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times the “age thirty-five” goal for my entire net worth that I had set for myself not so many years ago, and I was feeling pretty smug with the anticipation of seeing the numbers on my LCD. I clicked the Account Overview button on the menu, and my heart nearly stopped.
    “Ready or not, here I come,” said Mallory.
    The bathroom door opened, and she stepped out with the glass of wine in her hand. She was wearing a red teddy, but I was almost too stunned by the on-screen numbers to notice. The look on my face immediately threw her.
    “What’s wrong?” she said.
    I was still processing things, and it took me a moment to answer. “Were those phony FBI agents at my party the end of the birthday jokes?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Did you put someone up to messing with my personal account? As part of a joke, I mean.”
    “No,” she said as she slid onto the bed and sat beside me. “Why do you ask? And why are you checking investment accounts now?”
    I showed her the screen, and her jaw dropped.
    “How can that be?” she said.
    “Mallory, please tell me if this is a joke.”
    “No, I swear. That’s not even close to being funny. I would never do anything like that.”
    The stunned expression on her face didn’t lie—and neither did the account summary.
    Zero balance.
    I clicked the Refresh button on the tool bar. Same result: zero balance. I clicked Refresh twice more, then completely logged out of the Saxton Silvers Web site and logged back in. Each time, I got the same result. Zero. Nothing. Nada.
    “It’s a mistake, obviously some kind of mistake.” I was mumbling to myself, repeating that word— mistake —over and over again, as I clicked around and reviewed my account trading history. Then I froze.
    “Michael?” she said with trepidation.
    “This is crazy,” I said.
    “What?”
    “It’s all been liquidated. My entire account—everything was unloaded.”
    “Did you sell it?”
    “ No. That’s the point. Timing is everything in the market. I got killed on most of these transactions.” I kept scrolling down through the history.
    “Then why would James have pushed through all these orders?”
    “He wouldn’t,” I said. “And from the looks of this summary, he didn’t . Look at this stock here, for example. It was an after-hours trade through an ECN.”
    “A what?”
    “An electronic communications network. Some are regulated, some aren’t. This one looks like it’s unregulated—which has me even more freaked out. The only seller identified in the transaction reports is me .”
    “But you just said you didn’t sell.”
    “I didn’t . And some of these transactions are more complicated to unwind than a simple sell order, but it’s the same result. I’m shown as the one who authorized the transaction.”
    “How can that be?”
    “Don’t you get it? It must have been somebody posing as me.”
    “You mean like an identity thief?”
    I was suddenly dizzy. My mind didn’t want to go there. “That’s why I was hoping you were going to tell me that this was somebody’s idea of a joke.”
    “Michael,” she said, her voice quaking, “did someone take our money?”
    The answer was also on the screen. It had all been moved to a low-risk account that I hadn’t touched in years. “It’s okay. It’s there. It wasn’t a good time to liquidate most of these holdings, but it looks like the cash is still with Saxton Silvers.”
    “You have to do something. Reverse the transactions, right?”
    I grabbed my cell and dialed James in San Francisco. He was asleep—a West Coaster who lived on Wall Street time—but the problem I laid out for him forced him out of bed and over to his computer.
    “Holy shit,” he said over the phone. I presumed he was looking at the same screen I had in front of me—the long list of premature sales and other poorly timed transactions.
    “Tell me about it,” I said. “I look like the moron who bought high and sold everything low.”
    “I’m not