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.
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?"
"When you no longer trust your neurologist, where do you go? To a psychiatrist."
As before, she lengthened her syllables into deep undulations. Nobody could forget such a voice. A flood of saliva filled his mouth, a sludge that tasted just like the stench in the corridor. He knew what it was now: the bitter, profound, malevolent taste of fear. He was its sole source. It was exuding from every pore of his body. “Have you been following me? What do you want?"
Anna went over to him. Her indigo eyes glittered in the greenish light of the garage. Eyes like a dark ocean, slightly slanted, almost Asian. She smiled and said, "What do you think I want?"
In the field of the neurosciences, in neuropsychology and cognitive psychology I'm the best, or at least one of the best, in the entire world. This isn't vanity. It's quite simply a recognized fact in the scientific community. At the age of fifty-two, I have become what is called a reference.
But I really became important in these fields only when I deserted the scientific world, when I left the beaten track and took a forbidden path. A path that no one had taken before me. It was only then that I became a major researcher, a pioneer who will mark his epoch.
The trouble is, it's already too late for me…
MARCH 1994
After sixteen months of tomographic experiments on the memory-the third season of the Personal Memory and Cultural Memory program the repetition of certain anomalies led me to contact those laboratories that were using the same radio-labeled water in the experiments as my team: Oxygen-15.
The answer was unanimous. They hadn't noticed a thing.
This didn't mean I was wrong. It just meant that I was using higher doses on the subjects of my experiments and that my unusual results could be explained by this fact. I sensed something important had happened. I had crossed a threshold, and this threshold revealed the true power of this substance.
It was too early to publish. I just wrote a report for the Atomic Energy Commission, which was funding my work, summarizing that season's results. On the last page, 1 appended a note mentioning the repetition of certain unusual events during the tests. These events concerned the indirect influence of oxygen-IS on the human brain, and they undoubtedly ought to be studied during a specific research program.
Their reaction was instantaneous. I was called in to AEC headquarters in May. In a huge conference hall, a dozen specialists were waiting for me. With their short-cropped hair and rigid turn of phrase, I recognized them at once. They were the same soldiers who had interviewed me two years before, when I'd made my initial presentation of my research.
I started at the beginning: "The principle of PET (positron emission tomography) involves injecting radio-labeled water into the subject's blood. Once made radioactive itself, it emits positrons, which a camera then captures in real time, thus allowing cerebral activity to be localized. Personally, I selected a classic radioactive isotope, Oxygen-15, and-"
A voice interrupted me: "In your note, you mention some anomalies. What do you mean exactly? What happened?"
"I noticed that after the tests, some subjects confused their own memories with the stories they had been told during the sessions."
"Can you be more precise?"
"Several exercises in my protocol consisted of communicating imaginary stories, short fictions that the subject then had to summarize orally. After the tests, the subjects repeated these stories as if they were true. They were absolutely convinced that they had really experienced these inventions."
"And you think it was the use of Oxygen-15 that sparked this phenomenon?"
"I suppose so. A positron camera cannot have any effect on the consciousness. It's a noninvasive technique. Oxygen-15 was the only product administered to the subjects."
"How do you explain its influence?"
"I can't. Maybe it's the impact of radioactivity on the neurons. Or an effect of the molecule itself on the neurotransmitters. It's as if the experiment excites the cognitive system, thus making it permeable to information given during the test. The brain can no longer tell the difference between imaginary data and personal experiences."
"Do you think that using this substance, it might be possible to implant in a subject's consciousness memories that are… shall we say, artificial?"
"It's far more complex than that. I -"
"Do you think it's possible? Yes or no?"
"We could certainly explore this possibility"
Silence. Then another voice said, "During your career, you've worked on brainwashing techniques, haven't you?"
I burst out laughing in a vain attempt to defuse this inquisitorial atmosphere. "Over twenty years ago. In my Ph.D. thesis!"
"Have you followed the progress that has been made in the field?”
“More or less. But there's a lot of unpublished research on the subject. Work that has been classified top secret. I don't know if-"
"Can substances be used to act as an effective chemical screen to block out a subject's memory?"
"Yes, there are several such products."
"Which ones?"
"We're talking here about manipulations that are-"
"Which ones?"
I answered grudgingly, "There's much talk these days about substances like GHB or gamma-hydroxybutyrate. But to achieve this kind of objective, it's better to use a more common product. Like Valium, for instance."
