The Fear Index

14

Hoffmann had managed to hail a taxi on the Rue de Lausanne, one block away from the Hotel Diodati. Afterwards the taxi driver remembered the fare distinctly for three reasons. First because he was driving towards the Avenue de France at the time and Hoffmann needed to go in the opposite direction – he asked to be taken to an address in the suburb of Vernier, close to a local park – which meant he had to perform an illegal U-turn across several lanes of traffic. And second because Hoffmann had seemed so edgy and preoccupied. When they passed a police car heading in the opposite direction, he had sunk low in his seat and put up his hand to shield his eyes. The driver had watched him in the mirror. He was clutching a laptop. His phone rang once but he didn’t answer it; afterwards he turned it off.

A sharp breeze was stiffening the flags above the official buildings; the temperature was barely half what the guidebooks promised for the time of year. It felt as if rain was coming. People had deserted the pavements and taken to their cars, thickening the mid-afternoon traffic. Consequently it was after four when the taxi finally approached the centre of Vernier, and Hoffmann abruptly leaned forward and said, ‘Let me out here.’ He handed over a one-hundred-franc note and walked away without waiting for the change: that was the third reason the driver remembered him.

Vernier stands on hilly ground above the right bank of the Rhone. A generation ago it was a separate village, before the city spread across the river to claim it. Now the modern apartment blocks are close enough to the airport for their occupants to be able to read the names on the sides of the descending jets. Still, there are parts of the centre that retain the character of a traditional Swiss village, with overhanging roofs and green wooden shutters, and it was this aspect of the place that had stayed in Hoffmann’s mind for the past nine years. In his memory he associated it with melancholy autumn afternoons, the street lights just starting to switch on, children coming out of school. He turned a corner and found the circular wooden bench where he used to sit when he was early for his appointments. It girdled a sinister old tree in vigorous leaf. Seeing it again, he couldn’t bear to approach it but kept to the opposite side of the square. Nothing much else had changed: the laundry, the cycle shop, the dingy little cafe in which the old men gathered, the chapel-like maison d’artisant communal. Next to it was the detached building where he was supposed to have been cured. It had been a shop once, a greengrocer’s maybe, or a florist’s – something useful; the owners would have lived above the premises. Now its large downstairs window was frosted and it looked like a dentist’s surgery. The only difference from eight years ago was the video camera that covered the front door: that was new, he thought.

Hoffmann’s hand shook as he pressed the buzzer. Did he have the strength to go through it all again? The first time he hadn’t known what to expect; now he would be deprived of the vital armour of ignorance.

A young man’s voice said, ‘Good afternoon.’

Hoffmann gave his name. ‘I used to be a patient of Dr Polidori. My secretary was supposed to make an appointment for tomorrow.’

‘I’m afraid Dr Polidori spends every Friday seeing her patients at the hospital.’

‘Tomorrow is too late. I need to see her now.’

‘You can’t see her without an appointment.’

‘Tell her it’s me. Say it’s urgent.’

‘What name was it again?’

‘Hoffmann.’

‘Wait, please.’

The entryphone went dead. Hoffmann glanced up at the camera and instinctively raised his hand to cover his head from view. His wound was no longer tacky with blood but powdery: when he inspected his fingertips, they were covered with what looked like fine particles of rust.

‘Come in, please.’ There was a brief buzz as the door was unlocked – so brief that Hoffmann missed it and had to try a second time. Inside it was more comfortable than it used to be – a sofa and two easy chairs, a rug in soothing pastel, rubber plants, and behind the head of the receptionist a large photograph of a woodland glade with shafts of light falling from between the trees. Next to it was her certificate to practise: Dr Jeanne Polidori, with a master’s degree in psychiatry and psychotherapy from the University of Geneva. Another camera scanned the room. The young man at the desk scrutinised him carefully. ‘Go on up. It’s the door straight ahead.’

‘Yes,’ said Hoffmann. ‘I remember.’

