Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  Lucie nodded, pursuing Sharko’s line of thinking:

  “Lacombe lets himself be swayed by Peterson and agrees. To protect their secret from the CIA, they hide the film about the rabbits in another weird short, Lacombe’s specialty. Even if the CIA watched the film, since they owned the original and all the prints, they wouldn’t see a thing. At most, they’d have picked up on a few subliminal images of Judith Sagnol. Lacombe, with his genius and latent insanity, bested the American intelligence community at its own game.”

  “Right. And Peterson, for his part, is already thinking of getting out, fleeing Canada, and he wants to take Alice with him, the one who allowed him to reproduce Syndrome E. Had she become an object of study for him? Had he developed some kind of affection for her? Did he see her as the living proof of his success? A trophy? A curiosity? Whatever the case, he gets married, adopts Alice, and kills Lacombe by setting the fire. Then, probably with help from the French, he vanishes back into his native country, taking Alice and Lacombe’s original print with him.”

  “Except that Lacombe had taken precautions and made copies, hiding them in different places. The two men must have lived in constant fear and paranoia, not only of the CIA but of each other.”

  “Exactly. But all Lacombe’s precautions couldn’t save him. Protected and hidden, Peterson settles in France and probably pursues his experiments. His discoveries about Syndrome E fall into French hands, right under the CIA’s nose. Alice pays the price for Peterson’s fanaticism and madness. She’s already suffered all those tortures at Mont Providence, and she was the first one to start slaughtering the rabbits. She’s Patient Zero of Syndrome E—she triggered the wave of madness that affected all those other girls. The experiment inevitably left her with severe psychological scars—a violence and aggression deeply ingrained in the very structure of her psyche. But she was also brilliant, and probably picked up where her father left off.”

  “I remember Luc Szpilman’s body, and his girlfriend’s…All those knife wounds. There was a kind of frenzy, a blind, incomprehensible rage.”

  “The same as with the Egyptian girls, and the film restorer, and the rabbits. Alice is now sixty-two, and still hasn’t stopped killing. Madness and violence have spread deep inside her, the way they’ve spread inside everyone involved in this business.”

  Lucie clenched her fists and shook her head, eyes fixed on the ground. “There’s still something I don’t understand. Why did they use deep brain stimulation on Mohamed Abane?”

  “It’s simple. There was a sudden, uncontrolled outbreak of Syndrome E at the Legion. Something went wrong, the glitch that led to the murder of five young recruits. Except that Abane, who’d only been wounded in the shoulder, was still alive. No way were they going to let him live because of what had happened, but on the other hand Abane was, like Alice, a Patient Zero. I think that before she had him killed, Alice Tonquin, or Coline Quinat, wanted to experiment on him. She had a living, breathing guinea pig at her disposal, which must not have happened too often. She had her hands on someone who basically was just like her, and who must have made her relive the most painful times of her life. God only knows what tortures she put him through.”

  Lucie’s face darkened.

  “It’s not only God who knows. We’re going to know soon enough as well.”

  She stood up and watched an airplane slicing through the sky. Then she turned back to Sharko, who was nervously fumbling with his cell phone.

  “You’re dying to call your chief, aren’t you?”

  “I should, yes.”

  She gripped his wrists.

  “There’s just one thing I’m asking—let me see Alice face-to-face. I need to talk to her, look her in the eye, so that I can get her out of my head. I don’t want to keep thinking of her as a poor innocent, but as the worst sort of killer.”

  Sharko recalled his own face-to-face with the dangling body of Atef Abd el-Aal, the morbid sensation of pleasure he’d felt when he’d flicked the lighter and watched the man’s face go up in flames. He leaned closer to Lucie and whispered in her ear:

  “This business has been going on for more than half a century. A few more hours won’t make any difference. I’ll call him before we take off. I want to be in the front row and not miss anything either. What did you think?”

  60

  They had caught the last flight out that evening, destination: Paris. Since the plane wasn’t entirely full, they could sit next to each other. Her forehead flattened against the window, Lucie watched Montreal turn into a great luminous vessel that gradually let itself be swallowed by the shadows of night. A city that she’d only come to know by its darkest side.

  Then came the endless black of the ocean, that unknowable mass that quivers with life and holds our fate in its undulating belly.

  Next to her, Sharko had put on his sleeping mask and curled up in his seat. His head was nodding, and he could finally let himself go. They might have taken the eight hours of travel to talk, tell each other about their lives, their pasts, get to know each other better, but they both knew that they understood each other best in silence.

  Lucie looked with sorrow and desire at that square jaw, that face that had lived through so much. With the back of her hand she lightly brushed the stubble on his cheek and remembered that their relationship was born in the very heart of their own sufferings. There was hope. Deep down, she wanted to convince herself there was hope, that all scorched earth eventually started yielding grain again, one summer or other. The man must have been through the worst life had to offer; day after day, he must have tried to roll a ball of life that eroded more and more with each new incursion into Evil. But Lucie wanted to try. Try to give him back a tenth, a hundredth of what he had lost; she wanted to be there when things weren’t going well, and also when they were. She wanted him to hug her twins to his heart and, when he buried his face in their hair, perhaps think of his own child. She wanted to be with him, period.

