Sharko squeezed his skull between his hands.
“The killer must have been there…present after every massacre, to steal the brains.”
Pale, Lucie had come back to sit on the bed. She stared blankly at the screen.
“Szpilman didn’t care about the political, ethnic, or existential reasons for the genocides. He was tracking something in those massacres, in which perfectly normal fathers and children suddenly went into a killing frenzy. Just before he died, Philip Rotenberg had talked to me about research that led the Belgian to that business of mental contamination. He’d said there might exist a phenomenon so violent that it could modify the structure of the brain.”
“Like a virus, you mean?”
“Yes, except that there isn’t anything really physical or organic. Just…something that passes through the eye and directly modifies human behavior, that liberates the impulse toward violence.”
“A kind of criminal mass hysteria.”
“In a way. Ever since I saw the film with the girls in the white room, I’ve had an image in mind: they’re like a squadron of warplanes. The lead plane, the one that guides the rest, veers downward, and the other planes follow in formation, one by one, as if they were held together by an invisible thread. What if that’s what this Syndrome E is all about? One highly violent individual sets things off, acts as a catalyst; then the mental contamination of violence spreads almost immediately from person to person? What if that was the goal of the experiments hidden in Lacombe’s film? Trying to re-create the phenomenon for the camera? Establish concrete proof of its existence?”
Sharko walked almost mechanically around the room. Nothing existed around him. The case had absorbed him, and what Henebelle was saying struck him as at once far-fetched and frighteningly on target. Szpilman, through his own research and persistence, had stumbled onto the truth. He had spent years rummaging through books, contacting war zone photographers, collecting images, tracking down a horrifying discovery. Ultimately, the film that had no doubt come to him by arranged accident had been the cornerstone of his research, the missing piece that allowed him to grasp the very essence of his quest.
“There are people on this planet,” he said, “who are trying to understand, medically—I would almost say surgically—the workings of this phenomenon, which Jacques Lacombe recorded more than fifty years ago for the purposes of secret experiments. Violent mental contamination starting from a catalyst. That’s what Syndrome E is.”
“Violent mental contamination starting from a catalyst,” Lucie repeated. “A rare, random phenomenon that can strike anywhere, at any time. You can’t study it in a laboratory, so you go looking out in the field. At the site of massacres, the places where outbreaks of mass hysteria occur. You look in the heads of corpses for a trace, a clue.”
Sharko pursued her line of thinking, his hand on his chin.
“Chastel knew of the existence of Syndrome E, and that means two things. First, that the file, which in the fifties was in the hands of the CIA, has now been acquired by the French secret service. And second, that it’s…intrinsic to the Legion itself. It’s about a place where men, especially during the selection phase, are pushed to their physical and psychological limits. Where the slightest detail could suddenly set one of them off.”
“The Legion is the perfect breeding ground for mental contamination. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Exactly. Think of the photo of those soldiers facing the Jewish mothers, or the Hutus brandishing their machetes, the inherent violence of those scenes, their context. No doubt there are triggers that help bring about the syndrome, like stress, fear, external conditioning…”
“War, confinement…anything that involves some form of authority. Sister Marie talked about the anxiety the little girls exhibited after they’d been locked in those rooms and shouted at.”
“Absolutely. Before taking over as top commander, Chastel led the survival training in Guiana, a hellhole that could drive even legionnaires insane. There might have been an outbreak of the syndrome there. From that, Chastel might have caught the eye of our brain thief. He then did a stint with the secret service before ending up in Aubagne. I believe he was appointed top commander specifically to try to trigger Syndrome E among his own men, so that they could study the phenomenon on living beings.”
“A kind of incubator. The equivalent of the 1955 experiments, but outdoors.”
“Yes. But he got caught in his own trap. Mohamed Abane, a particularly violent individual, went out of control and dragged four other men down with him. They were probably massacred before Chastel could even intervene. At that point, the colonel immediately took charge of the situation. He, his henchman Manoeuvre, and our brain thief got to work: opening the skulls, removing the eyes, disposing of the remains.”
Sharko stood up and waved the list of SIGN attendees. He was on the brink of nausea.
“Manoeuvre and Chastel were only second-stringers. We need the real killer. The one who mutilated the Egyptian girls. The one who, for all these years, has probably been traveling from country to country sawing open skulls. The architect. He’s here, right in front of us, on this list of names. Burma dates back twenty-five years. If he went there after the massacre, our killer must be at least forty-five today.”
Sharko closed up like an oyster, delved into his list, and began crossing out names. Still shaken, Lucie took the opportunity to log on to the hotel’s Wi-Fi. She googled the name “Peter Jameson,” which didn’t yield anything relevant. She then entered “James Peterson.” A number of results came up.
“Franck? You should come see this…A James Peterson matches our criteria.”
As Sharko didn’t hear her, she had to say it again. He raised his eyes toward her and waved his list.
“I should be able to eliminate about half.”
He came toward her. Lucie pointed to the screen. She had clicked on a Wikipedia article about the man. The photo showed a thin, slight fellow, with angular features and intransigent eyes.
The two cops read silently. James Peterson…Parents emigrated from New York to France. Born in Paris in 1923. A remarkably gifted child who started university studies at age fifteen. Associate professor of physiology, before concentrating on the study of the nervous system when he wasn’t yet twenty. Then moved to the United States, to Yale, where he specialized in research into direct stimulation of the brain using electrical and chemical techniques. This was the subject of his only book, Brain Conditioning and Freedom of Mind, published in 1952. In 1953, Peterson inexplicably abandoned the scientific field and was never heard from again.
Lucie tried other searches, but they didn’t tell her anything further. Peterson had simply vanished. But the cops now knew where he’d gone after 1953: Mont Providence, under the hybrid identity of Peter Jameson. He had been recruited by the CIA, like the others, to perform experiments on children. For now, the trail dead-ended there. The cops awaited a call from Pierre Monette for more detailed information.
Lucie clicked on the link for the book James Peterson had written. The cover image appeared, and the two cops stared at it in amazement.
It showed an enormous bull, nose to nose with a small man wearing a blond mustache; his hands were behind his back and he was smiling. James Peterson himself.
“The bull facing off against the human, like in Lacombe’s film,” said Sharko. “What is this goddamn book about, anyway?”
With a few clicks, Lucie found a descriptive blurb of the work. She read aloud:
“Progress in physiology is such that, today, it is possible to explore the brain, to inhibit or excite aggression, and to modify maternal or sexual behavior. The tyrannical chief of a monkey colony yields to its subordinates, if one manages to stimulate a particular area of its encephalon. This direct access to the brain, through the miracle of astounding physical techniques, constitutes a more decisive phase in the history of man than the conquest of the atom.”
Sharko sat up. He realized that the solution to their puzzle was buried in the pages of that book. He put on his jacket, which he’d left at the foot of the bed, and headed for the door.
“Come on. While waiting for the cop to call, we’re going to see what horrors that book really contains.”