The Fear Index

was looking at him intently. ‘Okay,’ he conceded, ‘supposing you did receive emails. How did you know it was me sending them and not someone pretending to be me?’
    ‘Why would I think that? It was your company, your email address, I was paid from your bank account. And to be frank, Dr Hoffmann, you do have a reputation for being a difficult man to talk to.’
    Hoffmann swore and slammed his fist on his desk in frustration. ‘Here we go again. I’m supposed to have ordered a book on the internet. I’m supposed to have bought Gabrielle’s entire exhibition on the internet. I’m supposed to have asked a madman to kill me on the internet …’ He had an involuntary memory flash of the ghastly scene in the hotel, of the dead man’s head lolling on its stem. He had actually forgotten about it for a few minutes. He realised Quarry was looking at him in dismay. ‘Who’s doing this to me, Hugo?’ he said in despair. ‘Doing this and filming it? You’ve got to help me sort this out. It’s like a nightmare I’m caught in.’
    Quarry’s mind was reeling from it all. It took some effort to keep his voice calm. ‘Of course I’ll help you, Alex. Let’s just try to get to the bottom of this once and for all.’ He turned back to Genoud. ‘Right, Maurice, presumably you’ve kept these emails?’
    ‘Naturally.’
    ‘Can you access them now?’
    ‘Yes, if that is what you want.’ Genoud had become very stiff and formal during the last few exchanges, standing erect as if his honour as a former police officer was being called into question. Which was a bit bloody rich, thought Quarry, considering that whatever turned out to be the truth, he had set up a wholesale secret surveillance network.
    ‘All right then, you won’t mind showing them to us. Let him use your computer, Alex.’
    Hoffmann rose from his seat like a man in a trance. Fragments of the smoke detector crunched beneath his feet. Reflexively he looked up at the mess he had made of the ceiling. The hole where the tile had come down opened on to a dark void. Inside, where the trailing wires were touching, a blue-white spark flashed intermittently. He thought he saw something move in the crawl-space. He closed his eyes and the imprint of the spark continued to glow as if he had been staring at the sun. A worm of suspicion began to form in his mind.
    Genoud, bent over the computer, said triumphantly, ‘There!’
    He straightened and stood aside to let Hoffmann and Quarry examine his emails. He had filtered his saved messages so that only those from Hoffmann were listed – scores of them, dating back almost a year. Quarry took the mouse and started clicking on them at random.
    ‘I’m afraid it’s your email address on all of these, Alex,’ he said. ‘No question of it.’
    ‘Yeah, I bet it is, but I still didn’t send them.’
    ‘All right, but then who did?’
    Hoffmann brooded. This was beyond hacking now, or compromised security or a clone server. It was more fundamental, as if the company had somehow developed dual operating systems.
    Quarry was still reading. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘You even snooped on yourself in your own house …’
    ‘Actually, I hate to keep repeating myself, but I didn’t.’
    ‘Well I’m sorry, Alexi, but you did. Listen to this: “To: Genoud. From: Hoffmann. Required Cologny webcam surveillance units twenty-four concealed immediate …”’
    ‘Come on, man. I don’t talk like that. Nobody talks like that.’
    ‘Somebody must: it’s here on the screen.’
    Hoffmann suddenly turned to Genoud. ‘Where does all the information go? What happens to the images, the audio recordings?’
    Genoud said, ‘As you know, it’s all sent in digital streams to a secure server.’
    ‘But there must be thousands of hours of it,’ exclaimed Hoffmann. ‘When would anyone ever have time to review it all? I certainly couldn’t do it. You’d need a whole dedicated team. There aren’t the hours in the day.’
    Genoud shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’ve often wondered that myself. I just did what I was ordered.’
    Only a machine could analyse that quantity of information, thought Hoffmann. It would have to be using the latest face-recognition technology; voice-recognition as well; search tools …
    He was interrupted by another outcry from Quarry: ‘Since when did we start leasing an industrial unit in Zimeysa?’
    Genoud said: ‘I can tell you exactly, Mr Quarry: since six months ago. It’s a