chapter two

Henry stopped at the Safeway on Market Street at 2:00 A.M., on his way back from the office. Twenty-one hours earlier, he had also stopped at Safeway on the way to work. His eyes struggled to adjust to the sudden fluorescent brilliance of the store. Everything seemed to sparkle in a shrink-wrapped, cartoon-like way. The aisles were deserted, except for where the stocking clerks were cutting through the cellophane that held together giant boxes of Fruit Loops. Individual cartons had fallen off the dolly and littered the shiny waxed floor.

“Kellogg,” he thought, “Symbol: K. Close 38 1/8, up 1/8.” For several days, the stock had shown some unusual activity in deep-out-of-the-money calls.

His night trajectory through the store was always identical. Contadina garlic cheese ravioli, Prego tomato sauce (made with mushrooms). He dove a scoop into a bin full of too-perfect broccoli florets and baby carrots and spilled them into a clear plastic bag. A cold six pack of Corona. The checkout counters were vacant; all the clerks were stocking. He stood and leafed through People magazine, waiting for someone to notice him. He soaked up the pictures of movie stars in flimsy dresses, and felt the usual flicker of annoyance at the human-interest stories.

A clerk looked up from her pricing gun, and came over to the register. Despite having engaged in an identical transaction with this particular clerk a hundred times, there was still a formality of total strangers. How are you? I’m good. Find everything you needed? Yes. Safeway Club Card? No. ATM or credit? ATM. Cash back? No. Thanks and have a great evening. Thanks, you too.

In the parking lot, tendrils of fog were melting the sodium vapor lights into orange halos. He put the groceries in the leather passenger seat and let the car drift out of the parking lot. On 14^th Street, there was a huge empty spot on the steep grade in front of his house. For a month or so, he had used the car cover that the Porsche dealership had given him, but it had become too much of a hassle. The house was dark. Hollister had not come home.

The light on the answering machine burned steady and uncalled. There was no note on the kitchen table. In the sink was a pile of stoneware encrusted with tomato sauce. From beneath the plates he fished out a Calaphon four-quart saucepan. A square of pasta had cemented itself to the bottom. He filled the pot with water and put it on the stove.

He took a beer and went into the office to log in. His code had been running since the 1:00 P.M. close of the options market. All afternoon and evening, a parallel supercomputer in the basement of the D.R. Crawford building sifted through millions of trades, computing endless Fourier transforms, looking for patterns. As it ran, a part of the code studied itself, evolving its structure in response to another day of historical data. The Byzantine collection of fifty thousand lines of c++ was all geared to a simple underlying goal.

Somewhere perhaps, a small drug company has success in clinical trials of a new diabetes drug, and the FDA is inclined to declare that the company is ready to move to phase III trials. The news is a tightly held secret, but of course a few people know. Someone lets information slip in confidence, and options on the company are purchased. Spread thinly among several buyers. Shuttled through offshore accounts. Spaced out in time so as to not arouse the suspicion of the SEC agents and the SEC computers that will analyze each transaction after the fact.

For more than a year, he had been writing a code that could detect insider trading within the public record of options trades. If it could be made to work, it would be a perfectly legal money-making machine. For Henry, the prospect of a visit from the SEC held only the prospect of validation and success. The code became an addiction. His supervisors were becoming impatient. They wanted results. The string of twenty-hour days was the result.

The day’s output had printed to a series of files. He stared at the columns of numbers and activity analyses on the screen. Gradually, a coherent picture congealed and he felt his body deflate.

Something had gone completely wrong.

The routine had traced out a vast interconnected web of insider trading that looked like the feverish imagination of a conspiracy theorist. His code was recommending that the derivatives group place inordinately leveraged bets on a giant volatility spike for Hudson Networks, along with a strange array of other companies: Ergo-Biosys, Fairchild Silicon Industries, and a list of others with ticker symbols that he had never seen. There was no discernible reason to expect that any of this represented insider trading. Certainly, Hudson Networks, with a market capitalization of one half-trillion dollars, was far too large for anyone to take over. Even a dramatic announcement— a dire earnings warning perhaps, or a sequence of takeovers of smaller companies could not justify the crazy positions that the program was recommending.

