Rogue Code (35 page)

Jeff glanced at the phone, then slid it into a pocket. “Should we be worried about Agnes?” He hadn’t expressed his concern or fears in transit not being entirely sure their conversations were secure.

“Naw. I was once in … now, where was it? Oh, yeah, Rome. Anyway, I was in Rome, eating dinner with someone I was running, when this guy comes up all smiles. We’d gone to high school together, wanted to know how my wife was, shook my hand until I thought it would fall off, gave me his business card, hinted he wanted to join us, then seeing I wasn’t going to invite him he moved on.”

“Awkward. What did you tell the man you were with?”

“Mistaken identity.”

“Did he believe you?”

“No. The funny thing about it was I’d never seen the other guy before. I’d never gone to school with him, and he didn’t know me. He had my name wrong and that of my wife. It really was mistaken identity. So there you are. Agnes won’t be a problem. If we become a national story or the cyber community spreads word around, then she’ll try to put two and two together. If she likes you, she’s not likely to call the authorities because she’ll have her doubts, especially Agnes. Federal law enforcement has lost a lot of credibility since the Patriot Act and PRISM. And even if she tells someone about seeing you, the Miami airport feeds lots of places in the world.”

“It’s the gateway to South America.”

Frank nodded. “There’s that. But, Jeff, you give them too much credit. You’re not traveling under your own name. They’d have to use facial recognition to spot either of us and take it from me, since my group developed that software to its current state, it is nowhere near as fast or simple as the movies make it seem. I know their capability, and it’s limited. Mostly they catch people because people do stupid things, or act guilty. That’s why you need to put this out of your mind. For the next little while, you are Doug Bennett. Think about your cover story, don’t flash too much cash and ogle the babes. That’s the national pastime down here.”

“What about Carol?” Jeff asked. He had no one who needed to know he was on the run but Frank had a wife and family.

“Carol is fine.”

“I don’t understand. How can she be fine with all this going on?”

Frank took a pull of his beer. “She knew what I was when we met, or at least not long after we met. She’s the reason I made the career change but that didn’t happen overnight. She’s lived with this before. We have a code, just in case.”

“What kind of code? What’s it for?”

“It’s for emergencies when I might have to go to ground. I was still in the field for over a year after we started living together, so I gave her a code expression. Whenever she heard or read it from me it meant I was fine but had to vanish for a while and couldn’t be in touch with her. She was to do nothing. Not call anyone, not talk about it.”

“Couldn’t someone from the Company keep her posted, so she wouldn’t worry?”

Frank smiled. “Jeff, you are an American original. The Company might very well be why I was pulling my vanishing act.”

“You’re not serious.”

“After all you’ve been through since 9/11, and especially these last few days, you still don’t get it. The field is no different than Langley was. Remember those days? Management has its own agenda, the best and brightest are few and far between, motives are muddled. As often as not out there my adversary was the home office. Dealing with the official enemy was pretty straightforward and with most of the enemy operators there were rules we followed.”

“Rules? In espionage?”

“Of course. We all had families. One rule was that they were off limits. There were others.”

“So how many times did you have to hide from the Company?”

“That was just an example of why I needed a private code. I actually only kept my head down from the home office once and that was just for a few days until the situation corrected itself.”

Jeff started to ask, then stopped. What Frank might very well mean was that he’d corrected the situation personally. “Okay.”

“You never know when your past might catch up with you, so I kept the code alive. I called Carol when we went to ground so she knows I’ll be out of touch for a while.”

“Still, she must be worried.”

“Oh yeah. No matter how hard you try you always worry.”

53

MITRI GROWTH CAPITAL

LINDELL BOULEVARD

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

3:01
P.M.

Jonathan Russo looked up from the code and nodded to Alex Baker with approval. “We’re getting there,” he said.

“How much are we committing?”

“Everything. Opportunities like this don’t come along that often. We have no idea how many high-frequency traders will be in on the action, skimming the cream, and we have losses to make up for.”

