Rogue Code

41

Robert Alshon reviewed the search report from the office used by Jeff Aiken and Frank Renkin with disapproval. His team had done an outstanding job but the forensic examination of the physical evidence had turned up nothing of use to him. The preliminary examination of the computers was negative as well. The pair had been too crafty to be caught red-handed, leaving no obvious trail.

The search of their hotel rooms had been no more productive. The frustrating part was that his people had arrived too late. Their personal effects, specifically their computers, were gone. They’d been alerted by the security system in D.C. and moved one step faster than he had. Not for the first time, he regretted that he could not make the arrests at the same time he’d conducted the search.

Alshon’s supervisor had already expressed concern with the investigation. He wasn’t focused on this case as yet but the message was clear to him. He needed to close the circle ASAP.

His stomach burned. He reached into the right desk drawer for an antacid. He chewed two large pink tablets, then downed them with tepid black coffee. It was Sunday, he reminded himself again. He’d like to be doing something else. He spent too many weekend days in this office.

The good news was that the arrest warrants were out. He’d sent an alert to the NYPD and called his contact at the FBI Manhattan Field Office. With their cooperation he had local assets on the ground and was confident they’d flush his targets. New York was a big city but these two were from out of town, with no contacts. They’d need to use a debit or credit card soon enough, and then he’d have them. Plastic was always the Achilles’ heel for such criminals.

Though Alshon wasn’t all that certain in this case. He’d already tried tracing their cell phones. Both of them were inoperative. Aiken and Renkin had been smart enough to remove the batteries and were no doubt using burners. They’d also have ways to obtain false identities. They might even have access to cash to keep themselves off the electronic grid. He hated chasing spooks. They knew too much.

Alshon’s initial thought had been that this pair were computer geeks and would be easily snared. He’d done it often enough since coming to the SEC. Computer experts could write code and engage in all kinds of chicanery, but when it came to fleeing, they were amateurs. But not in this case, apparently.

Alshon’s immediate concern was how expert they were, what contacts they possessed he could not know about. Had they both or either of them been operatives at one time? He made a note to find out, grimacing as he wrote. The Company would drag its heels, it always did. The supposed post–9/11 camaraderie was a façade. No agency cooperated with another, not unless there was something in it for them or you had a personal contact inside. Not for the first time, he regretted not having cultivated one at the CIA.

But he just couldn’t stand spooks. The CIA was simply sleazy from his experience. They worked in the shadows, never told the truth, and never the entire truth even when forced to come clean. They routinely engaged in misdirection, were never straightforward. In Alshon’s view they were downright un-American in their conduct, and since their creation had caused far more harm than good.

In his experience, they also had an excess of money, power, and resources, and too many agents went into business for themselves taking advantage of what they learned and the contacts they’d made. It was disgusting, and it was a nasty business.

Alshon was forming the opinion that was the case here. He wondered just how far the web spread. Could just two men have done what the IT report claimed? There could very easily be more to this than met the eye. Whose nest were they feathering? How much help would others give them?

Alshon ran his right hand across his scalp. He was sweating. He closed his eyes. God, he wanted to nail these guys, nail them good. But what resources did they have access to? He fought off the sinking feeling that the pair had already slipped from beyond his grasp.

Just then, Susan Flores rapped lightly at his open door. He nodded for her to come in and sit.

“What do you have?” he asked sharply.

“We’re still at it but I know more than when we spoke last time.”

Alshon knew she’d been up most of the last two nights. She looked it. He’d have to back off on pressing her; otherwise, her efficiency would plummet. But time was critical right now, and he had no regrets about his manner. Everyone needed to know this case was urgent. They’d slip into the long-haul mode soon enough if he didn’t catch a break.

Flores referred to her notes. “It’s a big operation, bigger than it initially appeared. Like we thought, it’s been going on for about a year from what we can tell. The software uses a special high-frequency trading algo and exploits its preferred position within the Exchange’s trading platform. We haven’t traced any of the money yet but know that it’s scattered. The algo targets many companies, taking a bite everywhere; it doesn’t steal from within the Exchange itself. Candidly—” She hesitated just a millisecond before finishing. “—we’re wondering if this can possibly be a two-person operation.”

Alshon opened his desk drawer and shook out two more pink pills.

“We think they’ve been at this for several years, moving very carefully as they set it up. We were able to do a ‘before’ and ‘after’ of one of their updates and, frankly, it looks to us like more work than two men can accomplish within a reasonable time frame. It also has all the hallmarks of an inside job. Do these two have connections within the Exchange?” Flores stopped and looked up.

“I don’t know.” Alshon made a note. “I’ll have a background done on every key employee who could work this from the inside. Can you give me those names?” Flores nodded. “We’ll find the link if there is one.”

“The other part of this, sir, is that the operation is ongoing.”

Alshon was shocked. “You mean they’re still at it?”

“Absolutely. If anything, it looks like its accelerating in frequency.”

Alshon wrinkled his forehead. “They’re on the run. How can they do that? Are you positive this isn’t automated?”

“Yes. What’s happening is being human directed. My thinking was the same as yours initially, that they’d have to shut down in the circumstances, that if they did anything, it would be to delete code and cover their tracks. I think we really need to consider that a number of others are involved. Or—” She hesitated. “—whether these two are even involved at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Unless we can connect them with someone on the inside going back several years I think we need to consider that they’ve been set up.”

“Set up?”

“Right. Assume for a minute, they are fall guys. They were brought in to conduct a penetration test. We know they succeeded. In doing so they encountered the code for this illegal operation. Whoever is doing it could have made it look like they were the culprits to discredit them and divert attention.”

“That seems a stretch.”

“Yes, but I don’t find it any more implausible than Aiken opening a brokerage account in his own name and carelessly dropping malware the IT security trolls were sure to spot.”

“I’ll keep it in mind, but innocent men come forward. They don’t run and these two are running like rabbits.”

“Yes, sir. That’s your area. I just wanted to point out the possibility. Just keep in mind that if they are guilty, they’re doubtless part of a much bigger team. This is very sophisticated. And I really don’t see how they can be doing what is currently taking place from a hotel room with laptops.”

“I’ve been at this a lot of years, Susan. I know crooks when I see them. These two are bent. I can smell it. I’ve alerted NYPD and local FBI. They’ll flush them out, and when they do, they’ll roll over like all the rest.”

“Yes, sir,” Susan answered, her eyes steadfastly planted on her notes.

42

The office was as busy as on any workweek. Bill Stenton scanned the cubicles. Everyone was here. He’d not given orders, but somehow word had spread that this wasn’t a weekend to spend time at home.

He sat back in his chair, swiveled away from his door, closed his eyes, and wondered how things could ever had gone this far. Yesterday had been a disaster. Alshon from the SEC had stormed in with a search warrant and a team of investigators, ostensibly to search the office where the Red Zoya men had worked. In fact, Alshon’s team had been everywhere, eyeing trusted employees suspiciously, looking across desks distrustfully, obstructing the hallways, intruding in the normal flow of work. It had been terrible.

Alshon had made it worse by speaking to Stenton in such a way as to indicate that he wasn’t entirely trusted. Maybe that was an over interpretation, Stenton thought, but the investigator had answered questions with questions and had not taken him into his confidence.

When the SEC was finished, “for now” Alshon said, his team had stripped bare the office Aiken and Renkin had used, leaving nothing but fixtures and the desks behind. What was the point of that other than as a show of power? All the equipment they’d taken belonged to this office but Stenton was in no position to complain, nor did he want to. It was the turmoil and suspicion that troubled him.

