The Fear Index

by Robert Harris

‘Yes, I am going into the office. And you’re going to the gallery for the start of your exhibition.’

  ‘Alex …’

  ‘Yes, you are. You’ve been working on it for months – think of all the time you’ve spent here, for a start. And tonight we’re going to have dinner to celebrate your success.’ He was aware that he was starting to raise his voice again. He forced himself to speak more calmly. ‘Just because this guy got into our house, it doesn’t mean he has to get into our lives. Not unless we let him. Look at me.’ He gestured to himself. ‘I’m fine. You just saw the scan – no fracture and no swelling.’

  ‘And no bloody common sense,’ said an English voice behind them.

  ‘Hugo,’ said Gabrielle, without turning to look at him, ‘will you please tell your business partner that he’s made of flesh and blood, just like the rest of us?’

  ‘Ah, but is he?’ Quarry was standing by the door with his overcoat unfastened, a cherry-red woollen scarf around his neck, his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Business partner?’ repeated Dr Celik, who had been persuaded to bring Quarry down from A&E, and was now looking at him suspiciously. ‘I thought you said you were his brother?’

  ‘Just have the damned test, Al,’ said Quarry. ‘The presentation can be postponed.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Gabrielle.

  ‘I promise you I’ll have the test,’ said Hoffmann evenly. ‘Just not today. Is that all right with you, Doctor? I’m not going to collapse or anything?’

  ‘Monsieur,’ said the grey-haired radiologist, who had been on duty since the previous afternoon and was losing patience, ‘what you do, and do not do, is entirely your decision. The wound should definitely be stitched, in my opinion, and if you leave you will be required to sign a form releasing the hospital from all responsibility. The rest is up to you.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll have it stitched, and I’ll sign the form. And then I’ll come back and have the MRI another time, when it’s more convenient. Happy?’ he said to Gabrielle.

  Before she could reply, a familiar electronic reveille sounded. It took him a moment to realise it was the alarm on his mobile, which he had set for six thirty in what felt to him already like another life.

  HOFFMANN LEFT HIS wife sitting with Quarry in the reception area of the accident and emergency department while he went back into the cubicle to have his wound stitched up. He was given a local anaesthetic, administered by syringe – a moment of sharp pain that made him gasp – and then a thin strip of hair was shaved from around the wound with a disposable plastic razor. The process of stitching felt strange rather than uncomfortable, as if his scalp was being tightened. Afterwards, Dr Celik produced a small mirror and showed Hoffmann his handiwork, like a hairdresser seeking approval from a customer. The cut was only about five centimetres long. Stitched together it resembled a twisted mouth with thick white lips where the hair had been removed. It seemed to leer at Hoffmann in the glass.

  ‘It will hurt,’ said Celik cheerfully, ‘when the anaesthetic wears off. You will need to take painkillers.’ He took away the mirror and the smile vanished.

  ‘You’re not going to bandage it up?’

  ‘No, it will heal quicker if it’s exposed.’

  ‘Good. In that case, I’ll leave now.’

  Celik shrugged. ‘That is your right. But first you must sign a form.’

  After he had signed the little chit – ‘I declare that I am leaving the University Hospital contrary to medical advice, despite being informed of the risks, and that I assume full responsibility’ – Hoffmann picked up his bag of clothes and followed Celik to a small shower cubicle. Celik switched on the light. As he turned away the Turk muttered, barely audibly, ‘Asshole’ – or at any rate that was what Hoffmann thought he said, but the door closed before he could respond.

  It was the first time he had been alone since he recovered consciousness, and for a moment he revelled in his solitude. He took off his dressing gown and pyjamas. There was a mirror on the opposite wall and he paused to examine his naked reflection under the merciless neon strip: his skin sallow, his stomach slack, his breasts slightly more visible than they used to be, like a pubescent girl’s. Some of his chest hair was grey. A long black bruise extended across his left hip. He twisted sideways to examine himself, ran his fingers along the grazed and darkened skin, then briefly cupped his penis. There was no reaction, and he wondered: could a blow on the head render one impotent? Glancing down, his feet seemed to him unnaturally splayed and veined on the cold tile floor. This is old age, he thought with a shock, this is the future: I look like that portrait by Lucian Freud Gabrielle wanted me to buy. He bent to pick up the bag and for a moment the room went fuzzy and he swayed slightly. He sat down on the white plastic chair with his head between his knees.

