Delirious by Daniel Palmer Read Free Book Online Page B

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
    C harlie’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 In-Vision 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 Magellancode 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