Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  “You don’t talk a lot. I’d like to know what you’re feeling.”

  Sharko shook his head and pursed his lips.

  “Disgust. Just deep, deep disgust. There really aren’t any words to describe things like that.”

  Lucie leaned her head against his solid shoulder, and in that way they continued on to the station. Once at the entrance, letting go of their embrace, they headed toward one of the foyers of the vast edifice, which in the middle of summer was thronged with travelers. Carefree people, happy, or in a rush…

  Detective Pierre Monette and a colleague were waiting at the coffee bar. The policemen greeted each other respectfully and exchanged pleasantries.

  The lockers stretched in two long rows opposite a cash machine, under the red maple leaf of the Canadian flag. Lucie was surprised that someone of Rotenberg’s caliber should have picked such an open, heavily trafficked spot, but she figured he must have hidden copies of the information in various places, as Lacombe had evidently done with his film before burning to death.

  Detective Monette pointed to locker number 201, at the far left.

  “We already opened it. This is what we found.”

  He took a small object from his pocket.

  “A flash drive.”

  He handed it to Sharko, who brought it up to eye level.

  “Can you copy the files for me?”

  “Already done. Keep it.”

  “What did you think?”

  “We couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I’m hoping you can figure it out. Your case has got me curious.”

  Sharko nodded.

  “You can count on me. We’re going to have to ask you for a bit more help. We need you to do a top-priority check on a man named James Peterson, or Peter Jameson. He was a doctor at Mont Providence Hospital in the fifties and lived in Montreal. He’d be about eighty by now.”

  Monette took down the information.

  “Got it. I’ll try to call you later this afternoon.”

  As Lucie and Sharko headed back to the hotel, the inspector shot circumspect glances at the crowd, searching for Eugenie. He craned his neck, leaned over to check behind a nearby couple.

  She was still nowhere to be found.

  56

  Sharko’s hotel room had already been made up. Clean sheets on the bed, toiletries replenished. The cop pulled his old suitcase from under the bed, opened it, and took out his laptop.

  Lucie gave a curious glance, then knitted her brow.

  “Is that a jar of cocktail sauce in your luggage?”

  Sharko closed the lid quickly, pulled the zipper, and turned on his computer.

  “I’ve always had trouble with diets.”

  “Between that and the glazed chestnuts…Judging by its color, I’d say it didn’t weather the trip too well.”

  Leaving the remark unanswered, Sharko slid the drive into the USB port of his PC, and a window appeared with two folders. They were labeled “Szpilman’s Discoveries” and “McGill Brainwashing.”

  “It’s the same directory as on Rotenberg’s computer. He must have backed up his files.”

  “McGill or Szpilman first?”

  “McGill. The lawyer showed me photos of the patients being conditioned, but there was also a film. A film that Sanders showed his patients as part of his brainwashing technique.”

  Sharko clicked on the file marked “Brainwash01.avi.”

  “Oh-one…That could mean there were dozens of others.”

  From the very first image, the two cops immediately understood. Sharko pressed PAUSE and pointed a finger to the upper right of the frame. He turned to Lucie, his face serious.

  “The white circle…The same as on the deadly reel.”

  “And on the crash films. Jacques Lacombe’s maker’s mark.”

  A heavy silence, then Lucie’s voice, crystal clear:

  “He was working for the CIA. Jacques Lacombe worked for the CIA.”

  Lucie felt the new piece fit, undeniably.

  “That explains his relocation to Washington in 1951, near agency headquarters. Then his move to Canada, where MK-Ultra was still under way. They recruited him the same way they recruited Sanders. First they saw the potential in his films, the way he manipulated the unconscious. Then they contacted him and, as with the psychiatrist, gave him a cover—the job as a projectionist—and probably a healthy bank account to boot.

  Sharko agreed.

  “They enlisted the best talents they could find. Scientists, doctors, engineers, and even a filmmaker. They needed someone to make the movies they showed the patients.”

