Syndrome E

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, labeled “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.