Robert Harris - The Fear Index

On and on she wrote, forgetting time, the pen gliding over the hand-woven paper in her intricate calligraphy. The conservatory grew darker. Across the lake, the lights of the city began to glint. The thought of Alex out there with a broken head gnawed at her.

I feel awful going when you’re ill, but if you won’t let me help you, or the doctors properly examine you, then there’s not much point in my staying, is there? If you need me, call me. Please. Any time. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I love you. G x

She sealed the note in an envelope, wrote a large A on the front and carried it towards the study, pausing briefly in the hall to ask her driver-bodyguard to put her cases in the car and take her to the airport.

She went into the study and propped the envelope on the keyboard of her husband’s computer, and somehow she must have pressed a key by accident, because the screen came to life and she found she was looking at an image of a woman bending over a desk. It took her a moment to realise it was her. She looked behind her and above, at the red light of a smoke detector; the woman on the screen did the same.

She tapped a few more keys at random. Nothing happened. She pressed ESCAPE and instantly the image shrank into the top left-hand corner of the screen, part of a grid of twenty-four different camera shots, bulging outwards from the centre slightly, like the multiple images of an insect’s eye. In one, something seemed to be moving faintly. She adjusted the mouse and clicked on it. The screen was filled with a night-vision image of her lying on a bed in a short dressing gown, her legs crossed and her arms behind her head. A candle glittered as bright as a sun beside her. The video was silent. She unfastened the belt, slipped off the dressing gown, and naked held out her arms. A man’s head – Alex’s head, uninjured – appeared in the bottom right quadrant of the screen. He too began to get undressed.

There was a polite cough. ‘Madame Hoffmann?’ enquired a voice behind her, and she dragged her horrified gaze away from the screen to find her driver framed in the doorway. Behind him loomed two black-capped gendarmes.

IN NEW YORK at 1.30 p.m., the New York Stock Exchange began to experience such volatility that liquidity replenishment points increased in frequency to a rate of seven per minute, taking an estimated twenty per cent of liquidity out of the market. The Dow was off by more than one and a half per cent, the S amp;P 500 by two. The VIX was up by ten.

^ 1 Mary Shapiro, evidence submitted to Congress. The background detail of what happened on the US financial markets over the next two hours is entirely factual, drawn from Congressional

testimony and the joint CFTC and SEC report, Findings Regarding the Market Events of May 6, 2010.

Zimeysa was a nowhere land – no history, no geography, no inhabitants; even its name was an acronym of other places: Zone Industrielle de Meyrin-Satigny. Hoffmann drove between low buildings that seemed to be neither office blocks nor factories but a hybrid of both. What went on here? What was made? It was impossible to say. The skeletal arms of cranes stretched over construction sites and lorry parks deserted for the night. It could have been anywhere in the world. The airport was less than a kilometre to the east. The lights of the terminals imparted a pale glow to a darkening sky corrugated with low cloud. Each time a passenger jet came in low overhead, it sounded like a rolling wave breaking onshore: a thunderous crescendo that set Hoffmann’s nerves on edge, followed by a whining ebb, the landing lights receding like flotsam between the crane spars and flat roofs.

He treated the BMW with extreme care, driving with his face up close to the windscreen. There were a lot of roadworks, cables being laid, first one lane shut and then the other, creating a chicane. The turning to Route de Clerval was on the right, just past a distribution centre for auto parts – Volvo, Nissan, Honda. He indicated to turn into it. Up ahead on the left was a petrol station. He pulled up at the pumps and went into the shop. CCTV footage shows him hesitating between the aisles, then moving decisively to a section selling jerry cans: red metal, good quality, thirty-five francs each. The video is time-lapsed, making his actions seem jerky, like a marionette’s. He buys five, paying for them in cash. The camera above the till clearly shows the wound on the top of his head. The sales assistant subsequently described him as being in an agitated state. His face and clothes were streaked with grease and oil; there was dried blood in his hair.

Hoffmann said, with a terrible attempt at a smile, ‘What’s with all the roadworks?’

‘It’s been going on for months, monsieur. They’re laying fibre-optic cable.’

Hoffmann went out on to the forecourt with the jerry cans. It took him two trips to carry them to the nearest pump. He began filling them in turn. There were no other customers. He felt horribly exposed standing alone under the fluorescent lights. He could see the sales assistant watching him. Another jet came in to land directly over their heads, making the air tremble. It seemed to shake him from the inside out. He finished filling the last can, opened the rear door of the BMW and shoved it along to the far side of the back seat, stacking all the others in a row after it. He returned to the shop, paid one hundred and sixty-eight francs for the fuel and another twenty-five for a flashlight, two cigarette lighters and three cleaning cloths. Again he paid in cash. He left the shop without looking back.

Leclerc had briefly inspected the body at the bottom of the elevator shaft. There was not much to see. It reminded him of a suicide he had once had to deal with at the Cornavin railway station. He had a strong stomach for that kind of thing. It was the unmarked corpses who looked at you as if they should still be breathing that got under his skin: their eyes always seemed so full of reproaches. Where were you when I needed you?

In the basement he talked briefly to the Austrian businessman whose car Hoffmann had stolen. He was outraged, seemed to hold Leclerc more responsible than the man who had committed the crime – ‘I pay my taxes here, I expect the police to protect me’ and so forth – and Leclerc had been obliged to listen politely. The licence number and description had been circulated as a high priority to every Geneva police officer. The entire building was now being searched and evacuated. Forensics were on their way. Madame Hoffmann had been picked up at the house in Cologny and was being brought over for questioning. The office of the chief of police had been notified: the chief himself was at an official dinner in Zurich, which was a relief. Leclerc was not sure what else he could do.

For the second time that evening he found himself climbing multiple flights of stairs. He felt dizzy with the effort. There was a tingling in his left arm. He needed to get himself checked out: his wife was always nagging him about it. He wondered about Hoffmann and whether he had killed his colleague as well as the German in the hotel room. On the face of it, it seemed impossible: the safety mechanism of the elevator had plainly failed. But equally it was a remarkable coincidence, one had to say, for a man to have been at the scene of two deaths in the space of a few hours.

Arriving at the fifth floor, he paused to recover his breath. The entrance to the hedge fund’s offices was open; a young gendarme was standing guard. Leclerc nodded to him as he went past. On the trading floor, the mood seemed not merely shocked – he would have expected that, after the loss of a colleague – but almost hysterical. The employees, previously so silent, were huddled in groups, talking animatedly. The Englishman, Quarry, almost ran over to him. On the screens, the numbers continued to change.