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finish projects, or telling them their work was crap, or just plain changing what he wanted them to do.”
    “Did he fire anyone?” Emory said. “Who had a big enough beef to come after him? To trap him?”
    Fitzpatrick shook his head. “No, that’s the one thing he never did – he never fired anyone. He rode their asses, he yelled...but nobody got fired.”
    “Why did they put up with that shit?” Stevens said. If he’d worked for Stone, he’d long since have smashed the little prick’s face in.
    “Money and fame.” Fitzpatrick said, looking at Emory, and then Stevens.  “They were making money hand over fist and they were part of the fastest growing company on earth. People put up with a whole bunch of shit for that.”
    “So you really didn’t consider them a risk?” Stevens said.
    Fitzpatrick shrugged. “You never know when someone who’s treated like that is going to break.”
    “Did you consider them a risk?”
    “We always kept a man on him.”
    “Except when he was with girls?” Emory said.
    “Look.” Fitzpatrick held up his hands. “If you want to know about any of that you need to be talking to Tom Francis.”
    “Who’s that?” Stevens said.
    “He’s Stone’s PR guy. He handles Stone’s public persona, and along with that his female...situations.”
    “Situations?” Stevens glanced at Emory.
    Fitzpatrick pointed towards his chest. “We handle the physical threats. Francis handles public relations problems.”
    “Were there a lot of them?” Stevens said.
    Fitzpatrick sighed. “When you’re one of the richest men in the world, women have a tendency to throw themselves at you. Stone wasn’t a man to say no.”
    Stevens frowned. “How did it play out?”
    “After, they would come back, threatening to call him a pig in public – to kick up a shit storm. Francis would handle it.”
    Stevens looked at Emory. “Handle how?”
    “Not my line.”
    The door opened suddenly, revealing Agent Emily Sarah, catching her breath as if she had been running, a sheaf of papers in her hand. “We got it,” she said. “The IP address.”

Chapter 11
     
    “Venture Capitalists” translated into piles of cash flying at Billy very quickly, but he never had a chance to enjoy it, because he needed to live up to the expectations that the cash represented. That meant that he went from spending all his time in a darkened dorm room, writing code, to a much larger, darkened office with bigger, faster, better computers where he spent all his time...writing code.
    Billy knew computers, but he had no idea how to run a company. His first hire was Josh Bond, the one friend he’d kept from Stanford, who turned around and found Bill Johnson – who had years of corporate experience at IBM. Between the two of them, they were able to set up the infrastructure that Billy needed to take PushThrough global. They hired up-and-coming programmers, they bought the servers they needed, and they made the advertising connections that would turn a massive flow of funds into a company that blossomed.
    Billy had no idea what was happening outside of his office. He had no idea how the outside world saw him. His only concern day-to-day was improving the program. He’d work for days at a time writing code without sleeping. He’d obsess over features, and yell at the other programmers until they were able to push him in the right direction. The code of the other programmers was never good enough, so Billy rewrote it, again and again and again. 
    Josh had rented a massive apartment for Billy, a stone’s throw from the office, with a view that overlooked the San Francisco Bay, but Billy would only go there long enough to collapse at night, until a new idea woke him up and he went rushing back to the office. He had a brand new Mercedes but he’d never gotten his license.
    The entire idea behind PushThrough was to push people together so they could make connections, and Billy worked at a feverish pace to facilitate those