My Enemy Built My Alibi

One slip of the finger. That was all it took for fifteen billion dollars of the firms capital to vaporize in an instant, leaving us a hundred billion in debt to the exchange.

I was literally calculating the terminal velocity of a human body dropping from a forty-fourth-floor window, wondering if it would be enough to end things instantly.

That was when my sworn enemy kicked the door open, flanked by the entire legal team, and hurled a stack of glossy photographs right into my face.

"During the most critical thirty minutes of the trading day, youa Senior Trader at this firmwere busy sneaking off to sexually harass an intern!" he roared. "Look at these photos, Stratton. You're going to rot in federal prison!"

I stared down at the blurry, overexposed shots of a man's back pressed against a girl in a corner. I could feel a hysterical, breathless laugh bubbling up in my throat, stinging my eyes.

If I was supposedly busy committing sexual assault during that exact half-hour... then the hundred-billion-dollar fat-finger error that just blew up the firm wasn't my problem anymore, was it?

On the massive curved monitor of my terminal, the red candlestick line plunged downward, stretching longer than my life expectancy.

The entire market was ripping into a historic bull run!

And I was trapped in a massive, catastrophic short. The account had completely blown out.

The blood in my veins turned to ice water. I collapsed back into my ergonomic mesh chair, but I couldn't feel it supporting my weight. I was in freefall.

How had this happened?

Thirty-six consecutive hours of hyper-focused screen time will do that to you. Your brain turns to static. Just seconds ago, in a micro-moment of exhaustion-induced vertigo, my finger had slipped on the mouse.

Just a microscopic spasm of a muscle.

A long position, mistakenly entered as a short.

Shorting the market during an extreme, historic rally was like standing on the train tracks and trying to stop a freight train with your bare hands.

I could only watch, paralyzed, as fifteen billion dollars bled out of the firm's accounts, plunging violently past zero into a negative deficit. It became an astronomical number. A number I couldn't pay back in this lifetime, or the next, or the next.

No way to cancel the order.

No way to reverse it.

No chance for a remedy.

My mind was a white, blinding void. Only one crystal-clear thought managed to cut through the static:

It's over.

I hadn't just destroyed the firm; I had chained myself to a debt that would crush a small nation. According to my employment contract, a catastrophic operational failure of this magnitude made me personally liable.

My condo in Manhattan. My car. The modest suburban house my parents had worked their whole lives to pay off. The surgical fund I had painstakingly saved for my mothers treatments...

Everything would be seized, liquidated, and auctioned off. And it wouldn't even make a dent. It would be a single drop of water tossed into a raging ocean.

Three generations of my family, dragged down into the abyss because of my twitching finger.

I was a sinner.

A metallic, coppery taste rose in the back of my throat, but I didn't even have the strength to cough.

Over the years, I had generated tens of billions in pure profit for this firm. I was an industry myth. The guy they whispered about. The Wolf of Wall Street incarnate.

But what did that matter?

In the capital markets, it doesn't matter how many times you win. One catastrophic failure is all it takes to condemn you to hell.

I should leave a note, I thought.

My legs felt like they had been filled with wet concrete as I dragged myself toward the floor-to-ceiling windows of the forty-fourth floor. If I threw myself against the reinforced glass hard enough, it would shatter. The pavement below would make it quick.

Mom... I'm so sorry.

But just as my hand pressed against the cool glass.

Bang!

The explosive sound of the heavy mahogany doors flying open made my eardrums ring.

My rival, the Director of Trading, Bradley Hawthorne, stormed onto the floor. Behind him was a parade of suits from the legal and HR departments.

"Miles!"

He barked my name with a ferocious, unrestrained glee, slamming a thick stack of photographs directly against my chest. The sharp edge of the photo paper sliced across my cheekbone. A hot, stinging pain followed.

I looked down, picking one of the photos off the carpet.

In the grainy image, a man had a woman pinned against a wall in a shadowed alcove. The posture was aggressive, undeniable.

"During the most critical thirty minutes of the trading day, youa Senior Trader at this firmwere busy sneaking off to sexually harass an intern!" Bradley's voice was sharp, practically vibrating with triumph. "Look at these photos, Stratton. You're going to rot in federal prison!"

I froze.

Sexual harassment?

A half-hour ago?

Wasn't that... the exact timeframe of my fat-finger mistake?

I stared at the glossy paper in my hand, then slowly shifted my gaze to the catastrophic, blood-red deficit flashing on my monitors.

A tidal wave of pure, unadulterated euphoria violently shattered through my despair.

"You're done, Miles! Fired, effective immediately!"

Bradley stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his tailored suit straining slightly over his stomach.

"Pack your shit and get out! Scum like you don't belong in the financial sector."

He turned to the head of Legal standing over his shoulder. "Call the NYPD right now. A predator like this needs to be locked away."

Before the words fully left his mouth, a petite figure pushed her way through the crowd of onlookers.

It was the new intern, Paige.

The same shy, wide-eyed girl I had protected at last months client dinner by quietly intercepting three shots of whiskey meant for her.

Right now, her clothes were disheveled. She was clutching the collar of her silk blouse, where a button had conveniently popped off, sobbing inconsolably.

"No, please... don't call the police. Don't make this a public spectacle. I still have to build a career in this city..."

She gasped for air, looking up at me with eyes swimming with manufactured terror.

"Miles... I respected you so much. How could you do something so disgusting to me?"

The trading floor instantly erupted into a low, vicious murmur.

"Animal."

"I can't believe Miles is capable of that. And I actually looked up to the guy. What a joke."

"He's a stain on this firm."

Bradley soaked in the atmosphere. He looked incredibly satisfied.

He pulled two documents from his leather folder and slapped them down hard on my trading desk.

