The Empire Of The Wolves

by Jean-Christophe Grangé

  Dazed, Paul listened. He could see no connection between this ancient history and his investigation. He finally asked, "And you're telling me that it's these men who are killing the women?"

  "The Adidas jacket saw them taking Ruya Berkes away"

  "He saw their faces?"

  "They were wearing hoods, in commando getup."

  "Commando getup?"

  The Cipher sneered. "They're warriors, son. Soldiers. They drove off in a black station wagon. The Turk couldn't remember its registration number, or even its make. Or doesn't want to remember."

  "Why is he sure that it was the Grey Wolves?"

  "They shouted slogans. They have their own distinctive signs. There's no doubt about it. What's more, it fits in with the rest of the situation. The silence of the community. The fact that Gozar mentioned 'something political.' The Grey Wolves are in Paris. The Turkish quarter is shitting bricks."

  Paul could not accept such a different, unexpected direction, which broke entirely with his own intuitions. He had worked too long on the idea of an isolated killer. He insisted: "But why such violence?"

  Schiffer continued up the tracks, which were gleaming in the mist.

  "They come from distant lands. The plains, deserts and mountains, where such torture is standard. You were working on the hypothesis of a serial killer. With Scarbon, you thought you could recognize a quest for suffering in the wounds of the victims, or the traces of some trauma or something… But you overlooked an extremely simple solution. These women were tortured by professionals. Experts trained in the camps of Anatolia."

  "What about the mutilations after death? The cuts on their faces?"

  The Cipher's weary gesture seemed to accept all forms of cruelty. "One of them is maybe even nuttier than the rest. Or else perhaps they don't want their victims to be recognized, for the face they're looking for to be identified."

  "That they're looking for?"

  The cop stopped and turned around toward Paul.

  "You still don't understand what's going on, son? The Grey Wolves have a contract. They're looking for a woman." He rummaged through his bloodstained raincoat and then showed him the snapshots. "A woman with this face, answering to this description: a redhead, a seamstress, illegal alien, originally from Gaziantep."

  Paul silently looked at the photos in that wrinkled hand.

  Everything was taking shape. Burning up.

  "A woman who knows something that they need to drag out of her. On three occasions, they thought they'd got her. And they were wrong each time."

  "Why are you so sure? How can we be certain that they haven't found her?"

  "Because if one of them had been their target, then she would have talked, you can be sure of that, and they would have gone."

  "So… so you think the hunt's still on?"

  "For sure."

  Schiffer's irises were glistening below his lowered eyelids. Paul thought of silver bullets, which alone can kill werewolves.

  "You got the wrong lead, son. You were looking for a killer. You were grieving the dead. But it's a living woman you need to find. Someone very much alive, who is being hunted by the Grey Wolves."

  He gestured around at the buildings alongside the rail tracks.

  "She's there, somewhere, in this neighborhood. In the cellars. In the attics. In the depths of a squatters' building or home. She's being pursued by the worst killers imaginable, and you alone can save her. But you're going to have to act quickly. Very very quickly. Because those bastards are highly trained, and every door in the quarter is open to them."

  The Cipher grabbed Paul by his shoulders and stared intensely at him. "As they say, it never rains but it pours. I've got another piece of good news for you: if you want to pull it off, I'm the only chance you've got."

  PART VII

  38

  The telephone bell exploded into his ears.

  "Yes?"

  No answer. Eric Ackermann slowly hung up, then looked at his watch: 3:00 PM. The twelfth anonymous call since yesterday. The last time he had heard a human voice was the previous morning when Laurent Heymes had called to tell him that Anna had escaped. When he had tried to phone Laurent back later that afternoon, he'd answered at none of his numbers. Was it already too late for Laurent?

  He had tried other contacts. In vain.

  That evening, he had received the first anonymous call. At once, he checked through his window. Two police officers were posted in front of his building, on Avenue Trudaine. So the situation was clear. He was no longer someone to be contacted, or a partner to be kept informed. He was now someone to be watched, an enemy to be controlled. In the space of a few hours, a boundary had shifted beneath his feet. He was now on the wrong side of it, on the side of those responsible for the disaster.

  He stood up and went to his bedroom window. The two policemen were still stationed outside Lycée Jacques-Decourt. He stared at the grass borders that ran along the middle of the entire avenue, the plane trees swaying, still bare, in the sunlight, the gray structures of the kiosk on Square d'Anvers. Not a single car passed, and the street looked, as usual, like a forgotten byway.

  A quotation came to his mind: "Distress is physical if the danger is concrete, psychological if it is instinctual." Who had written that? Freud? Jung? How was danger going to manifest itself in his case? Were they going to shoot him down in the street? Jump him as he slept? Or just lock him up in a military prison? Torture him in order to obtain all the documents concerning the program?

