just not there. I’ve pretty much got used to it since then.’
‘And that was the first time you spoke to him?’
‘It was.’
‘What did you say?’
‘“Dr Hoffmann, I presume.”’
He had flourished the bottle of cognac and offered to go and find two glasses, but Hoffmann had said he didn’t drink, to which Quarry had said, ‘In that case why did you come to a New Year’s Eve party?’ to which Hoffmann had replied that several very kind but overprotective colleagues had thought it was best if he was not left on his own on this particular night. But they were quite wrong, he added – he was perfectly happy to be on his own. And so saying he had moved off into another room, obliging Quarry, after a short interval, to follow him. That was his first taste of the legendary Hoffmann charm. He had felt pretty pissed off. ‘I’ve come sixty miles to see you,’ he said, chasing after him. ‘I’ve left my wife and children crying in a hut on a freezing mountainside and driven through the ice and snow to get here. The least you can do is talk to me.’
‘Why are you so interested in me?’
‘Because I gather you’re developing some very interesting software. A colleague of mine at AmCor said he’d spoken to you.’
‘Yeah, and I told him I’m not interested in working for a bank.’
‘Neither am I.’
For the first time Hoffmann had glanced at him with a hint of interest. ‘So what do you want to do instead?’
‘I want to set up a hedge fund.’
‘What’s a hedge fund?’
Sitting opposite Leclerc, Quarry threw back his head and laughed. Here they were today with ten billion dollars – soon to be twelve billion dollars – in assets under management, yet only eight years ago Hoffmann had not even known what a hedge fund was! And although a crowded, noisy New Year’s Eve party was probably not the best place to attempt an explanation, Quarry had had no choice. He had shouted the definition into Hoffmann’s ear. ‘It’s a way of maximising returns at the same time as minimising risks. Needs a lot of mathematics to make it work. Computers.’
Hoffmann had nodded. ‘Okay. Go on.’
‘Right.’ Quarry had glanced around, searching for inspiration. ‘Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group with the short dark hair who keeps looking at you?’ Quarry had raised the cognac bottle to her and smiled. ‘Right, let’s say I’m convinced she’s wearing black knickers – she looks like a black-knickers kind of a gal to me – and I’m so sure that that’s what she’s wearing, so positive of that one sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I’m wrong, I’m wiped out. So I also bet she’s wearing knickers that aren’t black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours – let’s say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that’s the rest of the market; that’s the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I’m right, I make fifty K, but even if I’m wrong I’m only going to lose fifty K, because I’m hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use – I’m never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread – I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don’t have to be right all the time – if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I’m going to wind up very rich. She really is looking at you, you know.’
She had called across the room, ‘Are you guys talking about me?’ Without waiting for a reply, she had detached herself from her friends and come over to them, smiling. ‘Gabby,’ she had said, sticking out her hand to Hoffmann.
‘Alex.’
‘And I’m Hugo.’
‘Yes, you look like a Hugo.’
Her presence had irritated Quarry, and not only because she so obviously had eyes only for Hoffmann and no interest in him. He was still mid-pitch, and as far as he was concerned her role in this conversation was strictly as illustration, not participant. ‘We were just making a bet,’ he said sweetly, ‘on the colour of your knickers.’
Quarry had made very few social mistakes in his life, but this was, as he freely acknowledged, a beaut. ‘She’s hated me ever since.’
Leclerc smiled and made a note. ‘But your relationship with Dr Hoffmann was established that night?’
‘Oh yes. Now I look back on it, I’d say he was waiting for someone like me just as much as I was looking for someone like him.’
At midnight the guests had gone out into the garden and lit small candles – ‘you know, those tea-light things’ – and put them into paper balloons. Dozens of softly glowing lanterns had lifted off, rising quickly in the cold still air like yellow moons. Someone had called out, ‘Make a wish!’ and Quarry, Hoffmann and Gabrielle had all stood together silently with their faces upturned, misty-breathed, until the lights had dwindled to the size of stars and disappeared. Afterwards Quarry had offered to drive Hoffmann home, whereupon Gabrielle, to his irritation, had tagged along, sitting in the back seat and giving them her life story without being asked for it – some kind of joint degree in art and French from a northern university Quarry had never heard of, a masters at the Royal College of Art, secretarial college, temp jobs, the UN. But even she had shut up when they got inside Hoffmann’s apartment.
He had not wanted to let them in, but Quarry had pretended he needed to use the loo – ‘honestly, it was like trying to get off with a girl at the end of a bad evening’ – and so reluctantly Hoffmann had led them up to the landing and unlocked his door on to a vivarium of noise and tropical heat: motherboards whirring everywhere, red and green eyes winking out from under the sofa, behind the table, stacked on the bookshelves, bunches of black cables festooned from the walls like vines. It reminded Quarry of a story he had read just before Christmas about a man in Maidenhead who kept a crocodile in his garage. In the corner was a Bloomberg terminal for online home traders. On his return from the bathroom, Quarry had looked in at the bedroom – more computers taking up half the bed.
He had come back into the living room to find that Gabrielle had made room for herself on the sofa and kicked off her shoes. He said, ‘So what’s the deal here, Alex? It looks like Mission Control.’
At first Hoffmann had not wanted to talk about it, but gradually he had begun to open up. The object, he said, was autonomous machine-learning – to create an algorithm which, once given a task, would be able to operate independently and teach itself at a rate far beyond the capacity of human beings. Hoffmann was leaving CERN to pursue his research alone, which meant he would no longer have access to the experimental data emanating from the Large Electron-Positron Collider. For the past six months, therefore, he had been using data streams from the financial markets instead. Quarry had said it looked an expensive business. Hoffmann had agreed, although the main cost to him was not in microprocessors – many of which he had been able to salvage from scrap – or the cost of the Bloomberg service, so much as in electricity: he was having to find two thousand francs a week simply to bring in sufficient power; he had twice blacked out the neighbourhood. The other problem, of course, was bandwidth.
Quarry had said cautiously, ‘I could help you out with the cost, if you’d let me.’
‘No need. I’m using the algorithm to pay for itself.’
It had taken an effort for Quarry to stifle his gasp of excitement. ‘Really? That’s a neat concept. And is it?’
‘Sure. It’s just a bunch of extrapolations drawn from basic pattern analysis.’ Hoffmann had shown him the screen. ‘These are the stocks it’s suggested since December first, based on price comparisons using data from the past five years. Then I just email a broker and tell him to buy or sell.’
Quarry had studied the trades. They were good, if small: nickel-and-dime stuff. ‘Could it do more than cover costs? Could it make a profit?’
‘Yeah, in theory, but that would need a lot of investment.’
‘Maybe I could get you the investment.’
‘You know what? I’m not actually interested in making money. No offence, but I don’t see the point of it.’
Quarry couldn’t believe what he was hearing: he didn’t see the point!
Hoffmann had not offered him a drink, or even a seat – not that there was room to sit now that Gabrielle had
