“Okay, let’s go up and talk to the boss. Iceland looks to be the closest place. Last I heard, NATO still kept an SAS detachment at Keklivek Air Base.”

The young XO fell to and got to work, plotting out the track to Iceland. At least he was doing something to help now. That relieved the frustration of seeing one of his crew suffering and not being able to do anything about it.

He felt better, but not much.

Catherine Goldman sat in front of the computer screen in her hotel room, waiting impatiently for the laptop to boot up. She opened the slip of paper Chuck Gruver had given her and tapped in the special IP address. When the screen changed and requested it, she added the user ID and password. If this didn’t work, she had no idea what to try next.

The screen blinked a few more times and the familiar OptiMarx logo appeared. She was in! A few more keystrokes and Goldman was staring at the jumble of source code for the elaborate trading system. She dove in and began trailing threads through the labyrinth of complex symbols, making notes on the pad on the desk next to her right hand. The outside world faded from her consciousness as she sank deeper and deeper into the complicated computer code that made up the system.

She had been digging for at least an hour before she spotted a line of code that didn’t seem to make sense. She followed it as the logic led her to another subprogram. There the code sent her to a kernel in a different functionality. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. It was leading her all over the massive system, from one unrelated module to another.

She couldn’t imagine why someone would deliberately write code like this. The system was supposed to be optimized for speed. Jumping all over creation for no apparent reason just didn’t make sense.

Slowly, she began to put all the pieces together. A pattern was starting to materialize out of this convoluted jigsaw puzzle. When the errant lines of code were ultimately assembled, they would perform a function that someone had taken great strides to keep well hidden. Now it was a matter of determining what that mysterious function was. Maybe then she could figure out who was behind it.