The prospect of facing Myron in four and a half hours, of trying to explain again why his year’s worth of intense effort was failing to pay off, was more than he could deal with.

The front door slammed. The particular tenor of the footsteps on the stairs sent more shards of anxiety through his stomach.

Hollister was standing in the doorway, the fabric of her white dress was soaked red. “Jesus,” he jumped up awkwardly, “What happened?”

He stood and stared at her. The right side of the dress above her breast was heavily stained. Maybe her nose had been bleeding.

She was staring at him with a kind of empty contempt.

“Oh nothing. It’s just a broken blood vessel or something. I see that this is what it takes to tear you away from your computer?”

He stood several feet away from her, but the psychic distance between them was so great that the prospect of reaching out to embrace her seemed impossible.

“I haven’t seen you in weeks,” she said, “It’s like I don’t even exist for you.”

His body stiffened, bracing for hours of argument. He was so far behind in sleep.

“I’m sorry”, he started, “I guess it’s that I’ve been so preoccupied with work. All these problems with the code.” He could tell that the litany sounded dull and mechanical. It had been worn smooth by months of use.

Surprisingly, her anger seemed to evaporate. She stepped forward and put her hand on his forearm. “Henry, you look exhausted. Come on, take a shower and go to bed.”

In the bathroom mirror, his eyes were bloodshot. He opened the medicine cabinet and took out the Rogaine.

Beer and lack of exercise had blurred and thickened his face. As he undressed, he heard water running in the front bathroom. The sound was still there when he finished his own shower and fell across the unmade king-size bed. Falling asleep, he was vaguely aware that she wasn’t joining him.

He awoke suddenly in a bath of gray morning light. The transition to consciousness was jarring and instantaneous as he realized he had overslept. The clock radio said ten forty eight. He had missed the morning meeting with Myron, and he had not set up the day’s trading strategy for the derivatives group. Why hadn’t they called? On a Monday, seven months earlier, he had overslept and they had reached him by seven. He ran into the office to check the computer.

The terminal window on his screen has long since frozen into an inactivity disconnect. He typed:

%ssh –X –l henry@ethylene.drcrawford.com

He was confronted immediately with a terse message:

%connection refused by foreign host

“Shit, shit, shit!” He tried the command again and got the same response. Presumably another security flaw had turned up somewhere, and there had been a CERT bulletin, and the system manager had shut down connectivity.

In grade school, Henry had dreaded illness. His brothers had always enjoyed the luxury of a day off from school, sitting in front of the television and gorging on ice cream bars. For him, the prospect of displacement from the routine had gnawed at his stomach and crippled him with unease. Now, twenty-five years later, the feeling was identical and its effect was amplified. In Chicago, the CBOE had already been open for more than five hours. The landscape of market positions had diffused irrevocably from his state of familiarity. He had the sensation of waking up in the backseat of a driver-less car in highway traffic.

He grabbed the phone and dialed Jim on the trading floor.

“Jesus, Man, Where the fuck are you?” Jim shouted, “We’re driving blind here without your positions! Hudson is fucking lighting up, and you had us down for fucking short last night!”

“Shit, Man, I don’t know. I’m sorry Man, look, I overslept.”

“Then get on-line and help us out!”

“I can’t. The server isn’t letting me in.”

“Well then get the fuck in here. We’re dying up here! We’re fucking getting killed!”

Henry closed his eyes as the receiver clicked off. He felt cold. Running back through the living room, he saw a disordered down comforter on the couch. A small corner of his mind reflected that she had never gone to the extent of spending the night on the couch. And oddly, she hadn’t even seemed particularly angry. The argument he had expected had never materialized.

The bedroom floor was littered with a debris of crumpled suits. For the past several weeks, he had arrived home exclusively after Midnight. The dry cleaners closed at eight. He rooted through the clothes that he had been using for the past week. One of his bone-white Joseph Abboud shirts was rumpled and had coffee stains, but they were not visible underneath his black Prada suit. He had been gaining weight and the whole outfit was too tight.

