The Fear Index

bloody thing?’
    Hoffmann replied, without turning round, ‘But if we do that, then we simply cease to trade, period. We don’t unwind our present positions: we’re just frozen into them.’
    Little cries of alarm and astonishment were erupting all over the room. One by one the quants were abandoning their terminals and coming over to watch what Hoffmann was doing. In the manner of bystanders gathered around a big jigsaw puzzle, someone would occasionally lean forward with a suggestion: had Hoffmann thought of putting that there? Might this be better if he tried it the other way round? He ignored them. Nobody knew VIXAL as he did; he had designed every aspect of it.
    On the big screens the afternoon reports from Wall Street continued as normal. The lead story was still the riots in Athens against the Greek government’s austerity measures – whether Greece would default, the contagion spread, the euro collapse. And still the hedge fund was making money: in a way that was the weirdest aspect of all. Quarry turned away for a few seconds to consult the P&L on the next-door screen: it was now up by almost $300 million on the day. Part of him still wondered why they were so desperate to bypass the algorithm. They had created King Midas out of silicon chips; in what way was its phenomenal profitability not in their human interest?
    Suddenly Hoffmann lifted his hands from the keyboard in the dramatic manner of a concert pianist finishing a concerto. ‘This is no good. There’s no response. I thought we could at least make an orderly liquidation, but that’s obviously not an option. The whole system needs to be shut down completely and quarantined until we find out what’s wrong with it.’
    Ju-Long said: ‘How are we going to do that?’
    ‘Why don’t we just do it the old-fashioned way?’ suggested Quarry. ‘Let’s take VIXAL off-line and simply call up the brokers on the phone and get them on email and tell them to start winding down the positions?’
    ‘We’ll need to come up with some plausible explanation for why we’re no longer using the algorithm to go straight to the trading floor.’
    ‘Easy,’ said Quarry. ‘We pull the plugs and then we tell them there’s been a catastrophic loss of power in our computer room and we have to withdraw from the market until it’s fixed. And like all the best lies, it has the merit of being almost true.’
    Van der Zyl said, ‘In fact we only have to get through another two hours and fifty minutes, and then the markets are closed in any case. And the day after tomorrow it’s the weekend. By Monday morning the book will be neutral, and we will be safe – as long as the markets don’t stage a strong rally in the meantime.’
    ‘The Dow’s off a full percentage point already,’ said Quarry. ‘The S and P’s the same. You’ve got all this sovereign debt crap coming out of the eurozone – there’s no way this market’s going to end the day up.’ The four executives of the company looked from one to another. ‘So is that it? We’re agreed?’ They all nodded.
    Hoffmann said, ‘I’ll do it.’
    ‘I’ll come with you,’ offered Quarry.
    ‘No. I switched it on; I’ll switch it off.’
    It seemed to him a long walk across the trading floor to the computer room. He could sense the eyes of everyone like a weight upon his back, and it occurred to him that if this were a sciencefiction movie, he would now be denied access to the motherboards. But when he presented his face to the scanner, the bolts slid back and the door opened. In the cold, noisy darkness, the forest eyes of a thousand CPUs blinked at his approach. It felt like an act of murder, just as it had at CERN when they’d closed him down there all those years ago. Nevertheless, he opened the metal box and grasped the isolator handle. It was only the end of a phase, he told himself: the work would go on, if not under his direction then under someone else’s. He flicked the handle, and within a couple of seconds the lights and the sound had faded. Only the noise of the air-conditioning disturbed the chilly silence. It was like a mortuary. He headed towards the glow of the open door.
    As he approached the cluster of quants gathered around the six-screen array, everyone turned to look at him. He couldn’t read their expressions. Quarry said, ‘What happened? You couldn’t go through with it?’
    ‘Yes, I went through with it. I turned it off.’ He looked past Quarry’s mystified face.