The Fear Index (28 page)

‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said to Ju-Long and van der Zyl, ‘but at the end of the day we’re innovators in this shop, are we not, or we are nothing. And I’m afraid Gana is the kind of chap who’d have turned up on the quayside in 1492 and told Columbus he couldn’t set sail because of his negative risk assessment.’

Ju-Long said, with an asperity Quarry had not expected, ‘Risk was his responsibility, Hugo. You may have got rid of him, but you have not got rid of the problem.’

‘I appreciate that, LJ, and I know he was your friend.’ He put his hand on Ju-Long’s shoulder and gazed into his dark eyes. ‘But don’t forget that at this precise moment this company is about eighty million dollars richer than it was when we came in to work this morning.’ He gestured to the trading floor: the quants had all returned to their places; there was a semblance of normality. ‘The machine is still functioning, and frankly, until Alex tells us otherwise, I think we have to trust it. We have to assume VIXAL is seeing a pattern in events that we can’t discern. Come on – people are looking.’

They moved off, along the side of the trading floor, Quarry taking the lead. He was keen to get them away from the scene of Rajamani’s assassination. As he walked, he tried yet again to get Hoffmann on his mobile number; yet again he was put straight through to voicemail. This time he didn’t even bother to leave a message.

Van der Zyl said, ‘You know, I was thinking.’

‘What were you thinking, Piet?’

‘That VIXAL must have extrapolated a general market collapse.’

‘You don’t say.’

But van der Zyl missed the sarcasm. ‘Yes, because if you look at the stocks it’s shorting – what are they? Resorts and casinos, management consulting, food and household goods, all the others – these are just right across the board. They are not at all sector-specific.’

‘Then there is the short on the S and P,’ said Ju-Long, ‘and the out-of-the-money puts …’

‘And the Fear Index,’ added van der Zyl. ‘You know, a billion dollars of options on the Fear Index – my God!’

It certainly was a hell of a lot, thought Quarry. He came to a halt. In fact, it was more than a hell of a lot. Until that moment, in the general welter of data that had been thrown around, he had rather missed the significance of the size of that position. He stepped across to a vacant terminal, bent over the keyboard and quickly called up a chart of the VIX. Ju-Long and van der Zyl joined him. The graphic showed a gentle wave pattern in the value of the volatility index as it had fluctuated over the past two trading days, the line rising and falling inside a narrow range. However within the last ninety minutes it had definitely started trending upwards: from a base of around twenty-four points at the US opening, it had now climbed to almost twenty-seven. It was too early to say whether this marked a significant escalation in the level of fear in the market itself. Nevertheless, even if it didn’t, on a billion-dollar punt, they were looking at almost a hundred million in profit right there. Once again Quarry felt a cold tremble run down his back.

He pressed a switch and picked up the live audio feed from the pit of the S&P 500 in Chicago. It was a service they subscribed to. It gave them an immediate feel for the market you couldn’t always get from just the figures. ‘Guys,’ an American voice was saying, ‘the only buyer I have on my sheet here, guys, from about nine twenty-six on, is a Goldman buyer at fifty-one even two hundred and fifty times. Other than that, guys, every entry I have has been sell-side activity, guys. Merrill Lynch I had big-time seller. Pru Bache I had big-time seller, guys, all the way from fifty-nine to fifty-three. And then we saw Swiss Bank and Smith coming in big-time sellers—’

Quarry switched it off. He said, ‘LJ, why don’t you make a start on liquidating that two-point-five billion in T-bills, just in case we need to show some collateral tomorrow?’

‘Sure, Hugo.’ His eyes met Quarry’s. He had seen the significance of the movement in the VIX; so had van der Zyl.

‘We should try to talk to one another at least every half hour,’ said Quarry.

‘And Alex?’ said Ju-Long. ‘He ought to see this. He would be able to make some sense of it.’

‘I know Alex. He’ll be back, don’t you worry.’

The three men went their separate ways – like conspirators, thought Quarry.

14

Only the paranoid survive
.

ANDREW S. GROVE, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF INTEL CORPORATION

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 Rhône. 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 café 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?’