The Term Sheet: A Startup Thriller Novel

by Lucas Carlson

  “Yes, but because of its late start, the new arrival time was revised to 11:23 a.m. It was running on a train line usually reserved for military and police needs. There were four cars hooked up to the locomotive. The first was full of coal. Behind that were three exhibition passenger cars. The one in the rear was made of glass, that was where the politicians were waving and smiling to the crowds.”

  “Were we not watching that train with a helicopter?”

  Shawn picked up a glass of water and took a long drink as if he hadn’t had water in days.

  “Our resources were focused on the president at that moment.” He picked up a piece of paper with notes on it. “At 11:10 a.m., the train was moving out of the station. The conductor was asked to slow down, but we did not receive a response. A few minutes later, it was picking up speed quickly. The train was far too heavy for regular service, it was only used for slow-moving excursions and celebratory events. Once a train that heavy gets moving, it’s nearly impossible to stop.”

  “I see. So would it be appropriate to say that the train became a speeding bullet.” Senator Gadfly gave a proud smile at that remark.

  “Yes, I guess that’s one way to put it. There were only a few miles of track left when the train reached the point of no return. But even so, by our calculations, there were no attempts at trying to stop. By the time the locomotive hit the end of the track it was going approximately seventy-five mph.”

  “Why didn’t the train conductor stop?”

  “We have reason to believe that the train conductor was already dead. The investigation is still underway.”

  “I see. Please continue.”

  “The train bore through twelve cars and three city blocks. It tore a hole through a historic four-story brick building that used to be a brewery. It destroyed a communal city garden. It destroyed the entrance to a federal courthouse. It came to rest shortly after tearing apart a large white tent set up next to the courthouse for transportation coordination.”

  “Why didn’t you evacuate the area?”

  “We…we didn’t have enough warning. All our resources were looking in the wrong place.”

  “What was the extent of the human destruction?”

  “There were forty-two injuries and thirty-eight casualties,” said Shawn solemnly. “Including twelve Secret Service agents. My team.” Abigail, where did Abigail go?

  “Mr. Douglas, we're very sorry for your loss and can’t express enough our gratitude for your service and the service of the brave men and women that day. Thank you again for your time today.”

  Chapter 9

  Andrew stared crookedly at David. David was swirling a make-believe mustache in his fingers and curling it at the tips. David looked totally deadpan as he explained, “I have a plan, sir. A cunning and subtle plan.”

  Picking up on the Blackadder reference, Andrew got himself into character. “As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, it’ll have to wait. Let’s get coffee.”

  They walked to a local coffee shop with marble floors and countertops. It had a sleek modern feel blended with a traditional hole-in-the-wall French coffee shop vibe. The owner was a classic Portland hipster. Trim, thirty-something, dressed to the nines with short dark hair slicked back with pomade. He had a thick black apron, and a grey short-sleeve button-down shirt that was just short enough to show off tattoos of old carnival scenes.

  “Hey David,” said Billy with a smile. “What would you like today?”

  “Ummm, I’m not sure yet. Andrew, you order.”

  “I’ll get a large vanilla latte.” Andrew pulled out his credit card. He looked at Billy with half a smile. “And a banana.”

  Billy swiped Andrew’s card and mumbled: “You know we don’t sell bananas.”

  Andrew looked at David and asked: “Why is it that Starbucks has a whole case of bananas and all I can get here are croissants? Come to think of it, Starbucks probably has the healthiest drive-through fast-food anywhere.”

  Billy forced as polite a tone as he could. “So what can I get you?”

  “Macchiato, please,” said David. He turned back to Andrew. “Remember that link you sent me a few weeks ago, the one about encryption?”

  “Yeah, the one you said was all hype.”

  “Well I figured it out. Only better.”

  “Oh?” Andrew leaned in and rested his arms on the marble countertop.

  “You see, there are two big problems with the way everyone else is doing encrypted services. First, like I told you before, they’re all centralized. No matter how good the encryption schemes are, the government can come in and tap the host servers’ Internet connections and passively listen to every piece of information coming in and out.”

  Andrew looked at David, half confused, half excited. “Okay, but what does that matter if the information is all encrypted? The government will just be getting a bunch of junk.”

  “That brings us to the second problem: people assume that bad guys and governments can’t break strong encryption.”

  David sat back and took a sip of his macchiato. If David had said this ten years ago, people would have called him crazy. Since Snowden’s leaks, however, amateur conspiracy theorists were no longer the fringe, but the norm. The implications were staggering. Every email from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Apple and everywhere else was being stored and snooped on by the United States government. Every chat and IM was archived indefinitely.

  “I think I follow, but what can you do about it?”

  “Even though we have to assume encryption can be broken, it doesn’t mean it’s cheap or easy to do. Just imagine, if you are a human being and you hear the sentence: ‘Dick and Jane run up the hill,’ you can understand it immediately. No processing power required. If it’s slightly obfuscated, like if you remove the first letter of every word, it’s harder to understand and takes a bit more brainpower, but you still get it. Ick nd ane un p he ill. But if it’s just a bunch of jumbled letters and numbers, it’ll take a while to puzzle out the solution.”

