Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  Too absorbed in her thoughts, Lucie didn’t hear the man walking up behind her. He quickly sat down next to her and pulled a revolver from his jacket.

  “You will stand up and follow me without making any trouble.”

  Lucie went pale. The blood seemed to drain from her body.

  “Who are you? What—?”

  He jabbed the gun barrel deeper into her side. His forehead was sweating. One wrong move and he’d shoot, Lucie was sure of it.

  “I won’t say it again.”

  American accent. Broad shoulders, at least fifty years old. He was wearing generic sunglasses and a cap that read NASHVILLE PREDATORS. His lips were thin, sharp like a palm leaf.

  Lucie stood up; the man took up position behind her. The cop looked around for pedestrians, witnesses, but no luck. Alone and unarmed, she was helpless. They walked about a hundred yards without encountering a soul. A Datsun 240Z was waiting under the maples.

  “You drive.”

  He pushed her roughly into the car. Lucie’s throat was knotted and she was finding it hard to stay calm. The faces of her twins swam before her eyes.

  Not like this, she kept thinking. Not like this…

  The man took a seat next to her. Like a pro, he quickly patted her pockets, thighs, and hips. He took out her wallet, removed her police ID—which he looked at carefully—then turned off her cell phone. Lucie spoke in a slightly shaky voice:

  “No need—it isn’t working.”

  “Drive.”

  “What is it you want? I—”

  “Drive, I said.”

  She started the car. They headed out of Montreal due north, via the Charles de Gaulle Bridge.

  And left the lights of the city far behind.

  48

  Looking disheveled, Martin Leclerc paced nervously across his living room. He held the photo of Lucie with the tips of his fingers.

  “God dammit, Shark! What the hell possessed you to go messing with the Legion?”

  Sharko was seated on the couch, his head in his hands. The world was coming down around him and his chest felt like it was being crushed. He was suffering for the woman he’d sent straight into the danger zone.

  “I don’t know. I wanted—I wanted to draw them out. Stir things up a bit.”

  “Well, you succeeded.”

  Leclerc also put his hands to his head, his eyes looking at the ceiling. He sighed loudly.

  “You know you never get anywhere with just a hunch, especially against guys like that! Proof! We needed proof!”

  “What proof? You tell me!”

  Desperate, angry, Sharko jumped up and stood in front of his boss.

  “You know as well as I do that Colonel Chastel is mixed up in this affair. Begin legal proceedings against him. Mohamed Abane wanted to join the Legion; we find him buried with four other unidentified bodies. It could stick with a judge if you put your weight behind it. A cop’s life is at stake!”

  “Why Henebelle? What do they have against her?”

  Sharko clenched his jaws. Every second of every minute, he had not stopped thinking of that blonde with her delicate build. And perhaps because of him, she was now going to suffer the torments he himself had known in the Egyptian desert. The torture…

  “They want to use her as a bargaining chip. In exchange for information about Syndrome E that I don’t even have. I was bluffing.”

  Leclerc shook his head, jaw tight.

  “And you’re telling me this Chastel was stupid enough to openly come after you and give himself away so easily? Wasn’t he afraid we’d have a team waiting if he sent people to your place?”

  Sharko looked his boss and friend deep in the eyes.

  “I killed a man in Egypt, Martin. It was self-defense, but I couldn’t tell anyone. They had me in the crosshairs, and that Noureddine wouldn’t have missed. I gave Chastel the coordinates of where to find his body. He’s got me the same way I’ve got him. It’s our balance of terror.”

  Martin Leclerc stood there a moment with his mouth open. Then he turned toward the bar to pour himself a whiskey, half of which he emptied in one gulp.

  “Fuck me…”

  A long silence.

  “Who was it? Who did you kill?”

  Sharko’s eyes fogged up. In nearly thirty years, Leclerc had never seen him like this. A guy who had hit the wall, completely drained.

