By the time Alison came on the scene, there were already half a dozen other investigators poring over the data, some private and some acting on behalf of the authorities. The company had died by then and taken vast sums of other people’s money to its grave, like a pharaoh of old. What everyone wanted to know was why. Was it a software error, or was it—the angle that brought Julian’s employer in—deliberate outside interference? Perhaps a dry run for a wider crashing of the stock market?

However, there wasn’t a perceivable pattern. None of it made sense, unless SFI was covertly retaining Nostradamus and Mother Shipton on the payroll.

Alison read through interviews conducted with the various brokers employed by the firm who’d overseen these baffling but so often brilliant trades. At the start most had insisted on their own personal genius. After things went sour, they denied all responsibility, saying the decisions were mandated by Swayne’s revolutionary expert system. A team of computer experts had already done their best to work out what the system was doing and had mostly drawn a blank. Nobody could work out how the machine was able to second-guess the market three times out of four, or why the fourth time was such a disaster.

Alison, inheriting this morass of bafflement from her peers, decided to create her own data, exceeding her given role in exactly the way she would do later in the Service. Specifically, she went to speak to SFI’s system administrator.

SFI was a small enterprise doing its best to keep its costs down. Technical support was intended to be mostly outsourced, but as it happened, such expense had barely been needed because Charen Volkovska practically lived in the office. She’d made herself available twenty-four seven, in case anything went wrong. And during SFI’s tenure, she had never taken a day’s leave and had come in to work most weekends, when the offices were otherwise deserted. Her record went past “exemplary” into either “obsessive” or “suspicious.” Alison had been expecting the latter but, after meeting the woman, settled on the former. Charen knew computers, and possibly not much else. She spoke in rushes of lumped-together words punctuated by long silences. She had been briefly interviewed before, but she didn’t know about the trading arm of the business, nor did she seem to care. She was very, very interested in computers, and SFI’s beating heart in particular, and that was all. She idolized Swayne, who, to his credit, paid her very well and had personally headhunted her. She came highly recommended so long as you didn’t want someone who would play nicely with others.