Andretti grinned. Maybe she was in there fooling around with one of the geeks. That might be worth taking a quick peek at. Watching was the next best thing to doing.

He slipped as quietly as he could through the door and made his way among the cubicles and toward the sound of the voices. Despite his buzz, he managed to keep silent. It was clear that the pair in the testing room weren’t paying much attention to anything else that might be going on around them.

Hidden behind a cubicle divider, invisible in the shadows, Andretti stopped to watch.

Dmitri Ustinov was standing close behind the beautiful Russian programmer, his hands inside her sweater as he fondled her breasts and mumbled in her ear. She stood there, accepting his ministrations, entranced by the numbers that danced across the computer screen. She seemed fine with his hands on her.

Andretti heard the excitement in her voice when she spoke.

“Dmitri, we have made over five hundred million dollars today. I don’t believe it! We are rich. We have killed the market, exactly as Medikov has ordered us to do. Just us! We have done this all by ourselves! The Exchange will not even open for trading tomorrow because of us.”

Ustinov was fumbling with the buttons on her sweater. He answered her, his voice thick and trembling. “Five hundred million. Medikov gets most of it. I managed to siphon off ten percent for us.”

“You mean you cheated Boris Medikov out of fifty million dollars?”

“Yes, my dear. It is safely put away. For us. You and me. Old Boris will never miss such chump change. Now that we’ve crashed the American stock market, it’ll be years before he could untangle the records and find us, even if he were inclined to try.”

Ustinov had conquered all but the last of the sweater buttons. He pulled it away to reveal her white shoulders and flawless breasts. She sucked in her breath as Ustinov’s hands encircled them.

Andretti could not believe what he was hearing. The two were talking about a conspiracy that involved enormous numbers. He had no idea who this Medikov guy was, but it sounded as if he must be the boss of this scheme. Here was his ruination, standing right there in front of him, one groping the other.

It was these two who had killed his system and cheated him out of millions.

Nosovitskaya leaned back against Ustinov and sighed. A look of utter satisfaction flitted across her beautiful face.

“Dmitri, I never thought I would say this, but you are a genius,” she murmured. “You deserve a proper reward.” She took one of his hands in her own, removed it from her breast, and slid it down her body. “What kind of reward would you like?”