The Fear Index

intruder somehow just wandered in. He came prepared to restrain his victim, or victims, and it looks as though he handled knives while he was on the premises. But then he ended up just hitting Hoffmann on the head and running away. Nothing stolen. To be honest, I have a feeling Hoffmann isn’t telling us the full story, but I’m not sure whether that’s deliberate or he’s just confused.’
    There was a short silence at the other end. Leclerc could hear someone moving around in the background.
    ‘Are you going off shift?’
    ‘Just about to leave, Chief.’
    ‘Do me a favour and pull a double, will you? I’ve already had the Minister of Finance’s office on the phone, wanting to know what’s happening. It would be good if you could see this one through.’
    ‘The Minister of Finance?’ repeated Leclerc in amazement. ‘Why’s he so interested?’
    ‘Oh, you know, the usual story, I expect. One law for the rich, another for the poor. Keep me up to speed on it, will you?’
    After he had hung up, Leclerc let out a string of expletives under his breath. He plodded along the corridor to the coffee machine and got himself a cup of very black and unusually filthy espresso. His eyes felt gritty, his sinuses ached. I’m too old for this, he thought. It was not even as if there was anything much he could do: he had sent one of his juniors to interview the domestic staff. He went back to his office and called his wife and told her he wouldn’t be home until after lunch, then logged on to the internet to see if he could find out anything about Dr Alexander Hoffmann, physicist and hedge-fund manager. But to his surprise there was almost nothing – no entry in Wikipedia, no newspaper article and not one image available online. Yet the Minister of Finance himself was taking a personal interest in the matter.
    What the hell was a hedge fund in any case? he wondered. He looked it up: ‘A private investment fund that may invest in a diverse range of assets and may employ a variety of investment strategies to maintain a hedged portfolio intended to protect the fund’s investors from downturns in the market while maximising returns on market upswings.’
    None the wiser, he flicked back through his notes. Hoffmann had said in his interview that he had worked in the financial sector for the past eight years; for six years before that he had been employed on developing the Large Hadron Collider. As it happened, Leclerc knew a man, a former inspector in the police, who now worked in security at CERN. He gave him a call and fifteen minutes later he was at the wheel of his little Renault, driving slowly in the morning traffic, north-west past the airport, along the Route de Meyrin, through the drab industrial zone of Zimeysa.
    Up ahead, framed by the distant mountains, CERN’s huge rust-coloured wooden globe seemed to rise out of the arable fields like a gigantic anachronism: a 1960s vision of what the future was supposed to look like. Leclerc parked opposite it and went into the main building. He gave his name and clipped his visitor’s badge to his windcheater. While he waited for his contact to collect him he studied the little exhibition in the reception area. Apparently sixteen hundred super-conducting magnets, each weighing nearly thirty tonnes, were housed in a twenty-seven-kilometre circular tunnel beneath his feet, shooting beams of particles around it so quickly that they completed the circuit eleven thousand times per second. The collisions of the beams at an energy of seven trillion electronvolts per proton were supposed to reveal the origins of the universe, discover extra dimensions and explain the nature of dark matter. None of it that Leclerc could discern seemed to have anything whatever to do with the financial markets.

    QUARRY’S INVITEES BEGAN to arrive just after ten, the first pair – a fifty-six-year-old Genevese, Etienne Mussard, and his younger sister Clarisse – turning up on a bus. ‘They’ll be early,’ Quarry had warned Hoffmann. ‘They’re always early for everything.’ Dowdily dressed, they were both unmarried and lived together in a small three-bedroomed apartment in the suburb of Lancy that they had inherited from their parents. They did not drive. They took no holidays. They rarely dined in restaurants. Quarry estimated M. Mussard’s personal wealth at approximately seven hundred million euros, and Mme Mussard’s at five hundred and fifty million. Their mother’s