The Fear Index

by Robert Harris

  In the other room he sat on the chair and opened the laptop. It came awake immediately and at once the screen was filled with an image of Hoffmann’s own face. The quality of the photograph was poor – an enlarged picture-grab from a surveillance tape, by the look of it. He had been captured gazing up into the camera, his expression blank, unguarded. It was so tightly cropped it was impossible to tell where it had been taken.

  A couple of keystrokes took him into the hard-drive registry. The program names were all in German. He called up a list of the most recently viewed files. The last folder to be edited, just after six o’clock the previous evening, was entitled Der Rotenburg Cannibal. Inside it were scores of Adobe files containing newspaper articles about the case of Armin Meiwes, a computer technician and internet cannibal who had met a willing victim on a website, drugged him and started eating him, and who was currently serving a life sentence in Germany for murder. Another folder seemed to consist of chapters of a novel, Der Metzgermeister – The Master Butcher: was that right? – tens of thousands of words of what appeared to be a work of fantasy in an unparagraphed stream of consciousness that Hoffmann could not understand. And then there was a folder called Das Opfer, which Hoffmann knew meant The Victim. This was in English and looked like transcripts from an internet chat room – a dialogue, he perceived as he read on, between one participant who fantasised about committing murder and another who dreamed about what it would be like to die. There was something distantly familiar about the second voice, phrases he recognised, sequences of dreams that had once festooned his mind like filthy cobwebs until he had cleaned them out, or thought he had cleaned them out.

  Now they seemed to coalesce in front of him into a dark reflection, and he was so absorbed by what was on the screen it was a near-miracle that some slight alteration in the light or air caused him to look up as the knife flashed towards him. He jerked his head back and the point just missed his eye – a six-inch blade, a flick-knife; it must have been hidden in the man’s coat pocket. The German lashed out at him with his foot and caught him on the bottom of his ribcage, then lunged forward with the knife and tried to slash at him again. Hoffmann cried out in pain and shock, the chair toppled backwards and suddenly Karp was on top of him. The knife glinted in the pale light. Somehow, by reflex rather than conscious intent, he caught the man’s wrist with his left and weaker hand. Briefly the knife trembled close to his face. ‘Es ist, was Sie sich wünschen,’ whispered Karp soothingly. It is what you desire. The knife-tip actually pricked Hoffmann’s skin. He grimaced with the effort, holding the knife off, gaining millimetres, until at last his attacker’s arm snapped backwards and with a terrible exultation in his own power Hoffmann flung him back against the metal frame of the bed. It slid briefly on its wheels, banged against the wall and stopped. Hoffmann’s left hand still held on to the other man’s wrist, his right was clamped to Karp’s face, his fingers gouging into the deep sockets of the eyes, the heel of his hand jammed against the throat. Karp roared in pain and tore at Hoffmann’s fingers with his free hand. Hoffmann responded by adjusting his grip so that he had his hand entirely around the scrawny windpipe, choking off the sound. He was leaning in to him now; he was able to put the whole weight of his body behind that grip, and his fear and his anger, pinning Karp to the side of the bed. He smelled the animal leather of the German’s coat and the cloying rank odour of his sweat; he could feel the unshaved stubble on the neck. All sense of time was gone, swept away in the rush of adrenalin, but it seemed to Hoffmann only a few seconds later that the fingers gradually ceased scrabbling at his hand and the knife clattered to the carpet. The body went slack beneath him, and when he withdrew his hands it toppled sideways.

  He became aware of someone pounding on the wall and of a male voice calling out in thickly-accented French, demanding to know what the hell was going on. He heaved himself up and closed the door and as an extra protection dragged the wooden chair over and wedged it at an angle under the handle. The movement set off an immediate clamour of pain in various battered outposts of his body – his head, his knuckles, his fingers, the base of his ribcage especially, even his toes where he had kicked the man’s head. He dabbed his fingers to his scalp and they came away sticky with blood. At some point in the struggle his wound must have partially opened up. His hands were a mass of tiny scratches, as though he had fought his way out of an undergrowth of thorns. He sucked his grazed knuckles, registering the salty, metallic taste of blood. The hammering on the wall had stopped.

