The Fear Index (31 page)

Quarry had always had a sneaking fear that their rivals might be trying to spy on them: it was certainly what he would do in their shoes. That was why he had hired Genoud’s security consultancy. He turned the detector over in his hands, appalled. ‘You think there’s a camera in
all
of them?’

‘Well, we can check them out, but yeah – yeah, I do.’

‘My God, and yet we pay a fortune to Genoud to sweep this place for bugs.’

‘But that’s the beauty of it – he must be the guy who put all this in, don’t you see? He did my house too, when I bought it. He’s got us under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance. Look.’ Hoffmann took out his mobile phone. ‘He organised these as well, didn’t he – our specially encrypted phones?’ He broke it open – for some reason Quarry was reminded of a man cracking lobster claws – and quickly disassembled it beside one of the wash basins. ‘It’s the perfect bugging device. You don’t even need to put in a microphone – it’s got one built in. I read about it in the
Wall Street Journal
. You think you’ve turned it off, but actually it’s always active, picking up your conversations even when you’re not on the phone. And you keep it charged all the time. Mine’s been acting strange all day.’

He was so certain he was right, Quarry found his paranoia contagious. He examined his own phone gingerly, as if it were a grenade that might explode in his hand, then used it to call his assistant. ‘Amber, would you please track down Maurice Genoud and get him over here right away? Tell him to drop whatever else he’s doing and come to Alex’s office.’ He hung up. ‘Let’s hear what the bastard has to say. I never did trust him. I wonder what his game is.’

‘That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? We’re a hedge fund returning an eighty-three per cent profit. If someone set up a clone of us, copying all our trades, they’d make a fortune. They wouldn’t even need to know how we were doing it. It’s obvious why they’d want to spy on us. The only thing I don’t understand is why he’s done all this other stuff.’

‘What other stuff?’

‘Set up an offshore account in the Cayman Islands, transferred money in and out of it, sent emails in my name, bought me a book full of stuff about fear and terror, sabotaged Gabby’s exhibition, hacked into my medical records and hooked me up with a psychopath. It’s like he’s been paid to drive me mad.’

Listening to him, Quarry started to feel uneasy again, but before he could say anything his phone rang. It was Amber.

‘Mr Genoud was only just downstairs. He’s on his way up.’

‘Thanks.’ He said to Hoffmann, ‘Apparently he’s in the building already. That’s odd, isn’t it? What’s he doing here? Maybe he knows we’re on to him.’

‘Maybe.’ Suddenly Hoffmann was on the move once more – out of the men’s room, across the passage, into his office. Another idea had occurred to him. He wrenched open the drawer of his desk and pulled out the book Quarry had seen him bring in that morning: the volume of Darwin he had called him about at midnight.

‘Look at this,’ he said, flicking through the pages. He held it up, open at a photograph of an old man seemingly terrified out of his wits – a grotesque picture, Quarry thought, like something out of a freak show. ‘What do you see?’

‘I see some Victorian lunatic who looks like he just shat a brick.’

‘Yeah, but look again. Do you see these calipers?’

Quarry looked. A pair of hands, one on either side of the face, was applying thin metal rods to the forehead. The victim’s head was supported in some kind of steel headrest; he seemed to be wearing a surgical gown. ‘Of course I see them.’

‘The calipers are being applied by a French doctor called Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne. He believed that the expressions of the human face are the gateway to the soul. He’s animating the facial muscles by using what the Victorians called galvanism – their word for electricity produced by acid reaction. They often used it to make the legs of a dead frog jump, a party trick.’ He waited for Quarry to see the importance of what he was saying, and when he continued to look baffled, he added: ‘It’s an experiment to induce the facial symptoms of fear for the purpose of recording them on camera.’

‘Okay,’ said Quarry cautiously. ‘I get it.’

Hoffmann waved the book in exasperation. ‘Well, isn’t that exactly what’s been happening to
me
? This is the only illustration in the book where you can actually see the calipers – in all the others, Darwin had them removed. I’m the subject of an experiment designed to make me experience fear, and my reactions are being continuously monitored.’