Afterwards, he’d gone with his senior staff to a quiet watering hole. The discussion had inevitably turned to what had taken place earlier. From what they’d witnessed and what investigators said, it was apparent that Aiken and Renkin were suspects in a major crime. His colleagues kicked around what they’d heard, talked about it, and decided that this time the SEC was barking up the wrong tree. More than one on his team knew Aiken by reputation and refused to believe he was a criminal. “They don’t always get it right,” one said.

“Yeah, but they always make it look like they do,” another answered.

And that bothered Stenton because he was now having serious reservations about what was taking place. He’d called the colleague who’d recommended Aiken so forcefully and quizzed him at length.

“Jeff’s the best there is,” the man had repeated. “I’ve known him for years. It was a shame he left the CIA, but he’s proved his worth time and again.” The man related two incidents when Aiken had uncovered malware that was steadily looting companies. “You recall that Anonymous hack of RegSec? It was Jeff who figured that out, plus he came up with a way to identify the hacker at the conference he was attending.”

When Stenton continued to express reservations his colleague had told him stories he’d heard, how Aiken had hunted down two cyberterrorists in person, how his girlfriend had been kidnapped by a gang and he rescued her. “He’s as straight as they come,” he’d said. “Check around, Bill. You’ll see I’m right.”

Stenton had declined to say why he’d called but had taken the man up on his suggestion and called two more contacts in the industry, people he’d not talked with before. Both knew Aiken by reputation and both spoke very highly of him.

Now Alshon was telling him that Aiken was dishonest. How could that possibly be true given what Stenton was being told? People don’t just change their nature. Aiken had had plenty of chances to steal before, and in places with far less security. Here, he was all but sure to be caught.

Alshon had let drop that something was amiss in their system and had been for some time. Stenton found that impossible to believe, the harmless bot notwithstanding. The system had performed as expected, and their security measures, the finest in the industry, had detected nothing. Absolutely nothing.

And if Aiken were the guilty party, how could he have managed to steal for a year and then arranged for Stenton to hire him?

It was impossible. There was simply no way he could have hacked their system before he was hired, but that was what Alshon was suggesting. And if it was a coincidence, that was too improbable to even consider. Stenton had conducted a nationwide search for just the right man and ended up hiring the hacker who’d already penetrated his system?

Impossible was the word for it.

Stenton’s head throbbed. He’d kept his drinking under control with his staff but later, at the bar near his apartment, he kept at it until after midnight. He turned slightly toward his desk, picked up the Red Zoya summary, and flipped through it again. The papers quivered ever so slightly in his shaking hand.

Frank Renkin had left this summary of their findings. It was all there. How they’d successfully penetrated the impregnable system. How they’d discovered rogue code in it, code that had been there a year or more, just like Alshon had said. Renkin and Aiken had asked for a face-to-face to go over their findings in detail.

Stenton lifted the last page. The pair had recommended that Stenton get the IT people on the rogue code at once to get it neutralized, then reverse engineer it to determine what it did and how it managed to penetrate their system.

Was that something criminals would do? Hardly.

Then there was the attack on Aiken to consider. One of his employees had speculated that it could be related to his work somehow.

Could it? Stenton hadn’t even considered the possibility until then. But when he finally examined Red Zoya’s summary, he could see plenty of motive for someone to want to put Aiken out of action, though it looked as if they’d moved too late. What if Aiken was on to something and someone decided to stop him? It was far-fetched though not impossible. Assuming that to be true, where did it lead? Who would want to stop him? The hackers obviously, assuming the report was correct.

The first question to consider was who would know Aiken was working here. Stenton had kept the hire discreet and no one knew what he’d been hired to do. His staff had seen the men at work, but Aiken and Renkin were low key, not attracting attention to themselves. Next, and most troubling, was who would know they claimed to have discovered this rogue code? The obvious answer was the one he disliked the most — someone working in this office. Because that meant the hacker was a trusted employee.

Stenton knew all these people; he’d personally hired many of them. He rubbed shoulders with them every day. He’d never experienced the slightest doubt about their integrity. But from long experience, he knew that anyone can violate a trust. He’d seen it before. One of his employees at Wells Fargo had been caught in a pretty basic computer theft. It turned out she had a biker boyfriend who’d given her no choice. So it could happen.

Then there was the media and the frenzy the Times article about that bot was causing. The market had taken a real fall on Friday, and the international markets were suggesting it was in for more of the same on Monday. He’d been forced to meet with his boss and assure him that the accusations of the disgruntled former employee who leaked the story were unfounded, that the bot was simply harmless. Stenton’s response, he told him, had been to bring on board the finest team he could locate to conduct a pentest to locate and plug any holes.

He’d felt sick to his stomach defending himself that way, realizing too late that his superior might have already heard about the SEC investigation. Fortunately, the raid hadn’t happened until the next day, but Stenton knew he’d be back before his boss on Monday, trying to talk his way out of all this. His story was losing credibility even to himself. There’d been a harmless bot, he’d hired a company, the men were suspected by the Exchange’s IT department of looting accounts, and the SEC had launched an investigation, searching their office, questioning his staff. He’d heard warrants were outstanding for the pair.

This was his area, he was responsible. It almost didn’t matter what the truth was any longer because events were discrediting him with every passing hour. When it came time for heads, or a head, to roll, he hadn’t the slightest doubt his would be on the chopping block.

Stenton turned away from the door. He didn’t need this, not on top of his usual responsibilities and the endless meetings he was attending about the pending Toptical IPO. He’d never expressed his reservations about the new algo the Exchange was going to use as it had not been his decision and no one had asked. But the test runs had all experienced glitches and there was a pervasive sense of unease he could detect among those responsible for it. The IPO had to come off without a serious problem. With the stock market reeling the credibility of the Exchange was at stake. Too much depended on its success for there to be a failure like that experienced by BATS or even a snafu like the Facebook IPO.

What a disaster that would be, Stenton thought.

On Friday, he was asked specifically about the integrity of the Exchange’s trading platform, and he’d answered there were no problems, despite what The New York Times was reporting. Looking back at the Red Zoya summary, though, then recalling the earlier report from the Chicago office, he realized something very likely was amiss. Could it have anything to do with the IPO? There was without question enough money at stake to make it a ready target. And the fact that the Exchange was employing a new algo was common knowledge. The Wall Street Journal had dedicated a long article to it. New algos were always a place for shenanigans as the unexpected often occurred, even without interference.

Stenton found himself taking shallow breaths and forced himself to fill his lungs deeply. His uncontrolled eyelid tic was back. His wife had complained about the weekends he was working, among other things. He promised her that wouldn’t happen when he’d taken this job, and now it turned out he’d promised something he couldn’t deliver. And she didn’t even like living in Manhattan.

But Stenton had a more pressing issue, one that had gnawed at him ever since he’d first learned of Alshon’s investigation. Stenton had hired Jeff Aiken. What if, despite everything he’d been told, Aiken was guilty? What if he’d planted this rogue code the previous year?

God, Stenton thought, no one will believe my hiring him was a coincidence. No one. He’d be finished, not just here, but anywhere significant. And he’d deserve it, because it was him who’d let the fox into the hen house.

He glanced at his watch. Too much time. His first drink was at least three hours away.

43

A Rocha restaurant occupied the entire tenth floor of the Edifício República. To dine here meant Victor Bandeira did not have to leave the building, and his bodyguards could position themselves inconspicuously near the elevator.

The restaurant was busy as usual on a Sunday. Many of those who dined here regularly brought their wives and families directly from Mass. Bandeira sat at his usual corner table with the commanding view of the floor, acknowledging nods in his direction. He ordered a drink as he waited, wondering why he should be waiting.

