Extrait
Chapter One
Looking Up
The last thing Richard Hilzoy thought before the bullet entered his brain was, Things are really looking up.
He was on his way to the Silicon Valley offices of his lawyer, Alex Treven, who had arranged a meeting with Kleiner Perkins, the Midases of venture capital who could increase a company’s value a hundredfold just by offering to invest. And now Kleiner was considering writing a check to him, Richard Hilzoy, genius, inventor of Obsidian, the world’s most advanced encryption algorithm, destined to render all other network security software obsolete. Alex had already applied for the patent, and if things worked out with the VCs, Hilzoy would be able to rent office space, buy equipment, hire staff—everything he needed to finish commercializing the product and bring it online. In a few years he would take the company public, and his shares would be worth a fortune. Or he’d stay private, and become to security software what Dolby was to sound, raking in billions in licensing revenues. Or Google would buy him—they were into everything these days. The main thing was, he was going to be rich.
And he deserved it. Working for chump change in an Oracle research laboratory, drinking Red Bull after Red Bull late at night and shivering in the deserted company parking lot for tobacco breaks, enduring the taunts and laughter he knew went on behind his back. Last year his wife had divorced him, and boy was the bitch ever going to be sorry now. If she’d had any brains she’d have waited until he was rolling in money and then tried to shake him down. But she’d never believed in him, and neither had anyone else. Except Alex.
He walked down the cracked exterior steps of his San Jose apartment building, squinting against the brilliant morning sun. He could hear the roar of rush hour traffic on Interstate 280 half a block away—the whoosh, whoosh of individual cars, trucks grinding gears as they pulled on from the entrance ramp at South Tenth Street, the occasional angry honk—and for once, having to live like this, right on top of the freeway, didn’t bother him. Even the cheap bicycles and rusting barbecues and stained plastic garbage containers crammed together against the side of the adjacent building didn’t bother him, nor did the reek the autumn breeze carried from the overflowing parking lot Dumpster.
Because Alex was going to get him out of this sewer hole. Oracle was a client of Alex’s firm, and Hilzoy was Alex’s contact on patents there. Hilzoy hadn’t been overly impressed initially. He’d taken one look at Alex’s blond hair and green eyes and figured him for just another pretty boy—rich parents, the right schools, the usual. But he’d recognized soon enough that Alex knew his shit. Turned out he wasn’t just a lawyer, but had degrees from Stanford, too—undergraduate in electrical engineering, same as Hilzoy, and a Ph.D. in computer science. He knew at least as much programming as Hilzoy, maybe more. So when Hilzoy had finally worked up the nerve to pull him aside and ask about patenting Obsidian, Alex had gotten it right away. Not only had he deferred his fees, he’d introduced Hilzoy to a group of angel investors who had put in enough money for Hilzoy to quit his day job and buy the equipment he needed. And now he was poised to take money from the biggest swinging dicks of all. All in the space of a single year. Unbelievable.
Of course, there were aspects of Obsidian that the VCs might not like if they knew about them. They might even have found them scary. But they wouldn’t know, because there was no reason to tell them. Obsidian could protect networks, and there wasn’t a Fortune 500 company out there that wouldn’t pay out the wazoo for that. That’s what VCs understood. The rest . . . well, that would all just be his little secret, a kind of insurance policy to fall back on if Obsidian’s intended uses weren’t enough to command the proper sums.
He looked at his watch. He was nervous about the meeting.
