Flash Crash
Page 1
FLASH CRASH
The Jake Rivett Series
Praise for Flash Crash
Copyright
Title Page
Chapter One: Monday
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four: Sunday
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight: Monday
Chapter Nine: Tuesday
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve: Twenty Years Prior
Chapter Thirteen: Tuesday
Chapter Fourteen: Wednesday
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen: Fifteen Years Prior
Chapter Seventeen: Wednesday
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen: Thursday
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two: Ten Years Prior
Chapter Twenty-Three: Friday
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six: One Week Later
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Sunday
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Monday
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three: Ten Years Prior
Chapter Thirty-Four: Monday
Chapter Thirty-Five: One Month Later
Chapter Thirty-Six: Monday
A Note on Reviews
About The Author
Never Go Alone - Excerpt
THE JAKE RIVETT SERIES
FLASH CRASH
NEVER GO ALONE
(Read the first chapter of Never Go Alone at the end of this book!)
PRAISE FOR FLASH CRASH:
“Dialogue as entertainingly raunchy as that in The Wolf of Wall Street or the Showtime TV series Billions."
-Kirkus Reviews
"An absolute bullseye, reinventing the heist thriller for the information age."
-BestThrillers
"Theft, murder, betrayal, and computer coding come together in Flash Crash. Deftly going from the rich world of bankers to the dregs of Chinatown, Hatch's pacing ensures there is never a dull moment."
-IndieReader Approved
CLICK HERE TO BUY:
THE JAKE RIVETT SERIES ON AMAZON!
For more information about Denison Hatch:
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FLASH CRASH is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination and/or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Denison Hatch
Published by Lookout Press
All rights reserved
ISBN: 0-9972812-0-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-9972812-0-0
FLASH CRASH
A JAKE RIVETT HEIST THRILLER
by
Denison Hatch
ONE
DAVID BELOV WAS LATE for work. He’d never been tardy before, but that wasn’t why he was so damn scared. He stood quietly inside the subway car, attempting to display zen while every synapse in his brain burned red hot. Doing his best to stop the fear inside from gurgling up and entering the world, David reminded himself that he just needed to keep it together for a few more hours—one more trading session.
He emerged from the Broad Street station into lower Manhattan on a perfect Monday morning. Only a handful of cloud wisps and contrails arced through the bright blue sky. Crisp enough for David to respect his suit jacket but nothing more. As he paced down the sidewalk, he appeared to be just one more highly-paid, well-educated lemming amongst many.
A few minutes later, David walked through the doors of Montgomery Noyes’ headquarters in Wall Street. A storied investment bank, Montgomery was an utter cathedral of finance. If one couldn’t identify Montgomery by name alone, then the enormous modernist vaulted glass ceilings that no Roman architect would have conjured in his wildest dreams, and the white Thassos marble walls, made it abundantly clear that what Montgomery Noyes did was close to godliness. Their core competency was refined but simple. They turned money into more money. Montgomery had experienced a hundred years of institutional existence and planned on one thousand more. The firm was led by extremely driven men whose risk palettes had been pushed to aggressive overdrive at a very young age and never slowed down. In some manner of definition, David was also one of those men. It certainly hadn’t been destined. He’d bucked the trendline of his upbringing, but he knew that mean reversion always had a knack for bringing shooting stars back to Earth.
David headed through Montgomery Noyes’ foyer, past the coffee shop built into the front of the lobby and towards the staffed reception desk at the back. With a nod to a security guard standing sentinel, David brushed his RFID passcard against a sensor. A green light confirmed David’s credentials, allowing access. He passed through turnstiles towards Montgomery’s private elevator.
■
David walked across the trading floor on the twentieth story. At nine thirty-two in the morning, two minutes after the open, the place was going nuts. The trading day had begun and the big swinging you-know-what’s—in their light blue stripes and Ferragamos and trendy socks patterned after Santa Fe cave dweller scratchings—were in the groove. David couldn’t help but overhear a conversation between two gregarious traders.
“I got into the E-mini right as it broke the channel, man,” bellowed Rick Stanfield, a robust man who only wore Brooks Brothers but could never quite figure out how to choose an aesthetically pleasing combination of pattern and color. At first glance, in his red lobster corduroys and rainbow-striped shirt, Rick appeared to be an outright caricature of preppy culture. He reveled in that persona, of course. The truth was that his sartorial choices were utterly irrelevant. Rick could read a stock ticker like an elite wide receiver can trace a quarterback’s pigskin from sixty yards out. The ability to make money was paramount within the hierarchy of Montgomery Noyes’ business—a skill only seconded by the ability to not lose money.
