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to keep it hidden.
    “So you want to fire the trader. The guy who has been making twenty mil or so for you every year for the last five years. That’s a hundred million dollars, Virgil, and you’re going to can him forputting one percent of that aside for a rainy day—or January, whichever comes first.”
    “It’s not the money. He’s mismarking a position. The SEC will have us restating earnings going back to the firm’s inception.”
    I saw the big picture; I just thought there was a better way of keeping the crowd of pirates, hustlers, gunslingers, and cowboys that comprised the workforce at a Wall Street firm from degenerating into a gang of thieves.
    “The SEC won’t care if you don’t tell them. They don’t want to know about it. This is penny-ante stuff. You want to send a signal? You want to stop this kind of thing? Fire the manager. He sat here, looked you straight in the face, and lied his ass off, Virgil, and you know it. And he knew you knew it, and he didn’t care.”
    “It’s a matter of ‘he said, he said.’ I can’t fire a senior manager over some finger-pointing mess. I’d cut the legs out from under every other manager I’ve got.”
    “You hired me to find the cheaters, Virgil, not to tell you how to run the firm. I found this guy. Give me another week and I’ll find ten more. What they’re doing is not that unusual. If you fire the trader, you will have a late-year boost to earnings as every other trader marks his book correctly. And next December everyone will have forgotten the lesson and it will be the same crap all over again. But if you can the manager and bring in the head guy on every other trading desk and tell them
why
you are canning him, you’ll have a much better chance of never having to deal with this little problem ever again. And,” I said, smiling for the first time, “you’ll still get the pop in earnings, just as soon as they get back to their desks and lay down the law.”
    He saw the logic, but it didn’t make him happy. “He stood by the firm when we were badly on the ropes.”
    I gave him a look of open skepticism. “He had no choice. Wherewas he going to go? The guy swears he had no idea his trader was mismarking the book. So he is either a liar or a total incompetent. Either way, he’s a loser. Give him the boot.”
    “And the trader?”
    “Tell him he’s on probation. But pay him a bonus based on what he legitimately earned. My bet? You will never have to have another conversation with him about this. Case closed.”
    “I may lose some of my top managers this way.”
    “And you’ll be left with guys who aren’t afraid to tell you the truth.”
    He was sold, but it might take him a day or two to admit it. The manager was toast. If the guy had any brains at all, he was already sending out résumés.
    “Anything else we need to discuss?” Virgil sounded more than tired.
    “No,” I said. “Just that if you upgrade your oversight systems, as I recommended, you won’t have to bug me with this nonsense.”
    My whining amused him. “You are not being sufficiently entertained?”
    “Challenged,” I countered. My contract with Virgil was unbreakable. He owed me, and the paperwork confirmed it. This gave me a certain latitude when discussing my assignments.
    “The new systems will be in place and ready for testing by mid-January.”
    “And by next year this time, your traders will all have figured out how to circumvent them—if their managers let them.”
    He shrugged, dismissing the subject. “Maybe you’re right. Meanwhile, I may have something that will stretch your mental muscles a bit more. What do you know about insider trading?”
    “It’s illegal.”
    “True. But I may need you to develop a more nuanced view. Read up on the subject and watch the news over the weekend. Oneof the firm’s clients may need us to bail him out by Monday morning.”
    Philip Haley, the CEO of Arinna Labs and an early wunderkind in the field of