After a moment when he could not entirely trust himself to speak, Quarry said, ‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear that, Alexi. That must be a horrible feeling.’

‘The question is: who’s doing it, and why? Obviously it’s not Genoud’s idea. He’s just the tool …’

But now it was Quarry’s turn not to pay attention. He was thinking of his responsibilities as CEO – to their investors, to their employees and (he was not ashamed to admit it afterwards) to himself. He was remembering Hoffmann’s medicine cabinet all those years ago, filled with enough mind-altering drugs to keep a junkie happy for six months, and his specific instruction to Rajamani not to minute any concerns about the company president’s mental health. He was wondering what would happen if any of this became public. ‘Let’s sit down,’ he suggested. ‘We need to talk about a few things.’

Hoffmann was irritated to be interrupted in mid-flow. ‘Is it urgent?’

‘It is rather, yes.’ Quarry took a seat on the sofa and gestured to Hoffmann to join him.

But Hoffmann ignored the sofa and went and sat behind his desk. He swept his arm across the surface, clearing it of the detritus of the smoke detector. ‘Okay, go ahead. Just don’t say anything till you’ve taken the battery out of your phone.’

HOFFMANN WASN’T SURPRISED that Quarry had failed to grasp the significance of the Darwin book. All his life he had seen things faster than other people; that was why he had been obliged to pass so many of his days on long and lonely solo voyages of the mind. Eventually others around him caught up, but by then he was generally off travelling somewhere else.

He watched as Quarry dismantled his phone and placed the battery carefully on the coffee table.

Quarry said, ‘We have a problem with VIXAL-4.’

‘What kind of a problem?’

‘It’s taken off the delta hedge.’

Hoffmann stared at him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He pulled his keyboard towards him, logged on to his terminal and began going through their positions – by sector, size, type, date. The mouse clicks were as rapid as Morse code, and each screen they brought up was more astonishing to him than the last. He said, ‘But this is all completely out of whack. This isn’t what it’s programmed to do.’

‘Most of it happened between lunchtime and the US opening. We couldn’t get hold of you. The good news is that it’s guessing right – so far. The Dow is off by about a hundred, and if you look at the P and L we’re up by over two hundred mil on the day.’

‘
But it’s not what it’s supposed to do
,’ repeated Hoffmann. Of course there would be a rational explanation: there always was. He would find it eventually. It had to be linked to everything else that was happening to him. ‘Okay, first off, are we sure this data is correct? Can we actually trust what’s on these screens? Or could it be sabotage of some kind? A virus?’ He was remembering the malware on his psychiatrist’s computer. ‘Maybe the whole company is under cyber-attack by someone, or some group – have we thought of that?’

‘Maybe we are, but that doesn’t explain the short on Vista Airways – and believe me, that’s starting to look like somewhat more than a coincidence.’

‘Yeah, well it can’t be. We’ve already been over this—’

Quarry cut him off impatiently. ‘I know we have, but the story’s changed as the day’s gone on. Now it seems the crash wasn’t caused by mechanical failure after all. Apparently there was a bomb warning put up on some Islamic terrorist website while the plane was in the air. The FBI missed it; we didn’t.’

Hoffmann couldn’t take it in at first: too much information was coming at him too quickly. ‘But that’s way outside VIXAL’s parameters. That would be an extraordinary inflection point – a quantum leap.’

‘I thought it was a machine-learning algorithm.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Then maybe it’s learned something.’

‘Don’t be an idiot, Hugo. It doesn’t work like that.’

‘Okay, so it doesn’t work like that. Fine, I’m not the expert. The fact is, we have to make a decision rather quickly here. Either we override VIXAL or we’re going to have to put up two-point-five bil tomorrow afternoon just so the banks will let us continue trading.’

Marie-Claude tapped on the door and opened it. ‘Monsieur Genoud is here.’

Quarry said to Hoffmann, ‘Let me handle this.’ He felt as if he were in some kind of arcade game, everything flying at him at once.

Marie-Claude stood aside to let the ex-policeman enter. His gaze went immediately to the hole in the ceiling.