  She pulled back her hand, parted her lips just slightly to whisper all that to him, even though he was sleeping, because she now knew that a part of his brain would hear it, and that her words would register somewhere in the back of his mind. But no sound emerged from her mouth.

  And so she leaned over and simply planted a kiss on his cheek.

  Maybe that was how love began.

  61

  The minute they landed at Orly, everything accelerated. As soon as he’d heard, Martin Leclerc alerted Criminal Division headquarters in Grenoble. Without checking in at Number 36, Sharko had claimed his car at airport parking; he and Lucie headed south, their bags in the trunk.

  Their final straight line…The last euphoric, destructive line of coke…It would be soon. At six in the morning, the Grenoble police would enter the home of Coline Quinat, age sixty-two, who lived on Voie de Corato, overlooking the Isère River.

  Sharko and Lucie would be first in line.

  The landscapes flew by, valleys following fields, the mountains growing taller, breaking through the dry earth. Lucie dozed off and started awake by turns, her clothes rumpled, her hair tangled and unwashed. It didn’t matter—they had to see this through to the end. Like this—in one shot, without stopping, without catching their breath, without thinking twice. They had to get it all out. Have done with it once and for all.

  Grenoble was a city with rough associations for the inspector. He remembered the shadows that had cast him to the bottom of the abyss only a few years before. Back then, Eugenie had appeared behind him in the car, sleeping soundly on the rear seat. Sharko didn’t dare believe things could be so much better now, that the little phantom had disappeared from his head for good since his night with Lucie. Had he finally managed to close that door, which for so long had been open onto the faces of Eloise and Suzanne? Had he succeeded in wiping from his lips the honey of his unending grief? For the first time in years, he let himself hope so.

  To become like everyone else again. At least, sort of.

  They join
ed their Grenoble colleagues at about four in the morning. Introductions, coffee, bringing up to speed.

  At 5:30, a dozen officers headed for the home of Coline Quinat. A bloodred sun had barely detached itself from the horizon. The Isère slowly became haloed in silver reflections. Lucie smelled the odor of a manhunt’s end. The best moment for a cop, the final reward. Everything would soon be over.

  They arrived at their destination. The facade of the house was large and impressive. The cops were surprised to spot light coming through the slats of the upstairs shutters: Quinat was already awake. Cautiously, the teams got into position. Bodies tense, glances rapid, prickling in the chest. At 6:00 a.m. sharp, five blows of the police battering ram overcame the lock on the heavy front door.

  In a flash, the men flew inside like hornets. Lucie and Sharko immediately fell in with the ones dashing up the stairs. The beams from their flashlights danced on the steps, crossing over each other, as heavy boots clattered in sync.

  There was no battle, no explosions or gunfire. Nothing to match the incredible surge of horror and violence of the previous days. Just the queasy sensation of invading a lone woman’s privacy.

  Coline Quinat had just stood up from her desk, her face pale and calm. She slowly put down her fountain pen and latched her eyes onto Lucie’s, while the men rushed forward to cuff her. She stood quietly as they read her her rights, without resistance or protest. As if this were all following an implacable logic.

  Lucie stepped forward, almost hypnotized, so shocked to finally see in the flesh a person lost in the black and white of a fifty-year-old film. Quinat was a head taller than she. She was wearing a blue silk dressing gown. Her short, graying blond hair framed a hard face, perfectly preserved, with a prominent jawline. Her gaze…Lucie became lost in that dark gaze, which had traveled the years without losing any of its severity, its terrifying emptiness. The gaze of that sick little girl that had so upset her. The woman’s lips parted; she spoke:

  “I figured you’d come sooner or later. After Manoeuvre’s death and Chastel’s suicide, the dominos were falling one by one.”

  She tilted her head, as if trying to read into Lucie’s thoughts.

  “Don’t judge me too harshly, young lady, as if I were the worst sort of criminal. I only hope that in coming here, you’ve understood what my father and I were seeking to accomplish.”

  Behind her, Sharko whispered into the squad leader’s ear. The next moment, he and his men retreated from the room, leaving Sharko alone with Quinat and Lucie. Sharko closed the door and stepped forward. Lucie couldn’t contain her rage:

  “Accomplish? You slaughtered a defenseless old man, you…hanged him and disemboweled him! You riddled the bodies of a woman and her boyfriend with stab wounds, who weren’t even thirty years old! You are the worst sort of criminal!”

  Coline Quinat sat on her bed, resigned.

  “What can I say? I’m a Patient Zero and I’ll be one all my life. Syndrome E emerged from my head that summer day in 1954. The violence became…embedded…inside me, and its ways of expressing itself are not always the most…rational. Please believe that if I could have dissected my own brain, I would have. I swear to you I would have.”

  “You are insane.”

  Quinat shook her head and pinched her lips.

  “Inspector. None of this was supposed to happen. None of it. We just wanted to get back the copies of the film that Lacombe had strewn about. And we’d succeeded, for most of them. We had even gone to the United States. But…there was that cursed reel, which had traveled from Canada to Belgium. And then Szpilman. People like him exist, paranoiacs who dwell on conspiracies and the secret service, and they’re the ones who frighten us most. Because they react the minute there’s a malfunction—it’s like they have a…sixth sense.”

