The Fear Index

15

By the time Hoffmann reached his office, it was the end of the working day – about 6.00 p.m. in Geneva, noon in New York. People were coming from the building, heading for home or a drink or the gym. He stood in a doorway opposite and checked for any sign of the police, and when he was satisfied they were not in evidence he went loping across the street, stared bleakly at the facial scanner and was admitted, passed straight through the lobby, up in one of the elevators, and on to the trading floor. The place was still full; most people did not leave their desks until eight. He put his head down and headed for his office, trying not to notice the curious looks he was attracting. Sitting at her desk, Marie-Claude watched him approach. She opened her mouth to speak and Hoffmann held up his hands. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I need ten minutes on my own and then I’ll deal with all of it. Don’t let anyone in, okay?’

He went inside and closed the door. He sat in his expensive orthopaedic chair with its state-of-the-art tilt mechanism and opened the German’s laptop. Who had hacked into his medical records – that was the question. Whoever it was must be behind everything else. It baffled him. He had never thought of himself as a man with enemies. It was true he did not have friends; but the corollary of his solitariness, he had always assumed, was that he did not have enemies either.

His head was hurting again. He ran his fingers over the shaved area; it felt like the stitching on a football. His shoulders were locked with tension. He started massaging his neck, leaning back in his chair and looking up at the smoke detector as he had done a thousand times before when he was trying to focus his thoughts. He contemplated the tiny red light, identical to the one on their bedroom ceiling in Cologny that always made him think of Mars as he fell asleep. Slowly he stopped massaging. ‘Shit,’ he whispered.

He sat up straight and looked at the screensaver image on the laptop: the picture of himself, gazing up with a vacant, unfocused expression. He clambered on to his chair. It shifted treacherously beneath his feet as he stepped from it on to his desk. The smoke detector was square, made of white plastic, with a carbon-sensitive plate, a light to show that it was receiving power, a test button and a grille that presumably covered the alarm itself. He felt around the edges. It seemed to be glued to the ceiling tile. He pulled at it and twisted it, and finally in fear and frustration he grasped it hard and yanked it free.

The screech of protest it set up was physical in its intensity. The casing trembled in his hands, the air pulsed with it. It was still connected to the ceiling by an umbilical cord of wire, and when he put his fingers into the back of it to try to shut it down, he received an electric shock that was as vicious as an animal bite; it travelled all the way to his heart. He cried out, dropped it, let it dangle, and shook his fingers vigorously as if drying them. The noise was a physical assault: he felt his ears would bleed unless he stopped it quickly. He grabbed the detector by the casing this time and pulled with all his weight, almost swinging on it, and away it came, bringing down a chunk of the ceiling with it. The sudden silence was as shocking as the din.

MUCH LATER, WHEN Quarry found himself reliving the next couple of hours, and when he was asked which moment for him had been the most frightening, he said that oddly enough it was this one: when he heard the alarm and went running from one end of the trading floor to the other, to find Hoffmann – the only man who fully understood an algorithm that was even now making a thirty-billion-dollar unhedged bet – flecked with blood, covered in dust, standing on a desk beneath a hole in his ceiling, gabbling that he was being spied upon wherever he went.

Quarry was not the first on the scene. The door was already open and Marie-Claude was inside with some of the quants. Quarry shouldered his way past them and ordered them all to get back to their work. He could tell at once, craning his neck, even from that angle, that Hoffmann had been through some kind of trauma. His eyes were wild, his clothes dishevelled. There was dried blood in his hair. His hands looked as if he had been punching concrete.

He said, as calmly as he could, ‘Okay then, Alexi, how’s it going up there?’

‘Look for yourself,’ cried Hoffmann excitedly. He jumped down from the desk and held out his palm. On it were the components of the dismantled smoke alarm. He poked through them with his forefinger as if he were a naturalist inspecting the innards of some dead creature. He held up a small lens with a bit of wire trailing from the back. ‘Do you know what that is?’

‘I’m not sure that I do, no.’

‘It’s a webcam.’ He let the dismantled pieces trickle through his fingers and across his desk; some rolled to the floor. ‘Look at this.’ He gave Quarry the laptop. He tapped the screen. ‘Where do you think that picture was taken from?’

He sat down again and lolled back in his chair. Quarry looked at him and then at the screen and back again. 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 like somewhat more than a coincidence.’