He’d been drinking too much lately, he decided. He’d confided his concerns to no one. That was one of the prices he paid for being on the top. There was no one with whom he could share everything. Information was power and the more information he gave away the weaker he became. Such had been his experience.

Carnaval was the most ambitious operation of his career and must succeed. He’d spoken directly with Ramos about it and the man had expressed his unease. “I’m concerned that it’s too much, too fast,” he’d said respectfully.

Bandeira understood, but the allure of $10 billion in a single stroke had been more than he could resist. Now he was committed, and there was no turning back. He was satisfied that Grupo Técnico in Rio was doing what had to be done. Ramos had assured him the same was taking place in New York. Still, it was asking a lot, and though Bandeira gave the orders, he understood he was pressing his skilled staff to the breaking point.

But that’s what they were paid to do. If this work were easy, anyone could do it. They were bright, no question about it. But could they pull it off?

Any troubles they had, Bandeira believed, were connected to the fact that Pedro didn’t like taking direction from Abílio. He wanted to be his own man. He occasionally resisted instructions, which was bad enough but primarily he squabbled with his New York counterpart, clashing with him over ultimate authority. As if anyone but Bandeira was in charge. The situation was improved but it was still a source of concern to him.

He thought about his son and wondered if other fathers had the same troubles. He’d coddled the boy, he belatedly realized. An only son is a burden as everything rested on him. Perhaps it had been a mistake to put Pedro in charge of Casas de Férias. Of course, at the time he’d had no idea the operation would by now be poised to take $10 billion from the New York Stock Exchange, to make him and those with whom he did business richer than any of them had ever dreamed. Now, with everything depending on success, he was stuck with Pedro playing a key role. Everyone was expecting the big payoff. Bandeira had to deliver. He wondered if his son understood that.

Failure would be a disaster from which he could never recover. Bandeira was unconcerned about the operation being traced to him. That was of no consequence. The problem would be in disappointing those in power he depended on. So far, his career had been free of major missteps, but he’d studied previous chefes and had taken from them one important lesson: The perception of success is the mother of power. When those who can hurt you see you fail, then the power seeps from you like water from a cracked pot.

Bandeira’s fresh Scotch arrived and he lifted it to his lips. The first danger with Carnaval was that something might go wrong and would point to the ongoing Casas de Férias operation and possibly to the men working at the Exchange before they had a chance to get away. It wasn’t anything Bandeira thought couldn’t be handled, but it would be an unnecessary complication. He was satisfied that NL was sufficiently removed from the operation even in that eventuality.

What ate at him was the consequence of success. Ramos had expressed his concern that taking so much from the IPO could have a catastrophic cascading effect on the market. “Lesser amounts have caused serious disruptions,” he cautioned.

Bandeira found that hard to accept. The NYSE transacted billions of dollars every day. Ten billion would scarcely be missed but Ramos had explained that even a few billion when linked to the algos of the high-frequency traders had caused temporary chaos in the market previously. “Everyone is looking for the next event,” he said, “and when it happens, we can’t predict with total confidence how they will react. We could have a stock market crash unlike anything in history. Everything is set up for it to happen at some point. No one has faith in the Exchange to have in place the necessary controls.”

And there it was, the real source of Bandeira’s concern. He could not be seen as responsible for an international collapse of the financial markets. He required a functioning stock market. He needed a financial system with all the flaws the current one had to milk it. A restructured, rebuilt system would make what he’d been doing, and what he planned to do in the future, impossible. A catastrophe would also wipe out the fortunes of many powerful men. Guilt would need to be placed, a scapegoat found. Bandeira wondered if he could escape the blame of a concerted worldwide effort to find the culprit.

Was his ambition at last too much? Bandeira thought as he finished his drink and gestured for another. Had his ego finally become too much? Esmeralda had cautioned him once about that. She’d been the last person able to speak to him with such candor. He’d dismissed it at the time. Great men did great things. It was the way of the world. Still, it was peculiar that her words came back to him at this moment.

Ego had been the final undoing of his predecessor, Joaquim de Sousa Andrade. Known simply as Bibo, he’d been chefe for just a single year. He’d been satisfied with the status quo, content with the wealth and power that flowed his way and made no changes except the ill-advised one of moving Bandeira to the number two position. Andrade had thought the car accident that made his final elevation an act of God. Everything, it seemed to Bandeira, went to the man’s head and in the end it was vanity that did him in. He’d wanted a hair transplant, the bags under his eyes removed, his jowls reduced or eliminated, and opted to do it all in a single secret procedure. He trusted Bandeira with the news as he’d be out of commission for a week or so. He didn’t survive the procedure, nor did the doctor and his team. Bandeira had passed off their brutal elimination as revenge for their carelessness in allowing the great Bibo to die.

Just then, Carlos Lopes de Almeida, president of the Banco do Novo Brasil, entered the restaurant. Bandeira watched him smile and wave, then weave his way across the crowded room, shaking a few hands, gesturing to others along the way.

He was of slightly below average height compared to the new generation. His scalp shined in the bright light, the wreath of gray hair about it trimmed short. He wore heavy framed glasses in the Latin style. He smiled broadly as he reached the table. Bandeira rose and the two men embraced.

“I am so sorry to be late, my friend,” Almeida said. “I was detained at home and the traffic is just terrible.”

“Of course. I understand. I only just got here myself.”

Bandeira didn’t like depending on men like Almeida, men of privilege. They came from the highest ranks of Brazilian society, were intermarried with each other’s families, and were traditionally those who controlled the nation. That had changed in recent decades but such men were still important to someone like Bandeira who needed connections in such circles.

That was what irritated him. For all his wealth and power Bandeira would never be invited within that group. That was just one reason why he needed Almeida, why his involvement with Sonia was so reckless. Yes, he controlled the bank, but he still needed the father.

And just what game was she playing? He’d known women who enjoyed it rough. Typically they started fights knowing they would end in only one way. Over the years, he realized that these were not just women who came from violent childhoods but also women of social standing, women who had been pampered all their lives. Was he to believe that Sonia was one of them? You never knew with young women, not until it happened. He wondered sometimes if they knew. Had Sonia discovered this about herself only now? It would seem so, and if he was right, it opened up new opportunities for him with her, opportunities so much more reckless than what had gone before.

Almeida gestured for drinks; then the men ordered their meal. It had been Almeida who wanted to meet, so Bandeira waited, indicating by his silence that he intended to get to business. He had plans for later.

Almeida hesitated, then said, “I am concerned about the cash flow into the bank.”

Bandeira raised an eyebrow. “I thought banks liked money.”

Almeida smiled. “Oh we do, but lately it has been too much. It is getting difficult to manage without attracting attention. The Banco do Novo Brasil might be old and respected, but it is no longer a major bank in our nation.”

“It soon will be, Carlos. We’ve discussed my plans.”

“Oh yes, yes, I quite agree,” Almeida said eagerly. “But … too much, too fast is a problem, you understand?”

Bandeira pursed his lips. “I can see that.” The waiter set their drinks down, then drifted away. “How are the special accounts doing?”

The “special accounts” were those established for key politicians and government officials, all the corrupt elite who had to be taken care of. One of the reasons for acquiring control of the bank had been to give Bandeira a legitimate way of paying them off. Almeida’s principal service to him was to arrange this as routine business.

“There are no problems. It all goes smoothly.”

“Carlos, over the next week to ten days you will receive perhaps a billion U.S. dollars.” Almeida blanched. Bandeira held up his hand to stop him commenting. “I will be meeting with our friends before then, arranging special payments. I will give you the figures in a week. Move the money on to their outside accounts, you understand? Do not keep it in the bank.”

