The Fear Index

to the ceiling above Marie-Claude’s desk, where there was an identical detector. He put his finger to his lips. Then he took him to the edge of the trading floor and showed him – one, two, three, four more. There was one in the boardroom, too. There was even one in the men’s room. He climbed up on to the wash basins. He could just reach it. He pulled hard and it came away in a shower of plaster. He jumped down and showed it to Quarry. Another webcam. ‘They’re everywhere. I’ve been noticing them for months without ever really seeing them. There’ll be one in your office. I’ve got one in every room at home – even in the bedroom. Christ. Even in the bathroom .’ He put his hand to his brow, only just registering the scale of it himself. ‘Unbelievable.’
    Quarry had always had a sneaking fear that their rivals might be trying to spy on them: it was certainly what he would do in their shoes. That was why he had hired Genoud’s security consultancy. He turned the detector over in his hands, appalled. ‘You think there’s a camera in all of them?’
    ‘Well, we can check them out, but yeah – yeah, I do.’
    ‘My God, and yet we pay a fortune to Genoud to sweep this place for bugs.’
    ‘But that’s the beauty of it – he must be the guy who put all this in, don’t you see? He did my house too, when I bought it. He’s got us under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance. Look.’ Hoffmann took out his mobile phone. ‘He organised these as well, didn’t he – our specially encrypted phones?’ He broke it open – for some reason Quarry was reminded of a man cracking lobster claws – and quickly disassembled it beside one of the wash basins. ‘It’s the perfect bugging device. You don’t even need to put in a microphone – it’s got one built in. I read about it in the Wall Street Journal . You think you’ve turned it off, but actually it’s always active, picking up your conversations even when you’re not on the phone. And you keep it charged all the time. Mine’s been acting strange all day.’
    He was so certain he was right, Quarry found his paranoia contagious. He examined his own phone gingerly, as if it were a grenade that might explode in his hand, then used it to call his assistant. ‘Amber, would you please track down Maurice Genoud and get him over here right away? Tell him to drop whatever else he’s doing and come to Alex’s office.’ He hung up. ‘Let’s hear what the bastard has to say. I never did trust him. I wonder what his game is.’
    ‘That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? We’re a hedge fund returning an eighty-three per cent profit. If someone set up a clone of us, copying all our trades, they’d make a fortune. They wouldn’t even need to know how we were doing it. It’s obvious why they’d want to spy on us. The only thing I don’t understand is why he’s done all this other stuff.’
    ‘What other stuff?’
    ‘Set up an offshore account in the Cayman Islands, transferred money in and out of it, sent emails in my name, bought me a book full of stuff about fear and terror, sabotaged Gabby’s exhibition, hacked into my medical records and hooked me up with a psychopath. It’s like he’s been paid to drive me mad.’
    Listening to him, Quarry started to feel uneasy again, but before he could say anything his phone rang. It was Amber.
    ‘Mr Genoud was only just downstairs. He’s on his way up.’
    ‘Thanks.’ He said to Hoffmann, ‘Apparently he’s in the building already. That’s odd, isn’t it? What’s he doing here? Maybe he knows we’re on to him.’
    ‘Maybe.’ Suddenly Hoffmann was on the move once more – out of the men’s room, across the passage, into his office. Another idea had occurred to him. He wrenched open the drawer of his desk and pulled out the book Quarry had seen him bring in that morning: the volume of Darwin he had called him about at midnight.
    ‘Look at this,’ he said, flicking through the pages. He held it up, open at a photograph of an old man seemingly terrified out of his wits – a grotesque picture, Quarry thought, like something out of a freak show. ‘What do you see?’
    ‘I see some Victorian lunatic who looks like he just shat a brick.’
    ‘Yeah, but look again. Do you see these calipers?’
    Quarry looked. A pair of hands, one on either side of the face, was applying thin metal rods to the forehead. The victim’s head was supported in some kind of steel headrest; he seemed to be wearing a