Syndrome E

59

The two French cops were sitting on a bench in the middle of the deserted campus. Calm reigned over the ghostly space. Sharko had taken out his list of 217 persons and was running his pencil down every name that hadn’t been crossed out.

“Did you get what I got out of that, Lucie?”

“We’re not just looking for someone with medical training, but someone capable of performing an operation as delicate as deep brain stimulation, a scientist interested in the structure of the brain… I imagine James Peterson isn’t on the list. How old would he be today?”

“Too old. Even if he’d used another identity, there’s only one person on this list born in 1923, the same year as Peterson, and she’s a woman.”

“Don’t forget, the list is only of the French.”

Sharko crossed out more names.

“I know… but the legionnaire Manoeuvre was French. It’s unfortunately very likely our brain thief is too.”

“Could Peterson have had children? Maybe a son who took up his work?”

“Monette should be calling at any moment. We’ll know soon enough.”

Lucie had leaned forward, her hands squeezed together between her thighs.

“We’re almost there.” She sighed. “The killer has to be hiding there, right before our eyes, and I think that— I think we’re coming to the end of what we came to find here. Do you realize how far this stretches? If Syndrome E really exists, it calls so many things into question. Individual freedom, our ability to choose, responsibility for our actions. I can’t believe everything that governs what we do is merely chemical or electrical. Where is God in all this? Feelings, the soul—these aren’t just artificial constructs.”

The number of suspects on the list was shrinking but still remained significant—about forty names.

“And yet… well, take a schizophrenic, for instance. He might see an imaginary person as clearly as you see that lab tech in his white coat over there. All because a few millimeters of his brain are on the fritz. It has nothing to do with God or witchcraft. It’s chemistry. Just some shitty chemistry.”

His phone rang. He looked at the caller ID.

“It’s Monette.”

He answered and put the phone on speaker.

“I have some info about your Peter Jameson,” said the policeman.

Peter Jameson… So James Peterson had indeed come to Canada under an assumed name—though he hadn’t exactly strained his brain to find one.

“He moved to Montreal in 1953 and worked at Mont Providence as a medical researcher in the ward for acute mental retardation. In 1955, he married a woman named Hélène Riffaux, a math teacher and Canadian national. Together they adopted a little girl, and Jameson dropped out of sight a few weeks later, taking his daughter and abandoning his wife. As far as we can tell, he left no traces or forwarding address. No one ever saw him again. The marriage was just a pretext for the adoption, which he couldn’t have done otherwise. It’s a bit short, but that’s roughly all there is to know. Oh, one last thing, which might be important. The little girl was one of the orphans from Mont Providence.”

Those words set off an earthquake inside Lucie and Sharko. They stared at each other, flabbergasted, and seemed to come to the same realization simultaneously.

“The girl! Tell us her name!”

“Coline Quinat.”

Sharko’s finger ran down the Cairo list. He had seen a Coline in there. Letter Q. Quinat. There she was. Sharko thanked him in a blank voice and hung up. Lucie had pressed against him, her eyes fixed on the printed line.

“Coline Quinat, born October 15,1948, researcher in neurobiology at the research center of the Army Health Services, Grenoble.”

“The Army Health Services,” murmured Sharko.

“Good God… Born in 1948, like Alice. It’s her! Coline Quinat, Alice Tonquin. It’s a perfect anagram. It was right there all along!”

Lucie covered her face in her hands.

“Not her… not Alice.”

Sharko sighed, shaken by these revelations.

“Researcher in neurobiology… no doubt a bogus position to cover her real work for the army. It all fits together so well now. The tortured little girl herself becomes a torturer. The brain thief—she’s the one. She’s the one behind all these horrors. She’s the one who killed and mutilated the young Egyptians. And she’s the one who went to Rwanda, and wherever there had been massacres…”

Silence weighed on them for a few moments. Lucie was in shock. The person she’d wanted to avenge since the beginning was the very person she was hunting: the murderer, the one who removed the victims’ eyes and brains. The architect. The mastermind. The sickest of the killers.

Sharko couldn’t sit still; he was like a lion in a cage.

“Imagine this: after lots of trial and error, research, relentless pursuit, Peterson and Lacombe manage to film a major breakthrough—proof of the existence of mental contamination, which Peterson had always believed possible, and for which he’d managed to obtain CIA funding. But after their phenomenal results with the rabbits, the scientist convinces Lacombe not to tell the CIA about it. He knows how momentous this discovery is. Maybe he’s thinking of selling his findings to some other country, which is ready to pay a fortune for the knowledge. Especially France, the country of his birth.”

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?”