The Fear Index

  ‘He was a romantic on the subject – always dangerous. I was his section head at the Computing Centre. Maggie and I helped him get on his feet a bit. He used to babysit our boys when they were small. He was hopeless at it.’

  ‘I bet.’ She bit her lip at the thought of Alex with children.

  ‘Completely hopeless. We’d come home and find him upstairs asleep in their beds and them downstairs watching television. He was always pushing himself far too hard, exhausting himself. He had this obsession with artificial intelligence, although he disliked the hubristic connotations of AI and preferred to call it AMR – autonomous machine reasoning. Are you very technically minded?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Isn’t that difficult, being married to Alex?’

  ‘To be honest, I think the opposite. It’s what makes it work.’ Or did, she nearly added. It was the self-absorbed mathematician – his social artlessness, the strange innocence of him – that she had fallen in love with; it was the new Alex, the billionaire hedge-fund president, she found difficult to take.

  ‘Well, without getting too technical about it, one of the big challenges we face here is simply analysing the sheer amount of experimental data we produce. It’s now running around twenty-seven trillion bytes each day. Alex’s solution was to invent an algorithm that would learn what to look for, so to speak, and then teach itself what to look for next. That would make it able to work infinitely faster than a human being. It was theoretically brilliant, but a practical disaster.’

  ‘So it didn’t work?’

  ‘Oh yes, it worked. That was the disaster. It started spreading through the system like bindweed. Eventually we had to quarantine it, which meant basically shutting everything down. I’m afraid I had to tell Alex that that particular line of research was too unstable to be continued. It would require containment, like nuclear technology, otherwise one was effectively just unleashing a virus. He wouldn’t accept it. Things became quite ugly for a while. He had to be forcibly removed from the facility on one occasion.’

  ‘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.’

  15

  As I was considering these issues … a new concept popped into my head: ‘the digital nervous system’ … A digital nervous system consists of the digital processes that enable a company to perceive and react to its environment, to sense competitor challenges and customer needs, and to organise timely responses …

  BILL GATES, Business at the Speed of Light (2000)

  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 hi
s 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.’

  He was so certain he was right, Quarry found his paranoia contagious. He examined his own phone gingerly, as if it were a grenade that might explode in his hand, then used it to call his assistant. ‘Amber, would you please track down Maurice Genoud and get him over here right away? Tell him to drop whatever else he’s doing and come to Alex’s office.’ He hung up. ‘Let’s hear what the bastard has to say. I never did trust him. I wonder what his game is.’

  ‘That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? We’re a hedge fund returning an eighty-three per cent profit. If someone set up a clone of us, copying all our trades, they’d make a fortune. They wouldn’t even need to know how we were doing it. It’s obvious why they’d want to spy on us. The only thing I don’t understand is why he’s done all this other stuff.’

  ‘What other stuff?’

  ‘Set up an offshore account in the Cayman Islands, transferred money in and out of it, sent emails in my name, bought me a book full of stuff about fear and terror, sabotaged Gabby’s exhibition, hacked into my medical records and hooked me up with a psychopath. It’s like he’s been paid to drive me mad.’

  Listening to him, Quarry started to feel uneasy again, but before he could say anything his phone rang. It was Amber.

  ‘Mr Genoud was only just downstairs. He’s on his way up.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He said to Hoffmann, ‘Apparently he’s in the building already. That’s odd, isn’t it? What’s he doing here? Maybe he knows we’re on to him.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Suddenly Hoffmann was on the move once more – out of the men’s room, across the passage, into his office. Another idea had occurred to him. He wrenched open the drawer of his desk and pulled out the book Quarry had seen him bring in that morning: the volume of Darwin he had called him about at midnight.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said, flicking through the pages. He held it up, open at a photograph of an old man seemingly terrified out of his wits – a grotesque picture, Quarry thought, like something out of a freak show. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘I see some Victorian lunatic who looks like he just shat a brick.’

  ‘Yeah, but look again. Do you see these calipers?’

  Quarry looked. A pair of hands, one on either side of the face, was applying thin metal rods to the forehead. The victim’s head was supported in some kind of steel headrest; he seemed to be wearing a surgical gown. ‘Of course I see them.’

