The Fear Index

by Robert Harris

  ‘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?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Can you access them now?’

  ‘Yes, if that is what you want.’ Genoud had become very stiff and formal during the last few exchanges, standing erect as if his honour as a former police officer was being called into question. Which was a bit bloody rich, thought Quarry, considering that whatever turned out to be the truth, he had set up a wholesale secret surveillance network.

  ‘All right then, you won’t mind showing them to us. Let him use your computer, Alex.’

  Hoffmann rose from his seat like a man in a trance. Fragments of the smoke detector crunched beneath his feet. Reflexively he looked up at the mess he had made of the ceiling. The hole where the tile had come down opened on to a dark void. Inside, where the trailing wires were touching, a blue-white spark flashed intermittently. He thought he saw something move in the crawl-space. He closed his eyes and the imprint of the spark continued to glow as if he had been staring at the sun. A worm of suspicion began to form in his mind.

  Genoud, bent over the computer, said triumphantly, ‘There!’

  He straightened and stood aside to let Hoffmann and Quarry examine his emails. He had filtered his saved messages so that only those from Hoffmann were listed – scores of them, dating back almost a year. Quarry took the mouse and started clicking on them at random.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s your email address on all of these, Alex,’ he said. ‘No question of it.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet it is, but I still didn’t send them.’

  ‘All right, but then who did?’

  Hoffmann brooded. This was beyond hacking now, or compromised security or a clone server. It was more fundamental, as if the company had somehow developed dual operating systems.

  Quarry was still reading. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘You even snooped on yourself in your own house …’

  ‘Actually, I hate to keep repeating myself, but I didn’t.’

  ‘Well I’m sorry, Alexi, but you did. Listen to this: “To: Genoud. From: Hoffmann. Required Cologny webcam surveillance units twenty-four concealed immediate …”’

  ‘Come on, man. I don’t talk like that. Nobody talks like that.’

  ‘Somebody must: it’s here on the screen.’

  Hoffmann suddenly turned to Genoud. ‘Where does all the information go? What happens to the images, the audio recordings?’

  Genoud said, ‘As you know, it’s all sent in digital streams to a secure server.’

  ‘But there must be thousands of hours of it,’ exclaimed Hoffmann. ‘When would anyone ever have time to review it all? I certainly couldn’t do it. You’d need a whole dedicated team. There aren’t the hours in the day.’

  Genoud shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’ve often wondered that myself. I just did what I was ordered.’

  Only a machine could analyse that quantity of information, thought Hoffmann. It would have to be using the latest face-recognition technology; voice-recognition as well; search tools …

  He was interrupted by another outcry from Quarry: ‘Since when did we start leasing an industrial unit in Zimeysa?’

  Genoud said: ‘I can tell you exactly, Mr Quarry: since six months ago. It’s a big place – fifty-four Route de Clerval. Dr Hoffmann ordered a special new security and surveillance system for it.’

  Hoffmann said, ‘What’s in this unit?’

  ‘Computers.’

  ‘Who put them in?’

  ‘I don’t know. A computer company.’

  Hoffmann said, ‘So you’re not the only person I’m dealing with? I deal with entire companies by email too?’

  ‘I don’t know. Presumably, yes.’

  Quarry was still clicking through the emails. ‘This is unbelievable,
’ he said to Hoffmann. ‘According to this, you also own the freehold of this entire building.’

  Genoud said, ‘That’s true, Dr Hoffmann. You gave me the contract for security. That’s why I was here this evening when you called.’

  ‘Is this really right?’ Quarry demanded. ‘You own the building?’

  But Hoffmann had stopped listening. He was thinking back to his time at CERN, to the memo Bob Walton had circulated to the chairmen of the CERN Experiments Committees and of the Machine Advisory Committee, recommending that Hoffmann’s research project, AMR-1, be shut down. It had included a warning issued by Thomas S. Ray, software engineer and Professor of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma: ‘… freely evolving autonomous artificial entities should be seen as potentially dangerous to organic life, and should always be confined by some kind of containment facility, at least until their real potential is well understood … Evolution remains a self-interested process, and even the interests of confined digital organisms may conflict with our own.’