  “So did you invent a stronger type of encryption?”

  “No. But if you make it unbearably loud with so many different voices, it makes finding the signal in the noise asymptotically difficult. Combine this with no central datacenter, make it totally distributed, and things get interesting. Every message travels encrypted to a bunch of other anonymous users of the app who then repeat the message encrypted yet again. Simultaneously, it sends out tons of bogus messages that are also re-encrypted and repeated by a bunch of people. The end result is that for every one encrypted message you send, anyone spying will have to sort through thousands of bogus ones. Potentially hundreds of thousands.”

  “Huh. I think you lost me.”

  “Spies and hackers and foreign governments can probably decrypt anything, but it’s not easy and takes time, effort, and resources.”

  “Right.”

  “So if they can decrypt anything, let’s give them so much fake encrypted noise that they have to search for a needle in a haystack.”

  “Got it, and the more people who use your app, the bigger the haystack.”

  “Bingo.”

  “David, this is a good idea.”

  “I know.”

  “No, I mean this is something that could change the world.”

  “Yeah,” said David as he finished his macchiato. The last bittersweet swig made his throat warm and his stomach relax.

  “You should build it,” said Andrew almost as an afterthought.

  “It’s just a thought experiment. Nobody pays to use mobile chat apps today.”

  “It’s way better than your jellyfish idea. How’s that going anyhow? Sold anything yet?”

  “Not yet, but I’ve got some ideas. This week’s blog post is about jellyfish mating rituals.”

  Chapter 10

  Megan scrubbed the hardwood floors of their small apartment with an old Swiffe
r that was bent and duct-taped back together. The spring had brought more rain than normal and David always tracked in mud after working at the café a couple blocks from their place in Ladd’s Circle. Still David was confused about why he saw Megan cleaning all the time. He thought their apartment was small enough that it shouldn’t be that hard to keep clean. He rolled over in the bed to reach to the floor and pick up his socks from the night before.

  “Meg, it’s Saturday,” he yelled. “Do you really need to be cleaning this early? Come back to bed.”

  “Up already, lazy head? Coffee’s on the stove.”

  “Thanks.”

  David pulled himself up half-naked, wearing only his superhero pajama pants. The spring rain was beating hard and loud on the roof. David dragged himself to the kitchen and reached for a mug and a bowl.

  Megan brushed the Swiffer over David’s ever-expanding vinyl collection before tearing it off and throwing it in the trash. “I’m headed to the flea market to set up shop for tomorrow. Then I’m having lunch with Elly and Monica. Want to get together after lunch and catch a movie?”

  “Sounds good. Andrew will be here soon.”

  “He’s always late. Make sure he takes off his shoes.”

  David poured himself a bowl of Lucky Charms. Megan took off her top and started walking toward the bathroom.

  “You know what Andrew said I should do?”

  “Shave your beard?”

  “Ha. No.” His beard had been growing past the point of lazy stubble. “He said I should start a company around my encrypted chat idea. Isn’t that crazy?”

  “Crazy like spending your life savings on a jellyfish website in an online auction?” Megan turned on the shower.

  “Boy, you are really on this morning, aren’t you?”

  She turned and scrunched up her nose. “I’ll be here all weekend, tips are welcome in the jar.”

  “Anyhow, smarty-pants, I told him it was just a thought experiment. I am not going to turn away from the time and money we have invested in Jellies-R-Us.”

  “We? Whatever. The chat idea sounds like it has more potential than Jellies-R-Us ever did. At least this new idea solves a real problem, rather than one you made up to rationalize spending so much money.”

  “Very funny. You’re probably right, but I don’t like businesses that don’t charge money. Nobody pays for chat apps these days,” David said while scarfing down his cereal. He washed it down with a large gulp of coffee.

  “Remind me how many people have paid for the jellyfish tanks? I don’t have a degree from Harvard, but it seems to me like if you solve a real problem for people, you can figure out how to make money from it.”

  “Maybe. I’m just too busy to try something new right now.” David tossed the empty bowl in the white porcelain sink and poured another cup of coffee, before heading down the hallway to get dressed.

  After Megan finished her shower, a pop of sun poked through the clouds, briefly lighting up the small living room. David kissed Megan on the forehead and flew out the door. When it rained this hard in the spring, the ground would soak to capacity and water everywhere turned brown. During this quick interlude of sun in an otherwise miserable day, you could smell mud in the air and hear small birds singing in the trees.

  David walked a few steps to Palio Café to meet Andrew. The café felt a little like the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, with books piled to the ceiling, cozy tables, dim lights, and big windows to watch the passersby. Ladd’s Circle was the center of bicycle traffic for most of Southeast Portland, and no amount of rain stopped Portland bikers. Many of the tables were large, community tables with seven or eight wooden chairs surrounding them. But there were also a few big cozy leather chairs near the books. Prime real estate for someone reading a novel, or wanting to avoid the unwanted attention of strangers at a shared table. The coffee served there was from Stumptown and always good.

  David went to the counter and ordered an Earl Grey tea before spotting Andrew in the adjoining room. Andrew was alone at one of the large tables typing on his laptop.