“I’m concerned no matter how good our algo looks. The new IPO software the Exchange is using is still buggy. I called a contact there, and she’s not sure it’ll be fixed by Wednesday.”

“Are they going with it anyway?”

“She says they are, though there’s a revolt going on with the staff. But the Exchange committed to it publicly, and they are being told it has to fly.”

“That’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.”

Baker shrugged. “You know what they’re like.”

“I’m afraid so. I like what I see here,” Russo said, indicating his screen, “but I want you to triple-check our exit code. We’ve established parameters in which we’ll do well. If the trades migrate out of the parameters, we have to be sure we’re no longer participating. I think we’re secure in that regard.”

“I’ll be working on that all day tomorrow.” Baker stopped but seemed poised to say more.

“What?”

“I’m concerned the algos are getting too complicated.”

“They are sophisticated, no doubt about it.”

“They are time consuming to trace and too much of the code has been generated by other code. I have to use tools to understand some of it.”

“Nothing new there.”

“In this case, though, it is. I frankly don’t understand some aspects of our algos. I know that the tools say they’re fine and that they test out on our machines but…”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I don’t understand them except in the most general way. I could write a short paper describing how they function but I can’t explain the details of the functionality.”

“Yes, it’s not like the old days, but we’re going to see more and more of this, Alex. The day will come when code will write all code. We’ll just tell it what we want it to do.”

“Not soon, I hope. I don’t trust it.”

Russo leaned back. “Don’t tell me that you want to hold off? If the algo really isn’t ready, we shouldn’t use it. But you don’t know that, do you?”

“No. I’m just uneasy is all.”

“It’s always that way with something new. We’ve never been this aggressive before, this committed.”

“That’s it I guess, plus we had that problem last week, when the test had run just fine. Okay, late tomorrow, I’m shutting it down to changes, then we’ll run a number of scenarios in-house. If all goes as expected, we’ll be good to go. We’ll deploy the update two hours before trading begins Wednesday morning.”

“I’m depending on you. I’m exhausted. I’m going home for some rest and I’ll be in late tomorrow. We’ve a long day ahead of us once I get here.”

Russo watched Baker leave his office. He understood what the man was saying. When he started out, he’d written code from scratch. Later, he basically copied and pasted, then adapted code he had crafted already. Only when he went to work for Jump Trading, had he returned to writing code from scratch, at least in the beginning. Now every high-frequency trading company copied where it could, duplicated functions, producing nearly identical algos. They made money even then, but every edge you could encode meant a lot.

In Russo’s view this code was conservative compared to what he’d really like to do. He was already thinking of how it would be rewritten for the next major IPO. He’d squeeze the other HFTs out, that’s what he’d do. They’d never know what hit them. He was expecting to do well on Tuesday, and was prepared to bail out at signs of trouble, even overriding the program if he didn’t like what he saw. Despite his desire to plunge after the algo problems and losses of the previous week, there was too much on the line to be taking needless risks.

54

TRADING PLATFORMS IT SECURITY

WALL STREET

NEW YORK CITY

3:17
P.M.

Back in Manhattan, Daryl had found an image of a NYSE employee ID online, printed a copy at Kinkos, affixed a passport photo she had taken there, laminated it, and attached it to a lanyard. While it looked authentic, it didn’t have the RFID chip on it that would open secured doors when swiped past a reader.

The name on the card was that of a woman from the Server Systems Group at the Exchange taken from the employee information Jeff and Frank had compiled during their reconnaissance. Besides being on vacation and from a department that would give Daryl latitude to move around, she bore a vague resemblance to Daryl, at least based on the small photo in the company directory.

Daryl now stood outside the Wall Street building housing the offices for Trading Platforms IT Security and waited for a crush of employees, preferably one with several young women. It didn’t take long. She blended in with a stream, hanging close to three laughing and chatting women. Each swiped her card as she passed through a waist-level security gate. Daryl hurried behind the woman in front of her, sliding through before the gate closed while swiping her card. The security guard’s attention was elsewhere and the chattering group hadn’t noticed her tailgating behind them.

