The Fear Index (16 page)

‘But what about
you
, Alexi?’ asked Quarry urgently. ‘Do
you
want to stop? I mean we could, you know – we’ve made more than enough to live out the rest of our days in luxury. We don’t have to carry on pitching to clients.’

‘No, I don’t want to stop. We have the resources to do things here on the technical side that no one else is even attempting. But if you want to call it quits, I’ll buy you out.’

Now it was Quarry who looked taken aback, but then he suddenly grinned. ‘Like hell you will! You don’t get rid of me that easily.’ His nerve seemed to revive as quickly as it had wilted. ‘No, no, I’m in this for the duration. I suppose it was just seeing that plane – it spooked me a bit. But if you’re fine, I’m fine. Well then?’ He gestured for Hoffmann to step ahead of him. ‘Shall we return to that esteemed bunch of psychopaths and criminals we are proud to call our clients?’

‘You do it. I’ve nothing left to say to them. If they want to put more money in – fine. If not – screw ’em.’

‘But it’s you they’ve come to see …’

‘Yeah, well now they’ve seen me.’

Quarry’s mouth turned down. ‘You’ll come to the lunch at least?’

‘Hugo, I really cannot stand these people …’ But Quarry’s expression was so forlorn that Hoffmann capitulated at once. ‘Oh Christ, if it’s really that important, I’ll come to the goddam lunch.’

‘Beau-Rivage. One o’clock.’ Quarry seemed on the point of saying something else, but then looked at his watch and swore. ‘Shit, they’ve been on their own for a quarter of an hour.’ He set off towards the boardroom. ‘One o’clock,’ he called, turning round and walking backwards. He cocked his finger. ‘Good man.’ He already had his cell phone in his other hand and was entering a number.

Hoffmann pivoted on his heel and headed in the opposite direction. There was no one in the corridor. He quickly put his head round the corner of the alcove and checked the communal kitchen with its coffee machine, microwave and giant refrigerator: also empty. A few paces further on, Ju-Long’s office door was shut, his assistant away from her desk. Without waiting for a reply, Hoffmann knocked and went in.

It was as if he had disturbed a group of teenage boys examining pornography on the family computer. Ju-Long, van der Zyl and Rajamani drew back quickly from the terminal and Ju-Long clicked the mouse to change the screen.

Van der Zyl said, ‘We were just checking the currency markets, Alex.’ The Dutchman’s features were slightly too large for his face, giving him the look of an intelligent, lugubrious gargoyle.

‘And?’

‘The euro is weakening against the dollar.’

‘Which is what we anticipated, I believe.’ Hoffmann pushed the door open wider. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’

‘Alex—’ Rajamani began.

Hoffmann interrupted: ‘It was LJ I wanted to speak with – in private.’ He stared straight ahead as they filed out. When they had gone, he said, ‘So you say that account is on our system?’

‘It comes up twice.’

‘You mean it’s one of ours – we use it for business?’

‘No.’ Ju-Long’s smooth forehead creased into an unexpectedly deep frown. ‘Actually, I assumed it was for your own personal use.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you asked the back office to transfer forty-two million dollars into it.’

Hoffmann studied the other man’s face carefully for evidence that he was joking. But Ju-Long, as Quarry always said, though possessed of many admirable qualities, was entirely devoid of a sense of humour.

‘When did I request this transfer?’

‘Eleven months ago. I just sent you the original email to remind you.’

‘Okay, thanks. I’ll check it out. You said there were two transactions?’

‘Indeed. The money was entirely repaid last month, with interest.’

‘And you never queried this with me?’

‘No, Alex,’ said the Chinese quietly. ‘Why would I do that? Like you say, it is your company.’

‘Yeah, sure. That’s right. Thanks, LJ.’

‘No problem.’

Hoffmann turned at the door. ‘And you didn’t just mention this to Gana and Pieter?’

‘No.’ Ju-Long’s eyes were wide with innocence.

Hoffmann hurried back towards his own office. Forty-two million dollars? He was sure he had never demanded the transfer of such a sum. He would hardly have forgotten. It had to be fraud. He strode past Marie-Claude, sitting typing at her workstation just outside his door, and went straight to his desk. He logged on to his computer and opened his inbox. And there indeed was his instruction to transfer $42,032,127.88 to the Royal Grand Cayman Bank Limited on 17 June last year. Immediately beneath it was a notification from the hedge fund’s own bank of a repayment from the same account of $43,188,037.09, dated 3 April.

He performed the calculation in his head. What kind of fraudster repaid the capital sum he had stolen from his victim, plus exactly 2.75 per cent interest?

He went back and studied what purported to be his original email. There was no greeting or signature, merely the usual standard instruction to transfer the amount
X
to the account
Y
. LJ would have put it through the system without a second’s hesitation, confident that their intranet was secure behind the best firewall that money could buy and that the accounts would in any case be reconciled electronically in due course. If the money had been in the form of bars of gold or suitcases of cash, they might perhaps have been more careful. But this was not really money in the physical sense at all, merely strings and sequences of glowing green symbols, no more substantial than protoplasm. That was why they had the nerve to do with it what they did.

He checked what time he was supposed to have sent his email ordering the transfer: midnight exactly.

He tilted back in his chair and contemplated the smoke detector in the ceiling above his desk. He often worked late in the office, but never as late as midnight. This message, if genuine, would therefore have had to have come from his terminal at home. Was it possible that if he checked the computer in his study he would find a record of this email, along with the order to the Dutch bookseller? Could he be suffering from some kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde syndrome that meant one half of his mind was doing things the other half knew nothing about?