  After he had recovered, he dressed slowly and deliberately – boxer shorts, T-shirt, socks, jeans, a plain white long-sleeved shirt, a sports jacket – and with each item he felt a little stronger, a degree less vulnerable. Gabrielle had put his wallet inside his jacket pocket. He checked the contents. He had three thousand Swiss francs in new notes. He sat down and pulled on a pair of desert boots, and when he stood and looked at himself in the mirror again, he felt satisfactorily camouflaged. His clothes said nothing at all about him, which was the way he liked it. A hedge fund manager with ten billion dollars in assets under management could these days pass for the guy who delivered his parcels. In this respect if no other, money – big money, confident money, money that had no need to show off – had become democratic.

  There was a knock on the door, and he heard the radiologist, Dr Dufort, calling his name. ‘Monsieur Hoffmann? Monsieur Hoffmann, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ he called back, ‘much better.’

  ‘I am going off duty now. I have something for you.’ He opened the door. She had put on a raincoat and rubber boots and was carrying an umbrella. ‘Here. These are your CAT scan results.’ She thrust a CD in a clear plastic case into his hands. ‘If you want my advice, you should take them to your own doctor as soon as possible.’

  ‘I will, of course, thank you.’

  ‘Will you?’ She gave him a sceptical look. ‘You know, you should. If there is something wrong, it won’t go away. Better to face one’s fears at once rather than let them fester.’

  ‘So you think there is something wrong?’ He detested the sound of his own voice – tremulous, pathetic.

  ‘I don’t know, monsieur. You need an MRI scan to determine that.’

  ‘What might it be, do you think?’ Hoffmann hesitated. ‘A tumour?’

  ‘No, I don’t think that.’

  ‘What, then?’

  He searched her eyes for a clue but saw there only boredom; she must have to deliver bad news a lot, he realised.

  She said, ‘It probably isn’t anything at all. But I suppose other explanations might include – I am only speculating, you understand? – MS perhaps, or possibly dementia. Best to be prepared.’ She patted his hand. ‘See your doctor, monsieur. Really, take it from me: it is always the unknown that is most frightening.’

  4

  The slightest advantage in one being, at any age or during any season, over those with which it comes into competition, or better adaptation in however slight a degree to the surrounding physical conditions, will turn the balance.

  CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species (1859)

  SOME IN THE secretive inner counsels of the super-rich occasionally wondered aloud why Hoffmann had made Quarry an equal shareholder in Hoffmann Investment Technologies: it was, after all, the physicist’s algorithms that generated the profits; it was his name above the shop. But it suited Hoffmann’s temperament to have someone else, more outgoing, to hide behind. Besides, he knew there would have been no company without his partner. It was not just that Quarry had the experience and interest in banking that he lacked; he also had something else that Hoffmann could never possess no matter how hard he tried: a talent for dealing with people.<
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  This was partly charm, of course. But it was more than that. It was a capacity for bending human beings to a larger purpose. If there had been another war, Quarry would have made a perfect ADC to a field marshal – a position that had, in fact, been held in the British Army by both his great- and great-great-grandfathers – ensuring that orders were carried out, soothing hurt feelings, firing subordinates with such tact they came away believing it was their idea to leave, requisitioning the best local chateaux for temporary staff headquarters and, at the end of a sixteen-hour day, bringing together jealous rivals over a dinner for which he himself would have selected the most appropriate wines. He had a first in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford, an ex-wife and three children safely stowed in a gloomy Lutyens mansion in a drizzled fold of Surrey, and a ski chalet in Chamonix where he went in winter with whoever happened to be his girlfriend that weekend: an interchangeable sequence of clever, beautiful, undernourished females who were always discarded before there was any sign of gynaecologists or lawyers. Gabrielle couldn’t stand him.

