Mathilde shook her head with a smile and opened the door. So what had he revealed this time that was so important? It did not matter. He was sure to do even better next time. She went out onto the landing and switched on the light.
She screamed when she saw her.
The woman was hunched up against the wall, clutching her black kimono. Mathilde recognized her at once: Anna something. The one who needed a good pair of glasses. She was white and shaking from head to foot. What was this all about?
Mathilde pushed the man downstairs and turned angrily toward this little brunette. She did not tolerate it when her patients just showed up like that, without warning, without making an appointment. A good psychiatrist should always be a good bouncer.
She was about to give her a piece of her mind when the woman beat her to it, holding up to her nose a face scan.
"They've wiped away my memory and my face."
28
Paranoid psychosis.
The diagnosis was clear. Anna Heymes claimed that she had been manipulated by her husband and Eric Ackermann, as well as by some other men who were members of the French police force. Against her will, she was supposed to have been brainwashed and part of her memory removed. Her face had been altered using plastic surgery. She did not know why or how, but she had been the victim of a plot, or an experiment, that had damaged her personality.
She explained all this while hurriedly brandishing her cigarette like a conductor's baton. Mathilde listened to her patiently noting as she did how thin Anna was-anorexia could be another symptom of her paranoia.
Anna Heymes then came to the end of her unbelievable yarn. She had uncovered the plot that very morning, in the bathroom, when she discovered the scars on her face while her husband was about to take her to Ackermann's clinic.
She had escaped through the window and had been chased by policemen in civilian dress who were armed to the teeth and equipped with radio transmitters. She had hidden in an Orthodox church, then had had her face x-rayed at Saint-Antoine Hospital to obtain tangible proof of her operation. Then she had wandered around till nightfall, waiting to take refuge with the only person she now trusted Mathilde Wilcrau. There we are.
Paranoid psychosis.
Mathilde had treated hundreds of similar people at Sainte-Anne Hospital. The first thing to do was to calm the patient down. After a good deal of comforting words, she had managed to give her an intra-muscular injection of fifty milligrams of Tranxene.
Anna Heymes was now sleeping on her couch. Mathilde was sitting behind her desk, in her usual position.
All she had to do now was to phone up Laurent Heymes. She could even see to it that Anna was sectioned, or else contact Eric Ackermann, who was treating her. In a few minutes, everything would be sorted out. It was just routine.
So why hadn't she called? For the last hour, she had been sitting there, without picking up the phone. She stared around at the furniture, which glinted in places, reflecting the light from the window. For years, she had been surrounded by these rococo-style furnishings, most of which had been bought by her husband. She had fought hard to retain possession of them during their divorce. First to piss him off, then, she realized, to keep something of him. She had never made up her mind to sell them. She was now living in a sanctuary, a mausoleum of varnished antiques that reminded her of the only years that had really counted.
Paranoid psychosis. A textbook case.
Except that there were the scars. The traces she herself had observed on the young woman's forehead, ears and chin. She could even feel the screws and implants under her skin that were holding up her face's bone structure. That terrifying printout then gave her the details of the operations.
During her years of practice, Mathilde had encountered many paranoiacs, but very few of them went around with concrete proof of their delusions written into their faces. Anna Heymes was wearing a sort of mask that had been stitched onto her flesh. A rind of skin that had been fashioned and molded to dissimulate her smashed bones and atrophied muscles.
Was she quite simply telling the truth? Had these men-including even policemen-made her undergo such treatment? Had they shattered the bones of her face? Had they interfered with her memory?
There was another disturbing element in this business: the presence of Eric Ackermann. She remembered a tall redhead with a face pitted with acne. One of her countless suitors at university, but above all a man of extraordinary intelligence, which verged on the sublime.
At the time, what fascinated him was the human brain and "inner travel." He had followed the experiments on LSD conducted by Timothy Leary at Harvard and, via this approach, he claimed to be exploring uncharted regions of consciousness. He took all sorts of psychotropic drugs while analyzing his own altered states. He sometimes even spiked fellow students' coffee, by slipping LSD into it, "just to see." Mathilde smiled as she remembered his weirdness. It had been a crazy period, with psychedelic rock, protest movements, the hippies.
Ackermann had predicted that one day machines would allow us to travel inside the brain and observe its activity in real time. And time had proved him to be right. He had become one of the best-qualified neurologists in his field, thanks to new technologies such as the positron camera and the encephalogram.
Was it possible that he was conducting an experiment on this young woman?
She looked in her address book for the phone number of a student who had taken her courses at Sainte-Anne in 1995. On the fourth ring, the woman answered.
"Valerie Rannan?"
"Speaking."
"This is Mathilde Wilcrau."
"Professor Wilcrau?” It was past eleven, and her tone of voice was suddenly alert.
"What I am going to ask you will probably sound rather odd, especially at this time of the night…"
"What do you want?"
"I just want to ask you a few questions about your doctoral thesis. It was about mental manipulation and sensory isolation, if I remember correctly"
"It didn't seem to interest you very much at the time."