  Wait. He had to wait till nightfall before he could put his plan into action.

  Still standing by the window, he, mentally went over the career that had brought him here, to death's antechamber.

  Fear had been at the beginning. And fear would be at the end.

  ***

  His odyssey had started in. June 1985, when he had joined Professor Wayne C. Drevets's team at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The scientists had given themselves an ambitious objective: to localize the zone in the brain that caused fear, using positron emission tomography. To do so, they had drawn up a very strict protocol of experiments, which aimed to create terror in their voluntary guinea pigs. The appearance of snakes, the promise of an electric shock, which would seem all the worse the longer the wait…

  After several series of tests, they had located this mysterious area. It was in the temporal lobe, at the edge of the limbic circuit, in a little region called the amygdala, a kind of niche that is the "basic brain." It is the oldest part of the organism-the one humankind shares with the reptiles-that also houses sexual instinct and aggression.

  Ackermann remembered those thrilling days. For the first time, he was observing on a computer screen cerebral zones just as they were being activated. He knew that he had now found his career and his path forward. The positron camera would be the ship allowing him to voyage through the human cortex.

  He became a pioneer, a cartographer of the brain.

  When he returned to France, he had applied for funding from such public bodies as Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM); the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), as well as various universities and hospitals in Paris, thus increasing his chances of receiving a budget.

  A year went by without any answers. He went into exile in Great Britain, where he joined Professor Anthony Jones's department at the University of Manchester. With this fresh team, they set out for a different neuronal region-the one governing pain.

  Once again, he helped conduct a series of tests on subjects willing to undergo painful stimuli. And once again, he saw a new region lighting up on the screens: the land of suffering. It was not a concentrated region but a set of points that were activated simultaneously. A sort of spider-web running all through the cortex.

  A year later, Professor Jones wrote in the journal Science: "Once registered by the thalamus, the sensation of pain is orientated by the cingulum
and the frontal cortex towards the more or less negative. Only then does it became a sensation of suffering."

  This fact was of primordial importance. It confirmed the major role of thought in the perception of pain. Insofar as the cingulum acts as a selector of associations, feelings of suffering could be reduced thanks to a series of purely psychological exercises, thus diminishing and channeling its "resonance" in the brain. For example, in the case of burns, it was enough to think about the sun, instead of the burned flesh, for the pain to recede. Suffering could be fought by the mind. The very topography of the brain proved it.

  Ackermann had returned to France in a state of exultation. He could already picture himself at the head of a multidisciplinary research team, a superstructure bringing together cartographers, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists… Now that the brain was revealing its physiological keys, collaboration between all these disciplines became possible. The days of rivalry were over. They now just had to look at the map and unite their forces!

  But his requests for funding remained unanswered. Disgusted and in despair. he ended up in a tiny laboratory in Maisons-Alfort. where he started using amphetamines to get over his depression. Soon, full to the gills with Benzedrine, he convinced himself that his requests had been overlooked through simple ignorance. The powers of the PET scan were not sufficiently well known.

  He decided to bring together all of the international studies of the brain's cartography into one definitive reference work. He started traveling again, to Tokyo, Copenhagen, Boston… He met with neurologists, biologists, radiologists; he read their articles and wrote summaries of them. In 1992, he published a work of six hundred pages: Functional Imagery and Cerebral Geography. an atlas revealing a new world, a strange new geography containing continents, seas, archipelagos…

  Despite the success of his book within the scientific community, French institutions still remained silent. Even worse, two positron cameras had been bought in Orsay and Lyon; and never once had his name been mentioned. Never once was he consulted. As a ship less explorer, Ackermann had plunged even deeper into his universe of designer drugs. If he could remember certain soaring voyages on Ecstasy at this time, which had taken him beyond himself, he could also recall the abysses that opened in his mind after bad trips.

  He was at the bottom of one of these pits when he received a letter from the Atomic Energy Commission.

  At first he thought that he was still hallucinating. Then the news sank in. A positive answer. Given that use of a positron camera involves injecting a radioactive marker, the commission was interested in his work. A special board even wanted to meet with him to discuss how the commission might participate in funding his program.

  The following week, Eric Ackermann went to the board's headquarters in Fontenay-aux-Roses. He was in for a surprise. The committee was made up essentially of soldiers. This had brought a smile to his lips. These uniforms reminded him of the good old days, when he was a Maoist and had attacked the riot police on the barricades of Rue Gay-Lussac in 1968. It was a vision that inspired him. He had also swallowed a handful of Benzedrine to calm his nerves. So if he had to convince these johnnies, then he would talk the hind leg off a donkey…

  His presentation lasted several hours. He started by explaining how use of the PET scan had allowed the zone of fear to be identified as early as 1985, and how this discovery meant that specific drugs could now be developed to lessen its grip on the human mind.

