Cassy stood at her workstation, her eyes constantly switching between her four large computer screens as she inputted the first elements of a game she was trying to play with the system in order to trick the virus, or whatever it was, into showing itself.
She was mimicking a buyer whose normal trades were showing up as odd lots. So far the virus-detection program she’d designed was showing nothing. The system was working the way it was supposed to work.
But she knew better, and she was frustrated.
“I’m not liking this, Donni,” she muttered half under her breath.
But he’d heard her, and he moved over from his workstation next to hers, and studied her screens for a few moments. “Start with an even-lot trade, and see what happens.”
She did it, but the buy came up as normal. “The same as when I do the odd lots.”
“Can’t be,” Donni said. He nudged her out of the way and inputted an odd-lot trade of 1,013 shares, and almost instantly it came up as a normal trade. “It can’t have it both ways.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, and I’m getting a really bad feeling about this. It’s like the damned thing has a mind of its own.”
“Acts like a virus.”
“I told that to Francis and he blew me off.”
“So what do we do?”
Cassy switched to the screen on her right and brought up a recent history of trading from Dubuque regarding a grange holding company, which came in at lots of 1,001. Next she shifted to Danzig Capital in San Francisco, which came in at 1,002.
“Numerical order,” Donni said.
“I picked them at random,” Cassy said. “EconoMax, a trading firm in Minneapolis, came in at 1,003. Francis Retirement Fund, from a chain of hospitals in Gainesville, Florida, came in at 1,004.”
“Artificial,” Donni said. “Can’t happen.”
“But it is.”
“I see it, but someone is manipulating the system. Has to be.”
“Someone or something,” Cassy said. “My guess is that the odd-lot trades are symptoms, like when your nose runs when you get a cold. A virus has gotten into our system. And the sequential odd-lot numbers are the giveaway.”
When she’d found evidence of a data breach at Murphy Tweed, it had been similarly subtle and yet obvious to her. Apparent if you knew where to look and knew what you were looking at. But her boss back then hadn’t believed her any more than Masters had earlier this morning.
“Okay, what do we do?” Donni asked.
“Find the coding behind each trade.”
Donni slid over to his station. “I’ll take Dubuque.”
“I have Danzig,” Cassy said. She brought up the trade on one side of her center screen, and the BP account on which the company’s trades were managed on the other side. As soon as the programs got deeper into the code it became obvious that there were differences. Slight, but hardly insignificant.
She moved over to Donni’s station. He was coming up with the same anomalies.
“Not enough here to see how any difference could show up in the actual trades,” he said.
“Try to delete the last line of the code,” Cassy said.
Donni’s fingers danced over the keyboard, but when he hit enter, nothing changed. “We’re locked out.”
“Penicillin,” Cassy said. At her keyboard she set up a series of commands that would seek and destroy whatever was locking them out—like an antibiotic for an infection.
An instant after she’d hit enter, nothing changed.
Norman Applebaum was one of the bright kids who last year, at the age of twenty, had dropped out of MIT because he thought that he was smarter than the professors. He wandered over from his station and looked over Cassy’s shoulder. “You have a worm,” he said.
“Duh,” Cassy said.
Norman shouldered her out of the way and entered a series of commands on her keyboard. He was a runt, with a prominent Adam’s apple and red hair in a ponytail.
Nothing changed, and he looked over at Donni’s monitors for a longish moment before he shook his head. “Garbage in, garbage out,” he said almost disdainfully. “You guys gotta clean up your act before you can find anything meaningful.” He turned away and wandered toward the foosball table.
“I’m going to Francis again,” Cassy said. “Maybe he’ll listen this time.”
She headed over to Masters’s workstation, visions of a repeat of Murphy Tweed strong in her head. Only this time she knew that she was right, and she was going to be heard.