  Lucie nodded. In the heat of the investigation, she was no longer next to the man she’d recently slept with, but with a colleague who felt the same pain as she: that of a dangerous, impossible manhunt.

  “Rotenberg told me the program involving the children and rabbits wasn’t MK-Ultra, and that the doctor you never saw on film wasn’t Sanders. Which means…”

  “Jacques Lacombe worked on both projects. On MK-Ultra, with Sanders at McGill, and on the one that used the children, with that Peterson or Jameson at Mont Providence. The CIA knew it could trust him. No doubt it needed someone reliable to film what took place in those white rooms.”

  Lucie got up to pour herself some water. The night of giddiness and pleasure was already a distant memory. The demons had come charging back. Sharko waited for her to return and slid a tender hand over the back of her neck.

  “You doing okay?”

  “Let’s keep going…”

  He hit PLAY. Brainwash01.avi…

  Lacombe’s film, which had been shown to Sanders’s patients, was mind-bogglingly bizarre. It was a mix of black-and-white squares, lines, and curves oscillating like waves. It gave the feeling of sailing in a psychedelic or Zen-like world, in which the mind no longer knew exactly what to latch onto. On the screen, the squares moved around, slowly, quickly; the waves swelled and vanished. Sharko replayed the video frame by frame, and that’s when the hidden frames appeared.

  Lucie wrinkled her features. They saw clawlike fingers gripping skulls on a table. Spiders filmed close up, mummifying insects in their gossamer threads. A fat black cloud in a perfectly clear sky. A large dark clot in a pool of blood. Horrors, aberrations—all the things Jacques Lacombe prized.

  Sharko rubbed his temples, shaken.

  “They must have shown it to the patients in a continuous loop. Combined with the sounds from the loudspeakers, it would have been a veritable brainwashing machine. That Lacombe was as crazy as Sanders.”

  “That’s probably the image he had of mental illness: scenes of capture and imprisonment, the invasion of the body by foreign organisms. All that to create a shock to the brain. Just like Sanders, he wanted to eradicate illness by tapping directly into the unconscious. Bombard it, the way they bombard cancer cells with radiation today.”

  Sharko let go of his mouse and ran a hand through his hair.

  “Barbarians…We’re back in the days of the Cold War, the battle between East and West, when people were prepared to make any sacrifice to reach their goals.”

  Lucie sighed and looked the inspector in the eye.

  “When I think it was these horrors that brought us together, you and I…Without these monstrosities, we would never have met.”

  “Only a relationship born in suffering could bring together two cops like us. Don’t you think?”

  Lucie pinched her lips. The harshness and madness of the world saddened her more than anything.

  “Where’s the rhyme and reason in all this?”

  “There is none. There never was.”

  She nodded her chin toward the screen.

  “The other folder. We should get onto Szpilman’s findings—hopefully to find out his secrets and be done with this once and for all.”

  Sharko nodded gravely. Around them, the atmosphere in the room had become thick and viscous. The cop clicked on the “Szpilman’s Discoveries” folder. Inside was a single PowerPoint file, labe
led “Mental_contamination.ppt.” Lucie’s throat tightened.

  “Wait a minute. Just before they shot him, Rotenberg was telling me about mental contamination. With everything that happened afterward, it had slipped my mind. Open the file.”

  “A batch of photos, it looks like.”

  The slide show began, delivering its pixelated poison. They saw the pictures of the German soldier aiming at the Jewish women, which the police had already seen at the meeting in Nanterre. The eyes of the soldier in the foreground had been circled in marker.

  “His eyes…That’s what Szpilman wanted to call attention to.”

  The following series of photos: mass graves.

  The bodies of Africans in heaps, tangled together, gathered up by the army. The inhuman expression of a vile massacre.

  “Rwanda,” the inspector murmured with difficulty. “Nineteen ninety-four. The genocide.”

  A particularly horrible image showed the Hutus in action, armed with their machetes. The faces of the aggressors were contorted in hatred, their lips frothing with saliva, the veins on their necks and arms bulging beneath the skin.

