Victor looked around the room again. This was not just a hobby. This was a war room. “Why tell me about Triton?” Victor asked. “Why save me? If I lose everything, I’m just another casualty.” Selena walked up to him. She was small, but in this room, amidst her data, she loomed larger than him. “Because, Mr. Callaway, the man who is selling you Triton, Jonathan Vargas, is one of the men who destroyed my father. He’s using you. He needs you to hold the bag when the EPA hits so he can cash out and disappear.” She pointed a finger at his chest. “I didn’t tell you to save you. I told you because I need you to help me destroy him.”
Victor’s phone buzzed again. It was a text from Johnson. Update. We just got a drone shot of the Triton HQ. Federal SUVs are lining up down the block. It’s happening. Victor looked at the text, then at Selena. The market opened in two hours. “Okay,” Victor said, the adrenaline surging through his veins. “You have my attention. What’s the play?” Selena smiled, and for the first time it looked dangerous. “We don’t just sell,” she said. “We reverse the position. But we have to do it in a way they won’t see coming. We’re going to trigger a liquidity trap. But I need your trading floor to do it.” “My trading floor?” “I need access to your mainframe, Victor. I need the speed of your execution algorithms. If we do this from my laptops, they’ll trace it. If we do it from Callaway Capital, it just looks like you panic-selling.”
Victor hesitated. Giving a stranger, a waitress, the daughter of a disgraced genius, access to his firm’s central nervous system was insanity. It was suicide. But if he did not, he was bankrupt by noon. “Get your coat,” Victor said. “And bring the laptops.”
The elevator ride to the fortieth floor was silent, thick with a tension that felt like static electricity. Victor stood watching the digital floor numbers climb, his reflection in the polished brass doors looking paler than usual. Beside him, Selena clutched her battered laptop case like it contained nuclear codes. Brad was in the corner, frantically scrolling through Twitter on his phone, muttering about sentiment analysis.
When the doors slid open, the trading floor of Callaway Capital was no longer the ghost town it had been an hour ago. The sun was rising over the East River, casting long blood-orange shadows across the rows of monitors. The junior analysts had arrived, a sea of blue shirts and caffeine jitters, preparing for the opening bell. The room went dead silent as Victor marched in, followed not by a banking executive, but by a woman in oversized sweatpants and a frayed T-shirt.
“Johnson,” Victor roared. “Clear the center desk. Everyone else, headsets on, eyes forward. If I see a single phone out recording this, you’re fired before you hit the ground floor.” Johnson, a man with a receding hairline and an ulcer he treated with constant antacids, hurried over. He looked at Selena with open disdain. “Mr. Callaway, the pre-market is volatile. We have exposure on the Triton position. Why is she here?” “She’s driving,” Victor said, gesturing to the main terminal, the seat usually reserved for the head of quantitative strategy.
She took the chair. She reversed the position. She shorted the thing Victor had been about to buy, and she did it in pieces small enough that Vargas’s desk would not see the knife until it was already in. For a while, it worked. “Unrealized gains crossing fifty million,” Johnson shouted. “Not yet,” Selena said. “He’s going to fight back.”