“I understand.” Almeida lifted his drink gulping down half before lowering the glass.

Bandeira smiled. “In this case the bank records are important to us so don’t work too hard at concealing them.”

“I … I thought…”

“Yes, usually. But this time I want my friends tied very closely to me. Don’t be concerned, Carlos, the secretary of the Ministry of Finance will receive a significant sum. All is well.”

“As you say.” Almeida ran his bare hand across the top of his head. He removed a handkerchief and wiped it unconsciously.

This was insurance. Almeida would bind the powerful in Brazil to Bandeira so completely, implicate them in Carnaval so thoroughly, if the necessity came they would save him in saving themselves. It was going to cost a great deal but it was worth it.

Business done, Bandeira turned to chat. “And how is your family?”

“Oh, that. It is why I was delayed coming. My daughter, Sonia — you’ve met her — she is having boyfriend trouble.”

“Young women always have trouble with their romantic life.”

“You are lucky to have a son. You have no idea what a curse it is to have so beautiful and willful a daughter. It is not like the old days when a father simply told his daughter what to do.”

“She told you about this trouble?”

“Nothing like that. You know women. I think she told my wife who became very upset.” Almeida leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I think he was physical with her. She is wearing too much makeup on her left cheek.”

“Ahh. He has no right. They are not married.”

“Exactly!” Almeida blinked quickly several times. “But since I’m not sure what happened, I don’t know what to do.” He clenched his jaw. “But if he really hurt her, that filho da puta will pay, I promise you!”

Bandeira suppressed a smile. He could not imagine Almeida doing anything in such a situation. “These young people, they are always having troubles like this. We spoil them.”

“Yes, I know. I know.” Almeida picked up his glass.

“Who is she seeing? Do you know?”

“I’ve never met him. I asked once, just showing interest, and she glared at me. I asked my wife and she said nothing.”

“Difficult.”

“Yes, it is very hard.” The man uncharacteristically finished his drink. “I’ve been thinking,” Almeida said, “and want to make a suggestion. An idea I have to bring us closer together, bind our relationship and solve this problem I have.”

“Yes?”

“You find my daughter attractive. I’m sure you do. She is lovely. Perhaps you could spend some time with her. It would be a great favor to me as it would get her away from this vile man who abuses her. Perhaps, if you think it would be an agreeable match, you would do me the honor of considering marrying her.”

Bandeira was stunned.

“Ah, there they are.” Almeida rose to attract the attention of his wife and Sonia as they entered the dining room. His wife wore a fixed smile on her face, as plastic as that on a mannequin. Sonia, dressed in something light and sunny, kept her eyes down, looking up just once, her eyes passing across Bandeira’s face without expression. For all anyone watching could know, this was the first time they’d ever seen each other.

Bandeira carefully watched as she sat. Then, for the briefest of moments, she caught his eye with a sly, hungry gaze.

44

Daryl grimaced at the sight of the hotel where Frank and Jeff were staying. She looked carefully about the lobby as she entered and decided it was safe enough. The unshaven desk clerk eyed her as she went straight to the elevator but said nothing. She punched the button for the fifth floor, then stepped through the opening doors. The elevator swayed slightly as it rose, strange metallic sounds coming from above and below, echoing in the shaft.

The car stopped and the doors slowly parted. Daryl found the door and rapped lightly. A moment later Frank opened it half an inch, then pulled the door wide and greeted her with a smile.

“Good to see you,” he said, hugging her. “Come on in. Come on in.”

A bachelor’s effort had been made to clean the place, but it was obvious two men had been sharing the cramped room. The trash basket was filled to overflow with a pizza box and take-out containers. Papers on the dresser had been neatly stacked, sort of. Jeff was seated beside his laptop in the room’s only chair. There were white bandages on his head. He stood and smiled lightly.

“Hello, Daryl.” He didn’t approach her. She nodded in reply.

Frank closed the door behind her. Daryl moved to the first bed and sat. “Little short of sitting space, I see.”

“Yes,” Frank answered. “It’s turn-of-the-last-century modern. Hope you didn’t have any trouble getting here.”

She shook her head. “No. I took three cabs, traveled back and forth on the subway for an hour, then had a coffee for a bit before coming. That’s as good as I can do it. The area’s not as bad as its reputation, though a bit dodgy.” She took in the faded wallpaper. “This place is kind of a dump.”

“Manhattan. Gotta love it. They take cash, gladly.” Frank looked at Jeff as if giving him a prompt.

“Thanks for coming, Daryl,” Jeff said. “We both appreciate it very much.”

“How’s the head?” Frank had assured her it was nothing serious, though it certainly looked serious to her untrained eye. Jeff was pale, seemed weak to her, appearing as if he’d been sick for a long time. The change was remarkable from when she’d last seen him. He’d lost at least ten pounds.

“It’s been better. Still aches a bit but nothing I can’t handle. The swelling’s gone down, but I’ve still got a pretty good knot. I’ll ditch the bandage before we go out. It’ll be fine.”

“You’ve not seen a doctor?”

“Not since the hospital, no. Frank’s been my primary care physician.” He said the last with a small smile.

Frank shrugged. “What can I say? Emergency field medical management, EFM as we called it for short. The training came back.” He sat on the other bed, creating a conversation triangle for them.

Daryl reached into her purse and withdrew a white packet she handed to Frank. “Fifteen thousand dollars. You didn’t say anything but if you’re going to be fugitives, it’s better not to do it on a credit card. You can pay me back when this mess is over.”

“Thank you. This is very kind. You can never have too much in a situation like this.” Frank placed the packet on the dresser. “What have you found?”

“I have an answer for those numbers. A lot of them track to banks. I think they’re part of the routing protocol for moving the captured money.”

“What banks?” Jeff asked.

“They’re everywhere. Cayman Islands, Latvia, Costa Rica, Belgium, Switzerland. There are a lot more. Many of them right here in the U.S.”

“The U.S.?” Jeff said.

“Just touching points I’d guess,” Frank answered. “And the other numbers?”

“I’m still working on that. At least one of them is in Connecticut. I think it’s all part of the same money distribution and vanishing operation. I don’t know if I can run any of the money trails down to a final source, and if I do, if I’ll be able penetrate the shell corporations that will be set up. My guess is I can’t, not anytime soon, and not without a lot of help.” She paused. “What have you got?”

Frank looked to Jeff who cleared his throat. “As you know, the code is designed to exploit its favored position within the Exchange’s trading platform. It loots money from specifically defined trades from carefully defined entities. You’ve confirmed what we suspected, which is that the money then goes offshore as soon as it’s generated.” Daryl nodded. “We’ve reached the conclusion that there is at least one inside player. There is definitely someone responsible for the core trading system involved.”

“Maybe there is more than one employee involved,” Daryl suggested.

“We don’t rule out the possibility, but the more there are, the greater the security risk,” Frank said. “It seems more likely there is just a single conduit within the Exchange, someone well placed. We aren’t ruling out the existence of an extra hand or two, just think it unlikely.”

Daryl nodded. “Maybe someone penetrated from outside, and there is no insider.”

“We’ve considered that,” Frank said. “But with the single exception of the rootkit the rogue code is too smoothly integrated to the trading functions to be accomplished by outsiders. Someone in the know is doing it. Now, it’s possible it’s a former employee, or perhaps someone who worked on the system as a contractor. We’ve not dismissed the possibility they set up a backdoor they’re accessing. The stock exchange has undergone many changes these last few years with the creation of the super hubs and the merging of various international trading networks. A lot of people have worked on these projects during that time and one, or some of them, could be responsible. That would be a job for the SEC or the Exchange’s security team to undertake. But we think it’s someone still there.

