The Fear Index

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&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 …

    CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species (1859)

    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.
    He treated the BMW with extreme care, driving with his face up close to the windscreen. There were a lot of roadworks, cables being laid, first one lane shut and then the other, creating a chicane. The turning to Route de Clerval was on the