The familiar creak of the stairs was enough to unleash a flood of old sensations. Sometimes he had found it almost impossible to drag himself to the top; on the worst days he had felt like a man without oxygen trying to climb Everest. Depression wasn’t the word for it; burial was more accurate – entombment in a thick, cold concrete chamber, beyond the reach of light or sound. Now he was sure he could not endure it again. He would rather kill himself.

She was in her consulting room, sitting at her computer, and stood as he came in. She was the same age as Hoffmann and must have been good-looking when she was younger, but she had a narrow gully that ran from just below her left ear down her cheek all the way to her throat. The loss of muscle and tissue had given her a lopsided look, as if she had suffered a stroke. Usually she wore a scarf; today not. In his artless way he had asked her about it once: ‘What the hell happened to your face?’ She told him she had been attacked by a patient who had been instructed by God to kill her. The man had now fully recovered. But she had kept a pepper spray in her desk ever since: she had opened the drawer and showed it to Hoffmann – a black can with a nozzle.

She wasted no time on a greeting. ‘Dr Hoffmann, I’m sorry, but I told your assistant on the phone I can’t treat you without a referral from the hospital.’

‘I don’t want you to treat me.’ He opened the laptop. ‘I just want you to look at something. Can you do that at least?’

‘It depends what it is.’ She scrutinised him more closely. ‘What happened to your head?’

‘We had an intruder in our house. He hit me from behind.’

‘Have you been treated?’

Hoffmann bent his head forward and showed her his stitches.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Last night. This morning.’

‘You went to the University Hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they give you a CAT scan?’

He nodded. ‘They found some white spots. They could have come from the hit I took, or it could have been something else – pre-existing.’

‘Dr Hoffmann,’ she said more gently, ‘it sounds to me as though you are asking me to treat you.’

‘No, I’m not.’ He set the laptop down in front of her. ‘I just want your opinion about this.’

She looked at him dubiously then reached for her glasses. She still kept them on a chain around her neck, he noticed. She put them on and peered at the screen. As she scrolled through the document, he watched her expression. The ugliness of the scar somehow emphasised the beauty of the rest of her face – he remembered that as well. The day he recognised it was the day in his own opinion that he started to recover.

‘Well,’ she said with a shrug, ‘this is a conversation between two men, obviously, one who fantasises about killing and the other who dreams of dying and what the experience of death would be like. It’s stilted, awkward: I would guess an internet chat room, a website – something like that. The one who wants to kill isn’t very fluent in English; the would-be victim is.’ She glanced at him over her glasses. ‘I don’t see what I’m telling you that you couldn’t have worked out for yourself.’

‘Is this sort of thing common?’

‘Absolutely, and every day more so. It’s one of the darker aspects of the web we now have to cope with. The internet brings together people who in earlier years thankfully would not have had the opportunity to meet – who might not even have known they had these dangerous predilections – and the results can be catastrophic. I have been consulted by the police about it several times. There are websites that encourage suicide pacts, especially among young people. There are paedophile websites, of course. Cannibal websites…’

Hoffmann sat down and put his head in his hands. He said, ‘The man who fantasises about death – that’s me, isn’t it?’

‘Well, you would know, Dr Hoffmann, better than I. Do you not remember writing this?’

‘No, I don’t. And yet there are thoughts there I recognise as mine – dreams I had when I was ill. I seem to have done other things lately I can’t remember.’ He looked at her. ‘Could I have some problem in my brain that’s causing this, do you think? That makes me do things, out-of-character things, that I have no memory of afterwards?’

‘It’s possible.’ She put the laptop to one side and turned to her own computer screen. She typed something and clicked on a mouse several times. ‘I see you terminated your treatment with me in November 2001 without any explanation. Why was that?’

‘I was cured.’

‘Don’t you think that was for me to decide, rather than you?’

‘No, I don’t actually. I’m not a kid. I know when I’m well. I’ve been fine now for years. I got married. I started a company. Everything has been fine. Until this started.’

‘You might feel fine, but I’m afraid major depressive disorders like the one you had can recur.’ She scrolled down his case notes, shaking her head. ‘I see it’s eight and a half years since your last consultation. You’ll have to remind me what it was that triggered your illness in the first place.’