‘Yeah, well it can’t be. We’ve already been over this-’

Quarry cut him off impatiently. ‘I know we have, but the story’s changed as the day’s gone on. Now it seems the crash wasn’t caused by mechanical failure after all. Apparently there was a bomb warning put up on some Islamic terrorist website while the plane was in the air. The FBI missed it; we didn’t.’

Hoffmann couldn’t take it in at first: too much information was coming at him too quickly. ‘But that’s way outside VIXAL’s parameters. That would be an extraordinary inflection point – a quantum leap.’

‘I thought it was a machine-learning algorithm.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Then maybe it’s learned something.’

‘Don’t be an idiot, Hugo. It doesn’t work like that.’

‘Okay, so it doesn’t work like that. Fine, I’m not the expert. The fact is, we have to make a decision rather quickly here. Either we override VIXAL or we’re going to have to put up two-point-five bil tomorrow afternoon just so the banks will let us continue trading.’

Marie-Claude tapped on the door and opened it. ‘Monsieur Genoud is here.’

Quarry said to Hoffmann, ‘Let me handle this.’ He felt as if he were in some kind of arcade game, everything flying at him at once.

Marie-Claude stood aside to let the ex-policeman enter. His gaze went immediately to the hole in the ceiling.

‘Come in, Maurice,’ said Quarry. ‘Close the door. As you can see, we’ve been doing a little DIY in here, and we were wondering if you have any explanation for this.’

‘I don’t believe so,’ said Genoud, shutting the door. ‘Why should I?’

Hoffmann said, ‘By God, he’s a cool one, Hugo. You’ve got to give him that.’

Quarry held up his hand. ‘Okay, Alex, please just wait a minute, will you? All right, Maurice. No bullshit now. We need to know how long this has been going on. We need to know who’s paying you. And we need to know if you’ve planted anything inside our computer systems. It’s urgent, because we’re in a very volatile trading situation. Now we don’t want to call in the police to handle this, but we will if we have to. So it’s over to you, and my advice is to be absolutely frank.’

After a few moments Genoud looked at Hoffmann. ‘Is it okay for me to tell him?’

Hoffmann said, ‘Okay to tell him what?’

‘You are putting me in a very awkward position, Dr Hoffmann.’

Hoffmann said to Quarry, ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about.’

‘Very well, you can’t expect me to maintain my discretion under these circumstances.’ Genoud turned to Quarry. ‘Dr Hoffmann instructed me to do it.’

There was something about the calm insolence of the falsehood that made Hoffmann want to hit him. ‘You asshole,’ he said. ‘D’you think anyone’s going to believe that?’

Genoud continued unperturbed, addressing his remarks directly to Quarry and ignoring Hoffmann. ‘It’s true. He gave me instructions when you moved into these offices to set up concealed cameras. I guessed he wasn’t telling you about it. But he’s the company president, so I thought it was permissible for me to do as he asked. This is the absolute truth, I swear.’

Hoffmann smiled and shook his head. ‘Hugo, this is total, utter bullshit. This is the same goddamned crap I’ve been hearing all day. I haven’t had one single conversation with this guy about planting cameras – why would I want to film my own company? And why would I bug my own phone? It’s total bullshit,’ he repeated.

Genoud said, ‘I never said we had a conversation about it. As you well know, Dr Hoffmann, I only ever received instructions from you by email.’

Email – again! Hoffmann said, ‘You’re seriously telling me that you put in all these cameras and never, in all these months, despite all the thousands of francs this must have cost – that never once did we have a conversation about any of it?’

‘No.’

Hoffmann emitted a sound that conveyed contempt and disbelief.

Quarry said to Genoud, ‘That’s hardly credible. Didn’t it strike you as bizarre at all?’

‘Not especially. I got the impression this was all off the books, so to speak. That he didn’t want to acknowledge what was going on. I did try to bring it up with him once, obliquely. He looked straight through me.’

‘Well I probably would, wouldn’t I? I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. And how in the hell am I supposed to have paid you for all this?’

‘By cash transfer,’ said Genoud, ‘from a bank in the Cayman Islands.’

That brought Hoffmann up short. Quarry was looking at him intently. ‘Okay,’ he conceded, ‘supposing you did receive emails. How did you know it was me sending them and not someone pretending to be me?’