  “The brother of the cop who was looking into the murdered girls. He was one of their sentinels. He’d cut his own brother’s throat, and he was this close to finishing me off. I killed him by—by accident.”

  Leclerc’s face was a mix of disgust and anger.

  “Can the Egyptians trace it to you?”

  “First they’d have to find him. And even if they did, nothing connects me to Abd el-Aal.”

  The head of Violent Crimes emptied his glass. He grimaced and rubbed his mouth with the palm of his hand. Sharko stood behind him, his shoulders drooping under his rumpled jacket.

  “I’m ready to come clean and pay for all my fuckups. But before that, Martin, help me. You’re my friend. I’m begging you.”

  Sharko was lost, in a daze. Leclerc walked up to a framed photo sitting on a table in the living room: he and his wife, on a seawall overlooking the ocean. He picked it up and stared at it for a long time.

  “I’m about to lose her because I tried to do the right thing, come what may. I thought my job was the most important thing in my life, but I was wrong. What’s that cop done to you to get you so worked up about her?”

  “Are you going to help me?”

  Leclerc sighed, then took a brown envelope from a drawer. He handed it to Sharko. On the paper was written “Attention: Director, Criminal Investigations Division.”

  “You hold on to my resignation for now. I’ll take it back when this is all over. And you take back your photo and everything you’ve said. You were never here tonight. You never told me anything.”

  Sharko took the envelope and gripped his friend’s hand with his heavy mitt.

  49

  The stranger sitting next to Lucie finally removed his shades and stashed them in the glove compartment, along with the revolver.

  “I don’t mean you any harm. Please forgive my rather rude manners, but I needed you to come quietly.”

  Keeping her eyes on the road, she managed a glance at her companion. His eyes were a deep blue, protected by bushy gray eyebrows.

  “Who are you?”

  “Keep driving. We’ll talk later.”

  The names of towns paraded by: Terrebonne, Mascouche, Rawdon. The areas they traveled through became less and less populated. They followed an interminably straight road, thickly surrounded by maples and conifers as far as the eye could see. Only rarely did their path cross a truck or car. Night was falling. Now and again they saw points of light in the distance, boats that must have been navigating the rivers and lakes. They had driven about sixty miles when the man told her to turn onto a path. The headlights lit the massive bases of tree trunks. Lucie felt she was on the edge of the abyss; she had seen only two or three houses in the past half hour.

  A cabin emerged from the darkness. When the cop stepped onto the ground, feeling feverish, she heard the furious roar of a waterfall. The cool wind lifted her hair. The man waited a few moments, his eyes staring toward the shadows—shadows that were deeper here than anywhere else. He unlocked the cabin door. Lucie went in. The inside of the house smelled like cooked game. A woodstove with two burners squatted at the back of the room before a large bay window that looked out on the lilting sparkles the moon made on the surface of the great lake. In a corner were fishing rods, an old archery bow, woodsman’s saws, as well as wooden molds next to little maple sugar figurines.

  Puffing a bit, the man laid his gun on the table and removed his cap, revealing a sparse shock of salt-and-pepper hair. He looked even older and thinner with his jacket off. Just a tired, worn-out man.

  “This is the only place where we can talk freely and safely.”


  He had abandoned his American accent and now spoke like a Quebecer. Lucie suddenly realized she knew that voice.

  “You’re the man I spoke to on the phone when I called from Vlad Szpilman’s cell.”

  “Yes. My name’s Philip Rotenberg.”

  American accent once more. A true sonic chameleon.

  “How—?”

  “Did I find you? I have a highly placed and extremely reliable source at the Sûreté. He got in touch the moment he got wind of your request for a letter rogatory. A young French cop who wants to poke around the national archives in Montreal—I immediately made the link with the phone call from a few days ago. I knew when you were coming in and where you’d be staying. I’ve been following you since yesterday. I now believe I can trust you.”

  Rotenberg noticed that Lucie looked like she was feeling faint. He moved toward her and helped her to a sofa.