"Why?"
"Because at certain doses, Valium not only provokes partial amnesia, it also introduces automatisms. Patients become open to suggestion. What is more, we also have an antidote, so subjects can recover their memory afterward."
Silence.
The first voice: "Supposing that a subject had been given such a treatment. Would it be possible to inject new memories, using Oxygen-15?”
“If you're expecting me to-"
"Yes or no?"
"Yes."
Another silence. All eyes were fixed on me.
"The subject would remember nothing?"
"No."
"Neither the Valium treatment nor the use of Oxygen-15?"
"No, but it's too early to-"
"Apart from you, who else knows about this?"
"Nobody. I contacted some other laboratories that use the isotope, but no one had noticed anything and-"
"We know who you've contacted."
"You're spying on me?"
"Did you speak about it to the heads of the laboratories?"
"No, it was via e-mail. I-"
"Thank you, Professor."
At the end of 1994, a new budget was voted through for a program entirely devoted to the effects of Oxygen-15. Such are the ironies of fate. After encountering so many difficulties getting funding for a program that I had planned, presented and defended, I was now being given financing for a project I hadn't even envisaged.
APRIL 1995
The nightmare began. I was visited by a policeman, escorted by two goons dressed in black. He was a giant with a gray mustache, dressed in woolen gabardine. He introduced himself as Commissioner Philippe Charlier. He seemed jovial, smiling and relaxed, but my old hippie instincts whispered to me that he was dangerous. I saw in him a violent breaker of rebellion, a bastard sure that what he was doing was right.
"I've come to tell you a story," he announced. "A personal memory. About a wave of terrorist attacks that spread panic throughout France from December 1985 to September 1986. The Rue de Rennes, and so on. Remember? In all, thirteen dead and two hundred and fifty wounded.
At the time, I was working for the DST, or Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire. We had been given unlimited means. Thousands of men, surveillance systems, unrestricted powers of detention. We dug around in the Islamist groups, the Palestinian supporters, the Lebanese networks and Iranian Communists. Paris was completely under our control. We even offered a reward of a million francs to anyone providing information. All that for nothing. We couldn't find a single lead or clue. Zero. And the attacks were continuing, killing and wounding and demolishing property. We were powerless to stop them.
"One day, in March 1986, we had a breakthrough and netted all the members of the group: Fouad Ali Salah and his accomplices. They were storing their guns and explosives in a flat on Rue de la Voûte, in the twelfth arrondissement. Their meeting point was a Tunisian restaurant on Rue de Chartres, in the Goutte d'Or quarter. I was the one who led the operation. Within a few hours, we arrested the lot of them. Nice, clean work, and no foul-ups. In just one day, the bombings stopped. The city was calm once more.
And do you know what brought this miracle about? What the `breakthrough' was that changed everything? One of the members of the group, Lotfi ben Kallak, had quite simply decided to change sides. He contacted us and handed in his accomplices in exchange for the reward. He even agreed to organize the ambush from within.
"Lotfi was crazy. No one gives up his life for a few hundred thousand francs. No one accepts living like a hunted beast, running away to the ends of the earth knowing that sooner or later, they will catch up with him. But I could measure the impact of his betrayal. For the first time, we were inside the group. At the heart of the system, you see? From that moment, everything became easy, clear and effective. And that's the moral of my story. Terrorists have just one strength-secrecy. They strike wherever and whenever they want. There's only one way to stop them. You have to infiltrate their network. Infiltrate their brains. And then, you can do what you want. Like with Lotfi. And thanks to you, we're going to do just that with all the others."
Charlier's idea was simple: turn people close to terrorist networks using Oxygen-15, then inject them with artificial memories-for example, a motive for revenge-so as to convince them to cooperate and hand over their brothers in arms.
"The program will be called Morpho," he explained, "because we're going to change the psychic morphology of these Arabs. We're going to modify their personalities and their cerebral makeup. Then we'll release them into the world they came from. Like rabid dogs in the pack."