  ‘The calipers are being applied by a French doctor called Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne. He believed that the expressions of the human face are the gateway to the soul. He’s animating the facial muscles by using what the Victorians called galvanism – their word for electricity produced by acid reaction. They often used it to make the legs of a dead frog jump, a party trick.’ He waited for Quarry to see the importance of what he was saying, and when he continued to look baffled, he added: ‘It’s an experiment to induce the facial symptoms of fear for the purpose of recording them on camera.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Quarry cautiously. ‘I get it.’

  Hoffmann waved the book in exasperation. ‘Well, isn’t that exactly what’s been happening to me? This is the only illustration in the book where you can actually see the calipers – in all the others, Darwin had them removed. I’m the subject of an experiment designed to make me experience fear, and my reactions are being continuously monitored.’

  After a moment when he could not entirely trust himself to speak, Quarry said, ‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear that, Alexi. That must be a horrible feeling.’

  ‘The question is: who’s doing it, and why? Obviously it’s not Genoud’s idea. He’s just the tool …’

  But now it was Quarry’s turn not to pay attention. He was thinking of his responsibilities as CEO – to their investors, to their employees and (he was not ashamed to admit it afterwards) to himself. He was remembering Hoffmann’s medicine cabinet all those years ago, filled with enough mind-altering drugs to keep a junkie happy for six months, and his specific instruction to Rajamani not to minute any concerns about the company president’s mental health. He was wondering what would happen if any of this became public. ‘Let’s sit down,’ he suggested. ‘We need to talk about a few things.’

  Hoffmann was irritated to be interrupted in mid-flow. ‘Is it urgent?’

  ‘It is rather, yes.’ Quarry took a seat on the sofa and gestured to Hoffmann to join him.

  But Hoffmann ignored the sofa and went and sat behind his desk. He swept his arm across the surface, clearing it of the detritus of the smoke detector. ‘Okay, go ahead. Just don’t say anything till you’ve taken the battery out of your phone.’

  HOFFMANN WASN’T SURPRISED that Quarry had failed to grasp the significance of the Darwin book. All his life he had seen things faster than other people; that was why he had been obliged to pass so many of his days on long and lonely solo voyages of the mind. Eventually others around him caught up, but by then he was generally off travelling somewhere else.

  He watched as Quarry dismantled his phone and placed the battery carefully on the coffee table.

  Quarry said, ‘We have a problem with VIXAL-4.’

  ‘What kind of a problem?’

  ‘It’s taken off the delta hedge.’

  Hoffmann stared at him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He pulled his keyboard towards him, logged on to his terminal and began going through their positions – by sector, size, type, date. The mouse clicks were as rapid as Morse code, and each screen they brought up was more astonishing to him than the last. He said, ‘But this is all completely out of whack. This isn’t what it’s programmed to do.’

  ‘Most of it happened between lunchtime and the US opening. We couldn’t get hold of you. The good news is that it’s guessing right – so far. The Dow is off by about a hundred, and if you look at the P and L we’re up by over two hundred mil on the day.’

  ‘But it’s not what it’s supposed to do,’ repeated Hoffmann. Of course there would be a rational explanation: there always was. He would find it eventually. It had to be linked to everything else that was happening to him. ‘Okay, first off, are we sure this data is correct? Can we actually trust what’s on these screens? Or could it be sabotage of some kind? A
virus?’ He was remembering the malware on his psychiatrist’s computer. ‘Maybe the whole company is under cyber-attack by someone, or some group – have we thought of that?’

  ‘Maybe we are, but that doesn’t explain the short on Vista Airways – and believe me, that’s starting to look like somewhat more than a coincidence.’

  ‘Yeah, well it can’t be. We’ve already been over this—’

  Quarry cut him off impatiently. ‘I know we have, but the story’s changed as the day’s gone on. Now it seems the crash wasn’t caused by mechanical failure after all. Apparently there was a bomb warning put up on some Islamic terrorist website while the plane was in the air. The FBI missed it; we didn’t.’

  Hoffmann couldn’t take it in at first: too much information was coming at him too quickly. ‘But that’s way outside VIXAL’s parameters. That would be an extraordinary inflection point – a quantum leap.’

  ‘I thought it was a machine-learning algorithm.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then maybe it’s learned something.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Hugo. It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘Okay, so it doesn’t work like that. Fine, I’m not the expert. The fact is, we have to make a decision rather quickly here. Either we override VIXAL or we’re going to have to put up two-point-five bil tomorrow afternoon just so the banks will let us continue trading.’

  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.’