Hoffmann had kept it quarantined in his mind for so long, it was an effort to recall it. ‘I had some serious difficulties in my research at CERN. There was an internal inquiry, which was very stressful. In the end they closed down the project I was working on.’

‘What was the project?’

‘Machine reasoning – artificial intelligence.’

‘And have you been under a lot of similar stress recently?’

‘Some,’ he admitted.

‘What sort of depressive symptoms have you had?’

‘None. That’s what’s so weird.’

‘Lethargy? Insomnia?’

‘No.’

‘Impotence?’

He thought of Gabrielle. He wondered where she was. He said quietly, ‘No.’

‘What about the suicidal fantasies you used to have? They were very vivid, very detailed – any recurrence there?’

‘No.’

‘This man who attacked you – am I to take it he is the other participant in the conversation on the internet?’

Hoffmann nodded.

‘Where is he now?’

‘I’d prefer not to go into that.’

‘Dr Hoffmann, where is he now?’ When he still wouldn’t answer, she said, ‘Show me your hands, please.’

Reluctantly he stood and approached her desk. He held out his hands. He felt like a child again, being made to prove he had washed before sitting down to eat. She examined his broken skin without touching it, then carefully looked him over.

‘You have been in a fight?’

He took a long time to reply. ‘Yes. It was self-defence.’

‘That’s all right. Sit down again, please.’

He did as he was told.

She said, ‘In my opinion, you need to be seen by a specialist right away. There are certain disorders – schizophrenia, paranoia – that can lead the sufferer to act in ways that are entirely out of character and which afterwards they simply can’t remember. That may not apply in your case, but I don’t think we can take a chance, do you? Especially if there are abnormalities on your brain scan.’

‘Maybe not.’

‘So what I would like you to do now is take a seat downstairs while I talk to my colleague. Perhaps you could call your wife and tell her where you are. Is that all right with you?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

He waited for her to show him out, but she remained watchful behind her desk. Eventually he stood and picked up the laptop. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll go down to reception.’

‘Good. It should only take a few minutes.’

At the door, he turned. A thought had occurred to him. ‘Those are my records you’re looking at.’

‘They are.’

‘They’re on computer?’

‘Yes. They always have been. Why?’

‘What exactly is in them?’

‘My case notes. A record of treatment – drugs prescribed, psychotherapy sessions and so on.’

‘Do you tape your sessions with your patients?’

She hesitated. ‘Some.’

‘Mine?’

Another hesitation. ‘Yes.’

‘And then what happens?’

‘My assistant transcribes them.’

‘And you keep the records on computer.’

‘Yes.’

‘May I see?’ He was over at her desk in a couple of strides.

‘No. Certainly not.’

She quickly put her hand on the mouse to close the document, but he grabbed her wrist.

‘Please, just let me look at my own file.’

He had to prise the mouse away from her. Her hand shot towards the drawer where she kept the pepper spray. He blocked it with his leg.

He said, ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I just need to check what I told you. Give me a minute to look at my records and I’ll go.’

He felt bad seeing the fear in her eyes, but he would not yield, and after a couple of seconds she surrendered. She pushed her chair back and stood. He took her place in front of the screen. She moved to a safe distance and watched him from the doorway, drawing her cardigan tight around herself as if she were feeling cold. She said, ‘Where did you get that laptop?’ But he wasn’t listening. He was comparing the two screens, scrolling down first one and then the other, and it was as if he were looking at himself in two dark mirrors. The words on each were identical. Everything that he had poured out to her nine years ago had been cut and pasted and put up on to the website where the German had read it.

He said, without looking up, ‘Is this computer connected to the internet?’ and then he saw that it was. He went into the system registry. It didn’t take him long to find the malware – strange files of a type he had never seen before, four of them:

He said, ‘Someone’s hacked into your system. They’ve stolen my records.’ He glanced over to where she had been standing. The consulting room was empty, the door ajar. He could hear her voice somewhere. It sounded as though she was on the telephone. He seized the laptop and thumped his way down the narrow carpeted staircase. The receptionist came round from behind his desk and tried to block his exit, but Hoffmann had no trouble pushing him aside.

