He stood, checked his reflection in the office window, and then trotted out to find Marina Nosovitskaya.

The beautiful young programmer was in her cubicle, watching the stock ticker as it played across the screen of her monitor. Ustinov leaned against the wall and turned on his best practiced smile.

She ignored him for the longest time but eventually looked up and smiled in response. Her bright blue eyes danced in the light. “What is it? Or are you just going to stand there and ogle my breasts?”

Ustinov blushed but joined in the lighthearted banter. “That sounds like a very good idea to me, but they are too well hidden by all those clothes to properly ogle.”

“That’s the way they will stay, I assure you.” The smile disappeared as if she had thrown a switch. “Now what do you want?”

Ustinov handed her a copy of the e-mail as he answered, “From Uncle Boris. It is time to start.” He rubbed his hands together in eager anticipation. “It looks as if it will not be long until I have enough money to treat you in the manner you deserve.”

Nosovitskaya seemed to not hear his clumsy flirtation as she punched in a series of coded passwords on her keyboard. A screen popped up that looked very much like many others in the OptiMarx system. However, this particular screen did not appear in any of the volumes of operating manuals, nor was it referenced in the mounds of documentation.

She typed in several more commands and hit a button marked EXECUTE.

Turning back to Ustinov, she said, “It’s working. I set the system so that it would short-sell on any stock if it had two down ticks within five minutes. It will automatically buy when the price drops another nickel.”

“A nickel!” Ustinov snorted. “It will take forever to make any money at that rate.”

Nosovitskaya looked up and smiled, but it was a smile she might use when talking to a dim-witted child. “Impetuous, greedy boy. Think for a minute, or has all the blood pooled lower in your body?” She dropped her gaze to his crotch for a long second before going on. “At a nickel a share for a million shares, we make fifty thousand dollars in five minutes. Even you should be able to calculate how much that adds up to in a day.”

Ustinov shook his head in wonder. “Wow! That comes out to real money. How do we make sure no one catches on?”

Nosovitskaya groaned. “You should have thought of this earlier. It is a good thing that I did. We do what we do in lots of little thousand-share transactions. We use hundreds of different accounts. There is no way to trace them back to any common source. Then, to make it even more difficult, we do a lot of the transactions out on the regional exchanges. No way to put it all together.”