“Now the kernel of the trading platform is very sophisticated, very smooth. The code is altered periodically and the rogue code has to be modified with every update of the trading platform’s operating system. They do that almost seamlessly. It’s difficult to plant anything without attracting the attention of the automatic security audit monitoring. We think that’s what the rootkit was about. Someone got a little sloppy and didn’t want to put in the time to properly integrate the malware within the system. He took the easy way. It’s worked so far with the automated system but it was always vulnerable to being discovered by people like us who’d look for something like that.”

“So there is definitely an outside group involved,” Daryl said.

“Exactly,” Frank agreed. “Someone, somewhere else, is writing the code and keeping it on point.”

“Any hints?” she asked.

“More than a hint. We’ve got a location. The company is called Companhia Cero. It’s located in São Paulo.”

“Brazil? The bank data has two or three Brazilian banks in it.”

“That’s to be expected,” Frank said. “Any international laundering operation is bound to touch Brazil at some point, even land there eventually. It’s tolerant of white-collar criminals so it’s a likely end point for people doing something like this.”

“So you two think that it’s being run out of Brazil?” Daryl asked.

“We don’t know,” Jeff said. “We just know that’s where the New York code is originating. Whether or not it’s the origin point we can’t say, but someone in São Paulo probably knows the answer. The indicators point there.”

“All right. Look, you two have been working with the IT team. You must have met most, even all, of those with the kind of in-house access you suspect is necessary for this operation. Anybody come to mind?”

Frank made a face. “We’ve kicked it around a bit but to be honest we had our noses to the grindstone when we were there. No one was to know about the penetration test, so we made a point not to mingle much. If we’re right, and one or more of them is involved, maybe we spoke to them but it’s more likely we just passed them in the hallway.”

“Any hints? Brazilians?” She grinned at how obvious that would be.

“No,” Jeff said. “You, Frank?”

“No. Not that I know of. There were some Asians, a guy from Italy or Portugal if I got that right, an Aussie. The rest were all native-born Americans from what I could see.”

“Anybody can be a crook.”

“You got that right,” Frank agreed.

“As Frank mentioned,” Jeff said, “they’ve been regularly modifying and updating their code. There’s been a sharp increase since we went on the run. That suggests to us they’re in a hurry to do something, definitely something big.”

“Like what?”

“We don’t know. Perhaps you can figure that out.”

Daryl paused, then said, “Maybe it’s time to go to the SEC with what we have.”

“There’s a warrant out for our arrest,” Frank said. “They’ll be eager to lock us up. It’ll take days to even get access to someone who’ll listen and there’s no guarantee it will do any good.”

Daryl blanched at the news. “You can try the NYPD, FBI, some other agency.” Her voice faltered just a bit.

“We’ve talked about that but it works out the same way unfortunately.”

“How about sending what we’ve detected to the SEC through back channels, maybe find a source who’ll listen.”

“Yeah, that’s a possibility,” Frank said, “but in the end, it comes down to the same thing: two suspects pointing the guilty finger at someone else. It’s the same ol’ same ol’ as far as the SEC’s concerned.”

“This is absurd!” Daryl blurted. “Hasn’t anyone done a background check on you two? If you were crooked, it would have shown up years ago. Frank, you’ve been an operative, for God’s sake. Jeff, just look at all you’ve done for this country these last years. I just can’t believe someone can so easily frame you. It’s just not right!”

“We both appreciate that,” Frank said. “But I really think we need to pin this down ourselves.”

Daryl wiped a wet eye carefully so her mascara wouldn’t run. “What’s that mean?”

“We need to find the source,” Jeff said, “get access to the computers and original code. If we’re lucky, we’ll locate a body and get him to squeal. Is that still the word?” He looked at each of them in turn.

“You mean tell what he or she knows,” Frank said.

“Okay, I can see that,” Daryl said. “But how does that work?”

“We think whoever is doing this in São Paulo is a good starting point,” Jeff said.

“They might be the origin or they might be a conduit,” Frank explained. “We can’t tell, but if someone working there doesn’t know anything, which we think is highly unlikely, they should lead us to someone who does. We find that someone and suddenly we’ve got credibility, then all the rest we’ve come up with falls into place. With a bit of luck we can grab some computers as well. That would ice it.”

“What if this magic person doesn’t want to talk?”

“Daryl, Daryl,” Frank said. “There are ways.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I promise, no marks of any kind, but by the time I’m finished they’ll squeal like a greased pig.” He looked at Jeff. “Squeal I think is the right word.”

“This sounds dangerous,” Daryl said.

“Staying here is dangerous,” Frank said. “The local cops dropped off a flier downstairs earlier today with our photos on it. I was concerned it was them when you knocked. The clerk made a point to show me one. I slipped him a hundred, but that won’t hold him long. We’ve got to move now.”

“How hard was identifying São Paulo?” she asked suspiciously.

“Hard, but not impossible,” Frank said.

“Tell me,” she insisted.

Jeff looked at Frank, who answered. “We received a photograph. They hadn’t stripped the metadata and the GPS coordinates map to a warehouse district in São Paulo. Companhia Cero is the only company listed with offices at that location.”

“What photograph? Who would send you a photo? Of what? What are you talking about?”

“It was just a … gentle warning,” Jeff said.

“A warning? In a photograph? Let me see it.”

“Daryl, really, that’s not necessary,” Frank said quietly.

She was stunned. “You two, you’re going to get killed, you know that?” She reached into her purse, removed tissue, and blew her nose. As she put it away she said, “They go to the trouble of sending you a photograph and just accidentally leave the GPS in it. Someone is baiting you. They just put out the hook and you’re going to bite. You’ve thought of that, right?”

“First idea we had,” Frank said. “But we can’t stay here and São Paulo is the only physical lead we’ve got, tainted or not. And Brazil is perhaps the best place in the world for us to go right now.”

“And how does that work, exactly?” she asked.

Frank looked offended. He pulled open one of the top drawers in the dresser. “Here.” He handed over two Canadian passports.

Daryl fingered them both, then leafed through the pages, scrutinizing the visa stamps. “Are these any good?” she asked. “They look all right to me but will they pass?”

“They’re as good as originals. In fact, they are originals except for the fact the final product wasn’t officially created, though the Canadian computers say they were. And there’s a credit card or two to go with each of them, but we’ll only use them where cash will raise suspicions.”

Daryl looked distraught as she handed the passports back. “So when are you going?”

Frank checked his watch. “We’re leaving here in about an hour. We’re booked out of Newark, changing planes in Miami, then on to São Paulo. We’ll be there midday tomorrow; then we’ll work on finding the location.”

“Frank, please. Do you really know what you’re doing? You could end up in a Brazilian prison the way you’re talking.”

“It’ll be fine. You’ll see. Trust me.” Frank’s smile was dazzling.

45

Susan Flores rose from her desk, stretched her body with exaggeration as her yoga instructor had once taught her, repeated the movement three times, then slowly drew several deep breaths. She held each, then released them slowly.

She acknowledged the others working on her way to the ladies’ room. A computer forensics expert, she’d worked for Robert Alshon for nearly two years. Her specialty was the NYSE Euronext software architecture and specifically the trading system security mechanisms. This particular examination had proved problematic, since she didn’t know that much about malware, which was beyond the scope of her usual tasks. The NYSE IT computer security team did great work in her estimation, and she had always been careful not to step on their toes in the past. She’d made several requests for their resources, asking for data and access to log files and trading records. Though she had a court order, it was better if this was all done cooperatively. There’d be other investigations after all.

