The Empire Of The Wolves

by Jean-Christophe Grangé

  "When you no longer trust your neurologist, where do you go? To a psychiatrist."

  As before, she lengthened her syllables into deep undulations. Nobody could forget such a voice. A flood of saliva filled his mouth, a sludge that tasted just like the stench in the corridor. He knew what it was now: the bitter, profound, malevolent taste of fear. He was its sole source. It was exuding from every pore of his body. “Have you been following me? What do you want?"

  Anna went over to him. Her indigo eyes glittered in the greenish light of the garage. Eyes like a dark ocean, slightly slanted, almost Asian. She smiled and said, "What do you think I want?"

  40

  In the field of the neurosciences, in neuropsychology and cognitive psychology I'm the best, or at least one of the best, in the entire world. This isn't vanity. It's quite simply a recognized fact in the scientific community. At the age of fifty-two, I have become what is called a reference.

  But I really became important in these fields only when I deserted the scientific world, when I left the beaten track and took a forbidden path. A path that no one had taken before me. It was only then that I became a major researcher, a pioneer who will mark his epoch.

  The trouble is, it's already too late for me…

  MARCH 1994

  After sixteen months of tomographic experiments on the memory-the third season of the Personal Memory and Cultural Memory program the repetition of certain anomalies led me to contact those laboratories that were using the same radio-labeled water in the experiments as my team: Oxygen-15.

  The answer was unanimous. They hadn't noticed a thing.

  This didn't mean I was wrong. It just meant that I was using higher doses on the subjects of my experiments and that my unusual results could be explained by this fact. I sensed something important had happened. I had crossed a threshold, and this threshold revealed the true power of this substance.

  It was too early to publish. I just wrote a report for the Atomic Energy Commission, which was funding my work, summarizing that season's results. On the last page, 1 appended a note mentioning the repetition of certain unusual events during the tests. These events concerned the indirect influence of oxygen-IS on the human brain, and they undoubtedly ought to be studied during a specific research program.

  Their reaction was instantaneous. I was called in to AEC headquarters in May. In a huge conference hall, a dozen specialists were waiting for me. With their short-cropped hair and rigid turn of phrase, I recognized them at once. They were the same soldiers who had interviewed me two years before, when I'd made my initial presentation of my research.

  I started at the beginning: "The principle of PET (positron emission tomography) involves injecting radio-labeled water into the subject's blood. Once made radioactive itself, it emits positrons, which a camera then captures in real time, thus allowing cerebral activity to be localized. Personally, I selected a classic radioactive isotope, Oxygen-15, and-"

  A voice interrupted me: "In your note, you mention some anomalies. What do you mean exactly? What happened?"

  "I noticed that after the tests, some subjects confused their own memories with the stories they had been told during the sessions."

  "Can you be more precise?"

  "Several exercises in my protocol consisted of communicating imaginary stories, short fictions that the subject then had to summarize orally. After the tests, the subjects repeated these stories as if they were true. They were absolutely convinced that they had really experienced these inventions."

  "And you think it was the use of Oxygen-15 that sparked this phenomenon?"

  "I suppose so. A positron camera cannot have any effect on the consciousness. It's a noninvasive technique. Oxygen-15 was the only product administered to the subjects."

  "How do you explain its influence?"

  "I can't. Maybe it's the impact of radioactivity on the neurons. Or an effect of the molecule itself on the neurotransmitters. It's as if the experiment excites the cognitive system, thus making it permeable to information given during the test. The brain can no longer tell the difference between imaginary data and personal experiences."

  "Do you think that using this substance, it might be possible to implant in a subject's consciousness memories that are… shall we say, artificial?"

  "It's far more complex than that. I -"

  "Do you think it's possible? Yes or no?"

  "We could certainly explore this possibility"

  Silence. Then another voice said, "During your career, you've worked on brainwashing techniques, haven't you?"

  I burst out laughing in a vain attempt to defuse this inquisitorial atmosphere. "Over twenty years ago. In my Ph.D. thesis!"

  "Have you followed the progress that has been made in the field?”

  “More or less. But there's a lot of unpublished research on the subject. Work that has been classified top secret. I don't know if-"

  "Can substances be used to act as an effective chemical screen to block out a subject's memory?"

  "Yes, there are several such products."

  "Which ones?"

  "We're talking here about manipulations that are-"

  "Which ones?"