Mathilde noticed a slightly aggressive tone in the woman's answer. She had in fact refused to direct the student's work. She had not believed in this line of research. For her, brainwashing was more part of a collective fantasy or an urban legend.
She soothed out her voice with a smile. "Yes, I know. I was rather skeptical. But right now I need some information for an article I have to write on a short deadline."
"You can always ask."
Mathilde did not know where to start. She was not even sure what she wanted to find out. She started at random. "In the synopsis of your thesis, you wrote that it is possible to efface someone's memory. Is it… is it true?”
“The techniques were developed in the 1950s."
"By the Soviets, is that right?"
"The Russians, the Chinese, the Americans, just about everybody. It was a major element in the Cold War. Destroying the memory. Removing convictions. Modeling personalities."
"What methods were used?"
"Always the same ones: electroshock, drugs, sensory isolation." There was silence.
"Which drugs?" Mathilde asked.
"I worked mostly on the CIA 's program, MK-Ultra. The Americans used sedatives. Phenothiazine. Sodium amytal. Chlorpromazine."
Mathilde knew the names. They were the heavy artillery of psychiatry. In hospitals, these products were grouped together under the generic term chemical straitjacket. But in reality they were more like a grinder, a machine to mold the mind.
"What about sensory isolation?"
Valérie sneered. "The most advanced experiments were conducted in Canada, from 1954 onward, in a clinic in Montreal. First, the psychiatrists interviewed some of their female patients, who were depressives. They forced them to confess their faults, and any fantasies they were ashamed of them, they locked them in completely dark rooms, in which they could no longer see the floor, walls or ceiling. After that, they placed football helmets on their head
s, in which extracts from their confessions were played on a loop. The women constantly heard the same words, the same sentences, which were the most painful parts of their confessions. The only respite was the sessions of electroshock therapy and sleep cures under sedation."
Mathilde glanced over at Anna, asleep on the couch. Her chest rose and fell slightly as she breathed.
The student went on:
"When the patients could no longer remember their names or their pasts, when they had no willpower left, the real treatment began. The therapists changed the tapes in the helmets, which now played out orders and commands, which were supposed to forge their new personalities."
Like all psychiatrists. Mathilde had heard of such aberrations, but she could not convince herself of either their reality or their effectiveness. "What were the results?" she asked in a neutral voice.
All the Americans managed to produce were zombies. The Russians and Chinese seem to have obtained better results, using more or less identical methods. After the Korean War, over seven thousand American prisoners of war returned to their country, absolutely convinced of values. Their personalities had been conditioned."
Mathilde scratched her shoulder. A tomblike chill was rising up her limbs. "And do you think that laboratories have continued to work in this field since then?"
"Of course."
"What sort of labs?"
Valérie laughed sarcastically. "You're really on another planet, aren't you? We're talking about military research centers. All armies work on manipulating brains."
"In France, too?"
"In France, in Germany, in Japan, in the USA. Everywhere that has the technological means. New products are constantly coming out. Right now, there's a lot of talk about a chemical compound called GHB, which wipes out what you have experienced during the previous twelve hours. It's called the rapist's drug because a drugged victim won't remember a thing. I'm sure the army is still working on that kind of product. The brain is the most dangerous weapon in the world."
"Thank you, Valérie."
She sounded surprised. "You don't want any precise sources? A bibliography?"
"That's all right. I'll call you back if necessary"
29
Mathilde went over to Anna, who was still asleep. She examined her arm for traces of injections. Nothing. She looked at her hair. Repeated absorption of sedatives provoked an electrostatic inflammation of the scalp. No particular sign.
She stood up in amazement at having almost believed the woman's story. No, really, she herself must be out of her mind as well… At that moment, she once again noticed the scars on the forehead-three tiny vertical lines barely an inch apart. She could not resist touching the temples and jaws. The prostheses shifted around beneath the skin.
Who had done that? How could Anna have forgotten such an operation?
Right from her first visit, she had mentioned the institute where the tomographic tests had been carried out. It was in Orsay. A hospital full of soldiers. Mathilde had written the name down somewhere in her notes. She looked quickly through her pad and came across a page full of her usual doodling. In the top right-hand corner, she had written Henri-Becquerel.
Mathilde got a bottle of water from the closet next to her consulting room; then, after taking a long swig from it, she picked up the phone and dialed a number.
"Rene? It's Mathilde. Mathilde Wilcrau."
A slight hesitation. The time. The years gone by. The surprise… Then a deep voice finally said, "How are things?"
"I'm not disturbing you?"
"Of course not. It's always a pleasure to hear your voice."
René Le Garrec had been her teacher and professor when she was studying at Val-de-Grace Hospital. A military psychiatrist and specialist in the traumas of war, he had set up the first medicopsychiatric emergency units open to victims of terrorism, war or natural disasters. He was a pioneer who had proved to Mathilde that you can wear a uniform without necessarily being an idiot.
"I just wanted to ask you something. Do you know the Henri Becquerel Institute?"
She noticed a slight hesitation.