She’d been flattered when Alshon selected her as his go-to contact for such work. It was a big step up so early in her career. But the man was more than a little intimidating to work for and not very forgiving of failure. He’d made more than a few enemies even since she’d joined his team, and she didn’t want to go down that path. He demanded nothing less than excellence, and she wasn’t surprised he’d been divorced twice. She didn’t want to think what he must be like to live with.

Susan Flores had been raised in Tucson, Arizona, the oldest child of Mexican immigrants. She’d attended the University of Arizona, majoring in economics and computer science. She’d gone to work at the IT department of Nabisco after graduation and it was there she’d become interested in computer security. Though she’d been uneasy about moving to Manhattan, she loved her job with the SEC. It was a great place to apply her education, training, and experience. The only real downside was Alshon being so difficult to work with. As a result she lived in constant fear of perceived failure and worked under stress she’d not had before her move.

After stopping by the restroom, Flores went for coffee and considered why she felt so uneasy on this assignment. She had it. Alshon was behaving with an excess of passion. She was reluctant to admit it, but it seemed to her the fact that he’d once been with the FBI and that the targets in this case had formerly been CIA had a lot to do with it. She recalled previous disparaging comments he’d made about the CIA. Up to then, his attitude hadn’t seemed to influence his work but now she wasn’t so sure.

Red Zoya wasn’t the only examination on her desk. She’d been doing other important work, but he had her drop everything to work on this. And it wasn’t going as expected.

She poured some kind of artificial creamer into her black coffee and considered again how unhealthy her job was. Proper exercise was challenging. She enjoyed Central Park but so did most of the city on beautiful days. Sure, she could get off on a subway stop farther from the office, but finding time was difficult. She’d given up yoga and saw how quickly she was slipping away from what she’d been taught. It was so easy to turn into one more fat computer nerd. Maintaining fitness had been easier in Tucson, a bit challenging in New Jersey, but in Manhattan it was proving almost impossible.

Flores closed her eyes for a moment. When had she last slept more than an hour? She couldn’t remember. Two nights, at least.

She was to meet with Alshon later and mentally reviewed what she would tell him. Aiken and Renkin, her targets, had to be part of a much larger operation. She estimated as many as half a dozen software writers were involved, though she understood that such estimates were inexact. What she was sure of was that no two men were doing this.

The success and expanse of the penetration had come as a shock to her. She realized it had been a bit naïve on her part, but she’d honestly believed that it was impossible for someone to hack the Exchange’s trading platform. She found the reality more than a little unsettling.

Her most recent forensics data drop from the trading engines contained an updated version of the malware, confirming that the operation was ongoing. NYSE IT remained unaware of the malware’s existence and as a result they had yet to shut this operation down. She wanted to take her findings to her contacts there, but Alshon had explicitly instructed her not to. He didn’t want to act before he had a clear view of the extent of the infiltration, especially if there was an insider involved. Tipping their hand prematurely could result in the destruction of evidence or, worse, a rash act by the culprits or even the NYSE IT department that could take a bad situation and make it a disaster.

This was a complex and widespread operation, delicately interwoven within the kernel of the trading platform. Even after they were alerted NYSE IT would move cautiously and it would take more than a few days to act as they’d be concerned about disrupting normal operations by committing an error in negating the malware. The law of unintended consequences flourished in just such situations, especially when things were rushed.

The speed and size of the updates was just one reason she was certain so many people were involved. And it was ridiculous to think that two men on the run were making the recent changes from a hotel room somewhere. The scope and frequency of the additions and changes suggested to her an urgency by the hackers, and she increasingly felt a sense of unease that something very bad was about to happen, as if she and her colleagues at NYSE IT were the lookouts on the Titanic, who’d just spotted the iceberg dead ahead.

Which only heightened her suspicion. As she’d told Alshon, it wasn’t her place to analyze motives and character but the casual way Aiken had set up his brokerage account shocked her. He was surely cleverer than that. She’d researched his company and saw the rave reviews it received. Renkin was more difficult to research, as his computer career had been in the CIA, but she’d found no hint of concern about him or his work.

Not for the first time did she wonder if Alshon had this wrong. Her suggestion that the two had been set up was slowly turning into an opinion, one she knew would be unwelcome. She reminded herself to stay focused on what the code was doing. That was troubling enough.

Flores returned to her desk, sipped the hot coffee, set the cup down, then placed her face into her hands, her eyes burning slightly. Should she risk a nap? She feared she’d be down for the count if she did.

This high-frequency trading algo malware deeply concerned her. It was manipulating trades across the spectrum, and she suspected it was stealing money from them. She could see how the funds were routed out of the system, scattered about into what she believed were various banks and trusts. It had all the hallmarks of a classic financial fraud operation. The difference was its level of sophistication, its presence within the NYSE trading engines, and the implementation of a HFT algo. It was like multiple bank robberies occurring simultaneously on fast forward and the implications were staggering.

Flores sighed and went back to work. Her job was to tie these two to the operation. Failing that, she was to see where it led and who else was involved, if possible. It was up to Alshon to make the command decisions. She just hoped he knew what he was doing.

46

Pedro Bandeira couldn’t recall the last time he’d put in so many hours. Now, with blinding speed, everything was coming to an end. When this was over, he’d decided, he’d start his own computer company, providing legitimate services. Much of what they did was in fact not illegal and would be of use to companies. He’d even take his staff with him.

This idea of assuming the leadership of the Nosso Lugar after his father, something his mother frequently brought up, was absurd. He’d never be a criminal, at least not like his father was. What Pedro wanted was a quiet way out of what he was doing, a way to lead a normal life in the years to come.

Pedro turned his mind to business. What was nagging at him was his concern as to whether or not they could really pull this off. Right now it didn’t look to him as if it were possible. They were being asked to do the impossible.

In his last conversation with Abílio in New York he’d been sure he detected some doubt in his counterpart as well. Pedro might not have liked the subordinate role he’d held for most of the last five years, but he’d never doubted his boss’s expertise. Abílio was on-site. He saw everything firsthand. If he was worried, Pedro knew he had every reason to be as well.

Grupo Técnico had the Universal Trading Platform code for the NYSE engines. Obtaining it had been time consuming, and one of Abílio’s jobs was to ensure their version was always current. This gave them an engine core behaving exactly as it did at the New Jersey hub. They ran new and modified code within a simulated framework where they placed bids and offers and observed how their code worked in the complex environment. This allowed them to confirm it worked as predicted before insertion into the live trading engines.

They’d made several revisions to their code in recent days without difficulty but now they’d received a copy of the latest NYSE code drop the Exchange was uploading in preparation for the major IPO on Wednesday. And that had thrown a monkey wrench into their plans because the revised code was now incompatible with their simulation framework. The parameters of the various internal subroutine calls had been changed significantly, and his team was having a hard time understanding their purpose. Their limited goal was to get their own software functioning properly and every few hours, they thought they had it, but each time they ran a test with the latest code the simulator either hung up or crashed. They seemed no closer to a resolution now than they’d been when they’d run their first test.

Renata had given him a progress report earlier that afternoon. Five billion dollars of the Wednesday take was to come from several Casas de Férias operations against specifically targeted companies. They still hadn’t identified enough of them but most troubling was that, in her view, they had too few holding accounts and an insufficient number of exit channels for the money.

“I’m worried that it can be traced,” she’d said. “We haven’t generated enough targets to properly conceal it. There’s another concern as well.”

“What?”

“Ten billion is dangerous, Pedro. I know this is going to be a big IPO and there will be a lot of action surrounding it but that is a great deal of money. There’s the potential of something beyond our control going very wrong and we’ll get swept up in it.”

