ended in a miscarriage, but easily the longest and by far the most shattering. The hospital had given her an MRI scan when they began to get concerned, which was unusual. Afterwards, rather than stay on her own in Switzerland, she had gone with Alex on a business trip to Oxford. Wandering round a museum while he was interviewing PhDs in the Randolph Hotel, she had come across a 3D model of the structure of penicillin built up on sheets of Perspex in 1944 by Dorothy Hodgkin, the Nobel laureate for chemistry. An idea had stirred in her mind, and when she got home to Geneva, she had tried the same technique on the MRI scan of her womb, which was all she had left of the baby.
It had taken a week of trial and error to work out which of the two hundred cross-sectional images to print off, and how to trace them on to glass, what ink to use and how to stop it smearing. She had sliced her hands repeatedly on the sharp edges of the glass sheets. But the afternoon when she first lined them up and the outline had emerged – the clenched fingers, the curled toes – was a miracle she would never forget. Beyond the window of the apartment where they had lived in those days, the sky had turned black as she worked; brilliant yellow flashes of forked lightning had stabbed down over the mountains. She knew nobody would believe it if she told them. It was too theatrical. It had made her feel as if she were tapping into some elemental force: tampering with the dead. When Alex came home from work and saw the portrait, he had sat stunned for ten minutes.
After that she had become utterly absorbed by the possibilities of marrying science and art to produce images of living forms. Mostly she had acted as her own model, talking the radiographers at the hospital into scanning her from head to toe. The brain was the hardest part of the anatomy to get right. She had to learn which were the best lines to trace – the aqueduct of Sylvius, the cistern of the great cerebral vein, the tentorium cerebellum and the medulla. The simplicity of the form was what appealed to her most, and the paradoxes it carried – clarity and mystery, the impersonal and the intimate, the generic and yet the absolutely unique. Watching Alex going through the CAT scanner that morning had made her want to produce a portrait of him. She wondered if the doctors would let her have his results, or if he would allow her to do it.
She wrapped up the last of the glass sheets tenderly, and then the base, and sealed the cardboard box with thick brown sticky tape. It had been a painful decision to offer this, of all her works, to the exhibition: if someone bought it, she knew she would probably never see it again. And yet it seemed to her an important thing to do: that this was the whole point of creating it in the first place – to give it a separate existence, to let it go out into the world.
She picked up the box and carried it out into the passageway as if it were an offering. On the handles of the doors leading off the corridor, and on the wooden panels, were traces of bluish-white powder where the surfaces had been dusted for fingerprints. In the hall, the blood had been cleaned off the floor. The surface was still damp, showing where Alex had been lying when she discovered him. She carefully skirted the spot. A noise came from inside the study and she felt her skin rise into gooseflesh just as a man’s heavy shape loomed in the doorway. She gave a cry of alarm and almost dropped the box.
She recognised him. It was the security expert, Genoud. He had shown her how to use the alarm system when they first moved in. Another man was with him – heavyset, like a wrestler.
‘Madame Hoffmann, forgive us if we startled you.’ Genoud had a grave professional manner. He introduced the other man. ‘Camille has been sent by your husband to look after you for the rest of the day.’
‘I don’t need looking after…’ began Gabrielle. But she was too shaken to put up much resistance, and found herself allowing the bodyguard to take the box from her hands and carry it out to the waiting Mercedes. She protested that at least she wanted to drive herself to the gallery in her own car. But Genoud was insistent that it was not safe – not until the man who had attacked her husband had been caught – and such was his blunt professional inflexibility that eventually she surrendered again and did as she was told.
‘Bloody brilliant,’ whispered Quarry, catching Hoffmann by the elbow as they left the boardroom.
‘You think? I got the feeling I’d lost them at one point.’
‘They don’t mind being lost, as long as you bring them back eventually to what they really want to see, which is the bottom line. And everyone loves a bit of Greek philosophy.’ He steered Hoffmann ahead of him. ‘My God, old Ezra’s an ugly bugger, but I could give him a kiss for that bit of mental arithmetic at the end.’