  Once again, the killers’ eyes were circled. Lucie moved her face closer to the screen.

  “Always the same look in the eye, always…The German, the Hutu, the little girl with the rabbits. It’s like…a common feature of madness, transcending cultures and time periods.”

  “Different forms of mass hysteria. We’re in the thick of it.”

  The war correspondent had then ventured among the bodies, lingering over the corpses, not shying away from the most horrific close-ups.

  The following image froze Lucie and Sharko in complete stupor.

  It showed a Tutsi, his eyes missing, his skull cut in half.

  The photo bore the caption BEYOND MASSACRE: AN EXPRESSION OF HUTU MADNESS.

  Lucie burrowed into her seat, a hand on her forehead. The photographer had thought this was a barbaric act by the Hutus themselves, but the truth lay elsewhere.

  “I can’t believe it…”

  Sharko pulled on the flesh of his cheeks until his eyes slanted.

  “He was there too. The sicko who steals the brains. Egypt, Rwanda, Gravenchon—and how many other places besides?”

  Other documents followed: archival photos, scans of articles, or pages from history books.

  Each concerned a genocide or a massacre. Burma, 1988. Sudan, 1989. Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992. Horrible photos, taken in the frenzy of the moment. The very worst that history had to offer was on display before them. And always, eyes circled. Sharko looked for sliced skulls among the mountains of corpses, without finding any more. But they were surely there, somewhere among the dead. They simply hadn’t been photographed.

  The cop firmly hit PAUSE.

  “Enough!”

  He stood up, put his hands to his head, and paced the room. Lucie still couldn’t get over it.

  “Mental contamination,” she kept repeating mechanically.

  She filed through the last images; then the slide show ended.

  Quiet in the room. Discreet rumble of the air conditioner. Lucie rushed to the window and threw it open.

  Air. She needed some air.

  57

  Sharko squeezed his skull between his hands.

  “The killer must have been there…present after every massacre, to steal the brains.”

  Pale, Lucie had come back to sit on the bed. She stared blankly at the screen.

  “Szpilman didn’t care about the political, ethnic, or existential reasons for the genocides. He was tracking something in those massacres, in which perfectly normal fathers and children suddenly went into a killing frenzy. Just before he died, Philip Rotenberg had talked to me about research that led the Belgian to that business of mental contamination. He’d said there might exist a phenomenon so violent that it could modify the structure of the brain.”

  “Like a virus, you mean?”

  “Yes, except that there isn’t anything really physical or organic. Just…something that passes through the eye and directly modifies human behavior, that liberates the impulse toward violence.”

  “A kind of criminal mass hysteria.”

  “In a way. Ever since I saw the film with the girls in the white room, I’ve had an image in mind: they’re like a squadron of warplanes. The lead plane, the one that guides the rest, veers downward, and the other planes follow in formation, one by one, as if they were held together by an invisible thread. What if that’s what this Syndrome E is all about? One highly violent individual sets things off, acts as a catalyst; then the mental contamination of violence spreads almost immediately from person to person? What if that was the goal of the experiments hidden in Lacombe’s film? Trying to re-create the phenomenon for the camera? Establish concrete proof of its existence?”

  Sharko walked almost mechanically around the room. Nothing existed around him. The case had absorbed him, and what Henebelle was saying struck him as at once far-fetched and frighteningly on target. Szpilman, through his own research and persistence, had stumbled onto the truth. He had spent years rummaging through books, contacting war zone photographers, collecting images, tracking down a horrifying discovery. Ultimately, the film that had no doubt come to him by arranged accident had been the cornerstone of his research, the missing piece that allowed him to grasp the very essence of his quest.

  “There are people on this planet,” he said, “who are trying to understand, medically—I would almost say surgically—the workings of this phenomenon, which Jacques Lacombe recorded more than fifty years ago for the purposes of secret experiments. Violent mental contamination starting from a catalyst. That’s what Syndrome E is.”

