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It's October 2005 in a sterile office in Boston,

and a young, inexperienced legal clerk is staring down at the title of a report.

It reads, the world's largest hedge fund of a report. It reads,

The World's Largest Hedge Fund is a fraud.

Imaginative, if nothing else.

The Clark's eyes narrow as he readies himself to speed scan 25 pages of dense research.

R. Clark works at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So tips like this are a regular occurrence.

But there is something odd about this one. It's not just that it's so detailed. What's written is

unsettling. There's the litany of outrageous accusations. Again, not uncommon. But the desperate

plea for help and mathematical data catch his eye.

If true, this report would point to the impossible.

The clerk turns a page and his tired eyes stop on something new.

A single, simple graph.

Shooting from left to right across the X and Y axes are two lines.

One line charts the movements of the S&P 500 stock index over time. It's a line that traces the

ups and downs of America's corporate giants, a line that is jagged and unstable, littered with sudden hikes and quick dives,

just as it should be. The second line, though, is different. Far from uneven, it is beautifully

smooth, as if its author had drawn an elegant upward slope from left to right. This was the recorded growth of a hedge fund.

Could this difference be possible? Could a hedge fund simply expand with little interruption for

15 years? It would have to be completely immune to the noise and the mess of the markets.

...