“How hard did you ride it?” Peter Langer asked. Peter was Rick’s bullpen best friend. They shot the shit all day long, pounded down drinks after work, and never, ever asked about each other’s personal life. Both had wives, children, and homes in the posh suburbs outside of the city, but neither was interested in discussing those taboo topics. Masculinity was always at stake in the game. Especially if your numbers weren’t up to snuff. In that case manliness became critical and could in fact be ridden like a wave, at least until the next recession ate everyone’s lunch.
“Hard enough not to be the naked guy later,” Rick replied.
“I’m babysitting my shit again,” Peter said.
“Never babysit. Fuck babies. Drown ’em if they don’t make money.” Rick noticed David passing by as Peter laughed. “Right, Dave?” Rick held his hand out towards David in a teed-up fist pump gesture.
David grinned awkwardly and slapped Rick’s fist with his palm as he passed. David padded alongside the plate glass window towards a back hallway, unable to socialize at Rick and Peter’s level.
“Who’s that guy?” Peter asked after David had proceeded through the bullpen.
“The quant. David.”
“Whatever,” said Peter.
David Belov was well aware of where he fit within the pecking order of Montgomery Noyes. He wasn’t anything like the blue-blood traders in the bullpen. He was a quant, a quantitative programmer, which meant that he was relegated to the windowless back offices of Mo
ntgomery’s trading floor. His primary job responsibility was to develop, program, and maintain the algorithms that controlled the timing and manner in which the bank’s computer systems traded thousands of securities across the globe.
Fluent in C++, JavaScript, Python, and a handful of other esoteric languages all the way down to binary machine code, David was a commodity within the highly specific world of algorithmic trading. His LinkedIn received plenty of looks. But he was also just that—a commodity, paid ninety thousand dollars a year because he was three years out of grad school and that’s what the salary step called for. As far as traders like Rick and Peter were concerned, David was the equivalent of a tool to be utilized, not a person to be respected. He would never have a real, client-facing, trade-generating, revenue-sharing position like the bullpen guys stood on. And it didn’t help that David was a first-generation American from a Russian immigrant family who had to scrape for every success in life. If there’s anything David had learned about America so far, it was that people who were born with silver spoons in their mouths didn’t trust those born drinking powdered milk.
David continued along the back of the trading floor. After the rowdy trading desks in the bullpen came the fast-paced charmers in the sales department. They had names like “J.R.” and “Laird” and “Terrence.” David listened to the sweet words rattling off the sales guys’ tongues like music: “What’s really interesting to me, is I’m watching the commodity go up much faster than the miners are. I see a pairs trade there. Short the metal, long miners, and hope they converge.” Farther down the row, it was the same thing. Another sales guy raged into his telephone while simultaneously glancing at a tablet cell in the other hand, eyes tracking ticker tape and volume across the large plasma screens set against a back wall. “Anything you want. I’ll get you into the GLD index and if it’s big enough size, we can buy and store physical gold for you—no problem. We have the second-largest vault in the city.”
David padded down a quiet hallway towards the quant desks. Unlike the main floor, the quant section was carpeted. Colleagues spoke in quiet murmurs to one another. Floor-to-ceiling bulletproof glass protected the organized racks of blinking blade computers, and their power supplies and cooling units, which comprised the nerve center of the bank’s trading operations. David walked past the twenty-four-hour guarded security desk in front of the server room. He arrived at his own cube and sat down.
David didn’t immediately start up his computer as most of the office rats would. He didn’t begin checking voicemails, even though the notification light on his phone was blinking. Instead, after a long moment of consternation, he pulled a white envelope out of his pocket. He held it at arm’s length and simply stared at it.
“You know I love you, right, dude?” David’s reverie was broken by Tyler Stanton, the managing director of the department and David’s direct boss. Tyler stood inside David’s workspace, leaning against the side of the cubicle with his hand, absentmindedly nudging it back and forth a few inches.
“Watch out”—David pointed—“the desk.”
“Oh, crap.” Tyler backed up without apologizing. Another fundamental tenet of Montgomery was that one obeyed the hierarchy of command with military reverence. That meant that whatever Tyler felt, desired, or said took precedence over anything that David could possibly emote. Tyler continued to harangue David about his late arrival. “The rest of the guys are here for the FX huddle at six”—Tyler glanced at his watch—“and you’re three and a half hours late. Come on, dude. What is that? What’s going on? Something you need to tell me about?”
There was no safe way to begin the necessary conversation. The only thing that would save him was action. “I had problems at home,” David finally responded, which was literally true but metaphorically a massive understatement.
“Listen, I’m sorry to hear it. I really am,” Tyler said.
“Thanks.”
