The Fear Index

the same way, public or private.
    Hoffmann, still reading the description of fear, said distractedly, ‘Oh, hi. Did you just buy me a book?’
    ‘I don’t think so, old friend. Why? Was I supposed to?’
    ‘Someone’s just sent me a Darwin first edition and I don’t know who.’
    ‘Sounds pretty valuable.’
    ‘It is. I thought, because you know how important Darwin is to VIXAL, it might be you.’
    ‘’Fraid not. Could it be a client? A thank-you gift and they’ve forgotten to include a card? Lord knows, Alex, we’ve made them enough money.’
    ‘Yeah, well. Maybe. Okay. Sorry to bother you.’
    ‘Don’t worry. See you in the morning. Big day tomorrow. In fact, it’s already tomorrow. You ought to be in bed by now.’
    ‘Sure. On my way. Night.’

As fear rises to an extreme pitch, the dreadful scream of terror is heard. Great beads of sweat stand on the skin. All the muscles of the body are relaxed. Utter prostration soon follows, and the mental powers fail. The intestines are affected. The sphincter muscles cease to act, and no longer retain the contents of the body …

    Hoffmann held the volume to his nose and inhaled. A compound of leather and library dust and cigar smoke, so sharp he could taste it, with a faint hint of something chemical – formaldehyde, perhaps, or coal-gas. It put him in mind of a nineteenth-century laboratory or lecture theatre, and for an instant he saw Bunsen burners on wooden benches, flasks of acid and the skeleton of an ape. He reinserted the bookseller’s slip to mark the page and carefully closed the book. Then he carried it over to the shelves and with two fingers gently made room for it between a first edition of On the Origin of Species , which he had bought at auction at Sotheby’s in New York for $125,000, and a leather-bound copy of The Descent of Man that had once belonged to T. H. Huxley.
    Later, he would try to remember the exact sequence of what he did next. He consulted the Bloomberg terminal on his desk for the final prices in the USA: the Dow Jones, the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ had all ended down. He had an email exchange with Susumu Takahashi, the duty dealer in charge of execution on VIXAL-4 overnight, who reported that everything was functioning smoothly, and reminded him that the Tokyo Stock Exchange would reopen in less than two hours’ time following the annual three-day Golden Week holiday. It would certainly open down, to catch up with what had been a week of falling prices in Europe and the US. And there was one other thing: VIXAL was proposing to short another three million shares in Procter & Gamble at $62 a share, which would bring their overall position up to six million – a big trade: would Hoffmann approve it? Hoffmann emailed ‘OK’, threw away his unfinished cigar, put a fine-meshed metal guard in front of the fireplace and switched off the study lights. In the hall he checked to see that the front door was locked and then set the burglar alarm with its four-digit code: 1729. (The numerals came from an exchange between the mathematicians G. H. Hardy and S. I. Ramanujan in 1920, when Hardy went in a taxi cab with that number to visit his dying colleague in hospital and complained it was ‘a rather dull number’, to which Ramanujan responded: ‘No, Hardy! No, Hardy! It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.’) He left just one lamp lit downstairs – of that he was sure – then climbed the curved white marble staircase to the bathroom. He took off his spectacles, undressed, washed, brushed his teeth and put on a pair of blue silk pyjamas. He set the alarm on his mobile for six thirty, registering as he did so that the time was then twenty past twelve.
    In the bedroom he was surprised to find Gabrielle still awake, lying on her back on the counterpane in a black silk kimono. A scented candle flickered on the dressing table; otherwise the room was in darkness. Her hands were clasped behind her head, her elbows sharply pointed away from her, her legs crossed at the knee. One slim white foot, the toenails painted dark red, was making impatient circles in the fragrant air.
    ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten the date.’
    ‘Don’t worry.’ She untied her belt and parted the silk, then held out her arms to him. ‘I never forget it.’

    IT MUST HAVE been about three fifty in the morning that something caused Hoffmann to wake. He struggled up from