He left his office and hurried across the floor. By the time he reached Ivan Davidoff’s office, he was running. “Ivan, you free?”
“Sure, boss,” said the bespectacled IT professional.
“You familiar with a company called Matronix?”
“Of course. Their machines run the most sophisticated trading systems in the world.”
“And we just bought a bunch of them-I mean, my father did.”
“Yes, they’re housed in New Jersey.”
“No,” said Astor. “I mean here in Manhattan. The ones housed at the Exchange.”
“There are only a few there. Traders on the floor use remote terminals to input orders. The heart of the machinery is at the trading center in Mahwah.”
“Where?”
“Mahwah, New Jersey. All trading moved there two years ago.”
“So you couldn’t screw with the trading platform from the floor?”
“The only place you can tinker with the system is in Mahwah.”
“And you could introduce a source code there?”
“That’s correct.” Ivan Davidoff eyed Astor strangely. “What do you know about source codes?”
Sandy Beaufoy watched helplessly as the police took down three of his men. He glanced to his left. At the corner of Wall and Broadway, police tackled another one. Down the street, a female plainclothes officer held a pistol to the head of one of the Swedish girls. The entire area was swarming with undercover policemen.
The operation had been compromised.
“Freeze!”
Beaufoy spun and shot the policeman standing behind him in the head. Thirty feet away, another plainclothes cop charged his way, firing his gun. Beaufoy shot him, too.
Beaufoy ran into the building behind him. It was a bank. The lobby was crowded, but all activity had frozen at the sound of the first gunshot. As one, customers and employees stared at him. A security guard drew a gun. Beaufoy fired into the ceiling and the lobby devolved into chaos, every man, woman, and child for himself. Beaufoy ran through them, dodging and elbowing his way to the rear of the building. A narrow lane separated him from the Exchange. He freed his H &K, broke from the door, and charged toward the building’s New Street entrance. The police saw him coming, but he opened fire first. Glass shattered. Men fell. He threw open the door and shot a man in front of him.
Beaufoy ran along the corridor. The exfil plan was as important as the attack itself. He did not want to give his life to cause a blip in trading volume. He ran down one corridor, then another. He heard voices behind him. A woman shouting for him to freeze. A bullet struck the wall above his head. Too close. He slid on his knees, turning and spraying the corridor behind him. The woman was nowhere in sight. Beaufoy stood. The hall ended dead ahead, with offshoots to the right and left.
Which way?
He started right, then remembered it was left, then down a flight of stairs to the passageway that led out from under the Exchange a full city block south, to Beaver Street. The passage had been built when gold had been stored on the premises and bank officials did not want to bring it in under full public view. Beaver Street was the exfil point. From there, the teams would divide up and lose themselves in the warren of streets and alleys that made up the southern tip of Manhattan Island.
To the left, then.
The first bullet hit him before he could cover a step. A gut shot stopped by his vest. He hardly felt it. Beaufoy lifted the H &K and swiveled to get off a shot. The second bullet struck his neck and severed his spinal cord. He dropped to the ground as if he’d been unplugged.
A woman who was much too pretty to be a cop stood above him. She had lovely brown hair and eyes the color of good whiskey. He noticed that someone had given her a nice little shiner.
“Hello, Skinner,” she said.
“Like a labyrinth in here,” he muttered.
Beaufoy died.
90
Six buttonwood trees lined the pathway to the entrance of the New York Stock Exchange’s data center in Mahwah, New Jersey. The trees commemorated the storied buttonwood tree on Wall Street, where the first brokers of the infant United States had gathered in the late 1700s to trade shares. Septimus Reventlow thought it was a quaint touch. Ahead, a single set of doors provided entry to the building. No other doors led inside. There were no windows, either. The imposing stone structure looked more like a fortress or a monument to a modern-day pharaoh than the home of the world’s most sophisticated stock trading platform.
Reventlow walked easily toward the building. He had already cleared the security checkpoints without a hitch. First there had been the tall earthen berm and ironwork fence that surrounded the complex. Then there had been the three Delta barriers, each lowered only after he’d passed over the one before. None posed any problem. Reventlow’s name was on the visitors list. He was the day’s guest of honor.
An official waited at the door. Reventlow gave an alias, along with a matching identification, in this case a New York driver’s license. The alias matched the name of the vice president of a small investment bank that his brother had recently purchased. Like any similar institution, the bank desired to rent some space in the facility to house its own computers so they would be in close physical proximity to the computers that ran the Exchange. The proper term was colocation.
“All the Exchange’s proprietary computers are housed in a single twenty-thousand-square-foot room, or pod,” explained the official as they walked into the heavily air-conditioned building. “These machines match all buy and sell orders in the most efficient manner. We call them ‘matching engines.’”
“And these matching engines run the entire Exchange?”
“Eighty percent of it, and more each day. Of course, there are specialists on the floor who handle large block trades for their clients. But we’re able to assume more of that business, too. We also handle trades for the American Stock Exchange. All told, over three billion shares a day.”
“Impressive,” offered Reventlow.
“We’d like to put your hardware in a pod just down the hall. You’ll be sharing the space with a few other banks, but rest assured that you’ll be equidistant from our servers.”
“I wouldn’t want anything less,” said Reventlow. In the day of high-frequency trading, when millions of shares changed hands in seconds, the smallest difference in the time it took for a trade to be executed was crucial. Every thousand feet away from one of the Exchange’s matching engines meant an additional millionth of a second in transit time. While differences of a foot or 10 feet or even 1,000 feet conveyed no competitive disadvantage, differences of 10 miles or 100 or 1,000 miles did. Hence the need to allow banks to position their mainframes as close to the Exchange’s as possible.
“Do you think I might see the matching engines?”
“I’m sorry, that’s out of the question,” said the official. “I hope you understand.”
Reventlow reluctantly nodded. “Before I went into banking, I worked in systems design. I’ve heard this is a beauty.”
“If I do say so myself, it is. Tell you what, I can let you see our Risk Management Gateway. It’s the hardware we put in place to guarantee against any errors on your end.”
“So all trades pass through it?”
“Of course,” said the official, offended. “We consider it our prime competitive advantage.”