Robert Harris - The Fear Index

Marie-Claude tapped on the door and opened it. ‘Monsieur Genoud is here.’

Quarry said to Hoffmann, ‘Let me handle this.’ He felt as if he were in some kind of arcade game, everything flying at him at once.

Marie-Claude stood aside to let the ex-policeman enter. His gaze went immediately to the hole in the ceiling.

‘Come in, Maurice,’ said Quarry. ‘Close the door. As you can see, we’ve been doing a little DIY in here, and we were wondering if you have any explanation for this.’

‘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…