The Fear Index (29 page)

‘It’s possible.’ She put the laptop to one side and turned to her own computer screen. She typed something and clicked on a mouse several times. ‘I see you terminated your treatment with me in November 2001 without any explanation. Why was that?’

‘I was cured.’

‘Don’t you think that was for me to decide, rather than you?’

‘No, I don’t actually. I’m not a kid. I know when I’m well. I’ve been fine now for years. I got married. I started a company. Everything has been fine. Until this started.’

‘You might feel fine, but I’m afraid major depressive disorders like the one you had can recur.’ She scrolled down his case notes, shaking her head. ‘I see it’s eight and a half years since your last consultation. You’ll have to remind me what it was that triggered your illness in the first place.’

Hoffmann had kept it quarantined in his mind for so long, it was an effort to recall it. ‘I had some serious difficulties in my research at CERN. There was an internal inquiry, which was very stressful. In the end they closed down the project I was working on.’

‘What was the project?’

‘Machine reasoning – artificial intelligence.’

‘And have you been under a lot of similar stress recently?’

‘Some,’ he admitted.

‘What sort of depressive symptoms have you had?’

‘None. That’s what’s so weird.’

‘Lethargy? Insomnia?’

‘No.’

‘Impotence?’

He thought of Gabrielle. He wondered where she was. He said quietly, ‘No.’

‘What about the suicidal fantasies you used to have? They were very vivid, very detailed – any recurrence there?’

‘No.’

‘This man who attacked you – am I to take it he is the other participant in the conversation on the internet?’

Hoffmann nodded.

‘Where is he now?’

‘I’d prefer not to go into that.’

‘Dr Hoffmann, where is he now?’ When he still wouldn’t answer, she said, ‘Show me your hands, please.’

Reluctantly he stood and approached her desk. He held out his hands. He felt like a child again, being made to prove he had washed before sitting down to eat. She examined his broken skin without touching it, then carefully looked him over.

‘You have been in a fight?’

He took a long time to reply. ‘Yes. It was self-defence.’

‘That’s all right. Sit down again, please.’

He did as he was told.

She said, ‘In my opinion, you need to be seen by a specialist right away. There are certain disorders – schizophrenia, paranoia – that can lead the sufferer to act in ways that are entirely out of character and which afterwards they simply can’t remember. That may not apply in your case, but I don’t think we can take a chance, do you? Especially if there are abnormalities on your brain scan.’

‘Maybe not.’

‘So what I would like you to do now is take a seat downstairs while I talk to my colleague. Perhaps you could call your wife and tell her where you are. Is that all right with you?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

He waited for her to show him out, but she remained watchful behind her desk. Eventually he stood and picked up the laptop. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll go down to reception.’

‘Good. It should only take a few minutes.’

At the door, he turned. A thought had occurred to him. ‘Those are my records you’re looking at.’

‘They are.’

‘They’re on computer?’

‘Yes. They always have been. Why?’

‘What exactly is in them?’

‘My case notes. A record of treatment – drugs prescribed, psychotherapy sessions and so on.’

‘Do you tape your sessions with your patients?’

She hesitated. ‘Some.’

‘Mine?’

Another hesitation. ‘Yes.’

‘And then what happens?’

‘My assistant transcribes them.’

‘And you keep the records on computer.’

‘Yes.’

‘May I see?’ He was over at her desk in a couple of strides.

‘No. Certainly not.’

She quickly put her hand on the mouse to close the document, but he grabbed her wrist.

‘Please, just let me look at my own file.’

He had to prise the mouse away from her. Her hand shot towards the drawer where she kept the pepper spray. He blocked it with his leg.

He said, ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I just need to check what I told you. Give me a minute to look at my records and I’ll go.’

He felt bad seeing the fear in her eyes, but he would not yield, and after a couple of seconds she surrendered. She pushed her chair back and stood. He took her place in front of the screen. She moved to a safe distance and watched him from the doorway, drawing her cardigan tight around herself as if she were feeling cold. She said, ‘Where did you get that laptop?’ But he wasn’t listening. He was comparing the two screens, scrolling down first one and then the other, and it was as if he were looking at himself in two dark mirrors. The words on each were identical. Everything that he had poured out to her nine years ago had been cut and pasted and put up on to the website where the German had read it.

He said, without looking up, ‘Is this computer connected to the internet?’ and then he saw that it was. He went into the system registry. It didn’t take him long to find the malware – strange files of a type he had never seen before, four of them:

He said, ‘Someone’s hacked into your system. They’ve stolen my records.’ He glanced over to where she had been standing. The consulting room was empty, the door ajar. He could hear her voice somewhere. It sounded as though she was on the telephone. He seized the laptop and thumped his way down the narrow carpeted staircase. The receptionist came round from behind his desk and tried to block his exit, but Hoffmann had no trouble pushing him aside.

Outside, the normality of the day mocked him – the old guys drinking in the café, the mother with her pram, the au pair picking up the laundry. He turned left and walked quickly down the leafy street, past the drab shuttered houses opening directly on to the pavement, past the patisserie now closed for the day and the suburban hedges and the sensible small cars. He did not know where he was going. Normally 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 find Walton; she wondered how long he had been watching her. ‘Or the Law of Unintended Consequences. You start off trying to create the origins of the universe and you end up creating eBay. Come to my office. I don’t have long, I’m afraid.’

‘Are you sure? I don’t want to trouble you. I can always come back another time.’

‘That’s all right.’ He looked at her carefully. ‘Is it about making art out of particle physics, or is it by any chance about Alex?’

‘Actually it’s Alex.’

‘I thought it might be.’

He led her down a corridor lined with pictures of old computers and into an office block. It was dingy, functional – frosted-glass doors, too-bright strip lighting, institutional lino, grey paintwork – not at all what she had expected for the home of the Large Hadron Collider. But again she could imagine Alex here very easily: it was certainly a much more characteristic habitat of the man she had married than his present interior-designed, leather-upholstered, first-edition-lined study in Cologny.

‘So this is where the great man used to sleep,’ said Walton, throwing open the door of a spartan cell with two desks, two terminals and a view over a car park.

‘Sleep?’

‘Work, too, in fairness. Twenty hours of work a day, four hours of sleep. He used to roll out his mattress in that corner.’ He smiled faintly at the memory and turned his solemn grey eyes upon her. ‘Alex had already gone from here, I think, by the time you met him at our little New Year’s Eve party – or was going, anyway. There’s a problem, I assume.’

‘Yes, there is.’

He nodded, as if expecting it. ‘Come and sit down.’ He led her along the passage to his office. It was identical to the other, except that there was only one desk, and Walton had humanised it somewhat – put down an old Persian carpet on the lino and some plants along the rusting metal windowsill. On top of the filing cabinet a radio was quietly playing classical music, a string quartet. He switched it off. ‘So, how can I help?’