Syndrome E

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 joined 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, which 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.

“Just imagine soldiers who no longer experience fear, who can kill without remorse, without hesitation, like a single, powerful arm. Obviously, many parameters are still beyond us, especially regarding the most favorable conditions for propagating the impulse from Patient Zero. How much stress should we apply to the others? And what’s the best way to do it? But this will all eventually be figured out, mastered, and described in the protocols. With or without me.”

Sharko, impatient, kept his eyes riveted on Quinat. His fists clenched compulsively.

“We found a piece of electrode sheath in Mohamed Abane’s neck. What did you do to him?”

“Abane had survived Chastel’s ‘glitch,’ and he was a Patient Zero. Before studying his brain, I conducted deep brain stimulation experiments on him. We especially stimulated the pain centers, in order to trace curves and fill out our statistical tables. We had to eliminate him in any case, so let’s just say we got the most out of him first.”

Lucie sensed that Sharko was on the point of bursting.

“Why did you steal their eyes?” she asked in a harsh voice.

Coline Quinat stood up.

“Come with me.”

At his wits’ end, Sharko shouldered a path through the group of policemen waiting outside the room. Quinat led them to a large, clean basement. She nodded toward an old gray rug. Lucie understood; she rolled up the rug, revealing a small trapdoor, which she opened. She wrinkled her features: beneath her was pure horror.

In a minuscule crawl space rested dozens of jars in which pairs of eyeballs floated. Blue, black, and green irises bobbed slowly in formaldehyde. In disgust, Lucie held out a jar to the inspector. Coline Quinat looked carefully at the container. Something baleful shone in her own pupils.

“Eyes… Light, then the image, then the eye, then the brain, then Syndrome E… It’s all connected—now do you understand? One cannot exist without the other. These eyes are the ones through which Syndrome E was able to spread. They’ve always fascinated me, just as they fascinated Jacques Lacombe and my father. They are such perfect, precious organs. The ones you’re holding belonged to Mohamed Abane. You have in your hands a Patient Zero, miss. Eyes that absorbed the syndrome spontaneously, in a way we might never be able to explain, and that guided it straight to the brain, thereby modifying the brain’s structure. Aren’t eyes like that worth preserving?”

There was now a kind of madness shining from Quinat’s own eyes that Lucie had trouble defining. A madness born of the dogged determination of people who were willing to do anything in the service of their beliefs. Lucie turned toward Sharko, who was half hidden in the shadows, then grabbed Coline Quinat by the elbow and pulled her toward the men waiting at the top of the steps. Before putting her in the hands of the police, she asked:

“You’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison. Was all this really worth it?”

“Of course! You can’t imagine how much it was worth it!”

She smiled. And at that moment, Lucie understood that no bars could ever contain that kind of smile.

“Images, young lady. Increasingly violent images are everywhere. Think of your own children, numbed out in front of their computers and video games. Think of all those malleable brains, which the preponderance of images is modifying even in early childhood. None of that existed twenty years ago. If you ever have the chance, read the autopsy reports for Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, and Charles Whitman, young men who walked into their schools with shotguns and fired on anything that moved. Go have a look at their amygdala, and you’ll see it’s atrophied. You’ll understand that now it’s the entire planet that’s rushing toward its own genocide.”

She pressed her lips together, then opened them again:

“Anyone. Syndrome E can strike anyone, in any home. Tomorrow, it might be you or your children. Who’s to say?”

She added nothing more. The police led her away.

Chilled to the heart, Lucie went back downstairs alone, without making any noise, as if devoid of energy, exhausted, and with only one wish: to return home, curl up in her daughters’ arms, and get into bed. Sharko was sitting in front of the dozens of eyes that were watching him, still screaming out their final anguish.

“You coming up?” she murmured in his ear. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I can’t take any more.”

He looked at her for a long time without answering, then stood up with a deep sigh.

Sharko pressed the light switch at the top of the stairs. The eyes of Mohamed Abane shone for a fraction of a second, before going out forever in the darkness of the basement.