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With respect to Eric’s outside consulting I don’t know anything specific…. He was always very busy but I have no idea what he was doing. He was on his cell phone a lot and worked on his p.c. a lot.

And that was as much as management would be able to get from anybody as justification for firing me. But it was a fantastic find, because it meant my former bosses hadn’t caught on to the truth about me.

I would continue to check the firm’s emails over the following months to make sure nothing else turned up with my name on it. Nothing important ever did.

But keeping up my status as an ex-office-buddy, I stayed in touch with Ginger by calling her now and then to hear the latest from the company grapevine. After I let her know that I might file for unemployment, she admitted that the firm was worried I might sue for wrongful termination.

So apparently, after I was fired, they figured they should do some checking to see if they could drum up a legitimate reason for having fired me. I hadn’t had any reason to keep paying the answering service in Las Vegas for the phony Green Valley Systems, so when they tried to reverify my employment, they discovered there was no such company. They started pursuing some other queries.

The next time I called her, Ginger thought she was dropping the ultimate bomb on me: “The firm has done some checking. And, Eric… you don’t exist!”

Oh, well. So much for the second life of Eric Weiss.

With nothing to lose, I told Ginger I was a private investigator hired to collect evidence against the firm. And “I’m not allowed to discuss it.”

I went on, “One thing I can tell you. Everything is bugged—there are listening devices in Elaine’s office and under the raised floor in the computer room.” I figured she would walk—no, run—to Elaine’s office with the news. I hoped the disinformation tactic would raise doubts about the stories I had told Ginger in the past—so they wouldn’t know what to believe.

Every day, I would check De Payne’s Netcom account looking for any messages he had left for me to find. We were protecting our communications with an encryption program called “PGP” (short for “Pretty Good Privacy”).

One day I found a message that, when decrypted, read, “LITTMAN WAS VISITED BY 2 FBI AGENTS!!!” That scared me because I had spent some time on the phone with Jon Littman, who was writing a Playboy article about me around that time. (Actually, that was just what he originally told me; somewhere along the line, he cadged a contract to do an entire book on my story, without mentioning it to me. I hadn’t had any problem about talking to him for an article in Playboy. But Littman didn’t disclose to me that he was writing a book about my life until after I was arrested in Raleigh. Earlier I had turned down John Markoff and his wife, Katie Hafner, about cooperating on a book, and I would have never agreed to speak to Littman if he had told me he was writing a book about my life.)

I really loved Denver. My new permanent identity as Brian Merrill was ready to be rolled out, and for a time I toyed with the idea of lining up a new everything—job, apartment, furniture rental place, rental car, and the rest—and putting down roots as a Denverite. I would have loved to stay. I thought about just moving to the other side of town and starting over with a brand-new identity.

But then I pictured myself in a restaurant with some new coworker, a date, or, eventually, a wife, and having somebody walk up to the table with a bright smile and a hand extended for a shake, saying, “Hi, Eric!” Maybe I could claim mistaken identity the first time, but if it happened more than once…

No, that wasn’t a chance I was willing to take.

A couple of days later, with my clothes and other belongings still loaded in the U-Haul, I drove out of Denver headed southwest, for Las Vegas, to visit my mom and grandmother and to plan my next steps.

Checking back into the Budget Harbor Suites gave me an eerie feeling