  He was trembling now; he felt sick again. He went into the bathroom and retched into the toilet bowl. The basin was hanging away from the wall but the taps still worked. He splashed his cheeks with cold water and went back into the bedroom.

  The German lay on the floor. He had not moved. His open eyes gazed past Hoffmann’s shoulder, with an oddly hopeful expression, seemingly searching for a guest at a party who would never arrive. Hoffmann knelt and checked his wrist for a pulse. He slapped his face. He shook him as if that might reanimate him. ‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t need this.’ The head lolled like a bird’s on the stem of a broken neck.

  There was a brisk knock on the door. A man called out, ‘Ça va? Qu’est-ce qui se passe?’ It was the same heavily accented voice that had shouted through the wall from next door. The handle was tried several times and then the knocking resumed. The demand this time was louder and more urgent: ‘Allez! Laissez-moi rentrer!’

  Hoffmann levered himself painfully up on to his feet. The handle rattled again and whoever was outside began shoving against the door. The chair moved fractionally but held. The pushing stopped. Hoffmann waited for a renewed assault, but nothing happened. He crept quietly to the spyhole and looked out. The corridor was empty.

  And now the animal fear was inside him again, calm and cunning, controlling his impulses and limbs, making him do things that even an hour later he would look back on in disbelief. He grabbed the dead man’s boots and quickly unthreaded the laces, yanking them out and knotting them into a single length a metre long. He seized hold of the wall light but the fixing was too flimsy. The shower curtain rail came away in his hand in a spurt of pink plaster. In the end he settled on the handle of the bathroom door. He dragged the German’s body over and propped him up against it. He made a noose out of the end of the laces, slipped the ligature around Karp’s neck, looped the line over the handle and yanked. It took some effort, hauling on the cord with one hand and hoisting the corpse under its armpit with the other, but finally he managed to raise it sufficiently to make the scene look at least half-plausible. He looped the line around the handle again and knotted it.

  Once he had stuffed the German’s possessions back into the rucksack and straightened the bed, the bedroom looked oddly untouched by what had happened. He slipped Karp’s mobile into his pocket, closed the laptop and carried it over to the window. He parted the net curtain. The window opened easily, obviously often used. On the fire escape, amid the encrusted swirls of pigeon shit, were a hundred sodden cigarette butts, a score of beer cans. He clambered out on to the ironwork, reached around the window frame and pressed the switch. The shutter descended behind him.

  It was a long way down, six floors, and with every clanging step of his descent Hoffmann was acutely aware of how conspicuous he must be – directly visible to anyone looking out from the buildings opposite or who happened to be standing in one of the hotel bedrooms. But to his relief most of the windows he passed were shuttered, and at the others no ghostly faces materialised behind their shrouds of muslin. The Hotel Diodati was at rest for the afternoon. He clattered on down, his only thought to put as much distance between himself and the corpse as possible.

  From his high vantage point he could see that the fire escape led to a small concrete patio. A feeble attempt had been made to turn this into an outdoor seating area. There was some wooden garden furniture and a couple of faded green umbrellas advertising lager. He calculated that the best way to get out to the street would be t
hrough the hotel, but when he reached the ground and saw the sliding glass door that led to the reception area, the fear-animal decided against it: he couldn’t risk running into the man from the next-door room. He dragged one of the wooden garden chairs over to the back wall and climbed up on to it.

  He found himself peering at a two-metre drop to the neighbouring yard – a wilderness of sickly urban weeds choking half-hidden pieces of rusting catering equipment and an old bike frame; on the far side were big receptacles for trash. The yard clearly belonged to a restaurant of some kind. He could see the chefs in their white hats moving about in the kitchen, could hear them shouting and the crash of their pans. He balanced the laptop on the wall and hauled himself up to sit astride the brickwork. In the distance a police siren began to wail. He grabbed the computer, swung his leg over and dropped down to the other side, landing heavily in a bed of stinging nettles. He swore. From between the waste bins a youth stepped out to see what was going on. He was carrying an empty slop bucket, smoking a cigarette – Arab-looking, clean-shaven, late teens. He stared at Hoffmann in surprise.

