Robert Harris - The Fear Index

‘Your co-operation is noted, monsieur,’ said Leclerc. ‘Thank you.’ He sat at the terminal and peered close to the screen. He held Hoffmann’s mobile next to it and compared the two account numbers laboriously. They were an identical mixture of letters and digits. The name of the account holder was given as A. J. Hoffmann. He took out his notebook and copied down the sequence. ‘And you received no message other than this?’

‘No.’

Back in the gallery, he returned the mobile to Hoffmann. ‘You were right. The numbers match. Although what this has to do with the attack on you, I confess I do not understand.’

‘Oh, they’re connected,’ said Hoffmann. ‘I tried to tell you that this morning. Jesus, you guys wouldn’t last five minutes in my business. You wouldn’t even get through the frigging door. And why the hell are you going round asking questions about me at CERN? You should be finding this guy, not investigating me.’

His face was haggard, his eyes red and sore, as if he had been rubbing them. With his day’s growth of beard he looked like a fugitive.

‘I’ll pass the account number to our financial department and ask them to look into it,’ said Leclerc gently. ‘Bank accounts, at least, are something we Swiss do rather well, and impersonation is a crime. I’ll let you know if there are any developments. In the meantime, I strongly urge you to go home and see your doctor and have some sleep.’ And make it up with your wife, he wanted to add, but he felt it was not his place.

Hoffmann tried to call her from the back of the Mercedes, but he only got her voicemail. The familiar, jaunty voice caught him by the throat: ‘Hi, this is Gabby, don’t you dare hang up without leaving me a message.’

He had a terrible premonition she was irretrievably gone. Even if they could patch things up, the person she had been before this day began would no longer exist. It was like listening to a recording of someone who had just died.

There was a beep. After a long pause, which he knew would sound weird when she played it back but which he struggled to end, he said finally, ‘Call me, will you? We’ve got to talk.’ He couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘Well, okay. That’s it. Bye.’

He hung up and stared at the mobile for a while, weighing it in his palm, willing it to ring, wondering if he should have said something else or if there was some other way of reaching her. He leaned forward to the bodyguard. ‘Is your colleague with my wife, do you know?’

Paccard, keeping his eyes fixed on the road ahead, spoke over his shoulder. ‘No, monsieur. By the time he got to the end of the road, she was already out of sight.’

Hoffmann let out a groan. ‘Is there no one in this goddam town who can do a simple job without screwing up?’ He threw himself back in his seat, folded his arms and stared out of the window. Of one thing at least he was certain: he had not bought up Gabrielle’s exhibition. He had not had the opportunity. Convincing her, however, would not be easy. In his mind he heard her voice again. A billion dollars? Ballpark? You know what? Forget it. It’s over.

Across the gunmetal waters of the Rhone he could see the financial district – BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, Barclays Private Wealth… It occupied the northern bank of the wide river and part of the island in the middle. A trillion dollars of assets was controlled from Geneva, of which Hoffmann Investment Technologies handled a mere one per cent; of that one per cent his personal stake was less than one tenth. Viewed in proportion, why should she be so outraged by a billion? Dollars, euros, francs – these were the units in which he measured the success or failure of his experiment, just as at CERN he had used teraelectronvolts, nanoseconds and microjoules. However, there was one great difference between the two, he was obliged to concede; a problem he had never fully confronted or solved. You couldn’t buy anything with a nanosecond or a microjoule, whereas money was a sort of toxic by-product of his research. Sometimes he felt it was poisoning him inch by inch, just like Marie Curie had been killed by radiation.

At first he had ignored his wealth, either rolling it over into the company or parking it on deposit. But he hated the thought of becoming an eccentric like Etienne Mussard, twisted into misanthropy by the pressure of his own good fortune. So recently he had copied Quarry and tried spending it. But that had led directly to the overdecorated mansion in Cologny, stuffed with expensive collections of books and antiques he did not need but which required layers of security to protect: a sort of pharaoh’s burial chamber for the living. The final option he supposed would be to give it away – Gabrielle would approve of that, at least – but even philanthropy could corrupt: to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars responsibly would be a full-time job. Occasionally he had a fantasy that his surplus profits might be converted into paper money and incinerated round-the-clock, just as an oil refinery burned off excess gas – blue and yellow flames lighting up the Geneva night sky.

The Mercedes began to cross the river.

He did not like to think of Gabrielle wandering the streets alone. It was her impulsiveness that worried him. Once angered, she was capable of anything. She might disappear for a few days, fly back to her mother in England, have her head filled with nonsense. You know what? Forget it. It’s over. What did she mean by that? What was over? The exhibition? Her career as an artist? Their conversation? Their marriage? Panic welled inside him again. Life without her would be a vacuum: unsurvivable. He rested the edge of his forehead on the cold glass, and for a vertiginous moment, looking down into the lightless, turbid water, imagined himself sucked into nothingness, like a passenger whipped out through the fuselage of a ruptured aircraft miles above the earth.

They turned on to the Quai du Mont-Blanc. The city, crouched around the dark pool of its lake, looked low and sombre, hewn from the same grey rock as the distant Jura. There was none of the vulgar glass-and-steel animal exuberance of Manhattan or the City of London: their skyscrapers would rise and they would crash, booms and busts would come and go, but crafty Geneva, with its head down, would endure for ever. The Hotel Beau-Rivage, nicely positioned near the mid-point of the wide tree-lined boulevard, embodied these values in bricks and stone. Nothing exciting had happened here since 1898, when the Empress of Austria, leaving the hotel after lunch, had been stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist. One fact about her murder had always stuck in Hoffmann’s mind: she had been unaware of her injury until her corset was removed, by which time she had almost bled to death internally. In Geneva, even the assassinations were discreet.

The Mercedes pulled up on the opposite side of the road, and Paccard, his hand raised imperiously to stop the traffic, escorted Hoffmann across the pedestrian crossing, up the steps and into the faux-Habsburg grandeur of the interior. If the concierge felt any private alarm at Hoffmann’s appearance, he allowed no flicker of it to show on his smiling face as he took over from Paccard and led le cher docteur up the stairs to the dining room.

The atmosphere beyond the tall doors was that of a nineteenth-century salon: paintings, antiques, gilt chairs, gold swag curtains; the Empress herself would have felt at home. Quarry had reserved a long table by the French windows and was sitting with his back to the lake view, keeping an eye on the entrance. He had a napkin tucked into his collar, gentleman’s-club style, but when Hoffmann appeared, he quickly pulled it out and dropped it on his chair. He moved to intercept his partner in the middle of the room.