  Nevertheless, the crisis made them temporary allies. While Hoffmann was having his wound stitched up, Quarry fetched a cup of sweet milky coffee for her from the machine along the corridor. He sat with her in the tiny waiting room, with its hard wooden chairs and its galaxy of plastic stars gleaming from the ceiling. He held her hand and squeezed it at appropriate moments. He listened to her account of what had happened. When she recited Hoffmann’s subsequent oddities of behaviour, he reassured her that all would be well: ‘Let’s face it, Gabs, he’s never been exactly normal, has he, even at the best of times? We’ll get this sorted out, don’t worry. Just give me ten minutes.’

  He called his assistant and told her he would need a chauffeured car at the hospital immediately. He woke the company’s security consultant, Maurice Genoud, and brusquely ordered him to attend an emergency meeting at the office within the hour, and to send someone over to the Hoffmanns’ house. Finally he managed to get himself put through to Inspector Leclerc and persuaded him to agree that Dr Hoffmann would not be required to attend police headquarters to make a statement immediately he left hospital: Leclerc accepted that he had already taken sufficiently detailed notes to form a continuous narrative, which Hoffmann could amend where necessary and sign later in the day.

  Throughout all this, Gabrielle watched Quarry with reluctant admiration. He was so much the opposite of Alex – good-looking and he knew it. His affected southern English manners also got on her Presbyterian northern nerves. Sometimes she wondered if he might be gay, and all his thoroughbred girls more for show than action.

  ‘Hugo,’ she said very seriously, when he finally got off the phone, ‘I want you to do me a favour. I want you to order him not to go into the office today.’

  Quarry took her hand again. ‘Darling, if I thought my telling him would do any good, I would. But as you know, at least as well as I, once he gets set on doing a thing, he invariably does it.’

  ‘And is it really so important, what he has to do today?’

  ‘It is, quite.’ Quarry twisted his wrist very slightly, so that he could read the time on his watch without letting go of her hand. ‘I mean, nothing that can’t be put off if his health really is at stake, obviously. But if I’m honest with you, it would definitely be better to go ahead than not. People have come a long way to see him.’

  She pulled her hand away. ‘You want to be careful you don’t kill your golden goose,’ she said bitterly. ‘That definitely would be bad for business.’

  ‘Don’t think I don’t know it,’ said Quarry pleasantly. His smile crinkled the skin around his deep blue eyes; his lashes, like his hair, were sandy. ‘Listen, if I start to think for one moment that he’s seriously endangering himself, I’ll have him back home and tucked up in bed with Mummy within fifteen minutes. And that’s a promise. And now,’ he said, looking over her shoulder, ‘if I’m not mistaken, here comes our dear old goose, with his feathers half plucked and ruffled.’

  He was on his feet in an instant. ‘My dear Al,’ he said, meeting him halfway across the corridor, ‘how are you feeling? You look very pale.’

  ‘I’ll be a whole lot better once I’m out of this place.’ Hoffmann slipped the CD into his overcoat pocket so that Gabrielle could not see it. He kissed her on the cheek. ‘Everything’s going to be fine now.’

  THEY MADE THEIR way through the main reception. It was nearly half past seven. Outside, the day had turned up at last: overcast and cold and reluctant. The thick rolls of cloud hanging over the hospital were the same shade of grey as brain tissue, or so it appeared to Hoffmann, who was now seeing the CAT scan wherever he looked. A gust of wind swirled across the circular concourse and wrapped his raincoat around his legs. A small but egalitarian group of smokers, white-coated doctors and patients in their dressing gowns, stood outside the main door, huddled against the unseasonable May weather. In the sodium lighting their cigarette smoke whirled and disappeared amid flecks of raindrops.

  Quarry found their car, a big Mercedes owned by a discreet and reliable Geneva limousine service under contract to the hedge fund. It was parked in a bay reserved for the disabled. The driver – a heavyset and mustachioed figure – levered himself out of the front seat as they approached and held a rear door open for them: he has driven me before, thought Hoffmann, and he struggled to remember his name as the distance between them closed.