One was a Notice of Termination of Employment Contract. The other was a Voluntary Confession and Letter of Repentance.

"Sign it, Miles."

"Walk away with whatever shred of dignity you have left. If you sign, the firm will consider your past contributions and we'll handle this internally without pressing criminal charges."

He leaned in closer, dropping his voice. "If you fight this, I'll mail these photos directly to your sick mother's hospital room. Let her see exactly what kind of monster she raised."

"I'll make sure every hedge fund and bank in Manhattan knows that Miles Stratton is a predator who can't keep it in his pants. You will never touch a Bloomberg terminal again as long as you live."

I lowered my eyes, reading the text of the confession letter.

I, Miles Stratton, hereby admit that between the hours of 2:30 PM and 3:00 PM today, in the firm's 44th-floor rest lounge, I engaged in inappropriate and non-consensual physical conduct with Paige...

2:30 PM to 3:00 PM.

My catastrophic, firm-ending trade had executed precisely at 2:47 PM.

"I didn't do this!"

I jerked my head up. I forced my eyes to widen, letting them rim with red, pitching my voice into a raw, gravelly shout of a man who had been deeply and violently wronged.

"During that entire window, I was locked onto my monitors! I was trading! I didn't step away from this desk for a single second!"

My furious, unhinged reaction was exactly what they wanted to see. The desperate flailing of a pathetic, cornered animal.

Bradley predictably let out a contemptuous scoff.

"Still lying? You don't even have the spine to own up to your sickness."

He turned to the gathered crowd. "Let's ask the floor. Did anyone see our star trader at his desk a half-hour ago?"

His gaze slowly, deliberately swept over the room.

The air turned solid.

Nobody spoke.

The junior analysts who had sprinted over from the bullpenthe kids I had personally mentored, the ones who swore they'd follow me to any firm I went toall suddenly found their shoes incredibly interesting.

Bradley's eyes finally settled on Cameron.

"You tell us, Cameron."

Cameron was my protg. I had built him from the ground up.

Three years ago, he was a fresh grad who didn't even know how to read a basic candlestick chart. I taught him everything. When he blew a two-million-dollar hole in his portfolio his first year, I quietly used my own year-end bonus to cover the deficit so he wouldn't get fired.

As long as I'm here, I used to tell him, you have the safety net to make mistakes. Just learn from them.

Now, the entire floor was staring at Cameron. It was his turn to make a choice.

He took a slow, deep breath, lifted his chin, and looked me dead in the eye. His stare was glassy, completely devoid of the kid I used to know.

"Yes. Half an hour ago, I personally saw Miles force Paige into the rest lounge. He locked the door behind them."

In that moment, an icy chill radiated through my chest.

For three years, I had been warming a viper in my pocket.

I remembered him when he first started, so timid hed stutter when asking me a question.

I remembered finding him crying in the stairwell after his first major loss. I had clapped a hand on his trembling shoulder, telling him that the market breaks everyone eventually, and what mattered was how you pieced yourself back together.

I remembered when my mother was diagnosed, how he had run himself ragged bringing us dinners at the hospital, calling her "Auntie" with a warmth that felt so agonizingly real.

All of it. An illusion. A performance.

For the promise of a promotion, for a sliver of my year-end bonus pool, he was willing to shove me off a cliff and stomp on my fingers as I fell.

I looked at Cameron, my expression eerily calm as I pointed out the glaring flaw in his lie.

"The lock on the lounge door has been broken since last week. Maintenance hasn't fixed it yet."

"So how, exactly, did I lock it?"

Camerons face twitched. He immediately broke eye contact, looking nervously at the floor.

Paige lunged forward to fill the silence, her tears flowing right on cue. "He was too far away to see properly! The door was just pulled shut!"

"I tried to run, but Miles grabbed my ankle..."

She reached down and pulled up the hem of her tailored trousers, revealing a ring of red bruises around her pale ankle.

It was definitely a handprint. Someone had gripped her hard.

Bravo. Excellent production value.

I gave a small, defeated nod, abandoning the detail of the door. Instead, I pointed a trembling finger at my computer tower.

"My trading terminal has comprehensive operational logs. Every keystroke, every mouse click. It will prove unequivocally that I didn't step away from this seat for a single second all afternoon!"

It looked like I was playing my final trump card.

In reality, it was bait.

You want to prove I wasn't at my desk, Bradley? I thought. Come on. Take the bait. Destroy the irrefutable evidence of my fat-finger error with your own two hands.

Bradley looked at me like I had just told him a hilarious joke. "Logs? Miles, do you think we're idiots?"

Cameron, sensing the shift in momentum, immediately chimed in. "So what if there are keystrokes? With your status in this firm, you could have easily ordered a junior analyst to sit at your desk and click around for thirty minutes. Who would dare say no to you?"

Paige nodded furiously. "Exactly! You were just threatening me with your power. Using your authority to force someone to build an alibi for you while you cornered me... that's exactly the kind of manipulative thing you'd do!"

I roared, thrashing wildly like a man who had lost his mind.

"I didn't order anyone to cover for me!"

"Check it! I demand a forensic fingerprint analysis on that keyboard! My prints are the only ones on those keys!"

I knew the psychology of a bully. The angrier I looked, the more I struggled, the more Bradley would believe he had struck my Achilles heel.

Right on cue, a smug, vicious smile spread across Bradley's face. He picked up the heavy Yeti tumbler full of ice water sitting on my desk.

He tipped it over the mechanical keyboard.

Water flooded the keys, seeping deep into the circuitry, soaking the mouse, and cascading onto the hard drive tower beneath the desk until the screens flickered and died.

"No need to go through all that trouble, Miles," Bradley purred.

"Now... tell me. Where are these precious logs and fingerprints of yours?"