“I pointed that out and was told to go ahead anyway.”

“All right. But what if we cause a crash in the market? Something really serious? It could be very bad for us.”

He’d told her that he understood and sent her back to work. She’d raised the very question that most troubled him. An IPO of this size was drawing players who controlled unimaginable sums of money. These HFTs would be using their sophisticated algos to break the IPO their way. He simply couldn’t predict how that would affect Carnaval. He hoped those wouldn’t influence Carnaval at all, but the more he read about the Toptical buzz, the more concerned he became.

Should he talk to his father again? He looked at his staff. He’d have to give them a break. The botched update was a warning. If he continued to demand they work like this, there’d be more mistakes, and he didn’t dare risk that, not with what was on the line.

His Skype program rang. Pedro opened it, then accepted the call. “My son,” Bandeira said, “how are things going?”

“We’re working on the last update. I don’t know if we can get it ready before Wednesday morning.”

“It must be done,” Bandeira snapped, then smiled. “You can do it, Pedro. I know you can.”

“It’s like I told you before, I have too few people for all the work we have to do. If you scaled back how much you plan to take, things would be much easier.”

“That’s not possible.”

“As you wish. The good news is that our IPO algo looks good. We just have to get it working properly with the new code. We’re also having a problem with the other targets. They are scattered and it is more complicated.”

“Pedro, I have made commitments. The figure I’ve given is the one you must reach.”

“I’m doing my best, Father, but you are asking a great deal.”

“Just do it! We’ll talk Tuesday night, and I expect everything to be in place. Now, enough of your complaining. Be a man for once!” Bandeira ended the call.

Pedro sat back in his chair. This was the ugly side of his father, the one he despised. How many times had he been treated like this over the years? Too many. He considered what would happen if he missed the target, or if there was a disaster beyond his control. What would his father do?

Nothing significant to him, he realized. Humiliate him, shut down the operation, force him into a lowly job, but he couldn’t help feeling concern for his staff. He’d heard stories about what his father did to those who disappointed him. Until recently he’d not believed them. He could see the top of Renata’s head from where he sat. Would his father really kill her, a single mother?

There was a gnawing in the pit of his stomach. He knew the answer.

As for the $10 billion, Pedro knew what that was all about. Ego, greed, the pleasure his father took in setting an impossible demand and then insisting it be met. It was to be $10 billion because his father said so. There was no other reason.

47

Jeff examined his Canadian passport, wondering exactly how Frank had managed to get one for each of them so quickly. Not only had he accomplished it on short notice, but he also expressed absolute confidence in them.

Jeff wasn’t so sure. He ran his thumb across its surface. It definitely felt official. It looked it as well, on the cover and inside. But passports were now linked into vast computer networks. You didn’t just have to fool an individual when boarding the plane or when clearing immigration on arrival; you had to fool a sophisticated database.

He looked again at his new name: Douglas Bennett.

Was he even real? Or was the name simply a creation?

He’d asked Frank for specifics, but his friend had simply smiled, then patted his arm. “Let me worry about details. You just get well and take it easy.”

Easy to say but Jeff couldn’t help but be concerned. And if they were caught leaving the country, he didn’t want to think how badly that would reflect on them. Not one official would believe they were on their way to prove their innocence. They’d interpret this as two fugitives fleeing to avoid getting caught.

What a mess. Jeff slipped the passport back into the inside pocket of his jacket and closed his eyes. Frank was off buying water, snacks, and pain pills. Jeff was feeling better all the time, but right now couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so run-down. And he still had a ten-hour flight ahead of him.

He placed his hands on his head, inadvertently touching the tender spot. He’d removed the bandages before sneaking out of the hotel in Manhattan. He’d not said anything to Frank, but he wondered if he had internal bleeding on his brain, some slow seepage that would send him into a coma and kill him. He’d done an Internet search on the subject. There would be no symptoms until it was almost too late. That’s why patients with head injuries were kept in hospitals until the doctor was certain.

The airport was busy. Planes landed and took off every few minutes. Hordes of travelers moved about, usually in waves going one direction or another, pulling luggage behind them, wearing backpacks, texting and talking on their phones as they went. Not for the first time, he stared in amazement at the clothes people chose to wear on airplanes. The businessmen and women were obvious enough and there were a large number in cargo pants, comfortable walking shoes, and polo shirts. But the others … He had vague memories from his childhood when people dressed up to take a flight because such occasions were special and everyone wanted to look their best. Now the clothes looked pulled from a charity bin.

Seeing Daryl again had been both wonderful and awkward. He’d been relieved to see her looking good. He realized that he’d been worried about her but saw she’d flourished away from him. San Francisco apparently suited her. He’d considered embracing her as a longtime friend, but he’d hesitated, not sure the gesture would be welcome, and by then the moment had passed. From there on the personal aspect of seeing each other went downhill.

Daryl had talked mostly to Frank, only occasionally looking at him. Her departure had been as awkward for him as her arrival. So in the end, he was left with the work she’d done and with that he was very satisfied.

“Jeff! Jeff Aiken!” someone called.

Jeff looked up and spotted a woman in her fifties smiling as she walked up to him. Agnes Capps was wearing her distinctive purple glasses and was dressed in flamboyant Gypsy style, a mauve scarf wrapped about her neck with a flourish. She was a writer who late in life had carved out a niche for herself reporting and speaking on cybersecurity issues. Though not generally well regarded by computer security experts, as she tended to gloss over details and occasionally got things wrong, she was popular with various news shows. She produced a weekly article and a book nearly every year.

“My word,” Agnes said, “imagine running into you here of all places.” She sat beside him, a bit winded from her rush over. “Where are you off to? Or are you just coming back?”

Jeff had last seen Agnes the year before at CyberCon in San Diego. She’d been on one of the discussion panels. It had been unique in that the hacktivist group Anonymous had joined remotely.

Jeff didn’t want to lie, but then, he was traveling under a false identity. “Where are you off to?” he asked, answering her with a question of his own.

“Back home to beautiful Oklahoma City, if a tornado hasn’t flattened the homestead. I’ve been doing some research here. You would be shocked at what the U.S. government is secretly doing with all this social networking information people put out there so casually. It’s like Brave New World or 1984, one of those books. They know everything about us—absolutely everything — and they don’t even have to listen in to our telephone calls.”

“I doubt much would surprise me,” he said. “They have the ability to collect it and from their perspective, why not? They’ve got a country to keep safe.”

She snorted. “That’s what they say but it’s not true, believe me. You know,” she whispered, “I think that kind of information was used to influence that last presidential election. That’s why the polls were so far off.” She looked around to check that no one was listening. “I can prove the government used mass fake social networking accounts in the campaign, coordinated across Facebook, Toptical, and Twitter, and that they planted online articles to influence public opinion. They softened public outrage against the IRS, NSA, and other scandals with those same tactics.” She moved even closer, her body touching Jeff’s, and with her lips nearly touching his ear said, “If the truth were known, it would come out that the NSA is engaging in wholesale securities fraud to fund government black budget projects. They’ve been at it for years.”

What to say? “It wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

“So … where are you off to?”

“Just coming back. Going home.”

“Ah, well, that’s always nice, isn’t it? And how is the lovely Daryl? I’ve not seen her in ages.”

“Good.” He hesitated. “But we’re not together anymore.”

Agnes raised her eyebrows. “She’s a keeper, young man. You can take it from me. Don’t let her get away.” She glanced at her watch. “I must be off.” She stood. “See you soon.”

Jeff watched her walk away with a wave of relief.

“Agnes is looking good,” Frank said as he joined him. “I thought I’d wait until she left. Did you mention me?”

