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 his 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
