An incredible thriller from a brilliant new British writer
Gavin Robertson's debut novel for Headline books possesses the ingredients to be a huge bestseller; a realistic financial seam that could really work, and a love story played out on a Washington and Cambridge stage.
Computer expert Simon Northcott has very nearly perfected the biggest financial seam the world has ever seen. But his scheme to plunder the foreign exchange markets has one vital piece missing, a tricky bit of advanced maths called a drifting table, needed to keep all the millions of simultaneous deals together for the few seconds needed to pull it off. For that he needs a genuine maths genius - and someone he can trust more than he trusts himself. Which is where Kay, better known as Thousand (because of her daunting IQ) comes in. But does he want to involve the only woman he's ever really loved in a scheme that will more than likely get her killed? Because once the powers that be get wind of the seam he knows they're going to go to any lengths to make the problem and its perpetrators disappear. And as Simon is about to discover, advanced maths is a simple affair compared to the labyrinthine complexities of the human heart.
The financial seam at the heart of this book is complex. Dr. Simon Northcott knows that at the end of each day's trading on the worlds stock markets the large players place their overnight electronic 'cash' on the Foreign Exchange markets to take advantage of the extra profit offered by minor overnight fluctuations in the currencies across the world.
This dealing is usually uneventful and is trusted to computers owned by the separate Transnationals and major banks. As a precaution the computers are programmed to place all spare cash in 'safe' currencies such as the U.S. Dollar or German Mark over the midnight transition between two 'days'. But this rather conservative approach results in a very small rise in the safe currencies due to their 'popularity' at the midnight changeover.
The rise is barely perceptible and only lasts a few seconds. But it happens every time. Simon thinks that if he can electronically hack into the mainframes and 'borrow' enough money, ride it on those few seconds Forex trading, he will come out ahead every time.
He is clever enough to design and operate most of the hacking and dealing software he needs and knows it is undetectable. He is certain they will never see what is happening and wouldn't be able to stop him even if they did.
Outwitting the computers that monitor the foreign exchange markets is never going to be easy. It involves Large Number Theory, Drifiting Tables, Interference Clocks and Dry Accounts. But it is a seam that could really work. And it could also get you killed.
Gavin Robertson is an Australian brought up in England. He studied Life Sciences at the University of Liverpool and then Parasitology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He took a Ph.D. at Cambridge in Entomological Population Modelling where he first began to work with computers. Afterwards he travelled extensively as a technical advisor on tropical agriculture and specialised in cotton and cocoa. He took time out to do an M.B.A. and 'ended up', he says, negotiating U.S. Aid in Washington D.C. for Third World Malaria Control projects. Tired of all that, he returned to live permanently in Cambridge where at least you can get a decent cup of coffee. Now, by day he stares at Spreadsheets and crunches numbers for a living. In the evenings he writes, cooks appallingly, thinks about gardening and reads voraciously.
Sometimes, on summer evenings, he walks down to Byrons Pool to throw in twigs. To watch the dragonflies.
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