Viking Bay by M. A. Lawson Page A

where schools teaching girls were bombed by the Taliban, where women were expected to be completely subservient to men and hide their bodies in burkas, Sahid Khan had sent his daughter out into the world to become a sophisticated, highly educated young woman.
    When Ara returned to Afghanistan at the age of twenty-four, things changed. Dramatically. She put aside the clothes she wore in collegeand dressed as most modern Afghan businesswomen do—in long modest dresses and with a scarf covering her hair. She didn’t wear a burka or a veil. She immersed herself in her father’s business of governing Ghazni Province and, as Callahan had told Kay, assumed the role of his chief advisor. She wasn’t dating anyone, although a member of the French Embassy in Kabul—a young man from a good Parisian family who had known Ara in high school—would show up every so often for dinner at the Khans’ house, but they were never allowed to be alone together. Kay felt sorry for Ara Khan. It sounded as if she was leading an incredibly drab, stressful existence for a young woman of twenty-six.
    She wondered if Ara had any dreams of her own.
    The final item in the file was a copy of a 2010 article from the
New York Times
written by a guy named James Risen. The article discussed the vast mineral deposits that existed in Afghanistan and the difficulties associated with extracting those minerals. According to Risen, the Taliban might very well attempt to gain control of the minerals or, because of the rampant corruption in the central government, a few well-connected oligarchs could gain control. The article noted that Afghanistan had mining laws that had never been tested and how “endless fights” could erupt between the central government in Kabul and the leaders in the mineral-rich provinces.
    The thing Kay found most interesting in the article was that the Chinese had been caught trying to bribe the Afghan minister of mines with thirty million dollars to gain control of copper mining. So it appeared that what Callahan was trying to do had been tried before—and there was a lot of dangerous competition.

11 | Alpha knocked on Finley’s apartment door in Brooklyn, not concerned that it was almost midnight. Finley would be awake; Finley was almost always awake.
    Alpha had found Rodger Finley in a database at the Pentagon, did some preliminary research, and then hired an agency in New York to fill out his profile. He had double doctorates in math and computer science, the math degree alone making him a weirdo. In every high school algebra class there is maybe one kid in the entire class who thinks imaginary numbers make sense—and Finley would have been that kid.
    People who get advanced degrees in mathematics used to seek employment primarily with universities so they could spend all day playing with numbers and no one would demand that the playing result in something useful. Some went to work for places like the NSA where they needed math wizards to break codes—code breaking was very math- and computer-intensive—and others went to work for high-tech companies. The companies would stick the geeks down in a basement lab just
hoping
they’d come up with something that would turn a profit. All they could do was hope, because nobody could really communicate with them and they had a tendency to work on whatever interested them.
    These days, however, the place where a lot of math freaks ended up was Wall Street. These people are known as
quants
—an unattractive abbreviation for “quantitative analysts”—although
quant
better captures the personality and often the appearance of those who bear thetitle. Wall Street firms use their quants to develop programs containing algorithms that can buy and sell stocks and commodities in nanoseconds. The Wall Street guys aren’t smart enough to understand the algorithms—all they understand is that if you can buy and sell at the speed