Lucie nodded, pursuing Sharko’s line of thinking:
“Lacombe lets himself be swayed by Peterson and agrees. To protect their secret from the CIA, they hide the film about the rabbits in another weird short, Lacombe’s specialty. Even if the CIA watched the film, since they owned the original and all the prints, they wouldn’t see a thing. At most, they’d have picked up on a few subliminal images of Judith Sagnol. Lacombe, with his genius and latent insanity, bested the American intelligence community at its own game.”
“Right. And Peterson, for his part, is already thinking of getting out, fleeing Canada, and he wants to take Alice with him, the one who allowed him to reproduce Syndrome E. Had she become an object of study for him? Had he developed some kind of affection for her? Did he see her as the living proof of his success? A trophy? A curiosity? Whatever the case, he gets married, adopts Alice, and kills Lacombe by setting the fire. Then, probably with help from the French, he vanishes back into his native country, taking Alice and Lacombe’s original print with him.”
“Except that Lacombe had taken precautions and made copies, hiding them in different places. The two men must have lived in constant fear and paranoia, not only of the CIA but of each other.”
“Exactly. But all Lacombe’s precautions couldn’t save him. Protected and hidden, Peterson settles in France and probably pursues his experiments. His discoveries about Syndrome E fall into French hands, right under the CIA’s nose. Alice pays the price for Peterson’s fanaticism and madness. She’s already suffered all those tortures at Mont Providence, and she was the first one to start slaughtering the rabbits. She’s Patient Zero of Syndrome E—she triggered the wave of madness that affected all those other girls. The experiment inevitably left her with severe psychological scars—a violence and aggression deeply ingrained in the very structure of her psyche. But she was also brilliant, and probably picked up where her father left off.”
“I remember Luc Szpilman’s body, and his girlfriend’s… All those knife wounds. There was a kind of frenzy, a blind, incomprehensible rage.”
“The same as with the Egyptian girls, and the film restorer, and the rabbits. Alice is now sixty-two, and still hasn’t stopped killing. Madness and violence have spread deep inside her, the way they’ve spread inside everyone involved in this business.”
Lucie clenched her fists and shook her head, eyes fixed on the ground. “There’s still something I don’t understand. Why did they use deep brain stimulation on Mohamed Abane?”
“It’s simple. There was a sudden, uncontrolled outbreak of Syndrome E at the Legion. Something went wrong, the glitch that led to the murder of five young recruits. Except that Abane, who’d only been wounded in the shoulder, was still alive. No way were they going to let him live because of what had happened, but on the other hand Abane was, like Alice, a Patient Zero. I think that before she had him killed, Alice Tonquin, or Coline Quinat, wanted to experiment on him. She had a living, breathing guinea pig at her disposal, which must not have happened too often. She had her hands on someone who basically was just like her, and who must have made her relive the most painful times of her life. God only knows what tortures she put him through.”
Lucie’s face darkened.
“It’s not only God who knows. We’re going to know soon enough as well.”
She stood up and watched an airplane slicing through the sky. Then she turned back to Sharko, who was nervously fumbling with his cell phone.
“You’re dying to call your chief, aren’t you?”
“I should, yes.”
She gripped his wrists.
“There’s just one thing I’m asking—let me see Alice face-to-face. I need to talk to her, look her in the eye, so that I can get her out of my head. I don’t want to keep thinking of her as a poor innocent, but as the worst sort of killer.”
Sharko recalled his own face-to-face with the dangling body of Atef Abd el-Aal, the morbid sensation of pleasure he’d felt when he’d flicked the lighter and watched the man’s face go up in flames. He leaned closer to Lucie and whispered in her ear:
“This business has been going on for more than half a century. A few more hours won’t make any difference. I’ll call him before we take off. I want to be in the front row and not miss anything either. What did you think?”
60
They had caught the last flight out that evening, destination: Paris. Since the plane wasn’t entirely full, they could sit next to each other. Her forehead flattened against the window, Lucie watched Montreal turn into a great luminous vessel that gradually let itself be swallowed by the shadows of night. A city that she’d only come to know by its darkest side.
Then came the endless black of the ocean, that unknowable mass that quivers with life and holds our fate in its undulating belly.
Next to her, Sharko had put on his sleeping mask and curled up in his seat. His head was nodding, and he could finally let himself go. They might have taken the eight hours of travel to talk, tell each other about their lives, their pasts, get to know each other better, but they both knew that they understood each other best in silence.
Lucie looked with sorrow and desire at that square jaw, that face that had lived through so much. With the back of her hand she lightly brushed the stubble on his cheek and remembered that their relationship was born in the very heart of their own sufferings. There was hope. Deep down, she wanted to convince herself there was hope, that all scorched earth eventually started yielding grain again, one summer or other. The man must have been through the worst life had to offer; day after day, he must have tried to roll a ball of life that eroded more and more with each new incursion into Evil. But Lucie wanted to try. Try to give him back a tenth, a hundredth of what he had lost; she wanted to be there when things weren’t going well, and also when they were. She wanted him to hug her twins to his heart and, when he buried his face in their hair, perhaps think of his own child. She wanted to be with him, period.
She pulled back her hand, parted her lips just slightly to whisper all that to him, even though he was sleeping, because she now knew that a part of his brain would hear it, and that her words would register somewhere in the back of his mind. But no sound emerged from her mouth.
And so she leaned over and simply planted a kiss on his cheek.
Maybe that was how love began.
61
The minute they landed at Orly, everything accelerated. As soon as he’d heard, Martin Leclerc alerted Criminal Division headquarters in Grenoble. Without checking in at Number 36, Sharko had claimed his car at airport parking; he and Lucie headed south, their bags in the trunk.
Their final straight line… The last euphoric, destructive line of coke… It would be soon. At six in the morning, the Grenoble police would enter the home of Coline Quinat, age sixty-two, who lived on Voie de Corato, overlooking the Isère River.
Sharko and Lucie would be first in line.
The landscapes flew by, valleys following fields, the mountains growing taller, breaking through the dry earth. Lucie dozed off and started awake by turns, her clothes rumpled, her hair tangled and unwashed. It didn’t matter—they had to see this through to the end. Like this—in one shot, without stopping, without catching their breath, without thinking twice. They had to get it all out. Have done with it once and for all.
Grenoble was a city with rough associations for the inspector. He remembered the shadows that had cast him to the bottom of the abyss only a few years before. Back then, Eugenie had appeared behind him in the car, sleeping soundly on the rear seat. Sharko didn’t dare believe things could be so much better now, that the little phantom had disappeared from his head for good since his night with Lucie. Had he finally managed to close that door, which for so long had been open onto the faces of Eloise and Suzanne? Had he succeeded in wiping from his lips the honey of his unending grief? For the first time in years, he let himself hope so.