The clients were waiting patiently on the edge of the trading floor, all except for young Herxheimer and the Pole, Lukasinski, who had their backs to the others and were talking with quiet animation into their cell phones. Quarry exchanged a look with Hoffmann. Hoffmann shrugged. Even if they were breaking the terms of the non- disclosure agreement, there was not much that could be done. NDAs were bitches to enforce without evidence of breach, by which point it was too late in any case.
‘This way, if you please,’ called Quarry, and with his finger held aloft, tour-guide-style, he led them in a crocodile across the big room. Herxheimer and Lukasinski quickly ended their calls and rejoined the group. Elmira Gulzhan, wearing a large pair of sunglasses, automatically assumed the head of the queue. Clarisse Mussard, in her cardigan and baggy pants, shuffled along in her wake, looking like her maid. Instinctively Hoffmann glanced up at the CNBC ticker to see what was happening on the European markets. The week-long slide seemed to have stopped at last; the FTSE 100 was up by nearly half of one per cent.
They gathered round a trading screen in Execution. One of the quants vacated his desk to give them a better view.
‘So, this is VIXAL-4 in operation,’ said Hoffmann. He stood back to let the investors get closer to the terminal. He decided not to sit: that would have allowed them to see the wound on his scalp. ‘The algorithm selects the trades. They’re on the left of the screen in the pending orders file. On the right are the executed orders.’ He moved a little nearer so that he could read the figures. ‘Here, for instance,’ he began, ‘we have…’ He paused, surprised by the size of the trade; for a moment he thought the decimal point was in the wrong place. ‘Here you see we have one and a half million options to sell Accenture at fifty-two dollars a share.’
‘Whoa,’ said Easterbrook. ‘That’s a heck of a bet on the short side. Do you guys know something about Accenture we don’t?’
‘Fiscal Q2 profits down three per cent,’ rattled off Klein from memory, ‘earnings sixty cents a share: not great, but I don’t get the logic of that position.’
Quarry said, ‘Well, there must be some logic to it, otherwise VIXAL wouldn’t have taken the options. Why don’t you show them another trade, Alex?’
Hoffmann changed the screen. ‘Okay. Here – you see? – here’s another short we’ve just put on this morning: twelve and a half million options to sell Vista Airways at seven euros twenty-eight a share.’
Vista Airways was a low-cost, high-volume European airline, which none of those present would have dreamed of being seen dead on.
‘ Twelve and a half million? ’ repeated Easterbrook. ‘That must be a heck of a chunk of the market. Your machine has got some balls, I’ll give it that.’
‘Really, Bill,’ said Quarry, ‘is it that risky? All airline stocks are fragile these days. I’m perfectly easy with that position.’ But he sounded defensive, and Hoffmann guessed he must have noticed that the European markets were up: if a technical recovery spread across the Atlantic, they might be caught by a rising tide and end up having to sell the options at a loss.
Klein said, ‘Vista Airways had twelve per cent passenger growth in the final quarter and a revised profits forecast up nine per cent. They’ve just taken delivery of a new fleet of aircraft. I don’t get the sense of that position, either.’
‘Wynn Resorts,’ said Hoffmann, reading off the next screen. ‘A million-two short at one hundred and twenty- four.’ He frowned, puzzled. These enormous bets on the down side were unlike VIXAL’s normal complex pattern of hedged trades.
‘Well that one truly is amazing to me,’ said Klein, ‘because they had Q1 growth up from seven-forty million to nine-oh-nine, with a cash dividend of twenty-five cents a share, and they’ve got this great new resort in Macau that’s literally a licence to print money – it turned over twenty billion in table games in Q1 alone. May I?’ Without waiting for permission, he leaned past Hoffmann, seized the mouse and started clicking through the recent trades. His suit smelled like a dry-cleaning store; Hoffmann had to turn away. ‘Procter and Gamble, six million short at sixty-two… Exelon, three million short at forty-one-fifty… plus all the options… Jesus, Hoffmann – is an asteroid about to hit the earth, or what?’
His face was practically pressed against the screen. He produced a notebook from his inside pocket and began scribbling down the figures, but Quarry reached over and deftly plucked it from his hand. ‘Naughty, Ezra,’ he said. ‘You know this is a paperless office.’ He tore out the page, screwed it into a ball and put it in his pocket.