"Yes, I do. It's a military hospital."
"What do they work on there?"
"They used to work on nuclear medicine."
"And now?"
Another hesitation. Mathilde was now sure of one thing: she was venturing into forbidden territory.
“I don't know exactly" the doctor replied. "They treat certain forms of trauma."
"From war?"
"I think so. I'd have to ask."
Mathilde had worked for three years in Le Garrec's department. Never had any mention been made of this institute.
As though trying to cover the clumsiness of his lie, the soldier went on the attack. "Why arc you asking me this?"
She made no attempt to duck and dive. "I have a patient who's had tests done there."
"What sort of tests?"
"Tomographic ones."
"I didn't know they had a PET scanner."
"It was Ackermann who carried them out."
"The cartographer?"
Eric Ackermann had written a book about the techniques for exploring the brain, bringing together the work of various teams from around the world. It had since become the standard reference book. Since its publication, the neurologist had the reputation of being one of the greatest topographers of the human brain. A traveler who voyaged around this region of the anatomy as though it were the sixth continent.
Mathilde confirmed.
Le Garrec observed, "It's odd he's working with us."
The us amused her. The army was more than just a corporation. it was a family "You're right," she said. "I knew Ackermann at the university. He was a real rebel. A conscientious objector, drugged up to his eyeballs. I find it hard to picture him working with soldiers. I think he was even condemned for illegal production of narcotics."
Le Garrec could not help laughing. "But that could be the reason. Do you want me to contact them?"
"No thanks. I just wanted to know if you had heard about their work, that's all."
"What's your patient's name?"
Mathilde now realized that she had gone a step too far. Le Garrec was going to start asking questions himself or, even worse, refer the matter to his superiors. Suddenly, the world Valérie Rannan had described seemed more probable. A universe of secret, impenetrable experiments, conducted in the name of a higher reason.
She tried to deflate the tension. "Don't worry it was only a detail.”
“What's the patient's name?" the officer insisted.
Mathilde felt the chill rise higher in her body. "Thanks," she replied. "I'll call Ackermann myself"
"As you wish."
Le Garrec was retreating, too. They both adopted their usual roles, their usual casual tone. But they knew that during this brief conversation, they had crossed a minefield. She hung up after promising to call him back for lunch sometime.
So it was certain that the Henri-Becquerel Institute had its secrets. And Eric Ackermann's presence in this business deepened the mystery even more. Anna Heymes's "delusions" were now seeming less and less psychotic…
Mathilde went into the private part of her apartment. She had a particular gait: shoulders up, arms along her body fists raised and, above all, hips slightly swaying. When she was young, she had spent a long time perfecting this oblique step, which she thought suited her figure. It had now become second nature to her.
When she reached her bedroom, she opened a varnished writing desk, decked with palm leaves and bunches of reeds. A Meissonnier 1740. She used a miniature key, which she always kept on her, and then pulled open a drawer.
She opened a coffer of woven bamboo, encrusted with mother-of-pearl. At the bottom, there was a piece of chamois leather. With her thumb and forefinger, she pulled aside the rolls of cloth and revealed the glittering presence of a forbidden object: A Glock 9-mm automatic pistol.
It was an extremely light weapon, with a mec
hanical lock and a safe-action catch. Before, this pistol had been used as a piece of sports equipment, and its use had been authorized by an official license. But now this gun, loaded with sixteen armor-plated bullets, was no longer authorized. It had become an instrument of death, forgotten by the labyrinthine French bureaucracy..
Mathilde weighed the gun in her palm, thinking over her current situation. A divorced psychiatrist with a lousy sex life, hiding an automatic pistol in her writing desk. She smiled and murmured, "How symbolic can you get?"
When she returned to her consulting room, she made another phone call, then went over to the couch. She had to shake Anna extremely hard before the woman showed any signs of waking up.
Finally, the young woman rolled over slowly. She stared at her hostess, showing no surprise, her head to one side.
In a low voice, Mathilde asked, "You didn't tell anyone that you'd come to see me?"
Anna shook her head.
"No one knows that we know each other?"
Same answer. It occurred to Mathilde that she might have been followed. It was now double or nothing.
Anna was rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands, making herself look even more strange, with her lazy eyelids, that languidness about her temples, above her cheekbones. She still had the marks from the blanket on her cheek.
Mathilde thought of her own daughter, the one who had left home after tattooing on her shoulder the Chinese ideogram for "the truth.”
“Come on," she whispered. "We're going."
30
"What did they do to me?"
The two women were speeding along Boulevard Saint-Germain toward the Seine. The rain had stopped but left its presence everywhere in the glints, glitters and blue splashes of the night's vibrato.
To conceal her doubts, Mathilde adopted a professorial tone. "A treatment," she said.
"What sort of treatment?"
"Clearly something new which has allowed them to alter parts of your memory"
"Is that possible?"
"Normally speaking, no. But Ackermann must have come up with something… revolutionary technique connected with tomography and the brain's regions."
The Empire Of The Wolves Page 14