“How bad is this?” Masters demanded when she was finished showing him what she and Donni had found. “And how many times are you going to bring me something that’s still a work in progress?”
Norman had found a partner at the foosball table, and they were playing a noisy game.
“Bad,” Cassy said. She wasn’t going to be intimidated by the bastard, who in her estimation was as blind as her boss at Murphy Tweed had been, even though it had been him who’d hired her.
“Okay, I’ll take it.”
“I can handle this, Francis.” After the Murphy Tweed debacle, she had pledged that such a thing would never happen again.
“Then what are you doing bothering me?”
“I’m just making you aware that we could have a major problem.”
“There’s some brilliant research that you might not have seen on the eradication of well-protected intrusions that just came out of MIT,” Masters said, once more reminding her that he had graduated from that institution.
“This is what I’m being paid for, remember?”
Masters’s acne scars reddened. “I’m taking over,” he shouted. “Do you understand, Ms. Levin?”
The foosball game stopped and everyone looked up from their workstations. Cassy felt the heat rise up from her neck.
“Has Julia returned from the exchange yet? Maybe we should loop her in on this.”
“Who the hell do you think—?” Masters shouted, but he suddenly cut off in mid-sentence.
“Is there a problem?” Dammerman asked from behind Cassy.
“Nothing important,” Masters said.
“Everything,” Cassy said, turning around.
“From what I’m understanding, you may have uncovered a possible breach in our system.”
“Yes, sir. And it’s one that could really slam us.”
“Like Murphy Tweed?”
“Not exactly, but the end results could be the same.”
“Let’s get a coffee, and you can tell me what you’ve found.”
“I’ll just come along,” Masters said, but Dammerman gestured him off.
“We’ll take care of this,” Dammerman said.
Cassy followed BP’s number two toward the elevators. Like a politician, he shook hands and had a few words with the geeks, mostly young kids who looked up at him in awe. And he made small talk with the people riding up in the elevator, who for the most part could only nod sheepishly.
BP’s building, with a white atrium that soared twenty stories, was one of the newer ones in the Financial District. They got off at the floor for the cafeteria, which this time of the morning was still serving breakfast before switching over to an extensive lunch menu.
Dammerman was one of very few wearing a suit and tie. Everyone else was in business casual, the norm on Wall Street these days to make the millennial talent feel comfortable.
A stocky, broad-shouldered man with an oak-thick neck materialized beside them as they got off the elevator. He was Butch Hardy, a former NYPD cop who was head of BP’s security division.
“We’ll take espressos,” Dammerman said, not breaking stride on the way over to a table, and not bothering to ask Cassy what she wanted.
Hardy scuttled across to the coffee bar, and Cassy had to wonder how Dammerman could get away with treating his top security man like a servant.
“Masters is a dickhead who sometimes thinks he’s a hell of a lot smarter than he is,” Dammerman said.
BP staffers who usually milled around the cafeteria laughing and joking fell silent, some of them getting up from where they were sitting and moving away, giving Dammerman a wide berth. They were mostly traders and wonks, more socially astute than the geeks downstairs who didn’t know to be afraid of him. He had the reputation of sometimes firing people on a whim.
“Now, tell me what you think you’ve found,” Dammerman said as they reached a table and sat down across from each other.
“I think it’s a computer worm in our system,” Cassy said.
“How’s that different from a virus?”
“A virus needs to be attached to a program before it can spread. It can get into a network from a corrupted file, like when you click a free Florida vacation link to what turns out to be a hacker’s site. It can spread only if someone then opens the file. But a worm can get to work right away. It hides better, and it’s much, much harder to detect.”
“Wasn’t it something like that put the screws to Iran’s nuclear program?”
“Yes, sir. It was a worm called Stuxnet, and it went after the centrifuges used to enrich uranium to a bomb-grade level. It caused them to spin out of control and destroy themselves. Thing is, no one detected the worm until it was too late, and even then they couldn’t do anything about it. Rumor is that the Americans and Israelis were behind the intrusion. Knocked the Iranians out of the ballpark.”
“You ran into a worm at Murphy Tweed, right?”
“I did, but management didn’t believe me. The breach let the bad guys suck brokerage accounts dry in a matter of minutes. These were accounts protected by user names and passwords, as well as a two-factor identification routine where the customer had to text a code if they wanted to make a major trade.”
“Like if they wanted to liquidate their account,” Dammerman said.
“Yes. But the worm went right around it.”
”So if you’re right, and we have a worm, it’ll be powerful.”
Cassy nodded. He’d understood. “I think our worm hasn’t been designed to empty accounts. I think its goal is the destruction of our system, or at least to freeze us from doing business.”
“Freeze?” Dammerman barked.
“What’s worse, since all trading floors worldwide, including ours, are connected in one way or the other, is the possibility that the infection could spread from us to other investment firms and banks, and even exchanges.”
He was silent for several long beats, an expression of malevolence, even hate, on his face. “The entire world?” he said quietly.
“This has the look of something the hackers over in Amsterdam are capable of doing,” Cassy said. “The geeks and nerds living like hippies in the slums whose only life is messing with computer systems anywhere in the world. The bigger and tougher the better.”
Hardy appeared with the espressos. Cassy thanked the ex-cop, but Dammerman didn’t dismiss him. He remained standing off to one side.
“How do we stop it from damaging our system? Or is it even possible?”
“I think if I can make a copy of the worm, I can turn it inside out and feed it back into the system, neutralizing the code.”
“Just like that?” Dammerman said, and if Cassy hadn’t known better she would have thought he was being sarcastic instead of relieved.
“It’s what I could have done at Murphy Tweed if they had let me. But I have to go back downstairs to run some diagnostics. And if I’m right, I’ll be able to follow the worm everywhere, even to an infected exchange on the other side of the world, and kill it.”
“You can kill it?” Dammerman said, his voice low and menacing. “Aren’t you the smart one.”
Cassy was taken aback. It was Murphy Tweed all over again, and she was floored. Completely lost. He was acting like this was her fault. “What would you like me to do, sir?” she asked.
“Your job,” Dammerman said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Butch,” Dammerman said without taking his eyes off her, “keep your eye on our computer genius here, would you?”