The Fear Index

former mathematics professor and leader of the Polish Communist Youth Union, who now owned eastern Europe’s third-largest insurance company; and finally two Chinese entrepreneurs, Liwei Xu and Qi Zhang, representing a Shanghai-based investment bank, who arrived with no fewer than six dark-suited associates, whom they insisted were lawyers but who Quarry was fairly sure were computer experts, come to inspect Hoffmann’s cyber-security – after a furiously polite stand-off the ‘lawyers’ reluctantly agreed to leave.
    Not one existing investor whom Quarry had invited declined the invitation. ‘They’re coming for two reasons,’ he had explained to Hoffmann. ‘First, because over three years, even as the financial markets have tanked, we’ve returned them a profit of eighty-three per cent and I defy anyone to find any hedge fund anywhere that has produced such consistent alpha – I mean, they must be wondering just what the hell it is we’ve got going on here, yet we’ve refused to take a single extra cent in investment.’
    ‘And what’s the second reason they’re coming?’
    ‘Oh, don’t be so modest.’
    ‘I don’t follow.’
    ‘It’s you , you daft bugger. They want to take a look at you . They want to discover what you’ve been up to. You’re becoming a legend and they want to touch the hem of your garment, just to see if their fingers turn to gold.’

    HOFFMANN WAS WOKEN by Marie-Claude.
    ‘Dr Hoffmann?’ She shook his shoulder gently. ‘Dr Hoffmann? Mr Quarry says to tell you they are waiting for you in the boardroom.’
    He had been dreaming vividly, but when he opened his eyes the images vanished like bursting bubbles. For a moment his assistant’s face bending over him reminded him of his mother’s. She had the same grey-green eyes, the same prominent nose, the same anxious and intelligent expression. ‘Thanks,’ he said, sitting up. ‘Tell him I’ll be there in a minute,’ and then he added impulsively, ‘I’m sorry about your husband. I get’ – he twirled his hand helplessly – ‘distracted.’
    ‘That’s quite all right. Thank you.’
    There was a washroom across the passage from his office. He ran the cold tap and cupped his hands beneath it. He splashed his face again and again, flailing his flesh with the icy water. He had no time to shave. The skin on his chin and around his mouth, normally bland and smooth, felt as bristly and textured as an animal’s. It was a curious fact – no doubt an irrational swing of mood brought on by his injury – but he was beginning to feel exuberant. He had survived an encounter with death – exhilarating in itself – and now he had a boardroom full of supplicants waiting, in Hugo’s words, to touch his hem, in the hope that his genius for making money would rub off on them. The rich of the earth had bestirred themselves from their yachts and pools and racetracks, from the dealing rooms of Manhattan and the counting houses of Shanghai, and had gathered together in Switzerland to listen to Dr Alexander Hoffmann, the legendary – Hugo’s word again – creator of Hoffmann Investment Technologies, preach his vision of the future. And what a story he had to tell! What a gospel he had to preach!
    With such thoughts surging through his damaged head, Hoffmann dried his face, pulled back his shoulders and headed off to the boardroom. As he passed across the trading floor, the lithe figure of Ganapathi Rajamani, the company’s chief risk officer, moved smoothly to intercept him, but Hoffmann waved him out of the way: whatever his problem was, it would have to wait.

6

    No doubt wealth when very great tends to convert men into useless drones, but their number is never large; and some degree of elimination here occurs, for we daily see rich men, who happen to be fools or profligate, squandering away their wealth .

    CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man (1871)

    THE BOARDROOM HAD the same corporate impersonality – the same soundproofed glass walls and floor-to-ceiling venetian blinds – as the managers’ offices. A giant blank screen for teleconferencing took up most of the end wall, looking down on to a big oval table of pale Scandinavian wood. As Hoffmann entered the room, all but one of the table’s eighteen chairs was occupied either by the principals or their advisers; the only spare place was next to Quarry at its head. Quarry’s gaze followed his progress round the edge of the room with evident relief. ‘Here he is at