Lucie looked the nun deep in her cloudy eyes. No one could forget such darkness. No one.
The truth was about to pour out, here, right now, from her old lips. Her pulse pounding, Lucie nonetheless retained her cop’s reflexes.
“This superintendent. We need to know who he was.”
“Of course. His name was James Peterson. Or at least, that’s the name we overheard. Because he always signed Dr. Peter Jameson. James Peterson, Peter Jameson… I still don’t know which was his real identity. But one thing for certain, he lived in Montreal.”
Sharko and Lucie exchanged a brief glance. They had their final link in the chain. The nun stood up, shuffled toward her library, and knelt, tears in her eyes.
“I pray to God every day for those poor children that I left back there. They were my little girls. I had watched them grow, inside these walls, before we all found ourselves in that place of depravity.”
Lucie felt a kind of compassion for the poor woman, who was dying alone and in pain.
“There was nothing you could have done for them. You were a prisoner of the system and your beliefs. God has nothing to do with this.”
With trembling hands, Sister Marie du Calvaire lifted her Bible and began reading in a murmur. Lucie and Sharko knew there was no further reason to remain in the room.
They left without a sound.
55
The two cops went on foot from the convent to Montreal’s central train station, which wasn’t far. They walked without speaking, plunged into their darkest thoughts. They could see those closed-off rooms in the hospital, echoing with the moans of the insane, the frightened little girls intermingled with the most dangerous cases. They could hear the crackle of electroshock treatments in padded chambers. How had something like this been allowed to go on? Isn’t a democracy supposed to protect its citizens from such barbarity? On the verge of nausea, Lucie felt a need to break the silence. She pressed against Sharko, slipped her arm around his waist.
“You don’t talk a lot. I’d like to know what you’re feeling.”
Sharko shook his head and pursed his lips.
“Disgust. Just deep, deep disgust. There really aren’t any words to describe things like that.”
Lucie leaned her head against his solid shoulder, and in that way they continued on to the station. Once at the entrance, letting go of their embrace, they headed toward one of the foyers of the vast edifice, which in the middle of summer was thronged with travelers. Carefree people, happy, or in a rush…
Detective Pierre Monette and a colleague were waiting at the coffee bar. The policemen greeted each other respectfully and exchanged pleasantries.
The lockers stretched in two long rows opposite a cash machine, under the red maple leaf of the Canadian flag. Lucie was surprised that someone of Rotenberg’s caliber should have picked such an open, heavily trafficked spot, but she figured he must have hidden copies of the information in various places, as Lacombe had evidently done with his film before burning to death.
Detective Monette pointed to locker number 201, at the far left.
“We already opened it. This is what we found.”
He took a small object from his pocket.
“A flash drive.”
He handed it to Sharko, who brought it up to eye level.
“Can you copy the files for me?”
“Already done. Keep it.”
“What did you think?”
“We couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I’m hoping you can figure it out. Your case has got me curious.”
Sharko nodded.
“You can count on me. We’re going to have to ask you for a bit more help. We need you to do a top-priority check on a man named James Peterson, or Peter Jameson. He was a doctor at Mont Providence Hospital in the fifties and lived in Montreal. He’d be about eighty by now.”
Monette took down the information.
“Got it. I’ll try to call you later this afternoon.”
As Lucie and Sharko headed back to the hotel, the inspector shot circumspect glances at the crowd, searching for Eugenie. He craned his neck, leaned over to check behind a nearby couple.
She was still nowhere to be found.
56
Sharko’s hotel room had already been made up. Clean sheets on the bed, toiletries replenished. The cop pulled his old suitcase from under the bed, opened it, and took out his laptop.
Lucie gave a curious glance, then knitted her brow.
“Is that a jar of cocktail sauce in your luggage?”
Sharko closed the lid quickly, pulled the zipper, and turned on his computer.
“I’ve always had trouble with diets.”
“Between that and the glazed chestnuts… Judging by its color, I’d say it didn’t weather the trip too well.”
Leaving the remark unanswered, Sharko slid the drive into the USB port of his PC, and a window appeared with two folders. They were labeled “Szpilman’s Discoveries” and “McGill Brainwashing.”
“It’s the same directory as on Rotenberg’s computer. He must have backed up his files.”
“McGill or Szpilman first?”
“McGill. The lawyer showed me photos of the patients being conditioned, but there was also a film. A film that Sanders showed his patients as part of his brainwashing technique.”
Sharko clicked on the file marked “Brainwash01.avi.”
“Oh-one… That could mean there were dozens of others.”
From the very first image, the two cops immediately understood. Sharko pressed PAUSE and pointed a finger to the upper right of the frame. He turned to Lucie, his face serious.
“The white circle… The same as on the deadly reel.”
“And on the crash films. Jacques Lacombe’s maker’s mark.”
A heavy silence, then Lucie’s voice, crystal clear:
“He was working for the CIA. Jacques Lacombe worked for the CIA.”
Lucie felt the new piece fit, undeniably.
“That explains his relocation to Washington in 1951, near agency headquarters. Then his move to Canada, where MK-Ultra was still under way. They recruited him the same way they recruited Sanders. First they saw the potential in his films, the way he manipulated the unconscious. Then they contacted him and, as with the psychiatrist, gave him a cover—the job as a projectionist—and probably a healthy bank account to boot.
Sharko agreed.
“They enlisted the best talents they could find. Scientists, doctors, engineers, and even a filmmaker. They needed someone to make the movies they showed the patients.”
Lucie nodded. In the heat of the investigation, she was no longer next to the man she’d recently slept with, but with a colleague who felt the same pain as she: that of a dangerous, impossible manhunt.
“Rotenberg told me the program involving the children and rabbits wasn’t MK-Ultra, and that the doctor you never saw on film wasn’t Sanders. Which means…”
“Jacques Lacombe worked on both projects. On MK-Ultra, with Sanders at McGill, and on the one that used the children, with that Peterson or Jameson at Mont Providence. The CIA knew it could trust him. No doubt it needed someone reliable to film what took place in those white rooms.”
Lucie got up to pour herself some water. The night of giddiness and pleasure was already a distant memory. The demons had come charging back. Sharko waited for her to return and slid a tender hand over the back of her neck.
“You doing okay?”
“Let’s keep going…”
He hit PLAY. Brainwash01.avi…
Lacombe’s film, which had been shown to Sanders’s patients, was mind-bogglingly bizarre. It was a mix of black-and-white squares, lines, and curves oscillating like waves. It gave the feeling of sailing in a psychedelic or Zen-like world, in which the mind no longer knew exactly what to latch onto. On the screen, the squares moved around, slowly, quickly; the waves swelled and vanished. Sharko replayed the video frame by frame, and that’s when the hidden frames appeared.