On impulse he opened his desk drawer, took out the CD and inserted it into the optical drive of his computer. The program took a moment to run, and then the screen was filled with an index of two hundred monochrome images of the inside of his head. He clicked through them rapidly, trying to find the one that had caught the attention of the radiologist, but it was hopeless. Viewed at speed, his brain seemed to emerge from emptiness, swell into a cloudburst of grey matter, and then contract again to nothing.

He buzzed his assistant. ‘Marie-Claude, if you look in my personal directory you’ll see an entry for a Dr Jeanne Polidori. Will you make me an appointment to see her tomorrow? Tell her it’s urgent.’

‘Yes, Dr Hoffmann. What time?’

‘Any time. Also, I want to go to the gallery where my wife’s having her exhibition. Do you know the address?’

‘Yes, Dr Hoffmann. When do you want to go?’

‘Right away. Can you fix me a car?’

‘You have a driver at your disposal at all times now, arranged by Monsieur Genoud.’

‘Oh yeah, that’s right, I forgot. Okay, tell him I’m coming down.’

He ejected the CD and put it back in the drawer along with the Darwin volume, then grabbed his raincoat. Passing through the trading floor, he glanced across at the boardroom. Where a section of the blinds was not properly closed he could see Elmira Gulzhan and her lawyer boyfriend through the slats, bent over an iPad, watched by Quarry, who had his arms folded: he looked smug. Etienne Mussard, the curved turtle shell of his back turned towards the others, was entering figures with elderly slowness on to a large pocket calculator.

On the opposite wall Bloomberg and CNBC were showing lines of red arrows, all in the descendent. The European markets had shed their earlier gains and had started falling fast. That would almost certainly depress the opening in the US, which would in turn make the hedge fund much less exposed to loss by mid-afternoon. Hoffmann felt his spirits lighten with relief. Indeed, he experienced a definite thrill of pride. Once again VIXAL was proving smarter than the humans around it, smarter even than its creator.

His good humour persisted as he rode the elevator down to the ground floor and turned the corner into the lobby, where a bulky figure in a cheap dark suit rose to greet him. Of all the affectations of the wealthy, none had ever struck Hoffmann as quite as absurd as the sight of a bodyguard sitting outside a meeting or restaurant; he had often wondered who exactly the rich were expecting to attack them, except possibly their own shareholders or members of their families. But on this particular day he was glad to find himself approached by the polite, thuggish-looking man who flashed his ID and introduced himself as Olivier Paccard,
l’homme de la sécurité
.

‘If you would wait just a moment, please, Dr Hoffmann,’ said Paccard. He held up his hand in a polite plea for silence and stared into the middle distance. He had a wire trailing from his ear. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We can go.’

He moved swiftly to the entrance, hitting the exit button with the heel of his hand precisely as a long dark Mercedes drew up at the kerb, with the same driver who had picked Hoffmann up from the hospital. Paccard strode out first, opened the rear passenger door and ushered Hoffmann inside. His palm briefly brushed the back of the physicist’s neck. Before Hoffmann even had the chance to settle himself into his seat, Paccard was sliding into the front, the car doors were all closed and locked, and they were pulling out into the noonday traffic. The whole procedure must have taken less than ten seconds.

They made a sharp left, tyres squealing, and shot down a gloomy side street, which opened at the end on to the lake and the distant view of the mountains. The sun had still not broken through the cloud. The high white column of the Jet d’Eau rose 140 metres against the grey sky, dissolving at its top into a chilly rain that plunged to detonate against the dull black surface of the lake. The flashes from the cameras of the tourists photographing one another at its base winked bright in the gloom.

The Mercedes accelerated to beat a red light and made another sharp left into the dual carriageway, only to come to a halt alongside the Jardin Anglais, held up by some unseen obstruction ahead. Paccard craned his neck to see what was happening.

This was where Hoffmann sometimes went for a jog if he had a problem to solve – from here across to the Parc des Eaux-Vives and back again, two or three times if necessary, until he had found an answer, talking to no one, looking at nothing. He had never really examined the area properly before, so that now he gazed out at the unseen familiarity with a kind of wonder: the kids’ play area with the blue plastic slides, the outdoor crêperie under the trees, the pedestrian crossing where he might have to jog on the spot for a minute waiting for the lights to change. For the second time that day he felt as if he were a visitor to his own life, and he had a sudden desire to order the driver to stop the car and let him out. But no sooner had the thought arisen than the Mercedes moved forward again. They entered the busy traffic system at the end of the Pont du Mont-Blanc and emerged from it at speed a few seconds later, weaving westwards through the slower trucks and buses towards the galleries and antique shops of the Plaine de Plainpalais.

8

There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair
.

CHARLES DARWIN,
On the Origin of Species
(1859)

CONTOURS DE L’HOMME: Une exposition de l’oeuvre de Gabrielle Hoffmann
– how much more impressive it sounded in French than English, she thought – was scheduled to run for one week only at the Galerie d’Art Contemporain Guy Bertrand, a small whitewashed space, previously a Citroën auto-repair shop, in a back street around the corner from MAMCO, the city’s main contemporary art gallery.

Gabrielle had found herself sitting next to the owner, M. Bertrand, five months earlier at a Christmas charity auction at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel – an event Alex had flatly refused to attend – and the next day he had wheedled his way into her studio to see what she was working on. After ten minutes of outrageous flattery, he had offered to give her an exhibition in return for half of any proceeds, as long as she paid the expenses. Of course she had realised at once that it was Alex’s money rather than her talent that was the main attraction. She had observed over the last couple of years how great wealth acted like an invisible magnetic force field, pushing and pulling people out of their normal pattern of behaviour. But she had also learned to live with it. You could go mad trying to guess whose actions were genuine, whose false. Besides, she wanted to have a show – wanted it, she realised, more keenly than she had ever wanted anything in her life, except to have a child.