Leclerc swore. He said to the nearest gendarmes: ‘You three, check these premises.’ And then to the others: ‘You three, come with me.’ And finally to the room in general: ‘Nobody is to leave the building without my permission. Nobody is to make any phone calls. We shall try to be as quick as possible. Thank you for your co- operation.’
He walked briskly back towards reception. Quarry chased after him. ‘I’m sorry, Inspector – excuse me – what exactly has Alex done?’
‘A body has been discovered. We need to speak to him about it. Forgive me…’
He strode out of the offices and into the corridor. It was deserted. He had a funny feeling about this place. His eyes were searching everywhere. ‘What other companies are on this floor?’
Quarry was still at his heels. His face was grey. ‘Only us, we rent the whole thing. What body?’
Leclerc said to his men, ‘We’ll have to start at the bottom and work our way up.’
One of the gendarmes pressed the elevator call button. The doors opened and it was Leclerc, eyes darting, who saw the danger first and yelled out to him to stay where he was.
‘Christ,’ said Quarry, gazing at the void. ‘Alex…’
The doors began to close. The gendarme held his finger on the button to reopen them. Wincing, Leclerc got down on his knees, shuffled forwards, and peered over the edge. It was impossible to make out anything at the bottom. He felt a drop of moisture hit the back of his neck, and put his hand to it and touched a viscous liquid. He craned his head upwards to find himself staring at the bottom of the elevator car. It was only a floor above him. Something was dangling off the bottom. He drew back quickly.
Gabrielle had finished her packing. Her suitcases were in the hall: one big case, one smaller, and one carry-on bag – less than a full-scale removal but more than just an overnight stay. The last flight to London was due to take off at 9.25, and the BA website was warning of increased security after the Vista Airways bomb: she ought to leave now if she was to be sure of catching it. She sat in her studio and wrote Alex a note, the old-fashioned way, on pure white paper with steel nib and Indian ink.
The first thing she wanted to say was that she loved him, and that she was not leaving him permanently – ‘maybe you’d prefer it if I did’ – she just needed a break from Geneva. She had been out to see Bob Walton at CERN – ‘don’t be angry, he’s a good man, he’s worried about you’ – and that had been a help because for the first time really she had begun to understand the extraordinary work he was trying to do and the immense strain he must be under.
She was sorry for blaming him for the fiasco of her exhibition. If he still insisted he wasn’t responsible for buying everything, then of course she believed him: ‘But darling, are you sure you’re right when you say that, because who else would have done it?’ Perhaps he was having some kind of breakdown again, in which case she wanted to help him; what she did not want to do was learn about his past problems for the first time from a policeman, of all people. ‘If we’re going to stay together we’ve got to be more honest with one another.’ She had only come out to Switzerland all those years ago intending to work as a temp for a couple of months, yet somehow she had ended up staying and fitting her existence entirely around his. Maybe if they had had children it might have been different. But if nothing else, what had happened today had made her realise that work, even the most creative work, for her was no substitute for life, whereas for him she thought it was exactly that.
Which really brought her to her main point. As she understood it from Walton, he had devoted his life to trying to create a machine that could reason, learn and act independently of human beings. To her there was something inherently frightening about that whole idea, even though Walton assured her his intentions had been entirely noble (‘and knowing you, I’m sure they were’). But to take such a vaulting ambition and place it entirely at the service of making money – wasn’t that to marry the sacred and the profane? No wonder he had started to behave so strangely. Even to want a billion dollars, let alone possess such a sum, was madness in her opinion, and there was a time when it would have been his opinion too. If a person happened to invent something that everyone needed – well okay, fair enough. But simply to gain it by gambling (she had never understood exactly what his company did, but that seemed to be the essence of it), well, such greed was worse than madness, it was wicked – nothing good would come of it – and that was why she needed to get out of Geneva, before the place and its values devoured her…
On and on she wrote, forgetting time, the pen gliding over the hand-woven paper in her intricate calligraphy. The conservatory grew darker. Across the lake, the lights of the city began to glint. The thought of Alex out there with a broken head gnawed at her.
I feel awful going when you’re ill, but if you won’t let me help you, or the doctors properly examine you, then there’s not much point in my staying, is there? If you need me, call me. Please. Any time. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I love you. G x
She sealed the note in an envelope, wrote a large A on the front and carried it towards the study, pausing briefly in the hall to ask her driver-bodyguard to put her cases in the car and take her to the airport.
She went into the study and propped the envelope on the keyboard of her husband’s computer, and somehow she must have pressed a key by accident, because the screen came to life and she found she was looking at an image of a woman bending over a desk. It took her a moment to realise it was her. She looked behind her and above, at the red light of a smoke detector; the woman on the screen did the same.
She tapped a few more keys at random. Nothing happened. She pressed ESCAPE and instantly the image shrank into the top left-hand corner of the screen, part of a grid of twenty-four different camera shots, bulging outwards from the centre slightly, like the multiple images of an insect’s eye. In one, something seemed to be moving faintly. She adjusted the mouse and clicked on it. The screen was filled with a night-vision image of her lying on a bed in a short dressing gown, her legs crossed and her arms behind her head. A candle glittered as bright as a sun beside her. The video was silent. She unfastened the belt, slipped off the dressing gown, and naked held out her arms. A man’s head – Alex’s head, uninjured – appeared in the bottom right quadrant of the screen. He too began to get undressed.
There was a polite cough. ‘Madame Hoffmann?’ enquired a voice behind her, and she dragged her horrified gaze away from the screen to find her driver framed in the doorway. Behind him loomed two black-capped gendarmes.
IN NEW YORK at 1.30 p.m., the New York Stock Exchange began to experience such volatility that liquidity replenishment points increased in frequency to a rate of seven per minute, taking an estimated twenty per cent of liquidity out of the market. The Dow was off by more than one and a half per cent, the S amp;P 500 by two. The VIX was up by ten.
^ 1 Mary Shapiro, evidence submitted to Congress. The background detail of what happened on the US financial markets over the next two hours is entirely factual, drawn from Congressional
testimony and the joint CFTC and SEC report, Findings Regarding the Market Events of May 6, 2010.
17
The most vigorous individuals, or those which have most successfully struggled with their conditions of life, will generally leave most progeny. But success will often depend on having special weapons or means of defence…
Zimeysa was a nowhere land – no history, no geography, no inhabitants; even its name was an acronym of other places: Zone Industrielle de Meyrin-Satigny. Hoffmann drove between low buildings that seemed to be neither office blocks nor factories but a hybrid of both. What went on here? What was made? It was impossible to say. The skeletal arms of cranes stretched over construction sites and lorry parks deserted for the night. It could have been anywhere in the world. The airport was less than a kilometre to the east. The lights of the terminals imparted a pale glow to a darkening sky corrugated with low cloud. Each time a passenger jet came in low overhead, it sounded like a rolling wave breaking onshore: a thunderous crescendo that set Hoffmann’s nerves on edge, followed by a whining ebb, the landing lights receding like flotsam between the crane spars and flat roofs.