In a voice that chilled my blood, he concluded, "You've got a straightforward choice. Either you enjoy unlimited funding, as many subjects as you want, the chance to direct a scientific revolution in complete confidentiality. Or else you return to the shiny life of a petty researcher, running around after money, labs going broke, publishing obscure articles. And don't forget that we're going to run the program anyway, with you, or with others who will be given all your results and notes. You can count on other scientists to exploit the influence of Oxygen-15 and then claim it as their discovery"
During the next few days, I asked around. Philippe Charlier was one of the five commissioners of the Sixth Division of the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire (the DCPJ). He was one of the leaders of the war against international terrorism, under the orders of Jean-Paul Magnard, the head of the division.
His colleagues had nicknamed him the "Jolly Green Giant," and he was well known for his obsession with infiltration and the violence of his methods. He had even been sidelined on several occasions by Magnard, who was just as intransigent, but who had remained faithful to the traditional methods and distrusted any experimentation.
However, this was in the spring of 1995, and Charlier's ideas were of topical importance. France was under threat from a terrorist network. On July 25, a bomb exploded in the Saint-Michel RER station, killing ten people. The GIA- Groupe Islamique Armé-was suspected, but there was not the slightest lead to help stop this wave of attacks.
The Minister of Defense, in association with the Minister of the Interior, decided to fund the Morpho project. Even if this operation could not be effective for any particular case-the time line being too short-the moment had now come to use new weapons against terrorism.
At the end of the summer of 1995. Philippe Charlier came to see me again, already speaking of a guinea pig chosen from among the hundreds of Islamists who had been arrested during their investigations.
It was then that Magnard won a decisive battle. A bottle of gas had been found on a high-speed train line, and the police from Lyon were about to destroy it. But Magnard demanded that they examine it first. On it, they discovered the fingerprints of a suspect, Khaled Kelkal, who turned out to be one of those behind the attacks. The rest is history. Kelkal was tracked like a beast through the forests around Lyon. then shot down on September 29. His network was dismantled.
It was a triumph for Magnard and his good old-fashioned methods. No more Morpho. Exit Philippe Charlier.
And yet, the budget was still there. The ministries in charge of the country's security gave me plentiful funds to continue my research. During the very first year, my results proved that I was right. It really was Oxygen-15, when injected in large doses, that made neurons permeable to artificial memories. Under its influence, the memory became porous, letting in elements of fiction and incorporating them as real experiences.
My protocol grew more precise. I was working on dozens of different subjects, all provided by the army, or else volunteers from the ranks. At this stage, the conditioning was extremely light. Only one artificial memory at a time. I then waited several days to check if the "graft" was holding.
But we still had to carry out the ultimate experiment: conceal a subject's memory and implant a new one. I was in no hurry to attempt such brainwashing. What was more, the police and the army had apparently forgotten about me. At the time, Charlier had been relegated to fieldwork and was excluded from the circles of power. Magnard, with his traditional ideas, was the undisputed boss. I was hoping that they'd leave me alone for good. I dreamed of going back to civilian life, of officially publishing my results, of a beneficial use for my discoveries…
All of which might have been possible without September II, 2001. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
The wave of those explosions blew away all of the police's certitudes, all their investigative and surveillance techniques, on a global scale. The secret services, information agencies, police forces and armies of all the countries threatened by Al Qaeda were on tenterhooks. The politicians were panicking. Once more, terrorism had shown that its greatest strength was secrecy.
There was talk of holy war, of chemical attacks, atomic bombs…
Philippe Charlier was back in the front line. He was the man to deal with such persistence and obsession. A figure of power, with methods that were obscure, violent and… effective. The Morpho project was dug up again. Terrible words were on everyone's lips-conditioning, brainwashing, infiltration.
In mid-November, Charlier turned up at the Henri-Becquerel Institute. With a broad smile: he announced, "The Arabs are back."
He invited me to lunch in a restaurant specializing in Lyonnaise cuisine and Burgundy wine. The nightmare started up again in the stench of fat and cooked blood.
"Do you know the annual budget of the CIA and FBI?" he asked. I shook my head.
"Thirty billion dollars. The two agencies have spy satellites and submarines, automatic reconnaissance equipment and mobile phone tapping systems. The cutting-edge technology in the field of surveillance. Not to mention the National Security Agency and its know-how The Americans can listen in and spy anywhere. There are no more secrets on earth. Or so everyone thought. The entire world felt concerned. People were even talking about Big Brother… but then there was September.
A few men, armed with plastic knives, destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and took a good lump out of the Pentagon, while notching up a score of a good three thousand dead. The Americans listen to everything, receive everything, except when it's coming from people who are really dangerous."
