CHRISTOPHER MONTGOMERY WAS THREE YEARS OLDER THAN HIS LITTLE sister. Age, however, provided little leverage and no advantage. Avery was better than him at most things—she had been a better student and was a better sailor. She was more charismatic and outgoing. She could likely, if things ever got out of control between them, overpower him in a wrestling match. But there was one thing Christopher beat her at. Math. He was a savant when it came to numbers. Math and all its derivatives came easily to him. In fact, he had never felt the need to learn the subject. The knowledge was somehow already in his brain. He was born with it. All he had to do was organize the information and apply it to any version of math. In college, he majored in mathematics. After college he earned a master’s degree in applied and computational mathematics. If he had had a normal father, perhaps Christopher Montgomery would have become a professor or an actuary for the insurance industry. Instead, he took his mathematical brain to Wall Street and joined Montgomery Investment Services as an analyst.

Christopher applied himself to studying the market and determining the probabilities and statistical analysis of making money by trading stocks and commodities. Surprising to no one, he was very good at it. So good, in fact, that he rose to the top of the food chain at his father’s firm and was soon offering his advice not just to his father, but to every partner, about which industries to place the hedge fund’s assets into. Christopher became so lost in the statistical analysis of the firm’s funds that he couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Until one night when he was alone and working late. His mind functioned best when the offices of Montgomery Investment Services were empty. That was when he first began to unravel the fraud that was taking place. It took him weeks of working through the night to dissect the firm’s financial misdeeds.

The offices of Montgomery Investment Services occupied the entire fortieth floor of the Prudential building in lower Manhattan, and once Christopher smelled corruption, he didn’t care how many chances he took. Late at night, after the cleaning crew was gone, he entered his father’s office and searched through his computer. He did the same to each of the partners. What took the feds two years to uncover, Christopher had learned in two weeks. Montgomery Investment Services was dirty as sin, and Christopher’s name and brainpower was behind nearly every deal that had been made.