‘Why would I think that? It was your company, your email address, I was paid from your bank account. And to be frank, Dr Hoffmann, you do have a reputation for being a difficult man to talk to.’

Hoffmann swore and slammed his fist on his desk in frustration. ‘Here we go again. I’m supposed to have ordered a book on the internet. I’m supposed to have bought Gabrielle’s entire exhibition on the internet. I’m supposed to have asked a madman to kill me on the internet…’ He had an involuntary memory flash of the ghastly scene in the hotel, of the dead man’s head lolling on its stem. He had actually forgotten about it for a few minutes. He realised Quarry was looking at him in dismay. ‘Who’s doing this to me, Hugo?’ he said in despair. ‘Doing this and filming it? You’ve got to help me sort this out. It’s like a nightmare I’m caught in.’

Quarry’s mind was reeling from it all. It took some effort to keep his voice calm. ‘Of course I’ll help you, Alex. Let’s just try to get to the bottom of this once and for all.’ He turned back to Genoud. ‘Right, Maurice, presumably you’ve kept these emails?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Can you access them now?’

‘Yes, if that is what you want.’ Genoud had become very stiff and formal during the last few exchanges, standing erect as if his honour as a former police officer was being called into question. Which was a bit bloody rich, thought Quarry, considering that whatever turned out to be the truth, he had set up a wholesale secret surveillance network.

‘All right then, you won’t mind showing them to us. Let him use your computer, Alex.’

Hoffmann rose from his seat like a man in a trance. Fragments of the smoke detector crunched beneath his feet. Reflexively he looked up at the mess he had made of the ceiling. The hole where the tile had come down opened on to a dark void. Inside, where the trailing wires were touching, a blue-white spark flashed intermittently. He thought he saw something move in the crawl-space. He closed his eyes and the imprint of the spark continued to glow as if he had been staring at the sun. A worm of suspicion began to form in his mind.

Genoud, bent over the computer, said triumphantly, ‘There!’

He straightened and stood aside to let Hoffmann and Quarry examine his emails. He had filtered his saved messages so that only those from Hoffmann were listed – scores of them, dating back almost a year. Quarry took the mouse and started clicking on them at random.

‘I’m afraid it’s your email address on all of these, Alex,’ he said. ‘No question of it.’

‘Yeah, I bet it is, but I still didn’t send them.’

‘All right, but then who did?’

Hoffmann brooded. This was beyond hacking now, or compromised security or a clone server. It was more fundamental, as if the company had somehow developed dual operating systems.

Quarry was still reading. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘You even snooped on yourself in your own house…’

‘Actually, I hate to keep repeating myself, but I didn’t.’

‘Well I’m sorry, Alexi, but you did. Listen to this: “To: Genoud. From: Hoffmann. Required Cologny webcam surveillance units twenty-four concealed immediate…”’

‘Come on, man. I don’t talk like that. Nobody talks like that.’

‘Somebody must: it’s here on the screen.’

Hoffmann suddenly turned to Genoud. ‘Where does all the information go? What happens to the images, the audio recordings?’

Genoud said, ‘As you know, it’s all sent in digital streams to a secure server.’

‘But there must be thousands of hours of it,’ exclaimed Hoffmann. ‘When would anyone ever have time to review it all? I certainly couldn’t do it. You’d need a whole dedicated team. There aren’t the hours in the day.’

Genoud shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’ve often wondered that myself. I just did what I was ordered.’

Only a machine could analyse that quantity of information, thought Hoffmann. It would have to be using the latest face-recognition technology; voice-recognition as well; search tools…

He was interrupted by another outcry from Quarry: ‘Since when did we start leasing an industrial unit in Zimeysa?’

Genoud said: ‘I can tell you exactly, Mr Quarry: since six months ago. It’s a big place – fifty-four Route de Clerval. Dr Hoffmann ordered a special new security and surveillance system for it.’

Hoffmann said, ‘What’s in this unit?’

‘Computers.’

‘Who put them in?’

‘I don’t know. A computer company.’

Hoffmann said, ‘So you’re not the only person I’m dealing with? I deal with entire companies by email too?’

‘I don’t know. Presumably, yes.’

Quarry was still clicking through the emails. ‘This is unbelievable,’ he said to Hoffmann. ‘According to this, you also own the freehold of this entire building.’

