“Dmitri, how is the testing going?”

Alan Smythe stepped into the elevator just ahead of the man who ran his company’s testing department. He pushed the button for the twenty-seventh floor while the door hissed shut, and then he leaned back against the rail as the car whooshed upward.

Dmitri Ustinov glanced over at the slightly built Englishman as if he might not have heard the question. Although a mere twenty-two years old, Ustinov possessed a keenly trained intellect hidden in a bear’s body. Despite his heavy, continuous brow, droopy eyelids, and a stooped stature that made him appear on first glance a bit dense, the man possessed a unique skill set well suited for his present project. His knowledge of complicated computer systems along with his familiarity with the inane, convoluted rules for trading stocks and other securities was already well celebrated. Even at his young age, he was the chief engineer for testing the revolutionary new OptiMarx equities trading system.

“Problems with the integration to the National Market System,” he answered as they glided past the fifteenth floor. His accent still carried a hint of his native Russian though he had been in the United States for a decade. “The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at how we are doing that. It will be several weeks until we get a ruling out of them.”

Smythe grunted acknowledgment. Damn government bureaus worked on their own timetables. He was accustomed to such roadblocks, but they were still hard to stomach. “What does Chuck Gruver over at the NYSE say?”

“Not a lot of help. He is so damned head up and ass down in the changes to the Intermarket Trading System that he does not have time to help us on this side.”

“Not surprised. About time they fixed ITS. That ticker tape should have been donated to the Smithsonian a long time ago.” The elevator door parted and they walked out into the large open office space of OptiMarx, Inc. The big room was divided into a myriad of cubicles. Alan stepped to the left, toward the hallway that led to his office, while Dmitri headed to the right. Smythe stepped into his corner office. Opposite the door, the room’s glass wall looked out from the New Jersey shore, across New York Harbor, past the Statue of Liberty toward Lower Manhattan. Ferries scurried across the Hudson River to the north as helicopters buzzed back and forth between the heliports on either shore. Smythe slid into the modern black leather chair behind the smoked-glass desk, the panoramic view now at his back. He had hardly begun riffling through his morning e-mail before the intercom on his desk buzzed its annoying interruption.

Without even a “good morning,” his omnipresent executive assistant, Cheryl Mitchell, announced that Mark Stern wanted to speak with him. He sounded, she noted, “Pissed, as usual.”