  That is what he told the army.

  Then he described Professor Jones's work and how he had localized the neuronal circuit of pain. He pointed out that by associating these locations with psychological training, it was possible to limit suffering.

  That was what he told a committee of generals and army psychiatrists.

  He then spoke of other research-into schizophrenia, the memory, the imagination…

  Gesticulating wildly, rattling off statistics and references, he made them glimpse extraordinary possibilities: thanks to cerebral cartography, they were now going to be able to observe, control and fashion the human brain!

  A month later, he received a second invitation. They agreed to finance his project, on the condition that it was carried out in the Henri-Becquerel Institute, a military hospital in Orsay. He would thus have to work with military colleagues, in perfect transparency.

  Ackermann burst out laughing. He was going to work for the Ministry of Defense! Him! A pure product of the counterculture of the 1970s, a crazed psychiatrist high on speed… He convinced himself that he would be smarter than his paymasters, and would' manipulate them, without being manipulated himself.

  He was completely wrong.

  ***

  The phone echoed once more in his room.

  He did not even bother to answer. He drew his curtains and stood openly in the window. The sentinels were still there.

  Avenue Trudaine was a delicate mingling of brown tones-shades of dried mud, old gold, ancient metals. When looking at it, he always thought, without knowing why, of a Chinese or Tibetan temple, with peeling red or yellow paint revealing the bark of another reality.

  It was 4:00 PM and the sun was still high in the sky. Suddenly, he decided not to wait for nightfall. He was too impatient to get away. He crossed the living room, grabbed his bag and opened the door.

  Fear had been at the beginning. And fear would be at the end.

  39

  He went down to the building's garage via the emergency staircase. From the doorway, he peered around the dark space. No one. He crossed the floor, then unlocked a black iron door, hidden behind a pillar. At the end of the corridor, he emerged in Anvers metro station. He glanced back. Nobody was following him.

  The crowd of passengers bustling around made him panic for an instant. Then he reasoned with himself: they would actually help him escape. Without slowing down, he made his way through them, his eyes fixed on another door, at the far side of the ceramic area.

  When he reached the photo booth, he pretended to be waiting for his pictures while facing the narrow entrance and rummaging through the set of keys he had procured. After a while he found the right one and discreetly opened the door marked PERSONNEL ONLY.

  Sighing with relief, he was alone again. A pungent odor hung in the corridor: a bitter, heavy smell that he could not identify but that seemed to be inching all over him. He advanced, tripping over moldy cardboard boxes, forgotten cables and metallic containers. At no time did he look for the light. He fumbled with his keys, opening padlocks, gratings and reinforced doors. He did not bother to lock them again but found their presence behind his back reassuring, like so many layers of protection.

  Finally, he reached a second garage, below Square d'Anvers. It was exactly like the first one, except that the floor and walls were painted light green. Everything was deserted. He headed onward. He was dripping with sweat, trembling all over, feeling either boiling hot or chilled by turns. Apart from his anxiety, he realized that he was starting to exhibit withdrawal symptoms.

  Finally, at number 2033, he spotted the five-door Volvo. It’s imposing appearance, metal gray bodywork and registration plate bearing a number from the Haut-Rhin department, in the east of France, reassured him. His entire body seemed to stabilize and relocate its center of balance.

  As soon as the problems had started with Anna, he realized that they were going to get worse. More than anyone else, he knew that her breakdowns were going to multiply and that sooner or later the project would turn into a catastrophe. So he had thought of an escape plan. First move: go back to Alsace, where he was born. Because he could not change his name, he would conceal himself among all the other Ackermanns on the planet-over three hundred of them just in the departments of the Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin. He could then organize the real departure: Brazil, New Zealand, Malaysia…

  He removed a remote control from his pocket. He was about to use it when a voice hit him in the back: "Sure you haven't forgotten anything?" He turned around and saw a black-and
-white creature, wrapped up in a velvet coat, just a few yards away.

  Anna Heymes.

  His first reaction was a burst of anger. He thought of a bird of ill omen, a curse following his every step. Then he changed his mind. Hand her over, he thought. Hand her over it's the only way.

  He dropped his bag and adopted a reassuring tone. "Anna, where on earth were you? Everyone's been looking for you." He walked toward her, opening his arms. You did the right thing coming to see me. You-"

  "Don't move."

  He stopped dead still, then slowly, very slowly turned toward the second voice. Another figure was standing in front of a pillar, to his right. He was so amazed that a mist passed over his eyes. Confused memories were drifting up to the surface of his mind. He knew this woman.

  "Mathilde?"

  Without answering, she approached.

  He said again, in a dazed tone, "Mathilde Wilcrau?"

  She stood in front of him, pointing the automatic pistol that was in her gloved hand at him.

  Looking from one of them to the other, he stammered, "You… you know each other?"