She stayed tight with the three women, then rode the elevator with them, wanting to get off the ground floor and away from the security guards at once. They exited on the fourth floor. Daryl looked around. It didn’t seem right. At the closest cubicle, Daryl asked, “Where is IT Security? I’m afraid I left my directions at the office.”

The young man scarcely looked up from his screen, “Fifteenth floor, if you’re looking for admin. It’s also housed on the sixteenth and seventeenth floors.”

“Thanks.”

Daryl returned to the elevator, then stepped off on the seventeenth floor, glanced about, then walked along the hallway, which encircled the primary work area. Perhaps a third of the cubicles she saw were unoccupied, employees in meetings, taking breaks, sick, unfilled vacancies.

When she’d first considered this infiltration in the euphoria following her success earlier with the bank manager, it had seemed easy. Now she wasn’t so sure. She knew she couldn’t just stand around looking confused. Someone would ask if she needed help. In an empty cubicle she spotted a number of loose sheets of paper. She stepped in, picked one up, then walked steadily along the hallway as if she knew where she was going. She’d read somewhere that people carrying a piece of paper looked purposeful.

It was a busy office and for that she was grateful. Anyone she encountered was obviously busy while those in their cubicles were intent on their work. She drew a look from every man she passed but there was nothing new in that. The best news was that once at their station employees rarely displayed their identity cards. She’d noticed the women with whom she’d entered had taken theirs from purses and put them back as they walked to the elevators.

She went by a copy room, an empty manager’s office, then realized she was about to lap the floor, so she slipped into the unoccupied ladies’ restroom, entering the first stall. She stood there taking several deep breaths. So far, so good.

Women entered and went straight to the mirrors. “… our fault. I can’t believe we’ve had two meetings in three days over this nonsense. It’s not like we did it.” Her voice sounded very young.

“If the
Times
writes about it, if it’s in the news, we have to pay the price. You know that.” The second voice seemed a bit older.

“It was harmless. It happens to every company one time or another. Now he wants to change everything. You watch. We’ll spend the next three months focused on the wrong things just to cover his ass. In the meanwhile our real work will get ignored.”

Faucets were turned on and off, water splashed, there was more chitchat, then the women left. Daryl waited before stepping back into the hallway and resumed her walk, looking for an open workstation.

Richard Iyers spotted the blonde as he was on his way to the men’s room. “Well, hi,” he said when she was close. “I haven’t seen you before.”

Daryl stopped and smiled. “I’m from SSG.” The Server Systems Group was big and housed in a separate building. She was gambling not everyone working there was known by sight here.

“That explains it. My name’s Richard. I work over there.” Iyers gestured across the top of the cubicles. “If I can do anything for you, just let me know. I’m an infrastructure specialist. We should have a lot to talk about.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.” Daryl looked for his badge to get his last name and saw he had it tucked into his pocket. She moved around him.

“I didn’t catch your name,” Iyers said as she walked past him.

“Kelly,” Daryl replied over her shoulder.

This second time through, she thought she had a sense of the place. She selected a cubicle not directly seen from the hallway and sat. She couldn’t put her finger on it but as she examined the work area it gave her the impression that no one had worked at it recently. She slid into place and turned on the computer.

The backdoors into the system that Jeff and Frank had constructed were of necessity composed of several pieces. One bit was code they had planted in the trading engine. This connected to more code on the jump server, which in turn connected to still more code on other computers they’d compromised, including the essential Payment Dynamo servers. These connected out of the Exchange to the C2 servers they’d rented in public cloud providers such as Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Windows Azure. This was the tunnel Jeff and Frank employed and from which they could accomplish anything they wanted, from spying on employees on the IT side to injecting more code into the trading engine if that proved necessary.