The Fear Index (10 page)

‘
Goedemorgen. Rosengaarden en Nijenhuise
.’

The voice was neither elderly nor male but young and female; lilting, sing-song.

He said, ‘Do you speak English?’

‘Yes I do. How can I help you?’

He cleared his throat and sat forward in his seat. ‘I believe you sent me a book the day before yesterday. My name is Alexander Hoffmann. I live in Geneva.’

‘Hoffmann? Yes, Dr Hoffmann! Naturally I remember. The Darwin first edition. A beautiful book. You have it already? There was no problem with the delivery, I hope.’

‘Yeah, I got it. But there was no note with it, so I can’t thank whoever it was who bought it for me. Could you give me that information?’

There was a pause. ‘Did you say your name was Alexander Hoffmann?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

This time the pause was longer, and when the girl spoke again she sounded confused. ‘You bought it yourself, Dr Hoffmann.’

Hoffmann closed his eyes. When he opened them again it seemed to him that his office had shifted slightly on its axis. ‘That is not possible,’ he said. ‘I didn’t buy it. It must have been someone pretending to be me.’

‘But you paid for it yourself. Are you sure you have not forgotten?’

‘Paid for it how?’

‘By bank transfer.’

‘And how much did I pay?’

‘Ten thousand euros.’

With his free hand Hoffmann grasped the edge of his desk. ‘Wait a second. How could this happen? Did someone come into your shop and say they were me?’

‘There is no shop any more. Not for five years. Only a poste restante. These days we are in a warehouse outside Rotterdam.’

‘Well, surely someone must have spoken to me on the phone at least?’

‘No, to speak to a customer is very unusual these days. Orders all come from email.’

Hoffmann wedged the phone between his chin and shoulder. He clicked on his computer and went to his email screen. He scrolled through his outbox. ‘When am I supposed to have sent you this email?’

‘May third.’

‘Well, I’m looking here now at my emails for that day and I can assure you I sent no message to you on May third. What’s the email address on the order?’

‘A-dot-Hoffmann at Hoffmann Investment Technologies dot com.’

‘Yeah, that’s my address. But I don’t see any message to a bookseller here.’

‘You sent it from a different computer perhaps?’

‘No, I’m sure I didn’t.’ But even as he uttered the words the confidence leaked from his voice and he felt almost physically sick with panic, as if an abyss was opening at his feet. The radiologist had mentioned dementia as a possible explanation for the white pinpricks on his CAT scan. Perhaps he had used his mobile, or his laptop, or his computer at home, and forgotten all about it – although even if he had, surely some record of it would be here? He said, ‘What exactly was in the message I sent you? Can you read it back to me?’

‘There was no message. The process is automatic. The customer clicks on the title on our online catalogue and fills in the electronic order form – name, address, method of payment.’ She must have heard the uncertainty in his voice; now caution entered hers. ‘I hope you are not wanting to cancel the order.’

‘No, I just need to sort this out. You say the money was paid by bank transfer. What’s the account number the money came from?’

‘I cannot disclose that information.’

Hoffmann summoned all the force he could muster. ‘Now listen to me. I’ve clearly been the victim of a serious fraud here. This is identity theft. And I most certainly will cancel the order, and I’ll put the whole goddamned thing in the hands of the police, and my lawyers, if you don’t give me that account number right now so I can find out just what the hell is going on.’

There was a silence at the other end of the line. Eventually the woman said coldly, ‘I cannot give this information over the telephone, but I can send it to the email address given on the order. I can do it immediately. Will this be okay for you?’

‘This will be okay for me. Thank you.’

Hoffmann hung up and exhaled. He put his elbows on his desk and rested his head between his fingertips and stared hard at his computer screen. Time seemed to pass very slowly, but in fact it was only twenty seconds later that his email inbox announced the arrival of a new message. He opened it. It was from the bookshop. There was no greeting, just a single line of twenty digits and letters, and the name of the account holder: A. J. Hoffmann. He gawped at it then buzzed his assistant. ‘Marie-Claude, could you mail me a list of all my personal bank account numbers? Right away, please.’

