Crash

by David Hagberg

  Breakfast was served by four waiters, and when they were gone, O’Connell spoke up.

  “But we may have a problem,” she said.

  “What problem?” Treadwell asked.

  “A woman in my department, a data scientist named Cassy Levin, is suspicious that something is wrong. She came to me last week, damned near on the verge of exposing Abacus.”

  “Isn’t she the dumb ass who brought down Murphy Tweed?” Dammerman asked.

  “Wasn’t her fault,” O’Connell said. “And trust me, this gal is bright, very bright.”

  “Put Francis Masters on it,” Treadwell said. Masters was BP’s number-two cyber-research chief, a onetime hacker himself. The in-house belief was that the man would stomp his own mother to death if Treadwell told him to do it.

  “I’m just saying we need to be careful,” O’Connell said.

  “Maybe she’ll have an accident,” Dammerman said.

  4

  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.”

&n
bsp; 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.”

  5

  Masters had got a cup of coffee and was sitting at the break table in a corner across from the foosball table the kids used on their downtime, or when they were trying to figure out a tough coding problem.

  Cassy walked over, got a cup of coffee, and sat down across from him.

  He looked up from working on his iPad. “Good morning. You’re early.”

  “I think we might have a developing problem, Francis.”

  “The odd-lot trades you told me about the other day?”

  “It seems to be spreading.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure. But if I had to guess I’d say that we’ve picked up a bug. Almost acts like a cyberworm, except…”

  “Except what?”

  Cassy shook her head and looked away for a moment. “It’s like something in incubation. Something in the system that’s growing.”

  “Fix it. What we pay you for.”

  “I have to get a handle on it first.”

  “Then do it.”

  “I think we should take this to Julia.”

  “Take what to Julia?” Masters asked. “Exactly?”

  “I want to play a game with it. But I’ll need some help, and it might take a few hours.”

  “Do it.”

  “I’d need to suspend or at least delay Burnham Pike’s trades for today.”

  Masters laughed out loud. “Give me a fucking break,” he said. “Do you know how many millions of dollars the firm would lose? Now get back to work. Find it and fix it, and when you come up with something that makes sense, we’ll take it to Julia. But not until then.”

  6

  Reid Treadwell stood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange a few feet away from the post that would trade the initial public offering of Rockingham Corporation, a Burnham Pike client. It was a few minutes before the opening bell at nine-thirty.

  O’Connell was fidgeting off to his left, while Treadwell’s attention was completely on Heather, the twenty-five-year old daughter of Keith Rockingham, the founder of the company, who was now up on the rostrum with a half dozen of his executives.

  “This is like a dream come true for my father,” Heather said, almost gushing. She was a full head shorter than Treadwell, with long blond hair, a pretty oval face, green eyes, and a fabulous body, and wearing a sheer white blouse, a sharply tailored dark suit jacket, and trousers.

  “I hear that you’ve made a lot of strides in the company’s marketing department,” Treadwell said. “A lot of movers and shakers have already sat up and taken notice.”

  She touched his arm. “I don’t know how to thank you for all you’ve done for us, Mr. Treadwell.”

  “Please, no formalities. I’d be happy if you would call me Reid. My dearest friends do.”

  She was a little uncertain, but she nodded. Treadwell was the JFK of Wall Street. Don’t ask what Burnham Pike can do for you, ask what you can do for Burnham Pike was the bank’s unspoken mantra. “Okay, Reid,” she said.

  “That’s better.”

  The floor was busy this morning. CNN had wanted to do a live interview with Treadwell, but he had declined, patting the reporter on the shoulder. “Later in the week, okay, Mark?”

  “You bet, Mr. Treadwell,” the man said, and he and his cameraman headed away.

  Heather looked at him with open admiration, but then turned to look up at her dad on the rostrum with only minutes to go. “I’ve never seen an IPO go to market before,” she said. “This is exciting.”

  Rockingham Corporation, founded thirty years ago by Heather’s father, specialized in rugged outdoor wear for extreme sportsmen and -women. It had carved out a respected niche in the market but had never hit it big. At least, not until three years ago, when Burnham Pike enrolled the company as a client.

  In order to make money, you have to spend it was another of Treadwell’s self-serving mantras.

  To start out with, BP floated $100 million in debt for the company so that it could begin a massive expansion program. And now the company was going public, hoping to raise another $25 million, this time in stock. Rockingham would be able to build a new factory in Vietnam, where labor was cheap, embark on a major ad campaign, and expand the products and equipment it offered.