Outside, the sun had nearly burned away the morning overcast. The owner of the bed and breakfast across the street was standing in his bathrobe watering his

Hydrangeas with a hose. He gave a friendly wave that Henry failed to notice. During the night, two SUVs had somehow managed to crowd into his parking spot, and his Porsche was wedged between the bumpers.

“Fuck!” he swore repeatedly as he wrestled with the stick, alternately bashing into the boxy 4x4’s. On the second-to-last cut, as he tried to get out completely, there was a sickening scrape against high-gloss paint.

He suddenly remembered that the gas gauge had been on empty for the past two days. The Sanchez Shell station was completely filled. Cars were waiting three deep for a turn at the pumps. He briefly considered taking a right on Market to the Castro Chevron, but the thought of losing even another minute was too much.

“Fuck it!” he hissed with a vicious exhale. He pounded the heel of his hand against the dash. The left-turn light at Market seemed to be caught in a time warp. He stared ahead, trying to keep his head from exploding. The sun glared in his eyes.

An older man with a precisely trimmed gray beard crossed slowly in front of him, arm in arm with a twenty five year old brown-muscled Adonis. The light finally turned green. He pealed out with an acceleration that slammed him back into the seat, narrowly missing the pair. The older man gave him the finger.

He gunned the car down Market, whipping past refurbished 1947 streetcars. At Dolores, he ran the red light, raising honks from all sides. Below Van Ness, there was a long gap in the traffic. In the space of a block, he had the car up to sixty. At Larkin, he noticed that the engine had begun to sputter and choke. The car was lurching forward in spurts. He was running on fumes. No gas stations this far down. Two blocks later, at 7^th, the accelerator had gone completely dead. With the last bit of forward momentum, he rolled diagonally into the clear space of curb in front of a fire hydrant. Completely out of gas.

“Jesus Fucking Christ.”

He sat for a moment, his variously unpleasant options clamoring for his attention. An articulated MUNI bus rounded the corner onto Market. The heavyset driver leaned over the wheel, judging the rapidly closing distance in rapid-fire and ultimately flawed estimation. The brakes of the bus slammed. The bumper of the bus crunched into his car. There was a split-second of silence, followed by the clatter of a smashed tail-light on the pavement.

The bus door opened. The driver emerged. He had a red face and a crew cut.

“Man,” he said, “Sorry about that. What the hell were you doing parked in the hydrant space, anyway?”

Henry realized vaguely that he was a highly paid employee of D.R. Crawford and that he was expected to get angry. The bus driver was mostly at fault. Insurance would cover everything. It would entail hours of delay. Drawling policemen in the burning sun slowly filling out forms. In his rush to leave the house he had forgotten to bring his cell phone. He saw himself pumping quarters into a phone booth, explaining his predicament to sympathetic ears on the trading floor, “Yeah, I’m running a little slow right now. Got into a car accident.” He closed his eyes for a moment and exhaled, trying to calm down.

“OK, Look,” he said to the driver, “Don’t worry, alright? I needed to have some bodywork done anyway. We’ll just say it never happened, cool?”

The bus driver gave him an incredulous look. Henry could hear his thoughts.

“Goddamn little dot com Fuck. Gets his fucking Porsche bashed in and doesn’t even give

a fuck.”

“You sure about that?” asked the driver.

“Yeah.”

The driver got in the bus, which groaned and heaved away from his battered Porsche. The towers of the Financial District reared up a half-mile away like a mountain range. He could see the windows of the D. R. Crawford trading floor: third row from the top of 71 Battery. Getting there as fast as possible was all that mattered. He abandoned the car and started to run.

Within a block, he was winded. For eight months, his membership at Gold’s Gym had been evident only in unnoticed automatic withdrawals from his account. He unbuttoned his jacket and loosened his tie as he ran.

After five blocks, he was drenched with sweat. His Prada jacket held its elegant cut, mopping up the sweat, but his shirt, his pants and his tie were wilted wrecks. Three blocks from his building he stooped over to roll up his pants above the knees. A bus full of Midwestern tourists slowed down expressly to gawk at him, “Even in the buttoned-down center of the Financial District, San Francisco is a city of colorful individualism.” He ran through the granite-floored lobby of his building, squeezing in between the closing doors of an elevator.