‘Of course.’

‘And you keep a record of the security codes at my house, I believe?’

‘Yes, I do, Dr Hoffmann.’ Marie-Claude Durade was a brisk Swiss woman in her middle fifties who had been with Hoffmann for five years. She was the only person in the building who did not address him by his Christian name. It was inconceivable to him that she could be mixed up in any kind of illegal activity.

‘Where do you keep them?’

‘In your personal file on my computer.’

‘Has anyone asked for them?’

‘No.’

‘You haven’t discussed them with anyone?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Not even your husband?’

‘My husband died last year.’

‘Did he? Oh. Okay. Sorry. Anyway, there was a break-in at my house last night. The police may want to ask you some questions. Just to let you know.’

‘Yes, Dr Hoffmann.’

As he waited for her to send him the details of his accounts, he leafed through the Darwin. He looked up ‘suspicion’ in the index:

A man may have his heart filled with the blackest hatred or suspicion, or be corroded with envy and jealousy; but as these feelings do not at once lead to action, and as they commonly last for some time, they are not shown by any outward sign
…

With all due respect to Darwin, Hoffmann felt this was empirically untrue. His own heart was filled with the blackest suspicion and he had no doubt it was evident in his face – in his downturned mouth and sullen, narrowed, shifting gaze. Whoever heard of a case of identity theft in which the thief bought a present for the victim? Someone was trying to screw with his mind: that was what was going on here. They were trying to make him doubt his own sanity, maybe even murder him. Either that or he really was going mad.

He pushed himself on to his feet and prowled round his office. He parted the slats of his blinds and gazed out across the trading floor. Did he have an enemy out there? His sixty quants were split into three teams: Incubation, who composed and tested the algorithms; Technology, who turned the prototypes into operational tools; and Execution, who oversaw the actual trades. Some of them were a little weird, there was no doubt about that. The Hungarian, Imre Szabo, for example – he couldn’t walk down a corridor without touching every door handle. And there was another guy who had to eat everything with a knife and fork, even a biscuit or a packet of crisps. Hoffmann had hired them all personally, regardless of their oddities, but he did not know them well. They were colleagues rather than friends. He rather regretted that now. He dropped the slat and returned to his terminal.

The list of his bank accounts was waiting in his inbox. He had eight – Swiss franc, dollar, sterling, euro, current, deposit, offshore and joint. He checked their numbers against the one that had been used to buy the book. None matched. He tapped his finger against his desk for a few seconds, then picked up his phone and called the firm’s chief financial officer, Lin Ju-Long.

‘LJ? It’s Alex. Do me a favour. Check out an account number for me, would you? It’s in my name but I don’t recognise it. I want to know if it’s on our system anywhere.’ He forwarded the email from the bookshop. ‘I’m sending it across now. Have you got it?’

There was a pause.

‘Yes, Alex, I got it. Okay, well, first thing I can tell you right away: it starts “KYD” – that’s the Cayman Islands IBAN prefix for a US dollar account.’

‘Could it be some kind of company account?’

‘I’ll run it through the system. You got a problem?’

‘No. Just want to check it out, that’s all. I’d be grateful if you could keep this just between the two of us.’

‘Okay, Alex. Sorry to hear about your—’

‘I’m fine,’ cut in Hoffmann quickly. ‘No harm done.’

‘Okay, that’s good. Has Gana spoken to you, by the way?’

Gana was Ganapathi Rajamani, the company’s chief risk officer.

Hoffmann said, ‘No. Why?’

‘You authorised a big short on Procter and Gamble last night? Two million at sixty-two per share?’

‘So what?’

‘Gana is worried. He says our risk limit has been breached. He wants a meeting of the Risk Committee.’

‘Well, tell him to go talk to Hugo about it. And let me know about that account, will you?’

Hoffmann felt too tired to do any more. He buzzed Marie-Claude again and told her to make sure he was not disturbed for an hour. He turned off his mobile. Afterwards he lay on his sofa and tried to imagine who on earth would have gone to the trouble of stealing his name in order to buy him a rare volume of Victorian natural history using a Cayman Islands dollar account that he seemed to own. But the bizarreness of the conundrum defeated even him, and very soon he sank into sleep.

