Jean-Christophe Grangé - The Empire Of The Wolves

"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…