Ustinov nodded. “Smart, real smart. Beautiful, too. Marry me and make me happy forever.”

Nosovitskaya ignored him once again while she watched the numbers dance happily across her computer screen, the pixels reflecting in her deep, dark eyes.

Carl Andretti had waited as long as he could stand to. There was money to be made and that damned uppity Brit was off God knows where. Smythe had told him in no uncertain terms that he wanted to be there for the initial launch of the “special feature.” Smythe was the boss.

Well, he was going to miss it after all. Besides, there was a good chance that these trades would be so far off the books that Smythe wouldn’t ever know about them anyway. If that was the case, there would be no need for splitting those proceeds two ways.

Andretti looked over his shoulder several times as he entered the system and watched the ticker as the trades occurred. This particular ticker was just a little different from the one that everyone else saw. This one came directly off the output of the OptiMarx matching system. These were the trades at the instant at which buyers were being matched up with sellers. The numbers everyone else saw came from the stock exchange floor.

Theoretically…and according to the plans everyone else had seen…those numbers should be identical and be displayed milliseconds apart. Suppose someone could see the trades immediately as they came out of the matching system, but before they made it to the exchange floor? What if that person had the ability to make changes on the fly?

That was the capability that Andretti had secretly built into the OptiMarx system. He was able to move trades around so that sales that should have happened at a lower price showed up at a higher one. He could also manipulate it so that buys that should have been more expensive were accomplished much more cheaply. He knew that if he didn’t get greedy and changed only a few trades at a time, there was little chance of their operation being detected.

The fat CTO took a big slug of the Scotch in the Styrofoam cup at his elbow, bent over his keyboard, and started the system. Soon he was directing funds into his own special account, one Alan Smythe had no idea existed. His watery eyes gleamed as he watched the balance begin to grow.