The Jolly Green Giant was not smiling anymore. He slowly turned his palms to face the ceiling, above his plate. "Can you imagine the two sides of the scales? On the one hand, thirty billion dollars. On the other, some plastic knives. What do you think makes the difference? What made the fucking scale tip?"
He violently hit the table.
"Willpower. Faith. Madness. Confronted with an armada of technology, and thousands of American agents, a handful of determined men managed to slip through all their surveillance. Because no machine will ever be as powerful as the human mind. Because servants of the state, leading ordinary lives with normal ambitions, will never be able to catch fanatics who don't give a damn about their own lives, who are completely given over to a higher cause."
He paused, got his breath back, then went on: "The kamikaze pilots of September 11 had removed all their body hair. Do you know why? So as to be perfectly pure at the moment they entered paradise. What can you do against loonies like that? You can't spy on them, bribe them or understand them."
His eyes glittered with a strange light, as if he had warned everyone of the imminent catastrophe.
"I'll repeat: there's just one way to round up fanatics. Turn one of them against the others. Get a convert so as to be able to read the depths of their madness. Then, and only then, will we beat them."
The Jolly Green Giant laid his elbows on the tablecloth, put his rounded lips to his wineglass, then raised his mustache with a smile. "I've got some good news for you. As of today. the Morpho project is back on. I've even found you a guinea pig."
The wicked grin widened.
"A young lady."
"Me."
Anna's voice hit the concrete like a table-tennis ball. Eric Ackermann smiled weakly, almost apologetically, at her. He had now been talking nonstop for almost an hour. sitting in his five-door Volvo, the door open, legs stretched outside. His throat was dry. and he would have given anything for a glass of water.
Leaning against the pillar, Anna Heymes remained still, as slender as a graffito in India ink. Mathilde Wilcrau continuously paced up and down, putting on the headlights when the timer turned them off.
While speaking, he observed them both: the slight, pale and dark one who, despite her youth, seemed struck with a very ancient, even mineral, rigidity; and the large one who, on the contrary, was vegetal and vibrant with lingering freshness. Still that over-red Mouth, that overblack hair, that clash of brute colors, like a market stall.
How could he be having such ideas at a time like this? Charlier's men must be searching the neighborhood, escorted by the local police officers, all out to get him. Battalions of armed men set on gunning him down. And that need for drugs that was mounting, along with his thirst, irritating every inch of his body…
Anna repeated, a few notes lower: "Me.." She took a pack of cigarettes from her pocket.
Ackermann risked asking, "I couldn't have one, could I?"
She lit her Marlboro first, hesitated for a moment, then offered him one. At the moment she lit her lighter, darkness fell again. The flame pierced the night, making a negative print of the scene.
Mathilde turned the headlights back on. "What then, Ackermann? We're still missing the main point. Who is Anna?"
Her tone was still threatening but void of any anger or hatred. He now knew that these women would not kill him. No one turns into a murderer just like that. His confession was voluntary and also a relief. He waited for the taste of burning tobacco to fill his throat before answering.
"I don't know everything. Far from it. But according to what I was told, your name is Sema Gokalp. You're an illegal Turkish immigrant. You come from the Gaziantep region, in the south of Anatolia. You used to work in the tenth arrondissement. They took you to the Henri-Becquerel Institute on November 16, 2001, after a short stay in Sainte-Anne Hospital."
Anna remained impassive, leaning against the pillar. His words seemed to pass through her with no apparent impact, like a bombardment of invisible-but lethal-particles.
"I was kidnapped?"
"Found, more like. I don't know what happened exactly. A clash between Turks. The pillaging of a sweatshop around Strasbourg-Saint Denis. Some kind of racket. I'm not sure. All I know is that when the cops arrived, you were the only person left in the workshop. You were hiding in a stockroom…"
He took a drag. Despite the nicotine, the smell of fear lingered. "Charlier heard about the case. He immediately realized that he had a perfect guinea pig for his Morpho project."
"What do you mean, 'perfect'?"
"No I.D. papers, no family, no friends. And, even better, in a state of shock."
Ackermann glanced at Mathilde knowingly. Then his gaze returned to Anna.