  “I would love to pick your brain about marketing,” Heather said, pressing closer. “Reid.”

  Treadwell smiled. “That’s right—you’re Rockingham’s marketing director. Are you free for lunch today, after the opening hubbub subsides?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Basel’s,” he told her. “It’s a little Swiss restaurant just a few blocks from here.” It was just around the corner from one of the apartments he kept at this end of town for clients and other pursuits. And sometimes, like now, he was almost ashamed of himself for how easy it was. Almost.

  A middle-aged woman whom Heather introduced as an aunt showed up all overjoyed and gushing, embracing her niece in an encompassing hug.

  O’Connell was at Treadwell’s side. “Do you really want to do this today?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

  “Stress relief,” Treadwell said. “You should try it.”

  “I’m wasting my time here. We have that potential problem we talked about.”

  “Stay here and try to act like you’re enjoying yourself. When the shit hits the fan in the morning, let it be remembered that we were here and enjoying Rockingham’s little bullshit IPO.”

  The opening bell was on the verge of ringing. The rostrum was crammed mostly with Rockingham execs, including the old man himself, the company’s name and logo on a banner on the wall behind them.

  “Those poor bastards,” Treadwell muttered half under his breath, and he had to grin.

  The aunt had left, and Heather was looking up at him. “What?” she asked.

  “Your family is going to make a lot of money,” he said.

  Heather was smiling. “You betcha, Reid, and so are you.”

  On the rostrum, Rockingham, a large, barrel-chested man with a thick shock of perfectly white hair, pressed a button, and the brass, saucer-shaped bell just below where he and the others stood began ringing. Four other bells around the floor’s periphery rang at the same time.

  Heather moved forward to applaud her father.

  Rockingham pumped the hands of his execs; the well-wishers below applauded with abandon as just about everyone on the floor did at every opening bell.

  “How long’s their lockup period?” O’Connell asked.

  “Six months,” Treadwell said, his eyes on Heather, who was beaming up at her father and the others.

  “Wasn’t for Abacus they would actually make some money. It’s a good company.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Julia,” Treadwell said, just loudly enough so that O’Connell could hear what he was saying over the noise, but no one else could.

  Rockingham and his entire executive team got a big allotment of newly public company shares for free, while a lot of friends and family had been issued special blocks that they could buy at the offering price of $7 per share. Which was a good deal, because after an IPO, the price sometimes rose dramatically, providing the company stayed healthy and the market didn’t tank.

  The only problem was that IPO stocks issued to execs or purchased by friends and family were locked up for a period—in Rockingham’s case, six months. This meant that for a full half year they couldn’t sell. That was too bad if the stock price cratered in the meantime—which sometimes it did. And by tomorrow it certainly would.

  “They have an interest payment due next month, don’t they?” O’Connell said.

  “Five percent,” Treadwell replied absently. “Now get off
the subject.”

  The $100 million BP had raised for the company was in the form of seven-year bonds, which were sold to investors at 5 percent, paid yearly. At the end of seven years, and there were six to go, the company had to redeem the bonds and repay the borrowed money.

  Rockingham’s executives left the rostrum and began filtering onto the floor, while the old man himself came down, shook Treadwell’s hand, kissed his daughter on the cheek, then went over to the trading post handling the IPO.

  The round structure, of which there were a half dozen on the floor, was about thirty feet in diameter with banks of computer monitors and keyboards around the periphery. The market makers, as they were called, who manned each post, each with different-colored jackets—this one green—were already busy on phones and tablets. They were talking with brokers who delivered orders in person. A constant babble of voices surrounded each post. The feeling on the floor was electric.

  A CNBC reporter and camera crew came over and did a brief interview with Rockingham then moved off. The old man turned and gave Treadwell a nod and a big grin. This was his day.

  In Treadwell’s estimation it was actually a waste of time being here, but he had to admit that it was exciting. Got his blood stirring, especially with Heather Rockingham at his elbow.

  She turned to him, a huge smile on her face. “Isn’t this wonderful?” she said. “My dad is so happy. But tell me something: I thought that most stock trading was done by computers. So why all the people here?”

  “You’re right about one thing, most of it is done by computers. Eighty percent of the New York Stock Exchange’s trades are done digitally, in fact. But the exchange likes to have some live humans—market makers—at the posts who make trades, especially the more complicated ones. Trades where the guys in the bright jackets get the feel for the deal. They can haggle sometimes, and they have an instinct for what they can get in a trade. Computers don’t have instincts. Just numbers.”