  ‘Georges!’ He greeted him with relief. ‘Good morning to you, Georges!’

  ‘Good morning, monsieur.’ The chauffeur smiled and touched his hand to his cap in salute as Gabrielle climbed into the back seat, followed by Quarry. ‘Monsieur,’ he whispered in a quiet aside to Hoffmann, ‘forgive me, but just so you know, my name is Claude.’

  ‘Right then, boys and girls,’ said Quarry, seated between the Hoffmanns and squeezing the nearest knee of each simultaneously, ‘where is it to be?’

  Hoffmann said, ‘Office,’ just as Gabrielle said, ‘Home.’

  ‘Office,’ repeated Hoffmann, ‘and then home for my wife.’

  The traffic was already building up on the approaches to the city centre, and as the Mercedes turned into the Boulevard de la Cluse, Hoffmann fell into his habitual silence. He wondered if the others had overheard his mistake. What on earth had made him do that? It was not as if he usually noticed who his driver was, let alone spoke to him: car journeys were passed in the company of his iPad, surfing the web for technical research or, for lighter reading, the digital edition of the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal. It was rare for him even to look out of the window. How odd it felt to do so now, when there was nothing else to occupy him – to notice, for example, for the first time in years, people queuing at a bus stop, seemingly exhausted before the day had properly begun; or the number of young Moroccans and Algerians hanging around on the street corners – a sight that had not existed when he first came to Switzerland. But then, he thought, why shouldn’t they be there? Their presence in Geneva was as much a product of globalisation as his was, or Quarry’s.

  The limousine slowed to make a left. A bell clanged. A tram drew alongside. Hoffmann glanced up absently at the faces framed in the lighted windows. For a moment they seemed to hang motionless in the morning gloom then silently began to drift past him: some gazing blankly ahead, others dozing, one reading the Tribune de Genève, and finally, in the last window, the bony profile of a man in his fifties with a high-domed head and unkempt grey hair pulled into a ponytail. He stayed level with Hoffmann for an instant, then the tram accelerated and in a stink of electricity and a cascade of pale blue sparks the apparition was gone.

  It was all so quick and dreamlike, Hoffmann was not certain what he had seen. Quarry must have felt him jump, or heard him draw in his breath. He turned and said, ‘Are you all right, old friend?’ But Hoffmann was too startled to speak.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Gabrielle stretched back and peered around Quarry’s head at her husband.

  ‘Nothi
ng.’ Hoffmann managed to recover his voice. ‘Anaesthetic must be wearing off.’ He shielded his eyes with his hand and looked out of the window. ‘Turn on the radio, could you?’

  The voice of a female newsreader filled the car, disconcertingly bright, as if her script were unfamiliar to her; she would have announced Armageddon through a smile.

  ‘The Greek government vowed last night to continue with its austerity measures, despite the deaths of three bank workers in Athens. The three were killed when demonstrators protesting against spending cuts attacked the bank with petrol bombs …’

  Hoffmann was trying to decide whether he was hallucinating or not. If he wasn’t, he ought to call Leclerc at once, and then tell the driver to keep the tram in view until the police arrived. But what if he was imagining things? His mind recoiled from the humiliations that would follow. Worse, it would mean he could no longer trust the signals from his own brain. He could endure anything except madness. He would sooner die than go down that path again. And so he said nothing and kept his face turned from the others, so that they could not see the panic in his eyes, as the radio jabbered on.

  ‘Financial markets are expected to open down this morning after big falls all week in Europe and America. The crisis has been caused by fears that one or more countries in the eurozone may default on its debts. There have been further steep losses overnight in the Far East …’

  If my mind were an algorithm, thought Hoffmann, I would quarantine it; I would shut it down.

  ‘In Great Britain, voters are going to the polls today to elect a new government. The centre-left Labour Party is widely expected to lose office after thirteen years in power …’

  ‘Did you use your postal vote, Gabs?’ asked Quarry casually.

  ‘Yes. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Christ, no. Why should I bother with that? Who’d you vote for? Wait – no – let me guess. The Greens.’