The Fear Index

he found that when he exercised – walked, jogged, ran – it focused his thoughts, stimulated his creativity. Not now. His mind was in turmoil. He began descending a hill. There were allotments to his left and then, amazingly, open fields, a huge factory spread out beneath him with a car park, apartment blocks, mountains in the distance, and above him a hemispheric sky filled with an immense grey flotilla of clouds processing like battleships in review.
    After a while the road was sliced off by the concrete wall of an elevated autoroute. The road dwindled to a footpath that wandered left alongside the thunderous motorway, taking him down through some trees until he emerged on to the bank of the river. The Rhône was wide and slow at this point, perhaps two hundred metres from shore to shore, greenish-brown, opaque, bending lazily into open country with woodland rising steeply on the opposite bank. A footbridge, the Passerelle de Chèvres, linked the two sides. He recognised it. He had driven past and seen kids jumping off it in summer to cool down. The peacefulness of the view was in weird contrast with the roar of traffic, and as Hoffmann walked out on to the central span, it seemed to him that he had now fallen far outside the run of normal life: that it would be hard for him to get back. At the mid-point of the bridge, he stopped and climbed up on to the metal safety barrier. It would take him only a couple of seconds to drop the five or six metres into the slow-moving current and let himself be borne away. He could see why Switzerland was the world centre for assisted suicide – the whole country seemed organised to encourage one to disappear with privacy and discretion, causing as little trouble as possible.
    And he was tempted. He was under no illusions: there would be a mass of DNA and fingerprint evidence in the hotel room linking him to the killing; his arrest was only a matter of time, whatever happened. He thought of what awaited him – a long gauntlet of police, lawyers, journalists, flashing cameras, stretching months into the future. He thought of Quarry, Gabrielle – Gabrielle especially.
    But I am not mad, he thought. I may have killed a man but I am not mad . I am either the victim of an elaborate plot to make me think I am mad, or someone is trying to set me up, blackmail me, destroy me. He asked himself: did he trust the authorities – that pedantic has-been Leclerc, for example – to get to the bottom of such a fiendishly elaborate entrapment any better than he? The question answered itself.
    He took the German’s mobile phone out of his pocket. It hit the river with barely a splash, leaving a brief white scar on the muddy surface.
    On the far bank some children were standing beside their bikes, watching him. He clambered down and crossed the remainder of the bridge and walked straight past them carrying the laptop. He expected them to call out after him, but they remained solemn-faced and silent, and he sensed there might be something in his appearance that was frightening to them.

    GABRIELLE HAD NEVER before set foot in CERN, and immediately it reminded her of her old university in northern England – ugly functional office blocks from the sixties and seventies spread over a big campus, scruffy corridors filled with earnest-looking people, mostly young, talking in front of posters advertising lectures and concerts. It even had the same academic odour of floor polish, body heat and canteen food. She could picture Alex at home here far more comfortably than she could in the smart offices of Les Eaux-Vives.
    Professor Walton’s assistant had left her in the lobby of the Computing Centre and gone off to find him. Now she was alone, she was strongly tempted to flee. What had seemed a good idea in the bathroom in Cologny after finding his card – calling him, ignoring his surprise, asking if she could come over right away: she would tell him what it was about when she saw him – now struck her as hysterical and embarrassing. Turning round to find the way out, she noticed an old computer in a glass case. When she went closer, she read that it was the NeXT processor that had started the World Wide Web at CERN in 1991. The original note to the cleaners was still stuck to its black metal casing: ‘This machine is a server – DO NOT POWER DOWN!’ Extraordinary, she thought, that it had all begun with something so mundane.
    ‘Pandora’s Box,’ said a voice behind her, and she turned to