  Hoffmann said diffidently, ‘Où est la rue?’ He tapped the computer significantly, as if it somehow explained his presence.

  The youth looked at him and frowned, then slowly withdrew his cigarette from his mouth and gestured over his shoulder.

  ‘Merci.’ Hoffmann hurried down the narrow alley, through the wooden gate and out into the street.

  GABRIELLE HOFFMANN HAD spent more than an hour furiously prowling round the public gardens of the Parc des Bastions declaiming in her head all the things she wished she had said on the pavement to Alex, until she realised, on her third or fourth circuit, that she was muttering to herself like a mad old lady and that passers-by were staring at her; at which point she hailed a taxi and went home. There was a patrol car containing two gendarmes parked in the street outside. Beyond the gate, in front of the mansion, the wretched bodyguard-cum-driver whom Alex had sent to watch over her was talking on his telephone. He hung up and stared at her reproachfully. With his closely shaved domed head and massive squat frame he resembled a malevolent Buddha.

  She said to him, ‘Do you still have that car, Camille?’

  ‘Yes, madame.’

  ‘And you’re supposed to drive me wherever I want to go?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Bring it round, will you? We’re going to the airport.’

  In the bedroom she started flinging clothes into a suitcase, her mind obsessively replaying the scene of her humiliation at the gallery. How could he have done such a thing to her? That it was Alex who had sabotaged her exhibition she had no doubt, although she was prepared to concede he would not have meant it maliciously. No, what was absolutely bloody enraging was that it would have been his clumsy, hopeless conception of a romantic gesture. Once, a year or two ago, when they were on holiday in the south of France and dining in some ludicrously expensive seafood restaurant in St-Tropez, she had made an idle remark about how cruel it was to keep all those dozens of lobsters in a tank, awaiting their turn to be boiled alive; the next thing she knew he had bought the lot at double the menu price and was having them carried outside to be tipped into the harbour. The uproar that ensued as they hit the water and scuttled away – now that had been quite funny, and needless to say he had been utterly oblivious to it. She opened another suitcase and threw in a pair of shoes. But she couldn’t forgive him for today’s scene, not yet. It would take at least a few days for her to calm down.

  She went into the bathroom and stopped, staring in sudden bafflement at the cosmetics and perfume arrayed on the glass shelves. It was hard to know how much to pack if you didn’t know how long you would be gone, or even where you were going. She looked at herself in the mirror, in the wretched outfit she had spent hours choosing for the launch of her career as an artist, and started crying – less out of self-pity, which she despised, than out of fear. Don’t let him be ill, she thought. Dear God, please don’t take him away from me in that way. Throughout she kept on studying her face dispassionately. It was amazing how ugly you could make yourself by crying, like scrawling over a drawing. After a while she put her hand into her jacket pocket to try to find a tissue, and felt instead the sharp edges of a business card.

  Professor Robert WALTON

  Computing Centre Department Head

  CERN – European Organisation for Nuclear Research

  1211 Geneva 23 – Switzerland

  12

  … varieties are species in the process of formation, or are, as I have called them, incipient species.

  CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species (1859)

  IT WAS WELL after three o’clock by the time Hugo Quarry got back to the office. He had left several messages on Hoffmann’s mobile phone, which had not been answered, and he felt a slight prickle of unease about where his partner might be: Hoffmann’s so-called bodyguard he had found chatting up a girl in reception, unaware that his charge had even left the hotel. Quarry had fired him on the spot.

  Still, for all that, the Englishman’s mood was good. He now believed they were likely to mop up double his initial estimate of new investment – $2 billion – which meant an extra $40 million a year simply in management fees. He had drunk several truly excellent glasses of wine. On the drive back from the restaurant he celebrated by putting a call through to Benetti’s and commissioning a helicopter pad for the back of his yacht.

