They were moving across the projection. Fast, systematic, absorbing. He'd seen that look before. On the best quants in the building. The ones who could read a data set the way a conductor reads a score. He'd never seen it on someone who hadn't been to college. "Grant," Slade said quietly, "I think we might have a problem." Harrington ignored him. Whitney started with page one. She read the projection line by line, her eyes scanning left to right, top to bottom, the way most people read a novel.
But Whitney wasn't reading. She was deconstructing. Each equation was a wall, and she was looking for the bricks that didn't fit. The room was quiet. Not the polite quiet of a dinner party. The tense quiet of a courtroom waiting for a verdict. She picked up the marker and wrote on the first whiteboard. A clean re-derivation of the model's base assumptions. The interest rate inputs, the volatility surface, the correlation structure.
She worked fast, but not rushed. Every line followed the last like links in a chain. No gaps. No hesitations. "Page one. Clean. No errors." She moved to page two. Harrington watched from the head of the table, arms crossed, chin up. He turned to a guest, a venture capitalist named Douglas Pratt, and said, loud enough for the room, "She's stalling. Buying time. Watch. She'll start making things up soon." Pratt nodded, but his eyes stayed on the whiteboard.
"Page two." Whitney flagged a minor inconsistency in the volatility smile calibration. She corrected it in three lines. Not a fatal error, a rounding shortcut that Harrington's team had taken to save processing time. But, it introduced a small bias. She noted it, circled it, and moved on. "Page three, clean. Page four, another shortcut. This one is in the correlation matrix, a simplification that assumes static pairwise correlations when the underlying assets are dynamic." Whitney rewrote the block using a time-varying copula.
It took her four minutes. The young analyst from earlier, the one who had recognized her technique, was now sitting at the edge of his seat, his dinner untouched, his mouth slightly open. Harrington shifted in his chair. He uncrossed his arms, crossed them again, reached for his water, put it down without drinking. "Page five." Whitney stopped. She tapped the board twice with the back of her marker. Then she turned to the projection and pointed at a cluster of parameters near the bottom of the page.