Genoud said, ‘That’s true, Dr Hoffmann. You gave me the contract for security. That’s why I was here this evening when you called.’

‘Is this really right?’ Quarry demanded. ‘You own the building?’

But Hoffmann had stopped listening. He was thinking back to his time at CERN, to the memo Bob Walton had circulated to the chairmen of the CERN Experiments Committees and of the Machine Advisory Committee, recommending that Hoffmann’s research project, AMR-1, be shut down. It had included a warning issued by Thomas S. Ray, software engineer and Professor of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma: ‘… freely evolving autonomous artificial entities should be seen as potentially dangerous to organic life, and should always be confined by some kind of containment facility, at least until their real potential is well understood… Evolution remains a self-interested process, and even the interests of confined digital organisms may conflict with our own.’

He took a breath. He said, ‘Hugo, I need to have a word with you – alone.’

‘All right, sure. Maurice, would you mind stepping outside for a minute?’

‘No, I think he should stay here and start sorting this out.’ He said to Genoud, ‘I want you to make a copy of the entire file of emails that originate from me. I also want a list of every job you’ve done that I’m supposed to have ordered. I especially want a list of everything to do with this industrial facility in Zimeysa. Then I want you to start stripping out every camera and every bug in every building we have, starting with my house. And I need it done tonight. Is that understood?’

Genoud looked to Quarry for approval. Quarry hesitated, then nodded. Genoud said curtly, ‘As you wish.’

They left him to it. Once they were outside the office and the door was closed, Quarry said, ‘I hope to God you’ve got some kind of explanation for this, Alex, because I have to tell you-’

Hoffmann held up a warning finger and raised his eyes to the smoke detector above Marie-Claude’s desk.

Quarry said, with heavy emphasis, ‘Oh, right, I understand. We’ll go to my office.’

‘No. Not there. It’s not safe. Here…’

Hoffmann led him into the washroom and closed the door. The pieces of the smoke detector were where he had left them, next to the basin. He could barely recognise his own reflection in the mirror. He looked like someone who might have escaped from the secure wing of a mental hospital. He said, ‘Hugo, do you think I’m insane?’

‘Yes, since you ask, I bloody well do. Or probably. I don’t know.’

‘No, it’s okay. I’m not blaming you if that’s how you feel. I can see absolutely what this must look like from the outside – and what I’m about to say isn’t going to make you feel any more confident.’ He could hardly believe he was saying it himself. ‘I think the basic problem we have here is VIXAL.’

‘Lifting the delta hedge?’

‘Lifting the delta hedge, but let’s say also possibly doing somewhat more than I anticipated.’

Quarry squinted at him. ‘What are you talking about? I don’t follow…’

The door started to open and someone tried to come in. Quarry stopped it with his elbow. ‘Not now,’ he said, without taking his eyes from Hoffmann. ‘Sod off and pee in a bucket, will you?’

A voice said, ‘Okay, Hugo.’

Quarry closed the door and planted his back against it. ‘More than you anticipated in what way?’

Hoffmann said carefully, ‘VIXAL may be making decisions that are not entirely compatible with our interest.’

‘You mean our interest as a company?’

‘No. I mean our interest – the human interest.’

‘Aren’t they the same?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Sorry. Being dim here. You mean you think it’s somehow actually doing all this itself – the surveillance and everything?’

In fairness to him, Hoffmann thought, Quarry at least seemed to be treating the suggestion seriously.

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure I am saying that. We need to take this one step at a time until we have enough information to make a full assessment. But I think as a first move we have to unwind the positions it’s taken in the market. This could be quite hazardous – and not just to us.’

‘Even though it’s making money?’

‘It’s not a question of making money any more – can’t you forget about money just for once?’ It was becoming increasingly hard for Hoffmann to maintain his composure, but he managed to finish quietly, ‘We’re way beyond that now.’

Quarry folded his arms and thought it over, staring at the tiled floor. ‘Are you sure you’re in a fit state to be taking this kind of decision?’

‘I am, really. Trust me, please, will you, if only for the sake of the last eight years? It’ll be the last time, I promise you. After tonight, you’ll be in charge.’

