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.