  He took a breath. He said, ‘Hugo, I need to have a word with you – alone.’

  ‘All right, sure. Maurice, would you mind stepping outside for a minute?’

  ‘No, I think he should stay here and start sorting this out.’ He said to Genoud, ‘I want you to make a copy of the entire file of emails that originate from me. I also want a list of every job you’ve done that I’m supposed to have ordered. I especially want a list of everything to do with this industrial facility in Zimeysa. Then I want you to start stripping out every camera and every bug in every building we have, starting with my house. And I need it done tonight. Is that understood?’

  Genoud looked to Quarry for approval. Quarry hesitated, then nodded. Genoud said curtly, ‘As you wish.’

  They left him to it. Once they were outside the office and the door was closed, Quarry said, ‘I hope to God you’ve got some kind of explanation for this, Alex, because I have to tell you—’

  Hoffmann held up a warning finger and raised his eyes to the smoke detector above Marie-Claude’s desk.

  Quarry said, with heavy emphasis, ‘Oh, right, I understand. We’ll go to my office.’

  ‘No. Not there. It’s not safe. Here …’

  Hoffmann led him into the washroom and closed the door. The pieces of the smoke detector were where he had left them, next to the basin. He could barely recognise his own reflection in the mirror. He looked like someone who might have escaped from the secure wing of a mental hospital. He said, ‘Hugo, do you think I’m insane?’

  ‘Yes, since you ask, I bloody well do. Or probably. I don’t know.’

  ‘No, it’s okay. I’m not blaming you if that’s how you feel. I can see absolutely what this must look like from the outside – and what I’m about to say isn’t going to make you feel any more confident.’ He could hardly believe he was saying it himself. ‘I think the basic problem we have here is VIXAL.’

  ‘Lifting the delta hedge?’

  ‘Lifting the delta hedge, but let’s say also possibly doing somewhat more than I anticipated.’

  Quarry squinted at him. ‘What are you talking about? I don’t follow …’

  The door started to open and someone tried to come in. Quarry stopped it with his elbow. ‘Not now,’ he said, without taking his eyes from Hoffmann. ‘Sod off and pee in a bucket, will you?’

  A voice said, ‘Okay, Hugo.’

  Quarry closed the door and planted his back against it. ‘More than you anticipated in what way?’

  Hoffmann said carefully, ‘VIXAL may be making decisions that are not entirely compatible with our interest.’

  ‘You mean our interest as a company?’

  ‘No. I mean our interest – the human interest.’

  ‘Aren’t they the same?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Sorry. Being dim here. You mean you think it’s somehow actually doing all this itself – the surveillance and everything?’

  In fairness to him, Hoffmann thought, Quarry at least seemed to be treating the suggestion seriously.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure I am saying that. We need to take this one step at a time until we have enough information to make a full assessment. But I think as a first move we have to unwind the positions it’s taken in the market. This could be quite hazardous – and not just to us.’

  ‘Even though it’s making money?’

  ‘It’s not a question of making money any more – can’t you forget about money just for once?’ It was becoming increasingly hard for Hoffmann to maintain his composure, but he managed to finish quietly, ‘We’re way beyond that now.’

  Quarry folded his arms and thought it over, staring at the tiled floor. ‘Are you sure you’re in a fit state to be taking this kind of decision?’

  ‘I am, really. Trust me, please, will you, if only for the sake of the last eight years? It’ll be the last time, I promise you. After tonight, you’ll be in charge.’

  For a long moment they looked at one another, the physicist and the financier. Quarry frankly didn’t know what to make of it. But as he said afterwards, in the end the company was Hoffmann’s – it was his genius that had brought in the punters, his machine that had made the money in the first place, his call to shut it down. ‘It’s your baby,’ he said. He stood clear of the door.