  I answered grudgingly, "There's much talk these days about substances like GHB or gamma-hydroxybutyrate. But to achieve this kind of objective, it's better to use a more common product. Like Valium, for instance."

  "Why?"

  "Because at certain doses, Valium not only provokes partial amnesia, it also introduces automatisms. Patients become open to suggestion. What is more, we also have an antidote, so subjects can recover their memory afterward."

  Silence.

  The first voice: "Supposing that a subject had been given such a treatment. Would it be possible to inject new memories, using Oxygen-15?”

  “If you're expecting me to-"

  "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, kil
ling 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…

  All of which might have been possible without September II, 2001. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

  The wave of those explosions blew away all of the police's certitudes, all their investigative and surveillance techniques, on a global scale. The secret services, information agencies, police forces and armies of all the countries threatened by Al Qaeda were on tenterhooks. The politicians were panicking. Once more, terrorism had shown that its greatest strength was secrecy.

  There was talk of holy war, of chemical attacks, atomic bombs…

  Philippe Charlier was back in the front line. He was the man to deal with such persistence and obsession. A figure of power, with methods that were obscure, violent and… effective. The Morpho project was dug up again. Terrible words were on everyone's lips-conditioning, brainwashing, infiltration.

  In mid-November, Charlier turned up at the Henri-Becquerel Institute. With a broad smile: he announced, "The Arabs are back."

  He invited me to lunch in a restaurant specializing in Lyonnaise cuisine and Burgundy wine. The nightmare started up again in the stench of fat and cooked blood.

  "Do you know the annual budget of the CIA and FBI?" he asked. I shook my head.

  "Thirty billion dollars. The two agencies have spy satellites and submarines, automatic reconnaissance equipment and mobile phone tapping systems. The cutting-edge technology in the field of surveillance. Not to mention the National Security Agency and its know-how The Americans can listen in and spy anywhere. There are no more secrets on earth. Or so everyone thought. The entire world felt concerned. People were even talking about Big Brother… but then there was September.

  A few men, armed with plastic knives, destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and took a good lump out of the Pentagon, while notching up a score of a good three thousand dead. The Americans listen to everything, receive everything, except when it's coming from people who are really dangerous."

  The Jolly Green Giant was not smiling anymore. He slowly turned his palms to face the ceiling, above his plate. "Can you imagine the two sides of the scales? On the one hand, thirty billion dollars. On the other, some plastic knives. What do you think makes the difference? What made the fucking scale tip?"

  He violently hit the table.

  "Willpower. Fait
h. Madness. Confronted with an armada of technology, and thousands of American agents, a handful of determined men managed to slip through all their surveillance. Because no machine will ever be as powerful as the human mind. Because servants of the state, leading ordinary lives with normal ambitions, will never be able to catch fanatics who don't give a damn about their own lives, who are completely given over to a higher cause."

  He paused, got his breath back, then went on: "The kamikaze pilots of September 11 had removed all their body hair. Do you know why? So as to be perfectly pure at the moment they entered paradise. What can you do against loonies like that? You can't spy on them, bribe them or understand them."

  His eyes glittered with a strange light, as if he had warned everyone of the imminent catastrophe.

  "I'll repeat: there's just one way to round up fanatics. Turn one of them against the others. Get a convert so as to be able to read the depths of their madness. Then, and only then, will we beat them."

  The Jolly Green Giant laid his elbows on the tablecloth, put his rounded lips to his wineglass, then raised his mustache with a smile. "I've got some good news for you. As of today. the Morpho project is back on. I've even found you a guinea pig."

  The wicked grin widened.

  "A young lady."

  41

  "Me."

  Anna's voice hit the concrete like a table-tennis ball. Eric Ackermann smiled weakly, almost apologetically, at her. He had now been talking nonstop for almost an hour. sitting in his five-door Volvo, the door open, legs stretched outside. His throat was dry. and he would have given anything for a glass of water.

  Leaning against the pillar, Anna Heymes remained still, as slender as a graffito in India ink. Mathilde Wilcrau continuously paced up and down, putting on the headlights when the timer turned them off.

  While speaking, he observed them both: the slight, pale and dark one who, despite her youth, seemed struck with a very ancient, even mineral, rigidity; and the large one who, on the contrary, was vegetal and vibrant with lingering freshness. Still that over-red Mouth, that overblack hair, that clash of brute colors, like a market stall.