  “May I have some water, please,” she said. “I haven’t had anything to drink or much to eat. And it hasn’t exactly been a restful day.”

  “Oh, of course. My apologies.”

  He walked swiftly to the kitchen and came back with some sausage, bread, water, and two beers. Lucie downed several glasses of water and some sausage slices before feeling a bit more like herself. Rotenberg had uncapped a beer, which he looked at intently, his hands around the small bottle.

  “First of all, you need to know who I am. For a long time I worked in a law firm specializing in the defense of civil liberties in Washington, with the great lawyer Joseph Rauth. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Washington…Where Jacques Lacombe had lived.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Then you know even less than I thought.”

  “I’m here in Canada to get answers. To try to…figure out why someone would kill to get their hands on a fifty-year-old movie.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “You want to know why? Because everything is contained in that film, Lucie Henebelle. Because within it is hidden the proof of the existence of a covert CIA program, which used unfortunate guinea pigs to pursue its experiments. This phantom program, the very existence of which remains unknown even to this day, was developed alongside Project MK-Ultra.”

  Lucie ran a hand through her hair, brushing it back. MK-Ultra…She had glimpsed that word in Szpilman’s library, amid his books on espionage.

  “I’m sorry, but…I’m completely lost.”

  “If that’s true, there’s a lot I have to tell you.”

  Philip Rotenberg walked toward the stove and shoved in a few more logs.

  “Even in July, the nights are cool in the northern forests.”

  He snapped some branches, threw in a log, and lit it with a match. He watched the fire catch for a few moments. Lucie felt abnormally cold and rubbed her forearms.

  “In 1977, I was barely twenty-five. The law office of Joseph Rauth, Washington, D.C. Two men, a father and son, arrived in Joseph’s office. The son, David Lavoix, was holding an article from the New York Times, and the father seemed…troubled, absent. David Lavoix held out the clipping, which talked about Project MK-Ultra. Just so you know, the Times had sent the first shot across the bow two years earlier, in 1975, by revealing that in the fifties and sixties the CIA had conducted mind-control experiments on American citizens, mostly without their knowledge or consent. Investigative hearings were held and the American people were officially informed about the existence of this top secret project.”

  He nodded toward a large library.

  “It’s all in there. Thousands and thousands of pages in the archives, available to any citizen. The whole thing has long been a matter of public record—there’s nothing secret about what I’m telling you.”

  Philip Rotenberg went to leaf through his documents. He quickly pulled out a copy of the New York Times from back then and handed it to Lucie.

  Lucie opened the newspaper. A very long piece took up much of the front page. Certain words were underlined in ink: Dr. D. Ewen Sanders…Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology…MK-Ultra Project…

  “That day, Joseph Rauth asked the humble Mr. Lavoix how his office could be of assistance. And young Mr. Lavoix answered, casual as you please, that he wanted to sue the CIA. The CIA! ‘Why?’ asked Joseph. Mr. Lavoix pointed to his father and said plainly, ‘For the mental destruction and brainwashing of a hundred adult patients in the 1950s at Allan Memorial Institute, McGill University, Montreal.’ ”

  Behind him, the fire was spreading through the logs and the kindling crackled noisily. In the middle of nowhere, in the heart of this wild, unknown province of Quebec, Lucie felt uneasy. She finally picked up her beer and uncapped it. She absolutely had to loosen the knot in her stomach.

  “Montreal, once again,” she said.

  “Yes, Montreal. Still, the Times article didn’t mention Montreal, or Canada. It simply said that in the fifties the CIA had established a number of covert organizations to develop its research into brainwashing, such as SIHE, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Nothing very remarkable in that, just one more revelation about Project MK-Ultra, as we’d been used to seeing in the Times for months by then. But look here, this underlined name…”

  “Dr. D. Ewen Sanders. Head of research at SIHE.”

