LITMIR.BIZ

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Charlie fumbled with the device, nearly rear-ending a car as he inadvertently changed lanes. He scanned through several days’ worth of e-mail, looking for Anne Pedersen’s first e-mail message to him, the one where she requested they meet face-to-face. That e-mail wasn’t there. It wasn’t in his deleted folder, either.

      He thought about his next move. He saw no point in contacting Caroline Ramsey, even though Anne Pedersen had claimed she was positioning herself for a job in Caroline’s group and had given that as her reason for warning Charlie about Jerry’s power play. If the company had no record of Anne Pedersen’s existence, it was certain that Caroline Ramsey would have no knowledge of her, either.

      Charlie knew it was counterproductive to keep asserting that Anne Pedersen was a SoluCent employee. Leon Yardley had already taken Charlie aside to ask if pressure from the pending product launch was impacting his mental health. It was obvious what the CEO had been implying—that Charlie had invented Anne Pedersen as a way of self-sabotaging his career. Of course, Charlie had denied that was true. To clear his name, however, Charlie needed to find out who Anne Pedersen really was, without further raising Yardley’s suspicions.

      Before departing SoluCent, Charlie had returned to the Omni Way cafeteria but had left frustrated that not a single employee remembered serving him or his lunch companion. He wasn’t a regular at the cafeteria, a cashier had explained, otherwise he would have chatted with Charlie and perhaps remembered him coming through. There was no point in trying to find out if an Anne Pedersen had swiped her security badge at the Omni Way cafeteria, either. As far as corporate was concerned, Anne Pedersen did not exist. But perhaps someone had lost a badge or had had theirs stolen? It was worth checking into. In addition, Charlie wanted a log of his Outlook access. Someone might have been messing around with his system. Perhaps they’d changed property files on the PowerPoint document or sent and deleted his e-mails.

      One thing he knew for certain was that he had read Anne’s message. It had stood out from the others, for the simple reason that he hadn’t known who she was. Besides, he reasoned, without that e-mail, how would he have known to meet her at the cafeteria? To accept any other explanation would be to embrace the possibility that they had never met. That Anne Pedersen, as Yardley had implied, was his invention.

      Charlie switched the BlackBerry to phone mode and dialed SoluCent. He asked to be connected with Lawrence Washington in IT.

      “Lawrence here,” a husky voice growled into the phone.

      “Lawrence, Charlie Giles. How are you?”

      “What do you want?”

      Charlie found it ironic that those in IT who manned the help desk were often the least friendly and helpful people in the company. Lawrence was no exception. Even though he liked Charlie and respected his level of technical acumen, years on the job had made Lawrence a hard man.

      “I need a favor, Lawrence.”

      “Don’t we all.”

      “This is serious,” Charlie said.

      “Okay, I’m listening.”

      “I need to know if my e-mail has been compromised.”

      “Why do you think it has?”

      “Doesn’t matter. Trust me. I just need to know all the times I’ve logged into my e-mail. I need to know the exact date and time.”

      “Might take me a little while. When do you need it?”

      “Yesterday.”

      “Big surprise. That it?” Lawrence asked.

      “No,” Charlie said. “I need to know if anyone has reported a stolen or lost employee ID. I need it over the last few months.”

      “Can’t give that out, Charlie.”

      “Lawrence… I…need to know.” Desperation had replaced the confidence in Charlie’s voice.

      “Sorry,” Lawrence said. “But that ain’t your business.”

      “Are the Red Sox yours?”

      Lawrence paused.

      “This Saturday. Green Monster, against the Jays,” Charlie said.

      “That’s bribery, Giles.”

      “It’s the Red Sox,” Charlie said.

      “No e-mail. I’ll drop by with a disc. You can see the names.”

      “And I’ll drop by with the tickets tomorrow.” They’ll cost only a hundred and fifty dollars each from Corner Ticket.

      Charlie slid the BlackBerry back into its holder and caught the yellow flash from the sticky note he’d found days earlier and taped to the inside flap. He read it again.

      If not yourself, then who can you believe?

      The words had taken on an almost prophetic significance. What was happening to him? First a note that he didn’t recall writing, then a woman who didn’t exist, then a presentation he apparently authored without any recollection.

      A sickening thought swept through him, like a wave of grief. Could Yardley be right? Perhaps the pressure was more than he could handle, and now his subconscious mind wanted a way out.

      Charlie shook his head side to side.

      “No. It can’t be,” he said aloud. “I know what I saw…don’t I?”

      He looked back down at the sticky note on the inside flap of his BlackBerry holder, resting open on the passenger seat. His handwriting looked both familiar and alien.

      “When did I write this?” he asked. “And why?”

      He pulled the Post-it note from his BlackBerry holder and stuck it to the inside cover of a notebook he kept in the glove compartment. He didn’t want to give the note any more thought, but he wasn’t prepared to crumple it up and toss it away, either. At least not until a few other mysteries were solved.

      Charlie drove as if on autopilot into a hazy midafternoon sun as he replayed the events of the day. Assuming Anne Pedersen did exist, it still did not explain his authoring the PowerPoint presentation, the missing e-mails, or unfamiliar notes in his handwriting.

      Is it the pressure, Charlie?

      Yardley’s biting words came to him again.

      It had been obvious from the man’s eyes that he had already embraced that conclusion. If Yardley was thinking that way, Charlie lamented, the others would soon follow.

      I’m going to be branded a nutcase.

      Step one, Charlie decided, was to prove that wasn’t even a possibility. It seemed inconceivable that work pressures could trigger his creating an elaborate fantasy world—the sort of altered reality he associated with Joe or his father. If it wasn’t the pressure, could it be some sort of mental illness? Charlie was knowledgeable enough about his brother’s disease to know that symptoms manifested themselves in the late teens, midtwenties on the outside, but almost never in someone as old as he was. But was it possible?

      Jerking the steering wheel hard right, Charlie swerved the BMW in front of a fast-traveling Toyota 4Runner. The driver reciprocated with a customary Bostonian salute of his middle finger. Hitting the exit ramp at forty mph, the wheels of the BMW hugged the road with the advertised precision and control. Charlie shot over the overpass, got into the left lane, downshifted into second, then turned onto the entrance ramp heading in the opposite direction on Route 128, back toward Waltham.

      If he could medically disprove the possibility of work pressures or some late-blooming brain disease as the cause, it would go a long way toward reestablishing trust within SoluCent’s leadership team. That would give Charlie access to the necessary corporate resources to find the real culprits.

      “Please dial Mother,” Charlie said aloud.

      “Dialing Mother,” responded InVision.

      The phone rang

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