Robert Harris - The Fear Index

‘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 Geneve, 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.

‘Nothing.’ 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.’

‘It’s a secret ballot,’ she said primly, and glanced away, irritated that he had got it right.

Hoffmann’s hedge fund was based in Les Eaux-Vives, a district just south of the lake, as solid and confident as the nineteenth-century Swiss businessmen who had built it: heavy masonry, wide faux-Parisian boulevards webbed with tram cables, cherry trees erupting from the kerbsides to shower dusty white and pink blossom over the grey pavements, shops and restaurants on the ground floors, seven storeys of offices and apartments stacked imperturbably above. Amid this bourgeois respectability Hoffmann Investment Technologies presented a narrow Victorian facade to the world, easy to miss unless you were looking for it, with only a small name tag on an entryphone to betray its existence. A steel-shuttered ramp, watched by a security camera, led down to an underground car park. On one side was a salon de the, on the other a late-night supermarket. In the far distance the mountains of the Jura still bore a faint rim of snow.