  “Violent mental contamination starting from a catalyst,” Lucie repeated. “A rare, random phenomenon that can strike anywhere, at any time. You can’t study it in a laboratory, so you go looking out in the field. At the site of massacres, the places where outbreaks of mass hysteria occur. You look in the heads of corpses for a trace, a clue.”

  Sharko pursued her line of thinking, his hand on his chin.

  “Chastel knew of the existence of Syndrome E, and that means two things. First, that the file, which in the fifties was in the hands of the CIA, has now been acquired by the French secret service. And second, that it’s…intrinsic to the Legion itself. It’s about a place where men, especially during the selection phase, are pushed to their physical and psychological limits. Where the slightest detail could suddenly set one of them off.”

  “The Legion is the perfect breeding ground for mental contamination. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Exactly. Think of the photo of those soldiers facing the Jewish mothers, or the Hutus brandishing their machetes, the inherent violence of those scenes, their context. No doubt there are triggers that help bring about the syndrome, like stress, fear, external conditioning…”

  “War, confinement…anything that involves some form of authority. Sister Marie talked about the anxiety the little girls exhibited after they’d been locked in those rooms and shouted at.”

  Sharko nodded emphatically.

  “Absolutely. Before taking over as top commander, Chastel led the survival training in Guiana, a hellhole that could drive even legionnaires insane. There might have been an outbreak of the syndrome there. From that, Chastel might have caught the eye of our brain thief. He then did a stint with the secret service before ending up in Aubagne. I believe he was appointed top commander specifically to try to trigger Syndrome E among his own men, so that they could study the phenomenon on living beings.”

  “A kind of incubator. The equivalent of the 1955 experiments, but outdoors.”

  “Yes. But he got caught in his own trap. Mohamed Abane, a particularly violent individual, went out of control and dragged four other men down with him. They were probably massacred before Chastel could even intervene. At that point, the colonel immediately took charge of the situation. He, his henchman Manoeuvre, and our brain thief got to work:
opening the skulls, removing the eyes, disposing of the remains.”

  Sharko stood up and waved the list of SIGN attendees. He was on the brink of nausea.

  “Manoeuvre and Chastel were only second-stringers. We need the real killer. The one who mutilated the Egyptian girls. The one who, for all these years, has probably been traveling from country to country sawing open skulls. The architect. He’s here, right in front of us, on this list of names. Burma dates back twenty-five years. If he went there after the massacre, our killer must be at least forty-five today.”

  Sharko closed up like an oyster, delved into his list, and began crossing out names. Still shaken, Lucie took the opportunity to log on to the hotel’s Wi-Fi. She googled the name “Peter Jameson,” which didn’t yield anything relevant. She then entered “James Peterson.” A number of results came up.

  “Franck? You should come see this…A James Peterson matches our criteria.”

  As Sharko didn’t hear her, she had to say it again. He raised his eyes toward her and waved his list.

  “I should be able to eliminate about half.”

  He came toward her. Lucie pointed to the screen. She had clicked on a Wikipedia article about the man. The photo showed a thin, slight fellow, with angular features and intransigent eyes.

  The two cops read silently. James Peterson…Parents emigrated from New York to France. Born in Paris in 1923. A remarkably gifted child who started university studies at age fifteen. Associate professor of physiology, before concentrating on the study of the nervous system when he wasn’t yet twenty. Then moved to the United States, to Yale, where he specialized in research into direct stimulation of the brain using electrical and chemical techniques. This was the subject of his only book, Brain Conditioning and Freedom of Mind, published in 1952. In 1953, Peterson inexplicably abandoned the scientific field and was never heard from again.

  Lucie tried other searches, but they didn’t tell her anything further. Peterson had simply vanished. But the cops now knew where he’d gone after 1953: Mont Providence, under the hybrid identity of Peter Jameson. He had been recruited by the CIA, like the others, to perform experiments on children. For now, the trail dead-ended there. The cops awaited a call from Pierre Monette for more detailed information.