“No. I told her I was on my way to D.C.”

“Good. Keep it simple, logical. What say we check into international departures and get that out of the way?”

They took their carry-ons with them and entered the security checkpoint. Jeff held his breath as the heavyset woman accepted his passport, scanned it, looked at the screen for several seconds, then handed it back. He moved on, placed his laptop into a container, shoes and belt, wallet, keys and change into another. The alarm sounded when he went through the machine, and a stoic man had him pass through again, this time without incident. Jeff recovered his items and sat down to put his shoes back on.

“So far, so good,” he said as Frank sat beside him.

“Don’t think about it.”

The pair walked down the long hallway to their departure lounge. Two hours later, they boarded. Another woman looked at his passport, matched it to his boarding pass, then let him on. Jeff didn’t breathe easy until they were in the air.

Now all he had to worry about was clearing immigration in São Paulo.

48

Though her part of the operation was to follow the money, Daryl instead turned her attention to the code itself. She reasoned that Jeff and Frank had been in motion since the previous day, and she knew they’d had little if any time to work on the rogue code.

Frank had sent her a summary of their findings and suspicions before the pair left. She’d spent late Saturday night reviewing the code and tinkering with the malware. Now all day Sunday, she’d devoted herself again to the task.

She’d reached some conclusions, which to her seemed self-evident. She’d traced the stolen money to the bank accounts through which it was routed. According to Frank’s report, they’d decided that the money originated from outside traders, not from accounts within the Exchange itself.

This made a great deal of sense to her. If they were taking money from within the trading software of the Exchange, then security would easily discover it. But if they took the money from someone making a trade, then routed it through the Exchange, they could diffuse suspicion to any number of targets. And since none of the thieves were part of the NYSE, it would not be of concern to its ongoing security efforts.

So just as the money was dispersed into hundreds of bank accounts so too was it likely taken from a vast array of traders and brokers. As she worked the heavily obfuscated code in the malware she eventually located a store of IDs and what appeared to be trade amounts. She looked through the documents Jeff and Frank had gathered, remembering that one was a spreadsheet that listed the IDs the Exchange assigned to stocks. Sure enough, the IDs in the malware matched the ones in the spreadsheet. Attached to them as well were other symbols but a bit of research revealed them to be prefix designations to identify the type of trading vehicle.

One of the symbols was that for Toptical, TPTC. That was no surprise. Now that it was about to be publicly traded, it needed one — and starting Wednesday, it was going to be a heavily traded stock, at least initially. Its presence within the malware told her that the IPO was going to be a target.

As she knew little about them, Daryl researched IPOs to see what prior experience said on the subject. Major IPOs, she learned, created enormous volatility in the market during the first few hours. This occurred because there was pent-up demand by those who used the product, which in cases like this one represented millions of people. Toptical was enormously popular and a great number of the faithful users were going to want to own a piece of the action.

Another reason was that the public generally had a positive opinion of IPOs. There was the undeserved belief that they were always successful and that those who got on board early did very well. There were plenty of public offerings to testify against that opinion, but for some reason, that reality didn’t capture the public consciousness.

Then there was the host of brokers representing hundreds of thousands if not millions of clients. Public offerings were always a part of their portfolios and in this case they’d be under pressure to take part. There were as well hedge and retirement funds, enormous piles of cash looking to diversify under favorable conditions.

There were also speculators, individuals and traders who believed they understood the market better than most and were persuaded they saw an opportunity. Some of them would buy early and if a specific price point was reached late Wednesday, they’d sell, looking to make their money quick and easy. Others would gamble that the stock was overpriced. They would sell short and make their money during the price collapse.

Finally, there were the high-frequency traders, some of which fronted those big piles of cash. The difference with them was their ability to incrementally manipulate the price, then exploit the conditions they’d created. They were seen as major factors in previous IPOs, and they relentlessly expanded their algos, tweaking their systems for each new opportunity. They could make money on the rise, on the fall, and on the thousands of variations in price in the meanwhile. They would have enormous influence on the IPO, especially in establishing a perceived level of trade volume.

What concerned her was that Jeff and Frank had already concluded that the rogue code was itself a high-frequency trader and whoever was behind it had gone to a lot of trouble to get the two of them out of the way. The only conclusion she could take from that was that they’d been too close. The malware wasn’t just any high-frequency trader; it was a trader without a monetary reserve. In other words, it had no backing. In the real world it could be said that in many, if not most, cases it made its play by some form of cheating.

Looking at the data dumps that Jeff and Frank’s code had funneled out of the engine to her C2 servers via the backdoor, Daryl observed the code had been updated twice since the Exchange had loaded its new IPO software and updated its trading platform code. Now TPTC seemed to be interlaced everywhere within it. A third update that afternoon disclosed it as the rogue code’s primary target, the numbers controlling the size and frequency of the trading skims representing as much as half of all the projected rogue code action.

How much would that be? she wondered. What she saw convinced her it was more than a billion dollars.

She turned her attention to the malware’s trading logic, carefully stepping through it and following the numbers flow across it and into functions that were obviously its connections with the actual NYSE trading engine. After several hours, she decided that she could make an estimate of how much money it had siphoned out of legitimate trades in the last year, $50 to $100 million.

Employing this information as a baseline, she now tried to determine how much action the latest code and configuration were designed for when it came to Toptical. She knew her best estimate would be inexact, that it had to be inexact because even those who wrote the algo didn’t know with precision how many opportunities it would encounter on IPO day. But even an imprecise estimate was better than a guess.

Seven to fifteen billion dollars. That was the potential spread.

Daryl was staggered. She double-, then triple-checked her analysis, but the results didn’t change. Hadn’t one of the significant problems with the market been caused by a much smaller trade? After a few minutes, she found it. On a day in which total volume was $200 billion, the Flash Crash had been caused by a trade of just $4 billion.

She wrote up a report of her findings to the “boys,” as she thought of them, concluding, “I’m no expert, but if these guys are looking to take seven to fifteen billion Wednesday, that is going to cause a great deal of economic trouble. And if there is a problem with the rogue code, or with HFTs or with the NYSE’s new trading software, we could be looking at a disaster worse than 1929. These exchanges worldwide are so interlinked that a multibillion-dollar scam of this sort could be the catalyst for truly terrible events. Look at what that harmless bot has done to the market. There’s another editorial in the NYT today attacking security at the Exchange. The market is expected to fall even more tomorrow because of lost confidence. If Wednesday is a disaster, I don’t even want to think what the consequences will be. We need to stop this!”

Daryl stepped away from her laptop and prepared for bed, scrubbing her face, combing out her hair, brushing her teeth. She was tired but knew she could still put in several hours yet. Back at the desk she connected to one of the C2 servers and looked for a new data dump from the engine, but found none. She checked and saw that the jump server backdoor was not in the logs. They had either been discovered and shut down, or some change in the Exchange’s security configuration was blocking their outbound access.

Her shoulders sank as the reality set in. They were cut off from access into the Exchange beyond the jump server, with no access to the rogue code or chance to trace it back to whoever was planting it. She tried again. No luck. After sitting for several long minutes in shock and dismay, she composed herself and sent another message to Jeff and Frank. “Beacon is down on the backside.”

Daryl stood up. What to do? How much more could she learn on a computer? How much could she expect to accomplish from her hotel room? Where could she best spend the next day?

She undressed, then climbed into the shower, soaping head to foot, scrubbing herself clean as she emptied her mind. Outside the shower as she toweled off it came to her.

Plan B. Boots on the ground and all that. There wasn’t much time. Still …

She was humming as she set her alarm and crawled between the sheets.