Suddenly, the chart froze. The numbers stopped moving. “What happened?” Victor asked. “Did the exchange halt the stock?” “No,” Selena said, typing furiously. “It’s not the exchange. It’s us. My orders aren’t going through.” She pulled up the terminal command line. Error. Connection refused. Gateway timeout. “He’s hitting us,” Selena said. “Vargas isn’t just a CEO. He has a cybersecurity team. They’ve realized it’s Callaway Capital. They’re DDoSing our gateway. They’re jamming our connection to the exchange.” “Can we fix it?” Victor yelled. “I’m locked out,” Selena said, panic edging into her voice. “If we can’t close the short position and the stock bounces on a dead-cat bounce, we lose everything. He’s trying to force a squeeze.”
On the screen, the price flickered. Three dollars. Then three dollars and twenty cents. Vargas was using his remaining capital to artificially pump the price back up while Callaway was blind. “He’s counterattacking,” Victor realized. “He’s trying to blow up our margin.” Selena stared at the error message. Her breathing became shallow. For a second, she was not in a Manhattan high-rise. She was back in her father’s study, watching him weep as his screens went black, locked out by the same banks that destroyed him. The trauma of that night, the helplessness, washed over her. “I can’t do it. I’m just a waitress. I’m just Selena.”
Victor grabbed her shoulders. “Snap out of it. You said you wanted to destroy him. Well, he’s at the gate. What would Arthur Pendleton do?” The name of her father acted like a slap. Her eyes snapped into focus. “Arthur wouldn’t use the gateway,” she whispered. She spun her chair around. “Johnson, where is the hard line? The old copper-wire backup line for the fax machines.” “The fax line?” Johnson stammered. “It’s in the server room. But it’s analog. It’s too slow for HFT.” “I don’t need speed anymore,” Selena said, grabbing her laptop. “I need a tunnel he can’t see. Vargas is jamming the fiber optics. He’s not looking for a dial-up connection.”
She sprinted across the trading floor, Victor close behind her. They burst into the server room, a freezing-cold locker of humming black towers. Selena found the phone jack on the wall. She ripped the cord out of the dust-covered fax machine and jammed it into a dongle on her laptop. “It’s going to take ten seconds to handshake,” Selena said. The screeching sound of a dial-up modem filled the room, a ghost of the 1990s. “Come on,” Victor urged. “Price is back up to thirty-eight. We’re losing the advantage.” “Connected,” Selena said.
She was not using the fancy trading interface anymore. She was in the raw code, sending text-based commands directly to the NYSE server via a protocol that had not been used in a decade. “Sending the kill shot,” she muttered. She executed a final algorithm, an iceberg order. It broke the massive short position into thousands of tiny invisible chunks, slipping them past Vargas’s detection bots and flooding the market from a thousand different angles.
Back on the trading floor, the screens came alive. TRTN. Thirty-eight dollars. Twenty-two. Fifteen. The pump failed. Vargas’s defense crumbled under the weight of the analog assault. Breaking news. The TV blared. CEO of Triton Heavy Industries, Jonathan Vargas, seen being escorted out of headquarters in handcuffs. Fraud allegations confirmed. That was the nail in the coffin. TRTN. Eight dollars. Four. Then a dull twenty cents.
Selena slumped against the server rack, the adrenaline crashing out of her system. Victor looked at the laptop screen. The profit-and-loss column was a string of green numbers so long he had to count the commas. “One hundred forty million,” Victor whispered. “In twenty minutes.” He looked down at Selena. She was trembling. He sat down on the cold floor next to her, the billionaire and the waitress, surrounded by blinking lights. “You did it,” Victor said. “You got him.” Selena closed her eyes. “He’s not just broke, Victor. He’s in debt to the cartel that funded his leverage. He’s finished.”