The Term Sheet: A Startup Thriller Novel Read online

  Davie, don’t worry, we’ll figure it out. We always do. We always will.

  “Someone at the funeral told me that Zen philosophers say you can never step into the same river twice.”

  “Dave, I am sorry to inform you that I think we disproved that a few times already this morning.”

  David and Andrew were fishing on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge, just past Multnomah Falls.

  “I think he was trying to tell me to move on or something. Jesus, can’t people just give me some space?”

  Neither of them said anything for a long time after that. They hadn’t caught any fish that morning. Andrew had flown back from college for spring break to hang out with David and give him his support.

  “Dude, you know I could keep camping and fishing with you for weeks, but don’t you have to check on your sister or something?”

  “Heather can take care of herself. We don’t need help. And I definitely don’t need anyone telling me what to do.”

  “But didn’t she fall last week?”

  “Yeah, but she’s a trooper. She got her driver’s license and doesn’t need me driving her around anymore. She might have needed me when we were younger, but she is seventeen now, she’s basically an adult. Can you get off it, mom?”

  “Fine, jeez, just checking. Want to try another spot? I think this part of the river is dead.”

  David wondered about Heather’s muscular dystrophy. It hadn’t flared up for years now, but she had been falling more frequently since their mother died. Last week, she fell halfway down the concrete stairs leading to their second-floor apartment. Her bruises were always worse than regular people’s bruises. The muscles were progressively loosening their grip on her bones.

  David had caught Heather hiding bruises from him. She wore long-sleeved baggy sweaters and long loose pants. She tried to hide her pain too. She thought she did a good job, but he knew that when she smiled from the left side of her face, it wasn’t a smile of happiness. Her pretty blue eyes and soft features fooled most people, but not David.

  * * *

  “I’m going to Seattle,” said Heather. “See you when I see you.”

  “Heather, wait. I don’t want you to go out, you’ve been going out too much lately.”

  “I’m fine. What do you care anyhow? You disappeared for a week and didn’t tell me you were going.”

  “Now that Mom’s gone, I’m in charge. I don’t want you going out tonight.”

  “Bro, I love you, you know I love you, but don’t act like you are in charge, it doesn’t suit you. Go shoot pool with Andy or something. In a year, I’ll be in college and you won’t be able to stop me from going out then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  As Heather turned to grab her purse, she winced and smiled with half her face and sat down again.

  “Mom left me in charge,” said David, surprised by his insistent tone. “She made me promise to take care of you. You are not allowed to leave. That’s final.”

  David turned back to his computer, resuming his search for the bug in his code. He heard the slam of the front door.

  She’ll be fine.

  * * *

  “Heather. Heather. Hey sis. Hello.”

  Heather’s eyes opened slowly. She was lying in a hospital bed. She tried to respond but her lips wouldn’t move. Her hips, thighs and stomach were wrapped tightly with a wide bandage. Her eyes were tired and bloodshot.

  “I know you can’t talk, the doctors have you on all sorts of medicine and they say your lactic acid levels are through the roof. You are in the middle of an acute muscular attack. I should have known better, I should have noticed. I am so sorry, Heather. I...”

  He trailed off, bowing his head and staring at the floor. He sat silently. Heather fell asleep.

  Chapter 5

  “Hold on. Hold on,” yelled Megan. “You bought that stupid website? I thought I told you it was a stupid idea. Are you stupid or something?”

  She had started the day in such a great mood. He had made her a buffet breakfast that morning with Belgian waffles, eggs, bacon, cantaloupe, coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. When she asked why, he said because you deserve it with a low raspy hush in a horrible but endearing attempt to sound sexy. The white T-shirt and scruffy beard almost helped him pull off the faux sexy voice, but the Superman pants just made her giggle and roll her eyes. But now, at dinnertime, her good mood had morphed into a suspicious one.

  “I don’t think we ever finished that conversation,” said David. “Plus it’s from my savings.”

  “If our relationship is going anywhere, then what you do with your money directly impacts me too.”

  “I told you it would pay for itself,” said David.

  “After twenty years, and only then if monkeys started falling from the sky. How much did it cost?”

  David paused.

  “Twenty-eight thousand, five hundred and thirty-eight dollars. Thirty-eight was the escrow and wire fees. I shopped around and found a discount for escrow. It saved us like a hundred bucks!”

  Megan got up from the dinner table without saying another word. That was a generous way to describe the square black card table they had bought at a local Goodwill because of its faux leather top. When friends came over and they wanted more room to socialize, they could fold up the legs and store it behind their beat-up old sofa. They had furnished their small one-bedroom apartment mainly with hand-me-downs and thrift shop finds.

  Megan walked silently into the kitchen. They didn’t have anything close to that kind of spending money for something like this. He watched her pace, then pause to lean against the sink and stare at the floor. David stayed seated, reminding himself quietly that the best thing to do in these situations was to give her time to think.

  “How many credit cards?” she asked.

  “Three. No interest for eighteen months. By then I’ll be able to pay them all off with the revenue from sales.”

  David didn’t want to look at Megan’s face. He didn’t even glance in her direction. Her slender shape was broken in disgust. Then all at once she stiffened up.

