I'm here to replace you. Victoria scoffed, turning back to her tablet. Get out of my office, you psycho. Aiden walked out. He didn't look back.
The long game had officially begun. Three hours after leaving Cross Capital, Aiden sat in a diner that smelled of burnt coffee and old grease. The vinyl on the booth was held together with duct tape. Across the table sat Thomas Reed. Reed was a billionaire, though you wouldn't know it.
He wore a faded flannel shirt and possessed a thick, untrimmed beard. He ran a boutique hedge fund that operated entirely in the shadows, feeding off the carcasses of larger, sloppier firms. Reed and Victoria Cross hated each other. It wasn't professional. It was deeply personal.
Victoria had poached Reed's top traders three years ago, nearly tanking his fund in a hostile maneuver. She actually said that? Reed asked, chewing on a greasy french fry. We don't hire poor men. Word for word, Aiden said.
He opened his battered laptop and turned the screen toward Reed. Arrogance is a disease, Reed grunted, wiping his hands on a napkin. It rots the brain. But she's not stupid, Aiden. She's got a fortress.
How are you going to breach it with my money? Aiden tapped the screen. A massive wall of code appeared, scrolling so fast it was a blur. 10 years ago, before her father forced me out, I wrote the baseline algorithm for their risk management. Victoria thinks they've updated it.
They haven't. They've just built pretty interfaces on top of a foundation they don't fundamentally understand. Her quants are terrified to touch the core architecture because it works. "Until it doesn't," Reed said, his eyes narrowing. "Exactly," Aiden replied.
He pulled up a chart showing global shipping indexes and rare earth metal futures. I built a blind spot into the code. A very specific, highly improbable market scenario. If commodity futures in Southeast Asia drop by exactly 12% while domestic interest rates tick up a quarter point, the algorithm doesn't register the correlation. It sees the dip as a temporary market correction, not a structural failure.
Reed leaned forward, the casual demeanor vanishing. "It tells them to hold. " "Worse," Aiden said. "It tells them to double down. It interprets the drop as a discount. It will automatically leverage their cash reserves to buy the dip.
But the dip won't be a dip. It will be a cliff. "And how are you going to create that specific market scenario, Aiden? We aren't gods. We can't move global commodity markets just to trigger your trapdoor. " "We don't have to," Aiden said, pointing to the ticker.
Look at the geopolitical news from this morning. Supply chain strikes in the Pacific. The Federal Reserve is meeting tomorrow and every indicator says they're raising rates by a quarter point to combat inflation. The market is going to create the scenario for us. It's happening by Friday.
Reed stared at the screen. He did the math in his head. The magnitude of the impending slaughter was staggering. If Cross Capital's algorithm triggers, they will hemorrhage billions in a matter of hours. Their board will panic.
They will face a margin call they can't cover. Aidan corrected. Unless a private entity swoops in, buys their toxic debt at pennies on the dollar, and assumes majority voting rights to save the firm from total bankruptcy. Reed looked at Aidan. He saw the scuffed shoes.
He saw the cheap suit. But looking into Aidan's eyes, he saw something terrifying. He saw a man who had nothing left to lose wielding a weapon capable of leveling empires. You need me to bankroll the buyout, Reed said quietly. I need three billion dollars, Aidan said.
In liquid capital ready to deploy the second the algorithm hangs them out to dry. You provide the capital, I execute the trades, we take the firm. You get 51%, I get 49, and Victoria Cross gets nothing. Reed smiled. It was a wolf smile.
I'll make the calls. You better be right about this code, Aidan. I am. Aidan closed the laptop and left the diner. He didn't celebrate.
His chest felt tight. The machinery was in motion and there was no stopping it now. He took the subway back to his neighborhood stopping at a discount grocery store. He bought a box of macaroni and cheese, a small carton of milk, and a cheap bouquet of yellow carnations. When he unlocked the door to his apartment, the babysitter, a teenager from down the hall, was sitting on the couch scrolling on her phone.
Lily was at the kitchen table drawing with broken crayons. "Hey bug," Aiden said, his voice instantly softening. The cold, calculating corporate assassin vanished. He was just a dad again, tired and achy. Lily dropped her crayon and ran to him wrapping her arms around his legs.
"You got flowers. They're for you," he said handing her the wrapped plastic. "And for Mom. " They put half the flowers in a water glass on the table and the other half next to a framed photograph of a woman with warm eyes and a tired smile. Sarah. Aiden stared at the picture for a long time.
Sarah had died in a hospice bed because Aiden's health insurance through his menial jobs wasn't enough for the experimental treatments. When she got sick, he had gone to Victoria Cross. He had begged her for a loan against the equity he was promised when he built their systems. Victoria had legally maneuvered him out of his contract years prior. She told him in the lobby, surrounded by security, that his poor financial planning was not her company's problem.
Aiden shook his head pulling himself back to the present. He boiled water for the macaroni. He helped Lily with her math homework, patiently explaining subtraction. He listened to her talk about a stray dog she saw on the playground. He tucked her into bed at 8:00 p.m.
She coughed, a deep rattling sound that made Aiden's stomach clench. He gave her a dose of the cheap cough syrup he could afford. "Did you get the job, Dad? " she murmured. Her eyes half-closed. Aiden brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.
"I start on Monday, sweetheart. Everything is going to change. " He turned off her light. He walked into the living room, opened his laptop, and spent the next 10 hours writing the execution scripts that would burn Victoria Cross to the ground. Friday morning, 9:30 a.m. Victoria Cross stood by the massive floor-to-ceiling windows of her office, drinking a $12 green juice.
The sky over the city was a bruised, heavy gray. She checked her watch. The Federal Reserve had announced the quarter-point rate hike 20 minutes ago. She walked back to her desk and tapped her monitor to wake it. She expected a slight dip in the market, a brief period of volatility.