Robert Harris - The Fear Index

‘And that was when he had his breakdown?’

Walton nodded sadly. ‘I never saw a man so desolate. You would’ve thought I’d murdered his child.’

By the time Hoffmann reached his office, it was the end of the working day – about 6.00 p.m. in Geneva, noon in New York. People were coming from the building, heading for home or a drink or the gym. He stood in a doorway opposite and checked for any sign of the police, and when he was satisfied they were not in evidence he went loping across the street, stared bleakly at the facial scanner and was admitted, passed straight through the lobby, up in one of the elevators, and on to the trading floor. The place was still full; most people did not leave their desks until eight. He put his head down and headed for his office, trying not to notice the curious looks he was attracting. Sitting at her desk, Marie-Claude watched him approach. She opened her mouth to speak and Hoffmann held up his hands. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I need ten minutes on my own and then I’ll deal with all of it. Don’t let anyone in, okay?’

He went inside and closed the door. He sat in his expensive orthopaedic chair with its state-of-the-art tilt mechanism and opened the German’s laptop. Who had hacked into his medical records – that was the question. Whoever it was must be behind everything else. It baffled him. He had never thought of himself as a man with enemies. It was true he did not have friends; but the corollary of his solitariness, he had always assumed, was that he did not have enemies either.

His head was hurting again. He ran his fingers over the shaved area; it felt like the stitching on a football. His shoulders were locked with tension. He started massaging his neck, leaning back in his chair and looking up at the smoke detector as he had done a thousand times before when he was trying to focus his thoughts. He contemplated the tiny red light, identical to the one on their bedroom ceiling in Cologny that always made him think of Mars as he fell asleep. Slowly he stopped massaging. ‘Shit,’ he whispered.

He sat up straight and looked at the screensaver image on the laptop: the picture of himself, gazing up with a vacant, unfocused expression. He clambered on to his chair. It shifted treacherously beneath his feet as he stepped from it on to his desk. The smoke detector was square, made of white plastic, with a carbon-sensitive plate, a light to show that it was receiving power, a test button and a grille that presumably covered the alarm itself. He felt around the edges. It seemed to be glued to the ceiling tile. He pulled at it and twisted it, and finally in fear and frustration he grasped it hard and yanked it free.

The screech of protest it set up was physical in its intensity. The casing trembled in his hands, the air pulsed with it. It was still connected to the ceiling by an umbilical cord of wire, and when he put his fingers into the back of it to try to shut it down, he received an electric shock that was as vicious as an animal bite; it travelled all the way to his heart. He cried out, dropped it, let it dangle, and shook his fingers vigorously as if drying them. The noise was a physical assault: he felt his ears would bleed unless he stopped it quickly. He grabbed the detector by the casing this time and pulled with all his weight, almost swinging on it, and away it came, bringing down a chunk of the ceiling with it. The sudden silence was as shocking as the din.

MUCH LATER, WHEN Quarry found himself reliving the next couple of hours, and when he was asked which moment for him had been the most frightening, he said that oddly enough it was this one: when he heard the alarm and went running from one end of the trading floor to the other, to find Hoffmann – the only man who fully understood an algorithm that was even now making a thirty-billion-dollar unhedged bet – flecked with blood, covered in dust, standing on a desk beneath a hole in his ceiling, gabbling that he was being spied upon wherever he went.

Quarry was not the first on the scene. The door was already open and Marie-Claude was inside with some of the quants. Quarry shouldered his way past them and ordered them all to get back to their work. He could tell at once, craning his neck, even from that angle, that Hoffmann had been through some kind of trauma. His eyes were wild, his clothes dishevelled. There was dried blood in his hair. His hands looked as if he had been punching concrete.

He said, as calmly as he could, ‘Okay then, Alexi, how’s it going up there?’

‘Look for yourself,’ cried Hoffmann excitedly. He jumped down from the desk and held out his palm. On it were the components of the dismantled smoke alarm. He poked through them with his forefinger as if he were a naturalist inspecting the innards of some dead creature. He held up a small lens with a bit of wire trailing from the back. ‘Do you know what that is?’

‘I’m not sure that I do, no.’

‘It’s a webcam.’ He let the dismantled pieces trickle through his fingers and across his desk; some rolled to the floor. ‘Look at this.’ He gave Quarry the laptop. He tapped the screen. ‘Where do you think that picture was taken from?’

He sat down again and lolled back in his chair. Quarry looked at him and then at the screen and back again. He glanced up at the ceiling. ‘Bloody hell. Where did you get this?’

‘It belonged to the guy who attacked me last night.’

Even at the time Quarry registered the odd use of the past tense – belonged? – and wondered how the laptop had come into Hoffmann’s possession. There was no time to ask, however, as Hoffmann jumped to his feet. His mind was running away with him now. He couldn’t stay still. ‘Come,’ he said, beckoning. ‘Come.’ He led Quarry by the elbow out of his office and pointed to the ceiling above Marie-Claude’s desk, where there was an identical detector. He put his finger to his lips. Then he took him to the edge of the trading floor and showed him – one, two, three, four more. There was one in the boardroom, too. There was even one in the men’s room. He climbed up on to the wash basins. He could just reach it. He pulled hard and it came away in a shower of plaster. He jumped down and showed it to Quarry. Another webcam. ‘They’re everywhere. I’ve been noticing them for months without ever really seeing them. There’ll be one in your office. I’ve got one in every room at home – even in the bedroom. Christ. Even in the bathroom.’ He put his hand to his brow, only just registering the scale of it himself. ‘Unbelievable.’

Quarry had always had a sneaking fear that their rivals might be trying to spy on them: it was certainly what he would do in their shoes. That was why he had hired Genoud’s security consultancy. He turned the detector over in his hands, appalled. ‘You think there’s a camera in all of them?’

‘Well, we can check them out, but yeah – yeah, I do.’

‘My God, and yet we pay a fortune to Genoud to sweep this place for bugs.’

‘But that’s the beauty of it – he must be the guy who put all this in, don’t you see? He did my house too, when I bought it. He’s got us under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance. Look.’ Hoffmann took out his mobile phone. ‘He organised these as well, didn’t he – our specially encrypted phones?’ He broke it open – for some reason Quarry was reminded of a man cracking lobster claws – and quickly disassembled it beside one of the wash basins. ‘It’s the perfect bugging device. You don’t even need to put in a microphone – it’s got one built in. I read about it in the Wall Street Journal. You think you’ve turned it off, but actually it’s always active, picking up your conversations even when you’re not on the phone. And you keep it charged all the time. Mine’s been acting strange all day.’