Also in that box were charter contracts with an air carrier called APU Transport, and I could see at once that they’d been misfiled. These documents had nothing to do with the sell-off of company assets. Instead they showed the company’s outlays for passenger transport from PsT to various other points in Southeast Asia over several weeks in the fourth quarter of 2013. Apparently the company had chartered private jets on six occasions for one-way trips from its airstrip in PsT to Songkhla and Chiang Mai in Thailand and to Pontianak in Indonesia. Attached to each charter contract was a passenger manifest listing scores of Asian names.

I started to refile the air charter contracts where they actually belonged, with Expenses, in the first set of documents. But I checked myself. There might be some reason I couldn’t guess for filing them where they were. I put them back in the Liquidation Proceeds box, but just to be safe, I made copies and tucked them into one of my desk drawers for easy access should anyone ever question why the charter documents weren’t filed correctly.

I had a sudden worry that I might have already disturbed the filing system. Although the boxes seemed to have been haphazardly stacked in my office, it was possible that whoever had put them there had some kind of order in mind. Again, just to be safe, I took a legal pad next door and made a complete inventory of the contents of every box. It wouldn’t be a wasted effort if these boxes turned out to have anything to do with the Palmer case, and in any event, it consumed the rest of the day.

At seven o’clock, I switched off the lights, closed my office door, and headed for the elevator. It was the end of my first day of real employment, and when I stepped on the elevator, I gave a proud, happy smile to the mirror.

THE FIRST ITEM on my orientation schedule the next day was IT training at the Tech offices in the center of the twenty-seventh floor. I felt certain this would be a waste of my time. I already knew how to do everything I needed to do. Or so I thought. It turned out that technology hadn’t stalled along with my career. It had galloped ahead during the last five years, and there was a lot I had to learn.

A young Tech employee named Jason was my instructor for the day. He couldn’t have been twenty-five yet, but he was already losing his hair. His high domed forehead made him look smart, I thought, and I wondered if that was where the term egghead came from. He walked me through everything that was new since 2008: network security shields, virtual meeting platforms, collaborative tools for creating and editing documents online, even social media dos and don’ts.

“And here’s our pièce de résistance,” he said with a flourish as he brought out some kind of electronic box. “This is your virtual assistant. In honor of our founder, we call her Ma Belle.” He mugged a grin. “Get it?”