"I don't know what you saw that night, but it must have been something terrible. You were completely traumatized. Three days later, your limbs were still paralyzed by a cataleptic fit. You jumped at the slightest noise. But the most interesting thing is that the trauma had disturbed your memory. You seemed incapable of remembering your name, your identity, the few scraps of information in your passport. You kept muttering incoherently. This amnesia had prepared the ground for me. I was going to be able to implant new memories even more quickly. You were ideal."
Anna yelled, "You fucking bastard!"
He closed his eyes and nodded; then he seemed to pull himself back together, and added cynically: "What's more, you spoke perfect French. It was that fact which gave Charlier the idea."
"What idea?"
"To start with, all we wanted to do was to inject artificial fragments into the head of a foreigner, with a different culture. We wanted to see what would happen if we tried, for example, to alter the religious convictions of a Muslim. Or give her a reason for resentment. But you offered other possibilities. You spoke our language perfectly. Physically, you could easily pass for a European. So Charlier placed the bar even higher. Total conditioning. We would totally wipe out your personality and culture and replace them with Western ones."
He paused. The two women remained silent, a tacit invitation to continue.
"First, I increased your amnesia by injecting an overdose of Valium.
Then I started working on conditioning you. Constructing a new personality. Using Oxygen-15."
Intrigued, Mathilde asked, "How did you proceed?"
Another drag, then he answered, incapable of taking his eyes off Anna. "Mainly by exposure to information. In every form. Words. Films. Sounds. Before each session, I injected a radioactive substance into you. The results were incredible. Each piece of information turned into a real memory in your brain. Every day, you were becoming more and more like the real Anna Heymes."
The slender woman stood up from the pillar. "You mean she really exists?"
The smell in the garage was stronger and stronger, as though of rotten flesh. He was starting to decay as he sat there, while the craving for amphetamine raised a slope of panic in his mind.
"We had to fill your mind with a coherent set of memories. The best way was to choose a real person and use her life story, photos and video films. That's why we chose Anna Heymes. We had all the necessary material."
"Who is she? Where is the real Anna Heymes?"
He pushed his glasses up his nose, before saying, "Several feet underground. She's dead. Heymes's wife committed suicide six months ago. So the place was vacant, so to speak. All your memories are part of her story. The dead parents. The family in the southwest. The wedding in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The law degree."
At that moment, the light went out. Mathilde lit it again. The return of her voice coincided with the return of clarity. "And you would have let such a woman loose again in the Turkish community?"
"No, that would have been senseless. This was a trial run. An attempt at… total conditioning. To see how far we could go."
"In the end," Anna asked, "what would you have done to me?”
“No idea. That was out of my hands."
Another lie. Of course he knew what was awaiting her. What was to be done with such an embarrassing guinea pig? Lobotomy or elimination, that's what. When Anna next spoke, she seemed to have understood that dark reality. Her voice was as cold as a blade.
"Who is Laurent Heymes?"
"Exactly who he claims to be. The research director of the Minister of the Interior."
"Why did he participate in this farce?"
"It's all because of his wife. She was depressive, uncontrollable. Toward the end, Laurent got a job for her. A special mission for the Ministry of Defense concerning Syria. Anna stole some documents. She wanted to sell them to the authorities in Damascus before running away somewhere or other. She was nuts. The affair leaked out. Anna panicked and committed suicide."
Mathilde did not understand. "And this was a way of putting pressure on Laurent Heymes, even after her death?"
"He was always afraid of a scandal. His career would have been in ruins-a top civil servant married to a spy… Charlier has a complete dossier on the subject. He has a hold over Laurent, like he does over everyone else."
"Everyone else?"
"Alain Lacroux. Pierre Caracilli. Jean-François Gaudemer." He turned toward Anna. "All those supposedly high-ranking officials you had dinner with."
"Who are they?"
"Puppets, crooks, crooked cops who Charlier has information on and who were forced to attend the carnival."
"Why those dinners?"
"That was my idea. I wanted to confront your mind with the outside world and observe your reactions. Everything was filmed. The conversations were recorded. You must understand that your entire existence was fake: the building on Avenue Hoche, the janitor, the neighbors… Everything was under our control."
"A laboratory rat."
Ackermann stood up and tried to take a few steps, but he immediately found himself stuck between the car door and the wall. He slumped back down onto his seat. "This program was a scientific revolution," he replied hoarsely. "Moral considerations were irrelevant."
Anna offered him another cigarette over the car door. She seemed ready to forgive him, so long as he told her all.
"What about the Maison du Chocolat?"
When he lit the Marlboro, he noticed that he was shaking. A shock wave was on its way. The craving was soon going to start screaming beneath his skin.
"That was one of our problems," he said through a cloud of smoke. "Your job took us by surprise. We had to tighten our surveillance. Cops were constantly watching you. The doorman of a restaurant, I think-"
"La Marée."
"Yes, that's it."
"When I was working in the Maison du Chocolat, there was a regular customer. A man I had the impression I recognized. Was he a policeman?"
"Maybe. I don't know all the details. All I do know is that you were escaping from us."
Again, night fell and Mathilde woke up in the strip lights.
"The real problem was your fits," he went on. "I immediately sensed that there was a fault line, and that things were going to go from bad to worse. Your trouble with faces was just a precursor. Your real memory was beginning to resurface."
"Why faces?"
"No idea. This was pure experimentation."
His hands were trembling more and more. He concentrated on what he had to say. "When Laurent caught you observing him at night, we realized that the problem was worsening. We had to section you."
"Why did you want to conduct a biopsy?"
"To be sure what was going on. Maybe the huge jab of Oxygen-15 had caused a lesion. I just had to understand!"
He broke off, sorry that he had shouted. It felt as if short circuits were sizzling in his skin. He threw away his cigarette and stuck his hands between his thighs. How long could he hold out?
Mathilde Wilcrau then asked the crucial question: "Where are Charlier's men looking? How many of them are there?"
"I don't know. I've been sidelined. Laurent, too. I'm not even in touch with him anymore… As for Charlier, the program's over. The vital thing for them now is to catch you and put you out of circulation. You read the papers. You know what they're saying in the media and how outraged public opinion is about a little bit of phone tapping. Imagine what would happen if this story got out."
"So there's a price on my head, is there?" Anna asked.
"More like a desperate need for treatment. You don't know what you've got in your mind. You must give yourself up to Charlier. To us. It's your only chance to recover, and save all of our skins!"
He looked up over the curve of his glasses. The two of them now looked out of focus, and it was better that way. He added, "Jesus, you don't know Charlier! I'm sure all of this was perfectly illegal. So now he'll be sweeping up. Right now, I don't even know if Laurent is still alive. It's a total fiasco. Unless we can treat you again.." His voice was dying in his throat. What was the point of going on? Even he no longer believed in the possibility.
Mathilde then said, in her deep voice, 'All of which does not explain why you altered her face."
Ackermann felt a smile rise to his lips. He had been expecting this question right from the start. He stared straight into Anna's eyes. "You were like that when we found you. When I did the first scan, I discovered the scars, implants and screws. It was incredible. A complete surgical overhaul. It must have cost a fortune. Not the sort of operation an illegal immigrant worker could pay for."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean you're not a simple worker. Charlier and the others got it wrong. They thought they were kidnapping some faceless Turk. But you're much more than that. Crazy as it might seem, I reckon you were hiding out in the Turkish quarter when they discovered you."
Anna burst into tears.
"In a way," he went on bitterly to the end, "this fact explains the success of the treatment. I'm no magician. I could never have transformed a simple working girl from Anatolia to this extent. And definitely not in a few weeks. Only Charlier could swallow such nonsense."
Mathilde returned to the point. "What did he say when you told him that her face had been altered?"
"Nothing, because I didn't tell him. I kept this crazy secret to myself."
He looked at Anna. "Even last Saturday, when you came to Becquerel, I switched the X-rays. The marks appear on all of the images."
Anna dried her tears. "Why did you do that?"
"I wanted to finish the experiment. It was such a golden opportunity… Your psychic state was ideal. All that mattered was the research…"
Anna and Mathilde remained speechless.
When the little Cleopatra spoke again, her voice was as dry as a leaf of incense. "If I'm not Anna Heymes and I'm not Sema Gokalp, then who am I?"
"I don't have the slightest idea. An intellectual, maybe, a political refugee. Or a terrorist… I…"
The neon lights went out once more. Mathilde stuck out her hand. The darkness seemed to be deepening, like a flood of tar.
For a moment, he thought to himself, I was wrong. They are going to kill me. But then Anna's voice echoed through the shadows: "There's only one way to find out."
No one turned the lights back on. Eric Ackermann guessed what she was going to say.
Just beside him, Anna murmured, "You're going to give me back what you stole. My memory"