“You are incorrigible,” she retorted with a disapproving frown. Still, she took a deep breath and drew her arms back behind her chair. The sweater stretched even more tightly across her breasts, the nipples threatening to pierce right through the filmy knit fabric.

Ustinov’s mouth dropped open. His eyes bulged as he swallowed hard. The pencil he had been using rolled across the desk and fell to the floor, unnoticed.

Nosovitskaya laughed before returning her attention to her computer monitor screen.

“Show’s over,” she said. “Now get to work.”

The pair was alone in OptiMarx’s testing lab. With the trading system now fully operational, there wasn’t much need to test anything. It made an ideal command center for their attack on the stock exchange.

Today had been exciting. The short-sale module performed flawlessly. It danced across the lists of stocks and offered selected securities for sale. They were stocks they didn’t even own in the first place. Under normal circumstances, they would wait and buy the stocks later, when the prices were lower. Their plan had nothing to do with normal times. They were hell-bent on driving the market to its knees.

To anyone watching, it looked random, but the algorithm kept up a steady sell-side pressure. Wherever it sensed that buyers were available without sellers, it offered stock for sale. The inexhaustible supply drove prices down. Anyone trying to sell his shares had to lower the offering price, and there were plenty of sellers. The market worked on a herd instinct, and now a stampede was on. Panic was in full force. It was simple application of the law of supply and demand. America’s own financial empire was being used as a weapon against itself.

Ustinov watched Nosovitskaya’s fingers race across the keyboard. She smiled as she spoke.

“We’ve sold over three hundred million shares so far today. That’s ten percent of the total market. This program really rocks!”

The American slang sounded so provocative as it rolled off her tongue. She licked her lips. The glow of the monitor made her big, dark eyes shine. Her cheeks were flushed from the excitement of what she was watching.

Dmitri Ustinov moved closer behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, and bent down, his face brushing against hers as they watched the figures scroll seductively across the screen.

She was so lost in the staggering value of what she was seeing that she didn’t even bother to shrug him away. He couldn’t tell if his raging erection was from her burning nearness or from the sheer immensity of the dollars he was watching slip across the breadth of the monitor.