Outside, the normality of the day mocked him – the old guys drinking in the cafe, the mother with her pram, the au pair picking up the laundry. He turned left and walked quickly down the leafy street, past the drab shuttered houses opening directly on to the pavement, past the patisserie now closed for the day and the suburban hedges and the sensible small cars. He did not know where he was going. Normally he found that when he exercised – walked, jogged, ran – it focused his thoughts, stimulated his creativity. Not now. His mind was in turmoil. He began descending a hill. There were allotments to his left and then, amazingly, open fields, a huge factory spread out beneath him with a car park, apartment blocks, mountains in the distance, and above him a hemispheric sky filled with an immense grey flotilla of clouds processing like battleships in review.

After a while the road was sliced off by the concrete wall of an elevated autoroute. The road dwindled to a footpath that wandered left alongside the thunderous motorway, taking him down through some trees until he emerged on to the bank of the river. The Rhone was wide and slow at this point, perhaps two hundred metres from shore to shore, greenish-brown, opaque, bending lazily into open country with woodland rising steeply on the opposite bank. A footbridge, the Passerelle de Chevres, linked the two sides. He recognised it. He had driven past and seen kids jumping off it in summer to cool down. The peacefulness of the view was in weird contrast with the roar of traffic, and as Hoffmann walked out on to the central span, it seemed to him that he had now fallen far outside the run of normal life: that it would be hard for him to get back. At the mid-point of the bridge, he stopped and climbed up on to the metal safety barrier. It would take him only a couple of seconds to drop the five or six metres into the slow-moving current and let himself be borne away. He could see why Switzerland was the world centre for assisted suicide – the whole country seemed organised to encourage one to disappear with privacy and discretion, causing as little trouble as possible.

And he was tempted. He was under no illusions: there would be a mass of DNA and fingerprint evidence in the hotel room linking him to the killing; his arrest was only a matter of time, whatever happened. He thought of what awaited him – a long gauntlet of police, lawyers, journalists, flashing cameras, stretching months into the future. He thought of Quarry, Gabrielle – Gabrielle especially.

But I am not mad, he thought. I may have killed a man but I am not mad. I am either the victim of an elaborate plot to make me think I am mad, or someone is trying to set me up, blackmail me, destroy me. He asked himself: did he trust the authorities – that pedantic has-been Leclerc, for example – to get to the bottom of such a fiendishly elaborate entrapment any better than he? The question answered itself.

He took the German’s mobile phone out of his pocket. It hit the river with barely a splash, leaving a brief white scar on the muddy surface.

On the far bank some children were standing beside their bikes, watching him. He clambered down and crossed the remainder of the bridge and walked straight past them carrying the laptop. He expected them to call out after him, but they remained solemn-faced and silent, and he sensed there might be something in his appearance that was frightening to them.

Gabrielle had never before set foot in CERN, and immediately it reminded her of her old university in northern England – ugly functional office blocks from the sixties and seventies spread over a big campus, scruffy corridors filled with earnest-looking people, mostly young, talking in front of posters advertising lectures and concerts. It even had the same academic odour of floor polish, body heat and canteen food. She could picture Alex at home here far more comfortably than she could in the smart offices of Les Eaux-Vives.

Professor Walton’s assistant had left her in the lobby of the Computing Centre and gone off to find him. Now she was alone, she was strongly tempted to flee. What had seemed a good idea in the bathroom in Cologny after finding his card – calling him, ignoring his surprise, asking if she could come over right away: she would tell him what it was about when she saw him – now struck her as hysterical and embarrassing. Turning round to find the way out, she noticed an old computer in a glass case. When she went closer, she read that it was the NeXT processor that had started the World Wide Web at CERN in 1991. The original note to the cleaners was still stuck to its black metal casing: ‘This machine is a server – DO NOT POWER DOWN!’ Extraordinary, she thought, that it had all begun with something so mundane.

‘Pandora’s Box,’ said a voice behind her, and she turned to find Walton; she wondered how long he had been watching her. ‘Or the Law of Unintended Consequences. You start off trying to create the origins of the universe and you end up creating eBay. Come to my office. I don’t have long, I’m afraid.’