  “Ewen Sanders, that’s right. Now, according to Mr. Lavoix, a certain Ewen Sanders had been, some years earlier, the chief psychiatrist and director of the Allan Memorial Institute. The place where David Lavoix’s father, the rather passive individual there before us in the office, had gone to treat a case of simple depression and from where, long years later, he emerged with his mind entirely shot. For the rest of my life I will remember the sentence he managed to utter that day: ‘Sanders killed us inside.’ ”

  Sanders killed us inside. Lucie set the paper down on the table. She thought of what the archivist had given her to understand: experiments on human beings, conducted by Canadian psychiatric institutions.

  “So this Project MK-Ultra had covert branches in Canada?”

  “Precisely. Despite the 1975 hearings, no one knew that the American invasion of the mind had reached Canada. With his Times article, and by sheer chance, David Lavoix had touched on a major element that incriminated the CIA still further, and to the highest degree.”

  “So did you do it? Did you sue the CIA?”

  With a gesture, Rotenberg invited Lucie to join him at his computer, on a desk near the library. He clicked through several password screens and then skimmed through his computer files. One bore the name “Szpilman’s Discoveries.” He clicked on another folder, titled “McGill Brainwashing,” and moused onto a PowerPoint file. Underneath it was an AVI video file called “Brainwash01.avi.”

  “Nine of Sanders’s patients, with their families’ support, brought suit following Lavoix’s example. The other McGill patients were either dead, too traumatized, or incapable of remembering the treatments they’d been subjected to. Now listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you—it’s essential for what follows. In 1973, the CIA, informed that reporters were sniffing around their affairs, had destroyed all the files concerning Project MK-Ultra. But the CIA is, above all, an enormous bureaucracy. Joseph Rauth was convinced that some traces had to remain of such an important project, which had extended over twenty-five years and involved dozens of directors and a staff of thousands. Under the auspices of the Rockefeller Commission, we were authorized access to documents or other materials relating to research into mind control. We hired an ex-CIA operative named Frank Macley to look into it. After several weeks of investigation, he confirmed that most of the files had been destroyed by two high-ranking officials: CIA Director Samuel Neels and one of his close associates, Michael Brown. But through his persistence, Macley unearthed seven huge crates of documents relating to MK-Ultra at the Agency’s records storage facility. Crates that had gotten lost in the administrative labyrinth. More than sixteen thousand pages on which the names had been redacted, but that
related in detail how some ten million dollars had been spent for MK-Ultra via a hundred and forty-four universities in the United States and Canada, twelve hospitals, fifteen private companies—including Sanders’s—and three corrections facilities.”

  He clicked on the PowerPoint file.

  “From those archives, we recovered photos and a film, which I digitized and put in this folder. Here are some of the photos, taken by Sanders himself during his experiments, presumably at McGill.”

  Images scrolled by. There were patients in pajamas, strapped onto gurneys, lined up behind one another in endless corridors; then the same patients with earphones padlocked to their heads, sitting at tables in front of enormous tape recorders. Their faces were numb, passive; black rings sagged beneath their haggard eyes. Lucie had no trouble imagining the atmosphere of terror that must have reigned over the psychiatric hospital at McGill.

  “Here are Sanders’s tragic victims. He was a very brilliant psychiatrist whose great ambition was to cure mental illness, without ever managing to. It drove him crazy. One day he realized, completely by chance, that the intensive repetition of a tape that forced patients to listen to their own therapy sessions seemed to have a beneficial effect on their state of mind. But from there, it would escalate into horror. At first, Sanders forced his patients to put on headphones for three or four hours at a stretch, seven days a week. When they started to get exasperated and rebel, he created lockable headsets that couldn’t be removed. So then the patients broke the tape recorders, and in response he put the machines behind cages. The patients ripped out the wires, so they were put in restraints. Sanders ended up giving them LSD, a devastating new drug that hadn’t existed a few years earlier. For the psychiatrist, LSD was a miracle: not only did the patients remain tractable, but their conscious minds no longer blocked the way—so that words transmitted over and over through headphones would lodge directly in their brains.”