It was a full hour before the opening bell on the floor of the NYSE and a half hour before Burnham Pike’s DCSS—data center security suite—was officially open for business, but Cassy had been at her workstation for twenty minutes. And what she was seeing made her even more worried than she had been all week. Something was desperately wrong and getting worse.
The DCSS, located in a sub-basement beneath the firm’s tower on Nassau, just up the street from the Federal Reserve Bank, was fully staffed for only eight hours per day. Nine to five, unlike the trading floors two dozen stories above. Up there, deals were struck; down here, problems were predicted and handled before they came up.
Upstairs was where money was made for BP’s clients—mostly institutional investors, such as pension funds, insurance companies, mutual funds, college endowments, charities, and family offices that handled the money of the very wealthy.
Down here was where the investments were protected from foul play.
Nothing obvious was showing up on her three monitors, and yet at least two trades that were in the process of being put together upstairs for offering once the market opened in an hour were showing minor anomalies. Most trades were done in even lots—multiples of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. Odd lots were trades that somehow ended up as one hundred one, or one thousand one. A minor computer error? But Cassy had a bad feeling that it was more than that, because stuff like this had been popping up for more than a week now.
Donni Imani, her nineteen-year-old super-nerd friend, slid into his seat at his station next to hers. “How’s that boyfriend of yours doing this morning, Cassy?” he asked. He was well built, almost to the point of being muscle-bound, and so handsome he was pretty. And he knew it. But he was also very smart.
“He’s out of town for the day,” Cassy said, her eyes on the screen to her left. An offer from the Dubuque public workers trust fund in Iowa to trade five thousand and one shares of Amazon at $2,107.50 per share was on BP’s list for this morning’s projected trades.
Imani and his girlfriend, Tanya Swift, who worked on one of the trading floors at Bank of America, had had dinner with Cassy and Ben a few weeks ago.
That was on a Saturday evening. The next Monday Imani had declared to anyone on the DCSS floor, which was about the size of a big-city-hotel lobby, that he was henceforth and forever madly in love with Cassy Levin—and the hell with Ben Whalen.
“That guy of yours got himself a secret lover stashed away somewhere?”
“Shut the hell up, Donni, we have a problem here.”
Imani leaned in closer so that he could look over her shoulder. “Another one of your odd-lot bogeymen?”
“A PW trust fund in Dubuque.”
“Maybe they do it differently in Iowa.”
“Not like this.”
Imani moved back to his station and brought up Cassy’s screen. He shifted to a history mode, which showed the trades that the Dubuque PWF had made over the past three months, then six, nine, and a full year.
Cassy moved closer so that she could see his left screen as well as her own center display, on which she was searching for other anomalies.
“The odd lots just started showing up two weeks ago,” Imani said. “Give O’Connell the heads-up.”
“I talked to her about it two days ago, she said it was nothing. Anyway, she’s not here yet.”
“Then take it to Francis, he just walked in the door.”
Cassy looked up. Francis Masters was number two in charge of cybersecurity, reporting to O’Connell. He was a chunky, plump man in his late forties with acne scars on his face. He almost never wore a jacket, and went around with his shirts untucked to help hide his paunch. He had a doctorate in cyberscience from MIT—a fact he was fond of telling anyone who would listen—and he was arrogant and petulant, which was an unpleasant combination. But he was also seriously smart. Smarter than anyone else in the room, he’d like to brag. And no one ever contradicted him to his face. Except for his boss, Julia O’Connell, who was smarter than Masters and a lot nicer.
“We need more,” Cassy said.
“Look at the history. They’ve never made odd-lot trades in the past year. It’s just not done.”
“Please,” Cassy said, trying not to laugh. Imani was young, even for his years, and cocksure; he thought he was the smartest person in the room, but she loved him for it. “But I’ve been seeing them pop up for different buyers.”
Imani grinned. “You’d think someone was practicing for something.”
Cassy looked at him, her worry spiking. “Almost,” she said half under her breath. Appearing to be one thing, when in fact you were another. Like Ben.
More people were coming in, powering up their workstations, even though trading wouldn’t start for another half hour. They were mostly young, much younger than Cassy, and they loved what they were doing. In fact, she thought, most of the people she knew in the business loved it.
“Spending other people’s money by the basketful is a kick,” one of the kids had told her last month. “I mean, it’s bitchin’ cool! Like a video game.”
For just a moment she wished that Ben were with her right now. Or, better, that they were in Paris walking along the Seine. She had an idea that he was going to ask her to marry him. And she’d known for a long time now that when he did, she’d say yes. Unreservedly yes.
The night they’d met, she and her friend Janice were at Toni’s, a roadside dive on Long Island. They were playing eight ball on one of the three tables, a game Janice, who worked as an analyst on one of the trading floors over at Goldman Sachs, had introduced her to, when four monstrous, leather-clad bikers with tattooed necks and bushy beards swaggered in as if they owned the place. They came straight over to the pool table.
“Our turn,” the largest of them said. He wasn’t wearing a T-shirt under his leather vest, his hairy belly spilling over the tops of his dirty jeans.
Cassy had looked up. “When we’re done, mutton chops.” At that moment she’d hadn’t been in the mood to listen to some lowlife’s arrogance.
“I said now, bitch,” the biker roared, and everything in the place stopped dead.
A man who was much shorter than the bikers, with blue eyes and light hair, came up behind her. “The lady has a point,” he said, his voice soft, not demanding.
Cassy turned and looked at him. Her first thought was that he was going to get his ass seriously kicked, and her second was that he was movie star cute.
“Who the fuck do you think you are, asshole?” the biker demanded. “Get the fuck outa here.”
“Tell you what, how about I buy you and your friends a beer? And when the ladies are finished, I’m sure they’d be happy to give you a chance to play a game against them.”
The biker started to say something, but then he stopped. He looked at Cassy and Janice, then at the man whom he towered over and outweighed by at least one hundred pounds, and his face began to fall, a degree at a time.
“That’s okay,” he muttered. “We’ll play another time.”
He and his three friends turned and walked out the door.
“Who are you?” Cassy asked the man who’d stared down the bikers.
“Name’s Ben,” he said, his smile lighting up the entire room for her. “And you?”
“Cassy,” she said, almost tongue-tied. “Cassy Levin.”