INSPECTOR LECLERC KNEW that the chief of Geneva’s Police department, a stickler for punctuality, invariably arrived at police headquarters on the Boulevard Carl-Vogt at 9.00 sharp and that his first act of the day was always to read the summary of what had occurred in the canton overnight. Therefore when the telephone rang in his office at 9.08, he had a fair idea of who might be on the other end of the line.

A brisk voice said, ‘Jean-Philippe?’

‘Morning, Chief.’

‘This assault on the American banker, Hoffmann.’

‘Yes, Chief?’

‘Where are we on this?’

‘He’s discharged himself from the University Hospital. Forensics are at the house now. We’ve put out a detailed description. One of our men is watching the property. That’s about it.’

‘So he’s not seriously hurt?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘That’s something. What do you make of it?’

‘Bizarre. The house is a fortress but the intruder somehow just wandered in. He came prepared to restrain his victim, or victims, and it looks as though he handled knives while he was on the premises. But then he ended up just hitting Hoffmann on the head and running away. Nothing stolen. To be honest, I have a feeling Hoffmann isn’t telling us the full story, but I’m not sure whether that’s deliberate or he’s just confused.’

There was a short silence at the other end. Leclerc could hear someone moving around in the background.

‘Are you going off shift?’

‘Just about to leave, Chief.’

‘Do me a favour and pull a double, will you? I’ve already had the Minister of Finance’s office on the phone, wanting to know what’s happening. It would be good if you could see this one through.’

‘The Minister of Finance?’ repeated Leclerc in amazement. ‘Why’s he so interested?’

‘Oh, you know, the usual story, I expect. One law for the rich, another for the poor. Keep me up to speed on it, will you?’

After he had hung up, Leclerc let out a string of expletives under his breath. He plodded along the corridor to the coffee machine and got himself a cup of very black and unusually filthy espresso. His eyes felt gritty, his sinuses ached. I’m too old for this, he thought. It was not even as if there was anything much he could do: he had sent one of his juniors to interview the domestic staff. He went back to his office and called his wife and told her he wouldn’t be home until after lunch, then logged on to the internet to see if he could find out anything about Dr Alexander Hoffmann, physicist and hedge-fund manager. But to his surprise there was almost nothing – no entry in Wikipedia, no newspaper article and not one image available online. Yet the Minister of Finance himself was taking a personal interest in the matter.

What the hell was a hedge fund in any case? he wondered. He looked it up: ‘A private investment fund that may invest in a diverse range of assets and may employ a variety of investment strategies to maintain a hedged portfolio intended to protect the fund’s investors from downturns in the market while maximising returns on market upswings.’

None the wiser, he flicked back through his notes. Hoffmann had said in his interview that he had worked in the financial sector for the past eight years; for six years before that he had been employed on developing the Large Hadron Collider. As it happened, Leclerc knew a man, a former inspector in the police, who now worked in security at CERN. He gave him a call and fifteen minutes later he was at the wheel of his little Renault, driving slowly in the morning traffic, north-west past the airport, along the Route de Meyrin, through the drab industrial zone of Zimeysa.

Up ahead, framed by the distant mountains, CERN’s huge rust-coloured wooden globe seemed to rise out of the arable fields like a gigantic anachronism: a 1960s vision of what the future was supposed to look like. Leclerc parked opposite it and went into the main building. He gave his name and clipped his visitor’s badge to his windcheater. While he waited for his contact to collect him he studied the little exhibition in the reception area. Apparently sixteen hundred super-conducting magnets, each weighing nearly thirty tonnes, were housed in a twenty-seven-kilometre circular tunnel beneath his feet, shooting beams of particles around it so quickly that they completed the circuit eleven thousand times per second. The collisions of the beams at an energy of seven trillion electronvolts per proton were supposed to reveal the origins of the universe, discover extra dimensions and explain the nature of dark matter. None of it that Leclerc could discern seemed to have anything whatever to do with the financial markets.