  “Sell it back. Right now. Sell it to the first stupid loser you can find.”

  Megan’s stern voice prompted David to stand up. He walked over to the kitchen.

  “You have to give me a chance, Meg. We could get out of this paycheck-to-paycheck existence. This could help pay off my college debts and let me help my sister. Hell, I could help your family with this money. We’re never going to stand out from the crowd if we act like the crowd for all our miserable existence on this tiny planet.” David grabbed Megan’s arm. “Don’t you get it, Meg? Without this, what am I working for? What am I doing anything for? Without this, I don’t know...”

  Megan tore her arm away from David’s grasp. “Why are you with me, David? Where is this all going? Do you need this harebrained website to be with me?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  David walked to the card table, picked up the plates with half-eaten dinners, and started to wash them to the sink.

  “David, I love you. I really do. But you make it hard to love you. What makes you think you can make it? Do you know how many harebrained ideas my dad used to have? He got nowhere. He went bankrupt in a Ponzi scheme and left my mother and me with nothing.”

  Megan wouldn’t move out of the way and instead yanked the dishes out of David’s hands and began rewashing them. David picked up a towel to dry them and they stood shoulder to shoulder at the sink, both looking out of the small window. The sun was setting far above the overcast clouds, which turned a gloomy spring evening into a dark foggy haze.

  “If you don’t know what makes me different than your dad by now, I don’t...” David trailed off mumbling something unintelligible and then walked a few feet toward the bay window in the adjoining living room. He threw himself on the couch and opened his laptop.

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Megan. “Don’t walk away from me. Come back and talk.”
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  David was already lost in the computer. Megan stomped over, hands still wet, and slammed the laptop shut.

  “Hey!” David nearly jumped out of his seat, but Megan was standing right in front of him, blocking his exit.

  “I was talking to you.”

  David’s heart was beating through his chest. He just wanted her to understand that he was doing this for them. He wanted her to believe in him. He wanted her to understand the disgust and pity he had for her father. He wanted her to be proud of him. “I need to finish my blog post. No one visits a blog without fresh content…”

  “It’s all about you. YOUR blog post. YOUR website. YOUR sister. YOUR student loans. Do you even spend time thinking about me? Do you care about anything besides yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. You care about stupid jellyfish, apparently. You care more about jellyfish than your own girlfriend.”

  “No.”

  “Are you down to monosyllabic speech now?”

  David opened his laptop again and started typing.

  “Fine, go hide in YOUR laptop.” Megan grabbed her keys and stormed out of the apartment. David continued hitting the keys.

  DANGERBOY: well that went over well

  ADOG23: you told her?

  DANGERBOY: yea

  ADOG23: what did she say?

  DANGERBOY: that i am just like her dad, a lowlife bum. she likened my idea to a ponzi scheme. she totally doesn’t get it

  ADOG23: shit, I am sorry

  DANGERBOY: then she stormed out, who knows where

  ADOG23: sucks, want to see something cool?

  DANGERBOY: yea

  ADOG23: https://github.com/tutao/tutanota

  DANGERBOY: i don’t get it

  ADOG23: dude, this is THE FUTURE: encrypted everything. facebook, twitter, and google can’t be trusted, even when they say they are encrypting your stuff, this site just launched and protects you from it all by encrypting your email and shit

  DANGERBOY: this is pure hype dude, there is no substance. there is nothing really new here, the problem is that it stores your information centrally. Whenever there is a central storage system, even one built to “protect” you, there is always a way in

  ADOG23: too late, i already registered. wanna come over? we can hack on something

  DANGERBOY: no, I really have to finish this blog post

  ADOG23: cool

  ADOG23: I heard that MochaToca’s office space is killer cool, want to check it out with me tomorrow?

  DANGERBOY: why?

  ADOG23: I don’t know. Just thought we should do some networking. You never know, right?

  DANGERBOY: I suppose it wouldn’t hurt. night

  ADOG23: night.

  David wiped the dishwater left by Megan’s wet hands off the back of his laptop. He finished the blog post. It was the first post that had been added to the blog in the last year, but David hoped he could use some search engine tricks to bring the business back to life. He logged into his sales dashboard.

  Zero.

  He pressed refresh.

  Chapter 6

  The large warehouse was practically empty, so even though there were only two men in it and only one of them was typing on a keyboard, the clacking sounds filled the space. The man on the computer was wearing a trench coat and heavy black boots. The man over his shoulder was wearing an expensive grey suit, a freshly pressed white button-up shirt, and a pair of brown leather loafers.

  “How close are we?” said the man in the suit.

  “Close.”

  The warehouse was poorly lit, with exposed metal beams and a tin roof. The corner closest to the door was littered with large brown boxes stacked on crates. In the opposite corner was a metal desk with a laptop and some electronic parts.

  “How certain are you that this will work?” The man in the suit was scratching his hand. He started pacing. His leather loafers were evidently new, because they kept squeaking and making scratching noises. He was a large man—tall, not wide—but with a lot of mass.

  “Certain.”