For a long moment they looked at one another, the physicist and the financier. Quarry frankly didn’t know what to make of it. But as he said afterwards, in the end the company was Hoffmann’s – it was his genius that had brought in the punters, his machine that had made the money in the first place, his call to shut it down. ‘It’s your baby,’ he said. He stood clear of the door.

Hoffmann went out on to the trading floor with Quarry at his heels. It felt better to be doing something, fighting back. He clapped his hands. ‘Listen up, everybody!’ He climbed on to a chair so the quants could see him better. He clapped again. ‘I need you all just to gather round for a minute.’

They rose from behind their screens at his command, a ghost army of PhDs. He could see their exchange of glances as they came over; some were whispering. They were obviously all on edge with what was happening. Van der Zyl came out of his office, and so did Ju-Long; he couldn’t see Rajamani. He waited for a couple of stragglers from Incubation to thread their way around the desks and then he cleared his throat.

‘Okay, we’ve obviously got a few anomalies to deal with here – to put it mildly – and I think for safety’s sake we’re going to have to start dismantling these positions we’ve built up over the last few hours.’

He checked himself. He didn’t want to create a panic. He was also conscious of the smoke detectors dotted across the ceiling. Presumably everything he said was being monitored. ‘This doesn’t mean we have a problem with VIXAL necessarily, but we do need to go back and find out why it’s been doing some of the things it has been doing. I don’t know how long that’s going to take, so in the meantime we need to get that delta back in line – hedge it out with longs in other markets; even liquidate if it comes to it. Just get the hell out of where we are.’

Quarry said, to Hoffmann and the room, ‘We’ll need to tread very carefully. If we start liquidating positions this size too quickly, we’ll move prices.’

Hoffmann nodded. ‘That’s true, but VIXAL will help us achieve the optimums, even in override.’ He looked up at the row of digital clocks beneath the giant TV screens. ‘We’ve still got just over three hours before America closes. Imre, will you and Dieter help out with fixed income and currencies? Franco and Jon, take three or four guys each and divide up stocks and sector bets. Kolya, you do the same with the indices. Everyone else in their normal sections.’

‘If you encounter any problems,’ said Quarry, ‘Alex and I will be here to help out. And can I just say: don’t anyone think for a second that this is a retreat. We took in an additional two billion in fresh investment today – so this shop is still growing, okay? Is that clear? We’ll recalibrate over the next twenty-four hours and move on to even bigger and better things. Any questions?’ Someone raised their hand. ‘Yep?’

‘Is it true you just fired Gana Rajamani?’

Hoffmann glanced at Quarry in surprise. He’d thought he was going to wait until the crisis had passed.

Quarry didn’t miss a beat. ‘Gana has been wanting to rejoin his family in London for some weeks.’ A general exclamation of surprise arose from the meeting. Quarry held up his hand. ‘I can assure you he’s completely on side with everything we’re doing. Now does anybody else want to ruin their career by asking me a tricky question?’ There was nervous laughter. ‘Right then…’

Hoffmann said, ‘Actually, there is one last thing, Hugo.’ Staring out across the upturned faces of his quants, he felt for the first time a sudden sense of comradeship. He had recruited every one of them. The team – the company – his creation: he guessed it might be a long while before he had another chance to speak to them collectively, if ever. ‘Can I just add something to that? It’s been, as some of you have probably guessed by now, an absolute bitch of a day. And whatever happens to me, I just want to tell you all – every one of you…’ He had to stop and swallow. To his horror he was welling up, his throat thick with emotion, his eyes brimming. He looked down at his feet, waiting until he had himself under control, then raised his head again. He had to rush to get through it or he would have broken down completely. ‘I simply want you to know I’m very proud of what we’ve done together here. It’s never been just about the money – certainly not for me and I believe not for most of you, either. So thanks. It’s meant a lot. That’s it.’

There was no applause; simply mystification. Hoffmann stepped down from the chair. He could see Quarry looking at him in a strange way, although the CEO recovered quickly and called out, ‘All right, everyone, that’s the end of the pep talk. Back to your galleys, slaves, and start rowing. There’s a storm coming in.’

As the quants began to move away, Quarry said to Hoffmann: ‘That sounded like a farewell speech.’

‘It wasn’t meant to.’

‘Well it did. What do you mean, whatever happens to you?’ But before Hoffmann could answer, someone called out, ‘Alex, have you got a second? We seem to have a problem here.’