The Fear Index

him of an examination hall in an all-male college. Or a seminary, perhaps: yes, a seminary of Mammon. The image pleased him. On several of the screens he noticed a slogan, red on white, as in the old Soviet Union:

    THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL HAVE NO PAPER

    THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL CARRY NO INVENTORY

    THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL BE ENTIRELY DIGITAL

    THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED

    ‘Now,’ said Quarry, smiling again, ‘what can I offer you, Inspector? Tea, coffee, water?’
    ‘I think tea, as I am with an Englishman. Thank you.’
    ‘Two teas, Amber, sweetheart, please. English breakfast.’
    She said, ‘You have a lot of calls, Hugo.’
    ‘Yes, I bet I bloody do.’ He opened his office door and stood aside to let Leclerc go in first, then went straight to his desk. ‘Please, take a seat, will you, Inspector? Excuse me. I won’t be a second.’ He checked his screen. The European markets were all heading south fairly quickly now. The DAX was off one per cent, the CAC two, the FTSE one and a half. The euro was down more than a cent against the dollar. He didn’t have time to check all their positions, but the P&L showed VIXAL-4 already up $68 million on the day. Still, there was something about it all he found vaguely ominous, despite his good mood; he sensed a storm about to break. ‘Great. That’s fine.’ He sat down cheerfully behind his desk. ‘So then, have you caught this maniac?’
    ‘Not yet. You and Dr Hoffmann have worked together for eight years, I understand.’
    ‘That’s right. We set up shop in 2002.’
    Leclerc extracted his notebook and pen. He held them up. ‘You don’t object if I …?’
    ‘I don’t, although Alex would.’
    ‘I’m sorry?’
    ‘We’re not allowed to use carbon-based data-retrieval systems on the premises – that’s notebooks and newspapers to you and me. The company is supposed to be entirely digital. But Alex isn’t here, so don’t worry about it. Go ahead.’
    ‘That sounds a little eccentric.’ Leclerc made a careful note.
    ‘Eccentric is one way of putting it. Another would be stark raving bloody bonkers. But there you are. That’s Alex. He’s a genius, and they don’t tend to see the world the same way we do. Quite a large part of my life is spent explaining his behaviour to lesser mortals. Like John the Baptist, I go before him. Or after him.’
    He was thinking of their lunch at the Beau-Rivage, when he had been obliged to interpret Hoffmann’s actions to mere Earthlings twice – first when he didn’t show up for half an hour (‘He sends his apologies, he’s working on a very complex theorem’), and then when he abruptly sped away from the table midway through the entrée (‘Well, there goes Alex, folks – I guess he’s having another of his eureka moments’). But although there had been some grumbling and eye-rolling, they were willing to put up with it. At the end of the day, Hoffmann could swing naked from the rafters playing the ukulele as far as they were concerned, as long as he made them a return of eighty-three per cent.
    Leclerc said, ‘Can you tell me how you two met?’
    ‘Sure, when we started working together.’
    ‘And how did that come about?’
    ‘What, you want the whole love story?’ Quarry put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his favourite position, feet up on his desk, always happy to tell a tale he had recounted a hundred times, maybe a thousand, polishing it into a corporate legend: when Sears met Roebuck, Rolls met Royce and Quarry met Hoffmann. ‘It was around Christmas 2001. I was in London, working for a big American bank. I wanted to have a crack at starting my own fund. I knew I could raise the money – I had the contacts: that was no problem – but I didn’t have a game plan that would sustain over the long term. You’ve got to have a strategy in this business – did you know the average life expectancy of a hedge fund is three years?’
    Leclerc said politely, ‘No.’
    ‘Well it’s true. That’s the lifespan of the average hamster. Anyway, a guy in our Geneva office mentioned this science nerd at CERN he’d heard about who apparently had some quite interesting ideas on the algorithmic side. We thought we might hire him as a quant, but he just wouldn’t play ball at all – wouldn’t meet us, didn’t want to know: mad as a hatter, apparently, total recluse. We had a laugh about it – quants! I mean, what could you do? But there was just