  The man on the computer stopped typing. He pulled the USB cord out of his computer and disconnected a small motherboard the size of a deck of playing cards. He looked at the man in the suit with cold dark eyes.

  “Done.”

  “And what’s the signal strength?”

  “I said, done. It’ll work.”

  The man in the suit passed a bulging brown envelope across the table. He picked up the motherboard, placed it carefully in another brown envelope and put it in his pocket.

  The man at the computer started typing again, but paused and looked up, slightly annoyed. “Yes?”

  “Let’s stop all online communications.”

  “Fine.”

  “See you on the other side, Gabriel.”

  The clacking sounds resumed.

  Chapter 7

  “Didn’t I tell you? Isn’t this office space awesome?” said Andrew proudly.

  “It’s nothing like I expected,” said David.

  The MochaToca office was a modern, sprawling jungle inside an older traditional thirteen-floor office building in the middle of downtown Portland. Because the Pearl District was the fashionable place to have your startup, seeing as it was the trendy urban renewal area in the Northwest, many of the office spaces were both expensive and small. MochaToca had grown so quickly that they had now taken over the top five floors and were in negotiations on two more.

  A petite twenty-something woman who looked like a Georgia Peach gone punk with jet-black pixie-cut hair and tattoos of a panther on one arm and a bear on the other peeking out of her neon yellow tank top walked right up to David and Andrew.

  “You must be Andrew and David. I heard you might be coming to visit today. Would you gentlemen like a tour?”

  “Yes, very nice to meet you, Jeni, we would love a tour,” said Andrew with bright eyes. David leaned over, jammed his elbow into his friend’s side and whispered: “Stop gawking.”

  “Can I get you two some coffee from our in-house coffee bar?” Jeni directed them through the main foyer, which had a floating glass wall made of smaller glass panes hanging offset at different heights. Each pane was made of electric frosted glass and the opacity was set to turn on and off randomly, which created a breathtaking effect.

  “Yeah, coffee would be great.”

  As they passed the glass wall, it opened to a bustling office. In the middle was a meadow of open space freckled with leather couches, white sitting cushions, and metal coffee tables with glass tops. On the periphery of the room were rows and rows of grey desks and tall green chairs. Many of the desks had sleek twenty-seven-inch iMacs and some even had a second display. A few of the desks had plants on them, large succulents and flowering cactuses. The walls were mostly bare and grey, but they were speckled with magnificent stag ferns the size of a baby elephant’s ear.

  And then there were the flags. Everywhere you turned, there were flags. There were green flags and brown flags and black flags and white flags. Some flags indicated different groups: Web Developers, Customer Support, Global Sales, iOS Developers, Copy Writers, and even the Lawyers. Other flags indicated a favorite sports groups: mainly Timbers, Ducks, Beavers, and Seahawks. There were flags to indicate favorite music bands and even a few pirate flags.

  “I see you noticed our flags. Some people call ’em campy, but I like ’em.” Jeni kept walking.

  “They seem really well designed, with a consistent font and a color pallet that works,” said Andrew with a smile.

  David spoke under his breath, “Ooh, aren’t we just Mr. Project Runway today.”

  “Andrea says they create an atmosphere where people can have self-expression, but also one where people know what their neighbors are up to,” said Jeni, looking back at them with a faint smile.

  “What’s she like?” asked David.

  “Andrea? She’s awesome. Really generous woman. She took a big chance on me—I used to serve her cof
fee at Starbucks. We started talking and all of a sudden she asked me if I would come work for her as her assistant. Double the pay I was making pushing coffee.”

  They walked past bright chatty corners full of noise and activity. “Here is our inside sales team,” explained Jeni. There were dark broody corners that smelled of over-brewed coffee. “Over there’s our sys-admins, they don’t much like the light.” Everyone looked busy, but like they were also having fun.

  “So what do you guys do?” asked Jeni.

  “I’m in between things right now, but just got out of investment banking,” explained Andrew. “David’s a wantrepreneur,” he said with a smile. Andrea kinked her head and squinted slightly.

  “I sell jellyfish tanks online,” said David.

  “Cool. Andrea meets with bankers and entrepreneurs all the time. She does a monthly founders dinner here too. It’s all Greek to me though. I frankly couldn’t tell the difference between an investment banker or a bank teller.” They arrived at the coffee stand.

  “What’ll it be?” The barista didn’t look up from the large chrome espresso machine shooting steam into whole milk.

  “Americano, please,” said David.

  “Macchiato,” said Andrew.

  David reached for his wallet, but noticed there wasn’t a cash register.

  “We don’t charge for coffee,” explained Jeni. “Just tip the man if you want to.” David put a couple dollars into a tin can next to the espresso machine.

  “Aren’t you going to get something?” asked Andrew.

  “I’m fine, tryin’ to cut down.” Jeni scanned the room. David followed her gaze and saw a young woman with perfectly straight dirty blonde hair striding confidently toward a batch of desks near a banner labeled “Code Monkeys.” Usually when programmers are approached by beautiful women, they diffuse like oil on water or wilt like cut flowers in the sun. But these code monkeys welcomed the woman as one of them, and greeted her warmly.