Philip Kerr - Research

‘But Colson’s Geneva Convention is about to get even richer, after Colson acquires a company called Galatea Genomics run by two geneticists — Daniel Weinreich and William Williams. Weinreich, who deeply disapproves of Colson, disagrees with the board of Galatea and leaves the company. Then, with Williams’s help Colson constructs an innovative and highly confidential computer program that’s soon the basis of what the two men believe is nothing less than a new social science they now dub Phenomics .

‘Now, the big drawback of conventional economics of course is that it doesn’t act like a science at all, because human activity makes economic agents much too unpredictable. Put another way, Adam Smith was simply wrong because he believed that it was possible to make laws and rules for economies of the kind that Sir Isaac Newton had established for the universe. It just isn’t. Economies don’t behave like that with physical laws — with forces that act in a mechanistic and predictable way. If you’ve ever talked to three economists you’ll know what I’m talking about; they’ll all hold very different opinions about everything from unemployment to the price of eggs, which proves that economics really isn’t a science at all but a form of clairvoyance.

‘In my story Colson and Williams believe Phenomics remedies the defects of economics because the essence of the analysis is not the observation of rational laws that make economies easy to predict, but of the kind of human irrationality that makes economies impossible to predict — at least by the application of conventional economic principles. Crudely speaking, Phenomics purports to provide its inventors with a data-based method of making economics work as a true science. Without wanting to get too technical the Phenomics program is able to analyse companies as organisms with genetic codes that can be mapped, just like the DNA of a sheep or a human being. It’s Phenomics that provides Colson with an ensemble of observable characteristics displayed by a company; the program looks for company phenotypes, which is to say it attempts to identify the composite of a company’s observable characteristics and traits such as its morphology, heredity, development, business cycles, investment behaviour, products and personnel. Using an enormous amount of accumulated data the Phenomics program looks to predict those company phenotypes and the effect the company will have on the outside world — and, by extension, its chances of becoming a successful corporate organism.

‘Of course, this is fiction, and the beauty of this fiction is that since there are very few people who understand how hedge funds and their products actually work, this is the kind of story where the reader really does have to suspend disbelief. Especially my fucking readers. But after all that is the novelist’s job. Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick, it’s work. Damn right. So that when the Phenomics program makes the Geneva Convention the most successful hedge fund in the world, it doesn’t strain credibility too much.

‘Colson and Williams create a special tracking fund of 100 million dollars using Phenomics as the basis of its investment philosophy, and within just six months this shows a forty per cent return. Colson and Williams now proceed to sell Phenomics as the basis of modern investment to GC’s investors. And all goes smooth. Until it doesn’t. And of course this is where one says bollocks to Christopher Booker’s idea that there are seven basic plots. Frankly that just looked like rehashed Quiller-Couch, anyway. There is only one fucking plot in the whole of literature: in fiction nothing is what it ever seems to be. I mean everything comes down to that, right?

‘And this is where everything in the story gets turned upside down. In the book we’ve always known that Charles Colson has a skeleton in his closet; but now we discover that this is almost literally true. Charles once had an identical twin brother called James. As boys James and Charles had concluded that they could never live normal lives just as long as they were both alive. They did too many weird things to make people feel comfortable around them and decided that one of them should disappear. So they tossed for it and James lost; soon after that he vanished. Charles was even suspected of killing his twin. But a body was never found.

‘Now, using international criminal DNA databases, one of the people who worked for Galatea Genomics — Daniel Weinreich — has found out about the twin and traced him to Casuarina Prison in Western Australia, where he’s serving a sentence for a bank robbery he didn’t commit; he was framed by his brother Charles, to make sure he kept out of the way for ever. Weinreich and a bunch of people get together and spring James Colson, to take his brother’s place. They also kidnap Charles, take him to a motel in the outback, and then inform the police, who naturally assume they’ve caught his brother, James, who returns to Geneva with his liberators, where he assumes the place of his brother Charles; he starts to use the Geneva Convention money for good. Charles, locked up in Casuarina — which is the hardest prison in Oz — protests that he’s someone else; but of course, the prison officers assume he’s gone nuts and ignore him.

‘Of course, it’s the same story as The Man in the Iron Mask , in which the King’s musketeer, Aramis, substitutes the twin brother of Louis XIV, Philippe, for the king. This was always one of my favourite stories when I was a boy. And it’s long seemed to me that the founders and owners of modern hedge funds are the modern equivalent of the aristocracy and royalty that once ruled Europe.’

Don nodded. ‘It’s a good story. Your novel, I mean. I always liked it.’

‘I wish to God I’d let you write it, Don, like you wanted to. Seems like everything’s gone wrong since I started this fucking project. The minute I got here, shit started to happen.’

‘Such as.’

‘The very first night in Geneva. It had turned a little chilly and so I borrowed Mechanic’s coat to walk into the village and have dinner at the Café des Marronniers. Just before I went out I caught sight of myself in the mirror in the hall and thought how like Bob Mechanic I looked wearing his overcoat. And that might have been funny except that between here and there someone fucking mugged me. They didn’t get much. Just a couple of hundred euros. Fortunately, I wasn’t wearing this watch.’

I lifted my wrist to show Don the Hublot Caviar watch I was wearing. With a case made entirely of black diamonds which glistened in the light it did indeed look like a little pot of Beluga caviar.

‘Did you report it to the police?’ asked Don.

‘No. It was my own fault. It’s dark and very quiet around here at night and everyone in Geneva knows that people in Collonge-Bellerive have more money than sense. At the time I thought nothing about it. But then I got a call from Mechanic on his satellite phone warning me to be careful; he’d received an email from Keith Levin, the head of security at the Mechanism — that’s the name of Bob’s fund — advising him of the existence of a boiler-room company called Mechanism New Investment Capital that was offering discounted securities to UK investors. In other words these were scammers who were pretending to work for Bob Mechanic’s hedge fund. The head of security at the Mechanism thought it possible that the scammers were taking advantage of Bob being in the Antarctic to operate the boiler-room scam. When Bob told me this I rang Keith and told him about the mugging and Keith said it was quite possible that these two events were connected; and that I shouldn’t go anywhere on foot while I remained in Geneva. After that I didn’t go out for several days. I had my head down and wrote the best part of ten thousand words. Good stuff, too. Not just dialogue — which is easier to write, of course — but narrative. It was the best writing I’d done since I first started. After a while I felt I’d earned myself a break. I’d thought about taking a trip down to Lyon to see Philip French. He was always inviting me to his house in Tourrettes-sur-Loup. Anyway I didn’t go. Besides, it was my wedding anniversary and I had to go back to Monaco.’