‘Come in, Maurice,’ said Quarry. ‘Close the door. As you can see, we’ve been doing a little DIY in here, and we were wondering if you have any explanation for this.’

‘I don’t believe so,’ said Genoud, shutting the door. ‘Why should I?’

Hoffmann said, ‘By God, he’s a cool one, Hugo. You’ve got to give him that.’

Quarry held up his hand. ‘Okay, Alex, please just wait a minute, will you? All right, Maurice. No bullshit now. We need to know how long this has been going on. We need to know who’s paying you. And we need to know if you’ve planted anything inside our computer systems. It’s urgent, because we’re in a very volatile trading situation. Now we don’t want to call in the police to handle this, but we will if we have to. So it’s over to you, and my advice is to be absolutely frank.’

After a few moments Genoud looked at Hoffmann. ‘Is it okay for me to tell him?’

Hoffmann said, ‘Okay to tell him what?’

‘You are putting me in a very awkward position, Dr Hoffmann.’

Hoffmann said to Quarry, ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about.’

‘Very well, you can’t expect me to maintain my discretion under these circumstances.’ Genoud turned to Quarry. ‘Dr Hoffmann instructed me to do it.’

There was something about the calm insolence of the falsehood that made Hoffmann want to hit him. ‘You asshole,’ he said. ‘D’you think anyone’s going to believe that?’

Genoud continued unperturbed, addressing his remarks directly to Quarry and ignoring Hoffmann. ‘It’s true. He gave me instructions when you moved into these offices to set up concealed cameras. I guessed he wasn’t telling you about it. But he’s the company president, so I thought it was permissible for me to do as he asked. This is the absolute truth, I swear.’

Hoffmann smiled and shook his head. ‘Hugo, this is total, utter bullshit. This is the same goddamned crap I’ve been hearing all day. I haven’t had one single conversation with this guy about planting cameras – why would I want to film my own company? And why would I bug my own phone? It’s total bullshit,’ he repeated.

Genoud said, ‘I never said we had a conversation about it. As you well know, Dr Hoffmann, I only ever received instructions from you by email.’

Email – again! Hoffmann said, ‘You’re seriously telling me that you put in all these cameras and never, in all these months, despite all the thousands of francs this must have cost – that never once did we have a conversation about any of it?’

‘No.’

Hoffmann emitted a sound that conveyed contempt and disbelief.

Quarry said to Genoud, ‘That’s hardly credible. Didn’t it strike you as bizarre at all?’

‘Not especially. I got the impression this was all off the books, so to speak. That he didn’t want to acknowledge what was going on. I did try to bring it up with him once, obliquely. He looked straight through me.’

‘Well I probably would, wouldn’t I? I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. And how in the hell am I supposed to have paid you for all this?’

‘By cash transfer,’ said Genoud, ‘from a bank in the Cayman Islands.’

That brought Hoffmann up short. Quarry was looking at him intently. ‘Okay,’ he conceded, ‘supposing you did receive emails. How did you know it was me sending them and not someone pretending to be me?’

‘Why would I think that? It was your company, your email address, I was paid from your bank account. And to be frank, Dr Hoffmann, you do have a reputation for being a difficult man to talk to.’

Hoffmann swore and slammed his fist on his desk in frustration. ‘Here we go again. I’m supposed to have ordered a book on the internet. I’m supposed to have bought Gabrielle’s entire exhibition on the internet. I’m supposed to have asked a madman to kill me on the internet …’ He had an involuntary memory flash of the ghastly scene in the hotel, of the dead man’s head lolling on its stem. He had actually forgotten about it for a few minutes. He realised Quarry was looking at him in dismay. ‘Who’s doing this to me, Hugo?’ he said in despair. ‘Doing this and filming it? You’ve got to help me sort this out. It’s like a nightmare I’m caught in.’

Quarry’s mind was reeling from it all. It took some effort to keep his voice calm. ‘Of course I’ll help you, Alex. Let’s just try to get to the bottom of this once and for all.’ He turned back to Genoud. ‘Right, Maurice, presumably you’ve kept these emails?’