair; smile warm and embracing; teeth white and straight. “Anne Pedersen gave me this file, dammit!”

      Charlie squeezed the USB key with white-knuckling force, imagining for a moment that he crushed it under the pressure and somehow, with its destruction, ended the nightmare.

      “She forwarded me the invite to the meeting….” Charlie’s voice trailed off. “She forwarded me the invite,” he said again. “Of course. I have her e-mail!”

      Charlie’s eyes lit up as he reached in the pocket of his blazer and extracted his BlackBerry. Practiced at driving without giving it his undivided attention, Charlie turned on the device and accessed his e-mail over the network. He switched to calendar

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