The Devil Went Down to Austin Read Free Page A

realize we've missed the Gold Rush. We were born too early. You have any idea how that feels?"
    "So you decided to risk a startup company," I said. "And you screwed up."
    His eyes had a look of vacant anger, like an old soldier struggling to remember the details of a battle. "Mr. Sympathy. All right, yes. We screwed up. Lady named Ruby McBride—somebody Jimmy and I knew from way back. She invited us for drinks at this bar she owns down at Point Lone Star—she owns a whole fucking marina, okay?
    Ruby said she had some money to invest. She'd done some programming, had some ideas for a new encryption product. She wanted our help. The three of us agreed we could do something big together— something we could control all the way from the planning stages to the IPO. Ruby and Jimmy . . ."
    Garrett paused. "Well, you know about Doebler Oil."
    It took Jimmy a moment to react.
    Then he leaned forward into the light, frowned, and swiped the margarita thermos.
    "Goddamn it, Garrett. You know Doebler Oil didn't cut me a cent."
    "Whatever, man," Garrett said. "You had money. So did Ruby. I didn't, and I wanted to be an equal partner."
    "So you mortgaged the ranch," I said.
    "We expected a quick profit," Jimmy put in. "Our product kicked ass. Tech companies with programs a lot less solid than ours were seeing their public stock offerings quadruple the first hour of trading. All we figured we had to do was keep alive that long— finance the product through betatest phase, keep the investors excited. It's like a poker game, Tres. The longer you stay in, the bigger the pot."

    I looked at Jimmy Doebler, then at Garrett. I felt like I'd been dropped into a camp of defective mountain men, trying to figure out how to get beaver pelts traded on Wall Street. I said, "No wonder things went bad."
    Garrett glared at me. "As of January, smartass, we were flying high. Mr. Doebler here even convinced himself he was in love— went off and got himself married to our lovely third partner."
    Jimmy shoved the thermos back into the dirt, took a slug of his second drink. "Leave her alone, Garrett."
    Garrett waved the comment aside. "We convinced half a dozen companies to do a sixmonth betatest—meaning they'd try our product for free, we'd monitor how it went.
    Things went well, we could market the program commercially. Man, we rented offices, hired staff, did installation."
    "You spent more money you didn't have," I translated.
    "Three months in, things were going so well we were turning down buyout offers, little bro. Turning them down."
    "And then?" I asked.
    "We were sabotaged."
    Jimmy shifted his back uneasily against the mesquite. "We don't know that, Garrett."
    "The hell we don't. Fucking Matthew Pena."
    I made the timeout sign. "Who?"
    "Back in April," Garrett said, "we got this buyout offer from an investment banker in Cupertino, guy named Pena. Reminded me of a fucking vampire. He got along great with Ruby, which figures, but me and Jimmy said no way. Right after we turned Pena down, things started to go wrong with our betatesting. The program is supposed to protect traffic on our clients' computers, okay? Email, Internet commerce, important shit."
    "That's one of those hightech terms, right? 'Important shit.' "
    Garrett ignored me. He'd had a lot of practice at that over the years.
    "All of a sudden," he said, "it was like our program sprung leaks. Our clients start reporting documents showing up in weird places—employees getting termination notices in their email before they were officially fired, salary schedules getting posted on the company Web site, business plans emailed to competitors. Worst scenarios you can imagine. We've been busting our asses trying to figure it out, tell the clients the program can't be at fault. The leaks are too malicious, too . . . intelligent. It's got to be somebody—Pena for instance—bribing people to leak files directly from the test sites."
    "Yeah," Jimmy mumbled. "Couldn't be Garrett's perfect