  Sharko was standing next to Lucie.

  “You said ‘we.’ ‘We’d succeeded,’ ‘we wanted to get the copies’…Who is this ‘we’? The French secret service? The army?”

  She hesitated, then finally nodded.

  “People. A lot of people who labor every day to safeguard this country. Inspector Sharko, don’t confuse us with the riffraff you meet in the streets. We’re scientists, thinkers, decision makers; we make the world go forward. But every advance demands sacrifices, whatever they may be. It’s always been like that. Why should it change now?”

  Lucie could no longer sit still. This calm and levelheaded discourse, coming from the mouth of a lunatic, was making her seethe.

  “Sacrifices like those poor Egyptian girls? They were only children! Little girls, like you were! Why?”

  Coline Quinat tightened her jaw. She was trying not to talk, but the need to justify herself was too powerful.

  “My father passed away two years before the Burma genocides. He spent his entire life looking for manifestations of Syndrome E. The proof of its existence. He never went into the field, because he knew perfectly well that one could re-create it and study it in the laboratory. He used me, then dragged me in his wake, trained me, conditioned me to pursue his quest. Science studies, medical school, specialization in neurobiology. I had no say in the matter, I was…enlisted.”

  “Did they send you there? To the places where these genocides had occurred?”

  “They did—with legionnaires, humanitarian aid groups, Red Cross doctors. We collected corpses and stacked them up by the dozens before they could start to rot. I took advantage of the occasion to study their brains. I had official accreditation.”

  “And what about Egypt—did you have official accreditation there as well?”

  “Mass hysteria phenomena with violent manifestations occur so seldom and randomly that it was…almost impossible to do any serious studies. Naturally I went to Cairo.”

  “And you killed those girls. Mutilated them. Working alone, this time, without any orders. Or accreditation.”

  She answered evenly.

  “There was only one way to verify that it was Syndrome E, and that was to open their skulls and look inside their brains, at the amygdala, to see if it had atrophied. At the time, we didn’t have the kinds of scanners we have today. As for the mutilations”—she clenched her teeth—“that’s just how it was. No doubt you’ll call it uncontrollable impulses, or sadism, and you’d probably be right. Our minds have not begun to reveal all their secrets. Your old historian unfortunately had to bear the brunt of it. I wanted to show you that you weren’t dealing with…one of those common criminals that are your daily bread. This case went far, far beyond that. I hope it had the desired effect.”

  A heavy silence, then she continued:

  “My methodology in Cairo did not entirely please the powers that be, to say the least. But when they got wind of a telegram that some Egyptian cop had sent, they had no choice: they had to cover me, and themselves as well. Everything else was just collateral damage.”

  Lucie felt it all, every murderous impulse. The confirmation that the upper echelons of power had protected a woman who was dangerously insane, a murderer who would stop at nothing in the name of scientific progress, made her shake with rage.

  “Once back in France, I studied those brains, and I noticed that the amygdala of those Egyptian girls had indeed atrophied. Do you realize what that means, Inspectors? We weren’t talking about some genocide. The phenomenon had no particular origin, it had occurred with no real explanation, and it was capable, in certain cases, of propagating violence, sealing it once and for all into our head. I had concrete, definitive proof that Syndrome E truly existed and could strike anywhere. At anyone! You, Detective. Me, anybody. It crossed over years, peoples, and religions. I verified it again that same year in Rwanda. A very…fruitful time, if I may say so. I went into the mass graves, walked through the bodies, and once again I opened skulls. Imagine my amazement. One person’s violence spreads to the brain of another, atrophying his amygdala and making him violent in turn. And so on, one after the other. A veritable contagion of violence. This was a major discovery, wh
ich challenged so many fundamental concepts of how we understood massacres…”

  “An understanding that you and your collaborators kept to yourselves, naturally.”

  “The stakes were so high—not just militarily, but geopolitical and financial. Secrets had to be preserved. Mastering the emergence of Syndrome E and learning how to trigger it became my obsession. The last random manifestation to date is the one that happened at the Foreign Legion post. No matter where or how hard I looked, for years on end, the ‘creation’ of another Patient Zero was impossible. It required too much waiting and observation. It also needed test subjects. At the time, in 1954, scientists had a lot more leeway; they could profit from the excesses of the superpowers and their secret services. They had ‘raw material’ at their disposal, as in the back wing of Mont Providence Hospital. I was that raw material.”

  It was monstrous. The woman had become a block of cold meat, without emotion, without remorse. The purest, most extreme example of the relentless scientist.

  Quinat sighed.

  “But today, as we speak, there is a much quicker solution, which my father had already pointed out. A solution that technological progress has finally given us. Electrodes planted in the amygdala, which trigger extreme aggressive behavior with the simple push of a button, then spread the phenomenon to those nearby. You just have to place them in conditions of stress and fear, and get them used to authority so that Syndrome E will take root more easily.”

  Tirelessly she continued, evidently needing to justify her actions while detailing her most heinous crimes.