  He was smiling so much the facial-recognition scanner failed to match his geometry to its database and he had to try a second time when he had composed himself. He passed under the bland but watchful eyes of the security cameras in the lobby, cheerfully called out, ‘Five,’ to the elevator and hummed to himself all the way up the glass tube. It was the old school song, or as much of it as he could remember – sonent voces omnium, tum-tee tum-tee tum-tee-tum – and when the doors opened he tipped an imaginary hat to his frowning fellow passengers, the dull drones from DigiSyst or EcoTec or whatever the hell they were called. He even managed to maintain his smile when the glass partition to Hoffmann Investment Technologies slid back to reveal Inspector Jean-Philippe Leclerc of the Geneva Police Department waiting for him in reception. He examined his visitor’s ID and then compared it to the rumpled figure in front of him. The American markets would be opening in ten minutes. This he could do without.

  ‘It wouldn’t be possible, Inspector, would it, for us to have this meeting some other time? I only say this because we really are feeling pretty frazzled here today.’

  ‘I am very sorry to disturb you, monsieur. I had hoped to catch a word with Dr Hoffmann, but in his absence there are some matters I would like to discuss with you. I promise you it will only take ten minutes.’

  There was something in the way the old boy planted his feet slightly apart that warned Quarry he had better make the best of it. ‘Of course,’ he said, switching on his trademark smile, ‘you shall have as long as you like. We’ll go to my office.’ He extended his hand and ushered the policeman in front of him. ‘Keep right on to the end.’ He felt as if he had been smiling solidly for about fifteen hours that day already. His face ached with bonhomie. As soon as Leclerc had his back to him, he treated himself to a scowl.

  Leclerc walked slowly past the trading floor, examining his surroundings with interest. The big open room with its screens and time-zone clocks was more or less what he would have expected in a financial company: he had seen this on the television. But the employees were a surprise – all young, and not a tie between them, let alone a suit – and also the silence, with everyone at his desk, and the air so still and heavy with concentration. The whole place reminded him of an examination hall in an all-male college. Or a seminary, perhaps: yes, a seminary of Mammon. The image pleased him. On several of the screens he noticed a slogan, red on white, as in the old Soviet Union:

  THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL HAVE NO PAPER

  THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL CARRY NO INVENTORY

  THE COMP
ANY OF THE FUTURE WILL BE ENTIRELY DIGITAL

  THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED

  ‘Now,’ said Quarry, smiling again, ‘what can I offer you, Inspector? Tea, coffee, water?’

  ‘I think tea, as I am with an Englishman. Thank you.’

  ‘Two teas, Amber, sweetheart, please. English breakfast.’

  She said, ‘You have a lot of calls, Hugo.’

  ‘Yes, I bet I bloody do.’ He opened his office door and stood aside to let Leclerc go in first, then went straight to his desk. ‘Please, take a seat, will you, Inspector? Excuse me. I won’t be a second.’ He checked his screen. The European markets were all heading south fairly quickly now. The DAX was off one per cent, the CAC two, the FTSE one and a half. The euro was down more than a cent against the dollar. He didn’t have time to check all their positions, but the P&L showed VIXAL-4 already up $68 million on the day. Still, there was something about it all he found vaguely ominous, despite his good mood; he sensed a storm about to break. ‘Great. That’s fine.’ He sat down cheerfully behind his desk. ‘So then, have you caught this maniac?’

  ‘Not yet. You and Dr Hoffmann have worked together for eight years, I understand.’

  ‘That’s right. We set up shop in 2002.’

  Leclerc extracted his notebook and pen. He held them up. ‘You don’t object if I …?’

  ‘I don’t, although Alex would.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘We’re not allowed to use carbon-based data-retrieval systems on the premises – that’s notebooks and newspapers to you and me. The company is supposed to be entirely digital. But Alex isn’t here, so don’t worry about it. Go ahead.’

  ‘That sounds a little eccentric.’ Leclerc made a careful note.