  Andrew pointed at his screen. “Hey, how much do you think it costs to bribe Skype into letting you see all the chats going on in their system?”

  “No idea. A billion dollars,” said David.

  “Snowden released more documents today. Apparently it’s only twenty million a year. And they’ve been doing it since 2009. That’s a lot less money than I thought. I wonder if rich people and foreign governments are getting in on this action too, or if it’s just reserved for the good old USA.”

  “That’s crazy,” said David. “I wonder what email system Snowden uses. Probably something like Hushmail with built-in public-key encryption.”

  Andrew shook his head and asked: “Why is public-key encryption so damn hard to use? I tried to get my dad to use it last week but I lost him at the key server.”

  “You probably lost him long before that.” David laughed. “There are just a ton of steps to get started with that stuff, and it isn’t really useful until all your friends have done all of the steps correctly.”

  “Hey, if you built that encrypted chat service, I bet Snowden would use it. I bet he would even pay for it. He probably can’t use a credit card, so you would have to accept bitcoin.”

  “Ha!” David snorted his hot tea as he laughed, and an older lady with dark red hair and glasses that looked like they were made in the 70s glanced over with a disapproving look. “Megan likes the idea too, says it’s one of the better ideas I’ve had.”

  “Coming from her, that means a lot. You should at least test the idea to see if it has legs. Put a simple page up or whatever.”

  David opened his laptop and started editing his latest blog post. The novelty of male jellyfish spewing sperm from their gonads in a desperate hope of one happening to float along and hit a female had run out. Even the word “jellyfish” gave David indigestion these days. Can’t hurt to try a landing page, he thought. He closed his word processor, pulled up a terminal and started coding. Twenty minutes later he twisted his laptop toward Andrew and sat back.

  “You actually listened to me. Kudos for that. But that’s the crappiest landing page I have ever seen.”

  “I never live up to your standards. You badger me to test an idea, then I test it, and you don’t like how I test it.”

  “No, David, stop freaking out. You just have too many words—people don’t read on the interwebs. Here, let me fix it.”

  Andrew pulled the computer closer to him and started typing. A few minutes later, he turned the computer back to David. He started reading aloud. The lady behind them shot another disapproving glare their way, like a librarian trying to stare someone out of the library, but neither of them cared.

  “‘Cryptobit: an un-breakable, un-snoopable, un-stoppable encrypted chat service for your phone. To find out more, put your email in the box.’ That’s it? But don’t people have to know how it’s un-snoopable? I don’t think this is nearly enough information.”

  “You don’t sell people on features,” Andrew explained. “You sell people on their problems. Put yourself in their shoes, don’t be a smarty-pants and try to show off. How you make it work behind the scenes doesn’t matter to people. At least at first it doesn’t. They wouldn’t care if you pulled it off with monkeys passing messages through tin cans strung together by threads. They just want to know that it solves a problem they care about.”

  “I don’t think Snowden would pay for this the way you wrote it.”

  “I’m not asking people to pay here, I’m seeing if they want to find out more. I am certain he would put his email in the box to learn more.”

  “What do you know, anyhow?” asked David. “When did you become the Snowden whisperer? This is stupid. I don’t know why we're even still talking about this. I’m going to get another tea.”

  David picked up his big empty cup and the saucer with the spent teabag and dropped it clumsily in the dirty dishes tub.

  “Young man!
Can you please try to keep it down?” The old lady’s face was as red as a tomato.

  “I am sorry, ma’am, we didn’t mean to disturb you,” said Andrew like a troublemaker on his best behavior. The polite tone appeared to satiate the woman and she nestled herself back into her book. Andrew grabbed David’s computer and started fiddling around as David walked away.

  David turned around and stormed back to the table. “On second thought, I’ve got things to do.” He unplugged the charger, tucked the laptop under his arm, and waved halfheartedly. “Later.”

  “Wait,” said Andrew. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing.”

  Chapter 11

  He woke up in a cold sweat. Abigail, where did Abigail go? He had not been able to sleep through the night since the day of the attack. Shawn had tried over-the-counter and prescription pills, but they took his edge off during the daytime and he needed that edge. So he stopped.

  He woke at 5:43 a.m. and got out of bed at 5:44 a.m. His tiny one-bedroom apartment was in disarray. It looked like there had been a weekend frat party and smelled like dirty socks. The refrigerator was empty except for half a carton of spoiled milk and a couple eggs. At 6:12 a.m. he ate a scrambled egg. He then took a fifteen-minute cold shower. He put on his navy suit. As he passed the picture of his wife Norah, his fingers grazed over the top of the frame. He grabbed the keys sitting on the nightstand next to the photo and got into his old black Jaguar.

  Five minutes into the drive, he passed the dark glass office building on his right. It had been a particularly wet winter in Washington DC and now that the tourist season was winding down, the streets were clearing up. As he approached the National Mall, it was quiet and still. Most of the Mall didn’t open for another hour.

  The rains had helped wash the streets of the physical scars from the devastating events just a month earlier, but the psychological scars remained. The workers had just started laying bricks for the old brewery after having rebuilt much of the interior. The community garden remained untouched since planting season had long since passed.