The car was nearly full. Everyone stood packed quietly together, eyes averted, each person alone and distinct. Henry started unpleasantly when he noticed that Myron was at the back of the car. If he had seen Henry, he made no sign of acknowledgment. The Prada suit was a suffocating blanket. Unbroken rivulets of sweat were trickling down his skin and dripping on the polished floor of the elevator car. He felt an urge to force open his eyes, as if the situation were a nightmare from which he could emerge. He shook his legs as discreetly as he could, trying to get his pants legs to unroll. The left cuff unrolled, the right one was too tight and stayed put, exposing the full length of his sock and an interval of hairy skin. The elevator stopped several times. Finally, he and Myron were the only ones in the car.

Myron was looking at him with a detached curiosity.

“What happened to you?”

“I ran out of gas.”

The elevator opened into the sleek black foyer. D.R. Crawford was etched in lower-case San serif on a wall made from fossil-bearing polished limestone.

“Henry, could you come into my office?” Myron asked.

Myron was a small non-nondescript man with a head for numbers. Like most of the upper managers in the firm, his career was a dulled reflection of the career of D.R. Crawford. Everyone in the group had obtained doctorates in theoretical physics at Princeton, where they had studied under the supervision of the Nobel Prize-winning Thomas Cornell. Shortly before the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in the early Nineties, Crawford had switched gears and entered the financial industry. His trajectory was an oft-repeated myth. Crawford had started out at Morgan Stanley, at the head of the first wave of physicists who had altered the analytical landscape of finance. He had been phenomenally successful, rising to control of the Derivatives Group, and making several hundred million dollars in profits for his employers. In 1996, before he left to form his own company, his annual bonus had topped thirty million dollars.

The success had continued to compound. The D. R. Crawford Corporation had never missed a profitable quarter. It had made billions of dollars betting against shaky Asian currencies in the early phases of the 1998 crisis. Crawford’s judgment, his innate feel for the direction of the market, was legend.

Myron’s office had a dramatic corner view northwest across Nob Hill and on to the Golden Gate. The room was devoid of anything other than what the company provided (which included a large oil painting of a three-masted square-rigged ship negotiating treacherous seas). Myron worked all the time and rarely seemed to venture beyond the building. Hollister, after meeting him at an office party, had speculated that from Friday night through Sunday morning, when the world markets were closed, he lapsed into an inanimate state, sitting stiff and unmoving like an empty bottle, until the New Zealand exchange opened, marking the start of a new week.

Myron closed the door.

“I don’t want you to take any of this personally,” he said, “D.R. has decided that we’re spending too much of our effort on the genetic algorithms. He wants to refocus the computational resources on short-timescale analysis, so we’re going to let you go.”

Henry stared numbly at Myron. They were axing him. There was a silence. Finally he said, “I know that the code isn’t working, but I think it’s really on the verge. I think that...”

Myron’s voice was even and unstrained as he interrupted, “As I said, Henry, this is by no means a reflection on you. We’ve been completely satisfied with the work that you’ve done for us. You’re going out with our highest recommendation.”

Myron paused and studied Henry’s expression.

Henry was too stunned to say anything. “It’s actually happening,” he thought, “They’re actually doing it.” Variations on this scene had played in his thoughts for months as he had struggled to debug the code.

“We’ve put together a severance package, Henry. Your desk has been cleared and packed up.”

There was another silence. A passage from the Phaedo crowded into his mind,

His legs began to fail, and then he lay on his back, according to the directions, and the man who gave him the poison now and then looked at his feet and legs; and after a while he pressed his foot hard and asked him if he could feel; and he said, no; and then his leg, and so upward and upward, and showed us that he was cold and stiff. And he felt them himself, and said: “When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end. “

“As you know, you signed a non-disclosure agreement when you began working here. The codes that you’ve worked on are the sole intellectual property of D.R. Crawford. You are required to destroy any copies that you may have.”

He looked at Henry with a hint of question.

“Right,” said Henry.

“Good. As I said, there’s really nothing personal here. This was strictly an upper-level decision.”

A giant container ship was crawling under the traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge.