Franck Thilliez - Syndrome E

“You don’t talk a lot. I’d like to know what you’re feeling.”

Sharko shook his head and pursed his lips.

“Disgust. Just deep, deep disgust. There really aren’t any words to describe things like that.”

Lucie leaned her head against his solid shoulder, and in that way they continued on to the station. Once at the entrance, letting go of their embrace, they headed toward one of the foyers of the vast edifice, which in the middle of summer was thronged with travelers. Carefree people, happy, or in a rush…

Detective Pierre Monette and a colleague were waiting at the coffee bar. The policemen greeted each other respectfully and exchanged pleasantries.

The lockers stretched in two long rows opposite a cash machine, under the red maple leaf of the Canadian flag. Lucie was surprised that someone of Rotenberg’s caliber should have picked such an open, heavily trafficked spot, but she figured he must have hidden copies of the information in various places, as Lacombe had evidently done with his film before burning to death.

Detective Monette pointed to locker number 201, at the far left.

“We already opened it. This is what we found.”

He took a small object from his pocket.

“A flash drive.”

He handed it to Sharko, who brought it up to eye level.

“Can you copy the files for me?”

“Already done. Keep it.”

“What did you think?”

“We couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I’m hoping you can figure it out. Your case has got me curious.”

Sharko nodded.

“You can count on me. We’re going to have to ask you for a bit more help. We need you to do a top-priority check on a man named James Peterson, or Peter Jameson. He was a doctor at Mont Providence Hospital in the fifties and lived in Montreal. He’d be about eighty by now.”

Monette took down the information.

“Got it. I’ll try to call you later this afternoon.”

As Lucie and Sharko headed back to the hotel, the inspector shot circumspect glances at the crowd, searching for Eugenie. He craned his neck, leaned over to check behind a nearby couple.

She was still nowhere to be found.

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.