The Fear Index (40 page)
Authors: Robert Harris
The car drew up outside the office block. Quarry rested his head on the back of the seat and stared at the roof. He let out a long sigh. ‘What a bugger it all is.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Oh well.’ Wearily Quarry opened the door. ‘I expect we’ll talk again in the morning.’
Leclerc said, ‘No,
monsieur
, at least not with me. The case has been reassigned to a very able young officer – Moynier. You’ll find him efficient to deal with.’
‘Oh, okay.’ Quarry seemed vaguely disappointed. He shook the policeman’s hand. ‘I’ll wait to hear from your colleague, then. Good night.’
He climbed out of the car, his long legs swinging easily on to the pavement.
‘Good night. Incidentally,’ Leclerc added quickly, before Quarry shut the door. He leaned across the back seat. ‘Your technical problems earlier – I meant to ask – how serious were they?’
The habit of deception still came easily to Quarry. ‘That was nothing – not serious at all.’
‘Only your colleague said you had lost control of your system …’
‘He didn’t mean it literally. You know computers.’
‘Ah yes, absolutely – computers!’
Quarry closed the door. The patrol car pulled away. Leclerc glanced back at the financier as he entered the building. Some shadow passed across his mind but he was too tired to pursue it.
‘Where to, boss?’ asked the driver.
Leclerc said, ‘South on the road to Annecy-le-Vieux.’
‘Your place is in France?’
‘Just over the frontier. I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford to live in Geneva any more.’
‘I know exactly what you mean. It’s all been taken over by foreigners.’
The driver started to talk about property prices. Leclerc settled down in his seat and closed his eyes. He was asleep before they reached the French border.
THE GENDARMES HAD gone from the office building. One elevator was cordoned off by black-and-yellow tape and had a sign stuck to it – ‘DANGER: NOT WORKING’ – but the other was operational, and after a brief hesitation Quarry stepped into it.
Van der Zyl and Ju-Long were waiting for him in reception. They rose as he came in. Both looked badly shaken.
Van der Zyl said, ‘It’s just been on the news. They had shots of the fire, this place – everything.’
Quarry swore, looked at his watch. ‘I’d better start emailing the major clients straight away. Better if they hear it from us first.’ He noticed that van der Zyl and Ju-Long were looking at one another. ‘Well, what is it?’
Ju-Long said, ‘Before you do, there’s something you ought to see.’
He followed them on to the trading floor. To his amazement, none of the quants had gone home. They rose as he came in and stood in complete silence. He wondered if it was meant as some sort of mark of respect. He hoped they weren’t expecting a speech. Out of habit he glanced up at the business channels. The Dow had recovered almost two thirds of its losses to close down 387; the VIX was up sixty per cent. The imminent UK election results were being forecast from a nationwide exit poll: NO OVERALL CONTROL. That just about summed it up, he thought. He checked the nearest screen for the day’s P&L, blinked at it and read it again, then turned in wonderment to the others.
‘It’s true,’ said Ju-Long. ‘We made a profit out of the crash of four-point-one billion dollars.’
‘And the beauty of it is,’ van der Zyl added, ‘that that represents only zero-point-four per cent of total market volatility. No one will ever notice, except us.’
‘Jesus wept …’ Quarry quickly did the calculation in his head of his personal net worth. ‘That must mean VIXAL managed to complete all the trades before Alex destroyed it.’
There was a pause, and then Ju-Long said quietly, ‘He didn’t destroy it, Hugo. It’s still trading.’
‘What?’
‘VIXAL is still trading.’
‘But it can’t be. I just saw all the hardware burned to the ground.’ ‘Then it must have other hardware we don’t know about. Something quite miraculous appears to have taken place. Have you seen the intranet? The company slogan has changed.’
Quarry looked at the faces of the quants. They seemed to him to be both blank and radiant at the same time, like members of a cult. It was eerie. Several of them nodded at him encouragingly. He bent to examine the screensaver.
THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL HAVE NO WORKERS
THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL HAVE NO MANAGERS
THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL BE A DIGITAL ENTITY
THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL BE ALIVE
IN HIS OFFICE, Quarry was writing an email to the investors.
To: Etienne & Clarisse Mussard, Elmira Gulzhan & François de Gombart-Tonnelle, Ezra Klein, Bill Easterbrook, Amschel Herxheimer, Iain Mould, Mieczyslaw Łukasiński, Liwei Xu, Qi Zhang
From: Hugo Quarry
Subject: Alex
My dear friends, by the time you read this you will probably have begun to hear the tragic story of what happened to Alex Hoffmann yesterday. I will call you all individually later today to discuss the situation. For now I just wanted you to know that he is receiving the very finest medical care, and that our prayers are with both him and Gabrielle at this difficult moment. Of course it is too early to talk of the future of the company he founded, but I did want to reassure you that he has left systems in place which mean that your investments will not only continue to prosper, but will, I am confident, go from strength to strength. I will explain in more detail when I speak with you.
The quants had taken a vote on the trading floor and agreed to keep what had happened confidential. In return, each would receive an immediate cash bonus of $5 million. There would be further payments in the future, on a scale to be agreed, dependent on VIXAL’s performance. No one had dissented: he supposed for one thing they had all seen what had happened to Rajamani.
There was a knock at the door. Quarry shouted, ‘Come!’ It was Genoud.
‘Hello, Maurice, what do you want?’
‘I’ve come to take out those cameras, if that’s all right with you.’
Quarry considered VIXAL. He pictured it as a kind of glowing celestial digital cloud, occasionally swarming to earth. It might be anywhere – in some sweltering, potholed industrial zone stinking of aviation fuel and resounding to the throb of cicadas beside an international airport in South-East Asia or Latin America; or in a cool and leafy business park in the soft, clear rain of New England or the Rhineland; or occupying a rarely visited and darkened floor of a brand-new office block in the City of London or Mumbai or São Paulo; or even roosting undetected on a hundred thousand home computers. It was all around us, he thought, in the very air we breathed. He looked up at the hidden camera and gave the slightest bow of obeisance.
‘Leave them,’ he said.
GABRIELLE WAS BACK where her day had begun, sitting in the University Hospital, only this time she was beside her husband’s bed. He had been put into his own room at the end of a darkened ward on the third floor. There were bars on the windows and gendarmes outside, a man and a woman. It was hard to see Alex under all the bandaging and tubing. He had been unconscious since he hit the ground. They told her he had multiple fractures and second-degree burns; they had just brought him out of emergency surgery and connected him to a drip and a monitor; he was intubated. The surgeon declined to offer a prognosis: he said only that the next twenty-four hours would be critical. Four rows of glowing emerald-green lines processed hypnotically across the screen in gentle peaks and troughs. It reminded her of their honeymoon, watching the Pacific breakers forming far out at sea and following their progress all the way in to land.
Alex cried out in his sedated sleep. He seemed terribly agitated by something. She touched his bandaged hand and wondered what was passing through that powerful mind. ‘It’s all right, darling. Everything’s going to be all right now.’ She laid her head on the pillow next to his. She felt strangely content, despite everything, to have him beside her at last. Beyond the barred window a church clock was striking midnight. Softly she began singing to him a baby’s lullaby.
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409039129
Published by Hutchinson 2011
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Copyright © Robert Harris 2011
Robert Harris has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Hutchinson
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London SW1V 2SA
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780091936969