“But don’t let people see you bleed. It’s a bad look,” Tyler dispensed his wisdom as he walked away from David’s cubicle.
After Tyler was out of sight, David realized that he’d been clenching the envelope nervously throughout his entire interaction with Stanton. His fingers shook while he opened the enclosure. Inside was an anticlimactic, tiny microSD card. David placed the card in his pocket. He tossed the envelope in the trash. The vessel didn’t matter—the content did. The result of many hours of panicked programming lay inside the bits and bytes of the microSD card. In many ways, David’s entire life had lead up to this moment. No one would ever know it, but the powerful code that rested within that microscopic piece of plastic and copper was the best work he’d ever done.
The air conditioning inside the building was set to maximum spend, but David couldn’t feel it. His brow was drenched in sweat. Water dripped off his body like a pot of boiling water with the lid left on too long. He did the best that he could to wipe the physiological condensation off with his hands and then dried them by patting his slacks. David took a final deep breath. He stood up and paced down the hallway towards the glass-encased door to the server room. One of Montgomery’s information security officers—a nice enough gent named Roberto, whom David would often chat with about terrible reality television—was sitting in front of the door.
“Had a bunch of flags pop on the code check for three-one,” David said.
“Okay. Did Tyler approve it?” Roberto inquired.
“It . . .” David stumbled for a moment. “It should be in the system. That’s what I was told.”
Roberto checked his computer monitor again, clicking through a bunch of menus. “Oh, there it is. That’s weird. Wasn’t there a second ago. I got it. All good. Don’t trip, buddy,” Roberto said as he tapped a button and the door to the server room slid open.
David grimaced. If only that dude knew the beginning of it.
David stepped down the long, silent server room. The custom-built computer systems that lived inside this chamber were absolutely state-of-the-art. The room was always guarded and staffed twenty-four seven. It contained synchronizing software that mirrored all of its data onto colocated servers as far as Sweden and Hawaii, should the East Coast cease to exist at some point in the future. The room was kept at a constantly chilled temperature to prevent the processors from overheating. The system was also protected by massive battery systems from APC, the size of about fifty refrigerators, in case of an extended power outage. The entire network was set up for redundancy in the event of any individual component’s failure. If a hard drive, processor, or power supply stopped working, it could be hot swapped out and replaced with no effect on the functionality of the system. Montgomery’s information technology team was proud of the fact that they had only lost internet connectivity for a total of three and a half minutes in the last year, which was a better result than 99.89 percent of the entire commercial hosting market. David knew the “Box” very well. He’d coordinated the build out between the programming and operations teams. And in all situations, he’d been a real team player—a true mensch. He’d been the fucking go-to guy and this was what happened to him?
David finally reached his goal, locating a slim black server box nestled deep within the racks. The technorati referred to servers as “blades” because they were only a half inch tall and slid in and out of their cages similar to a sword emerging from a sheath. David placed his hands on his target—one blade amongst many. He yanked the server out and flipped it around, viewing the various inputs on the back. He pulled the microSD card from his pocket and inserted it into a small slot on the back of the blade. Then he replaced the blade into the slot where it came from. A new diode glowed blue on the front of the box, the only indication that the microSD card was present. David gave the server a final lookover, then turned on his heels and headed out of the room.
David returned to his cubicle within the quant section. He sat down. He loaded up the two stock tickers that most accurately tracked the global commodity trade of pure gold: CME Group Gold Future
s and the GLD ETF Index. He watched GLD’s stock chart. Not much was going on. Low volume compared to average. The commodity was up a little bit on the day, by half a percent. But nothing was out of the ordinary. It was a boring day for gold. It would not stay that way.
David gazed over the rest of his colleagues in the room. The knowledge of what was about to happen was slowly driving him insane, but the truth was he couldn’t expose his predicament to any of them. That was the first rule and the critical one. The second rule was to finish the job—no matter what.
His pupils had reduced to tight little particles. He was perspiring greatly. With his hair slicked back and sweat emerging from his temples, David appeared slightly, but visibly, ill. There was a small part of him that secretly hoped that another programmer, or Tyler, or someone from human resources would pull him aside and ask him what was wrong. Then maybe he could leave for the rest of the day and not be there for the carnage. He shook his head. Not even that would solve his problems. It was a pipe dream. The unvarnished truth was that no one could really tell that something was up with David—because no one was paying him any attention.
David’s eyes dipped down to the monitor in front of him. He loaded a programming terminal on his computer and typed quickly, routing the command prompt to a subfolder on the server blade he’d just pulled. He copied his algorithm from the microSD card onto the executable folders of every single server in the stacks. David opened his program’s command module. The name of the algorithm played across his computer screen:
.