The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(55)

"Jimmy needed someone with access to Matthew's computer," he told me. "He wanted me to confirm his suspicions. He thought Matthew was using a back door in the program."

"A back door."

"Programmers call it that. It's a command that's not advertised— something that lets you inside the program. You hit your special access sequence, and you can get behind the program, go into God mode. The back door can give you unlimited access, let you change data at will."

"Or steal confidential files from betatesters," I suggested.

Dwight didn't answer.

"This back door," I said. "Where'd it come from?"

"Jimmy didn't tell me. Probably one of the original programmers—Jimmy, Ruby, or Garrett. Maybe they forgot about it, or

thought it so well hidden there was no reason to take it out. One of them could've even snuck it into the program maliciously."

"Dwight, we're only talking about three people, here—how would the others not know?"

"You have to trust your partners in a startup—there's no time to check each other's work. A highlevel encryption program has millions of lines of code—millions of places to stash a back door."

"If one of the principals, a malicious one, gave Pena access to that back door ..."

"Matthew could destroy the betatesting," Dwight finished. "The other principals might never know what hit them. Once Matthew bought Techsan, he could fix the back door quickly, document the problem, blame it on the original programmers, then turn around and make a huge profit. He could afford to bribe his informant several million and still come out ahead."

I thought about that. There were only three principals at Techsan. One was now dead.

"You told Jimmy you couldn't help him," I guessed.

Dwight nodded slowly. "I couldn't go behind Matthew's back. Jimmy couldn't give me any more specifics. The conversation came to an impasse."

"But now you think Jimmy was right."

Dwight stared at his little Jesus on the rearview mirror. "The way Matthew was talking yesterday, about how quickly he would fix the software, yes. I think Jimmy was right.

But that's not what bothers me most, Tres—not how Matthew hurt your brother's company, but why."

I waited.

"I've seen Matthew do bad things," Dwight said. "Scary things. But this acquisition seems . . . special to him. I gave him a list of four or five possibilities in Austin. Not just Techsan. But he looked at the names of the principals and zeroed in on Techsan immediately. He's spent a lot of time on this project, more than anything else he's done."

"The money potential," I said. "You indicated it was huge."

"That's just it. He's making it huge. He could've made the same size IPO with any other company I showed him, probably with less work. But Matthew is pulling in all his markers with venture capitalists to make Techsan his biggest play. It's like he intentionally wants

to hurt these principals, make them know they've been crushed. He's being worse about this than I've ever seen him. Almost like—"

"It's personal," I supplied.

He nodded.

"Why would it be?" I said. "Pena ever meet Jimmy before?" "No."

"Ruby or Garrett?"

"Not that I know of."

"UT," I said. "That's where you and Pena met. That's where Jimmy and Garrett and Ruby met. No crossing of paths?"

"We must've graduated at least ten years after the Techsan folks."

He was right. There really wasn't much coincidence—a school with fifty thousand students. It was hard to find five people in Austin who hadn't gone there.

"What about before college—you know anything about Matthew's past?"

Dwight hesitated. "I know he was from a welloff family. I know he hated his parents."

"Because?"

"He said— I don't know why this would help you. His parents were doctors, lived in Marble Falls, did a lot of charity work in orphanages, homeless shelters, places like that. According to Matthew, he was like their trophy child. They gave him everything but never paid attention to him. When he turned eighteen, he pretty much severed all communication with them."

"Parents still alive?"

"No. They died while we were in college. Car accident."

I stared into the parking lot.

I wondered whether my urge to dig up Pena's past was really my investigative instinct, or just the desire to find a weak chink in Pena's armour, a place he could be hurt. I didn't trust myself to stop if I found the latter to be true.

"W.B. Doebler," I said. "How tight were he and Pena?"

Dwight shook his head. "An occasional meeting. I wouldn't describe them as tight. The only person Matthew spent any real time with in Austin besides me—"

He stopped himself.

"Dwight?"

He ran his knuckle along the windshield. "I was going to say, Ruby McBride."

I'd looked through Pena's appointment book and seen only one meeting scheduled with Ruby—the one Dwight had already mentioned in the spring, when Pena had first approached Techsan.