LITMIR.BIZ

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hold down a job. Two years later and after countless hours at Walderman, Joe was working a night security detail for a downtown office high-rise. Those evening hours passed so slowly, Joe complained, but it was—as he put it—a paying gig.

      From the day Joe was diagnosed, Charlie’s mother had dedicated her every waking minute to his care and well-being. Charlie had been too young to understand exactly what was happening, but in looking back, he understood that her passion had turned into an obsession. There was no blame or anger, but the family lacked closeness. It was simply how he grew up—his mother so deeply involved with his brother’s care that she had nothing left to give to anybody else. Instead of lamenting a past he could not change, Charlie put all his attention on what mattered most—how not to become like them.

      Sometimes Charlie wondered what would have happened if his brother hadn’t gotten sick. Perhaps he, Charlie, never would have been as driven and successful. Perhaps he owed his brother a debt of gratitude. As for brotherly love, however, those years had proved deeply scarring and had left an indelible chasm between them.

      Growing up, neither brother knew their father was schizophrenic until after he left them. His mother justified the deceit by explaining it was at their father’s insistence—he believed the less the children knew about his disease, the better.

      After Joe was diagnosed, Charlie was understandably interested in the role genetics played in schizophrenia. Much that he found on that subject was unnervingly speculative. One disturbing fact Alison Giles shared was that Charlie’s father had stopped taking his medicine. It was probably the reason he’d abandoned the family without warning one rainy October so many years ago. No one had heard from him since.

      Charlie sat back down after giving his desk a thorough wipe-down and tried to guess what Anne Pedersen had to say that could possibly jeopardize InVision. The thought that something threatened InVision was both troublesome and puzzling. It angered him that he couldn’t come up with an answer, and pride begged him to believe she was mistaken without even knowing what she had to say.

      InVision, Charlie had been led to believe, was essential to SoluCent’s growth strategy and a key factor in sales forecasts and revenue projections. It was why the A-team from the strategic acquisition committee had been so relentless in their pursuit of Charlie’s start-up, and had paid handsomely for it, too. There was no possible explanation for why these senior executives would have misled him.

      Charlie had made almost fifteen million in cash from the transaction and stood to make millions more in stock and incentive bonuses, based on performance and product success. The decision to sell his company had been a no-brainer. It had been the fastest way to go from good money to the big leagues. Yet here he was, wondering if his dream was now being second-guessed by the very people who had convinced him to sell. He silently berated himself. When would the fear that everything would vanish go away? he wondered. When women like Anne Pedersen stopped insinuating that it might.

      Charlie reached for his BlackBerry to check his calendar, not waiting for Outlook to restart. There he saw the note again.

      If not yourself, then who can you believe?

      A mentor from his MIT days had warned him that when you reached the top, plenty of people were always waiting below to pull you back down. He’d brushed it off as a cliché. It now seemed prophetic.

      People were always hungry to pull him down. He wasn’t there to win any popularity contests. He was there to make it happen, and that meant having a work ethic that few could stand. He had no patience or interest in anything that wasn’t going to advance his cause.

      Since coming to SoluCent over two years ago, Charlie had never set foot in any of the five campus cafeterias. Lunchtime was reserved for Monte’s afternoon walk, not eating. With his fourteen-hour workday, he needed those walks to help keep the pounds off in an industry notorious for overweight, sedentary workers.

      Today would be an exception. Today he would meet Anne Pedersen at 12:00 p.m. in the Omni Way cafeteria. Only then would he find out what was so important that it had to be confided in person.

      Charlie brought Monte over to Nancy, whose cubicle was just outside his office. She agreed, and would agree to do so every day if he asked, to take Monte for his afternoon walk. He couldn’t tell who was more excited to see the other.

      “He’s still your dog, Charlie,” Nancy said as Monte rolled onto his back to expose her hands to his warm belly.

      “But with you in the picture, I don’t think it would take long for him to get over me,” Charlie offered.

      Charlie went back inside his office and locked his computer using the Task Manager. He changed his log-on password weekly, months before corporate IT demanded it be changed. It was his private defense against hackers and unauthorized access. Nobody ever touched his files. He made sure of it. He closed and locked his office door and kept his head down as he walked the carpeted corridor toward the stairwell. He wanted to seem preoccupied and unavailable for a quick sidebar chat on some problem that wasn’t his in the first place.

      He said a brief hello to Tom Connors, who was senior VP and division head for the electronic solutions consulting group, but ignored the rest of the rank and file. Tom expected Charlie to address him. Charlie didn’t much care what the others thought.

      Chapter 4

      Charlie glanced at his watch just as he arrived at the cafeteria. It was 11:55 a.m., and the cafeteria was already nearly full. This wasn’t his campus building, so Charlie wasn’t surprised not to recognize a single person seated at the rows of cafeteria tables, nor did anyone in the lunch line recognize him.

      He was a bit surprised that Anne Pedersen came right up to meet him, hand extended. Her badge was turned around, so he couldn’t see her photo ID. The IDs had employee numbers, which would have helped Charlie gauge how long she’d been working there. She was a slender, attractive woman in her early forties, with shoulder-length dark brown hair and playful dark eyes. She wore a formfitting blue blouse and a knee-length black skirt that accentuated what he assumed were runner’s legs.

      Charlie made sure to look directly in Anne’s eyes as he gave her a firm handshake. It was one of the few lessons his father had taught him before he disappeared: never look away when you shake somebody’s hand. “It’s a sign of weakness,” he’d always say. Anne seemed tense, her gaze shifting and avoiding Charlie’s eyes.

      “I’m glad you could come,” she said. Her voice was deeper than Charlie had expected. He liked it. It made her sound assertive, which he found attractive.

      “How could I pass it up?” Charlie said. “You made it sound like it wasn’t really an option.”

      “It wasn’t,” Anne said. “Let’s get our food before I fill you in.”

      Anne ordered a Buffalo chicken wrap and got the chips instead of fries. Her fit figure was apparently the result of exercise and good genes, not a rigid diet. Charlie went with a small salad, vinaigrette dressing, a whole wheat roll, and a bottle of Poland Spring lemon-flavored water. Since he seldom ate lunch, he wasn’t sure how a hearty meal in the middle of the day would impede progress on the list of things he still had to do.

      They found a circular, raised table with three stools toward the back, away from the crowds at the long tables.

      “Your product is in real trouble,” she began.

      Charlie looked up from his food. “How do you know?”

      “Listen, Charlie, I’ll be candid with you. I know you don’t know me, but I used to work here years ago and came back to SoluCent only because I had to. I just got divorced.”

      “I’m sorry to hear that,” Charlie said.

      “It doesn’t matter,” Anne said. “Anyway, I just got divorced, and I have two kids at home and an ex-husband who doesn’t understand that working means getting off your butt and doing something for money.”

      Charlie leaned back on his stool, surprised by her hostility but attracted

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