‘Are you sure? I don’t want to trouble you. I can always come back another time.’

‘That’s all right.’ He looked at her carefully. ‘Is it about making art out of particle physics, or is it by any chance about Alex?’

‘Actually it’s Alex.’

‘I thought it might be.’

He led her down a corridor lined with pictures of old computers and into an office block. It was dingy, functional – frosted-glass doors, too-bright strip lighting, institutional lino, grey paintwork – not at all what she had expected for the home of the Large Hadron Collider. But again she could imagine Alex here very easily: it was certainly a much more characteristic habitat of the man she had married than his present interior-designed, leather-upholstered, first-edition-lined study in Cologny.

‘So this is where the great man used to sleep,’ said Walton, throwing open the door of a spartan cell with two desks, two terminals and a view over a car park.

‘Sleep?’

‘Work, too, in fairness. Twenty hours of work a day, four hours of sleep. He used to roll out his mattress in that corner.’ He smiled faintly at the memory and turned his solemn grey eyes upon her. ‘Alex had already gone from here, I think, by the time you met him at our little New Year’s Eve party – or was going, anyway. There’s a problem, I assume.’

‘Yes, there is.’

He nodded, as if expecting it. ‘Come and sit down.’ He led her along the passage to his office. It was identical to the other, except that there was only one desk, and Walton had humanised it somewhat – put down an old Persian carpet on the lino and some plants along the rusting metal windowsill. On top of the filing cabinet a radio was quietly playing classical music, a string quartet. He switched it off. ‘So, how can I help?’

‘Tell me what he was doing here, what went wrong. I gather he had a breakdown, and I have a bad feeling it’s happening all over again. I’m sorry.’ She looked down at her lap. ‘I don’t know who else to ask.’

Walton was sitting behind his desk. He had made a steeple of his long fingers and had it pressed to his lips. He studied her for a while. Eventually he said, ‘Have you ever heard of the Desertron?’

The Desertron, said Walton, was supposed to be America’s Superconducting Super Collider – eighty-seven kilometres of tunnel being dug out of the rock at Waxahachie, Texas. But in 1993 the US Congress, in its infinite wisdom, voted to abandon construction. That saved the US taxpayer about $10 billion. (‘There must have been dancing in the streets.’) However, it also pretty much wiped out the career plans of an entire generation of American academic physicists, including those of the brilliant young Alex Hoffmann, then finishing his PhD at Princeton.

In the end Alex was one of the lucky ones – he was only twenty-five or thereabouts, but already sufficiently renowned to be awarded one of the very few non-European scholarships to work at CERN on the Large Electron-Positron Collider, forerunner of the Large Hadron Collider. Most of his colleagues unfortunately had to go off and become quants on Wall Street, where they helped build derivatives rather than particle accelerators. And when that went wrong and the banking system imploded, Congress had to rescue it, at a cost to the US taxpayer of $3.7 trillion.

‘Which is another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences,’ said Walton. ‘Did you know Alex offered me a job about five years ago?’

‘No.’

‘This was before the banking crisis. I told him that in my view high-end science and money don’t mix. It’s an unstable compound. I may have used the words “dark arts”. I’m afraid we fell out all over again.’

Gabrielle, nodding eagerly, said, ‘I know what you mean. It’s a sort of tension. I’ve always been aware of it in him, but especially lately.’

‘That’s it. Over the years I’ve known quite a few who’ve made the crossover from pure science to making money – none as successfully as Alex, I admit – and you can always tell, just by how loudly they insist the opposite, that secretly they despise themselves.’

He looked pained by what had happened to his profession, as if they had somehow fallen from a state of grace, and again Gabrielle was reminded of a priest. There was an other-worldly quality to him, as there was to Alex.

She had to prompt him. ‘But about the nineties…’

‘Yes, so anyway, back to the nineties…’

Alex had arrived in Geneva only a couple of years after CERN’s scientists had invented the World Wide Web. And oddly enough, it was that which had seized his imagination: not re-creating the Big Bang or finding the God particle or creating antimatter, but the possibilities of serial processing power, emergent machine reasoning, a global brain.

‘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.’