  Hoffmann went out on to the trading floor with Quarry at his heels. It felt better to be doing something, fighting back. He clapped his hands. ‘Listen up, everybody!’ He climbed on to a chair so the quants could see him better. He clapped again. ‘I need you all just to gather round for a minute.’

  They rose from behind their screens at his command, a ghost army of PhDs. He could see their exchange of glances as they came over; some were whispering. They were obviously all on edge with what was happening. Van der Zyl came out of his office, and so did Ju-Long; he couldn’t see Rajamani. He waited for a couple of stragglers from Incubation to thread their way around the desks and then he cleared his throat.

  ‘Okay, we’ve obviously got a few anomalies to deal with here – to put it mildly – and I think for safety’s sake we’re going to have to start dismantling these positions we’ve built up over the last few hours.’

  He checked himself. He didn’t want to create a panic. He was also conscious of the smoke detectors dotted across the ceiling. Presumably everything he said was being monitored. ‘This doesn’t mean we have a problem with VIXAL necessarily, but we do need to go back and find out why it’s been doing some of the things it has been doing. I don’t know how long that’s going to take, so in the meantime we need to get that delta back in line – hedge it out with longs in other markets; even liquidate if it comes to it. Just get the hell out of where we are.’

  Quarry said, to Hoffmann and the room, ‘We’ll need to tread very carefully. If we start liquidating positions this size too quickly, we’ll move prices.’

  Hoffmann nodded. ‘That’s true, but VIXAL will help us achieve the optimums, even in override.’ He looked up at the row of digital clocks beneath the giant TV screens. ‘We’ve still got just over three hours before America closes. Imre, will you and Dieter help out with fixed income and currencies? Franco and Jon, take three or four guys each and divide up stocks and sector bets. Kolya, you do the same with the indices. Everyone else in their normal sections.’

  ‘If you encounter any problems,’ said Quarry, ‘Alex and I will be here to help out. And can I just say: don’t anyone think for a second that this is a retreat. We took in an additional two billion in fresh investment today – so this shop is still growing, okay? Is that clear? We’ll recalibrate over the next twenty-four hours and move on to even bigger and better things. Any questions?’ Someone raised their hand. ‘Yep?’

  ‘Is it true you just fired Gana Rajamani?’

  Hoffmann glanced at Quarry in surprise. He’d thought he was going to wait until the crisis had passed.

  Quarry didn’t miss a beat. ‘Gana has been wanting to rejoin his family in
London for some weeks.’ A general exclamation of surprise arose from the meeting. Quarry held up his hand. ‘I can assure you he’s completely on side with everything we’re doing. Now does anybody else want to ruin their career by asking me a tricky question?’ There was nervous laughter. ‘Right then …’

  Hoffmann said, ‘Actually, there is one last thing, Hugo.’ Staring out across the upturned faces of his quants, he felt for the first time a sudden sense of comradeship. He had recruited every one of them. The team – the company – his creation: he guessed it might be a long while before he had another chance to speak to them collectively, if ever. ‘Can I just add something to that? It’s been, as some of you have probably guessed by now, an absolute bitch of a day. And whatever happens to me, I just want to tell you all – every one of you …’ He had to stop and swallow. To his horror he was welling up, his throat thick with emotion, his eyes brimming. He looked down at his feet, waiting until he had himself under control, then raised his head again. He had to rush to get through it or he would have broken down completely. ‘I simply want you to know I’m very proud of what we’ve done together here. It’s never been just about the money – certainly not for me and I believe not for most of you, either. So thanks. It’s meant a lot. That’s it.’

  There was no applause; simply mystification. Hoffmann stepped down from the chair. He could see Quarry looking at him in a strange way, although the CEO recovered quickly and called out, ‘All right, everyone, that’s the end of the pep talk. Back to your galleys, slaves, and start rowing. There’s a storm coming in.’

  As the quants began to move away, Quarry said to Hoffmann: ‘That sounded like a farewell speech.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant to.’

  ‘Well it did. What do you mean, whatever happens to you?’ But before Hoffmann could answer, someone called out, ‘Alex, have you got a second? We seem to have a problem here.’

  16

  Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.