"God be praised!"
PART IX
51
Mathilde Wilcrau had never been so near to a positron camera.
From the outside, it looked just like a traditional scanner: a wide, white wheel with a stainless-steel stretcher inside, equipped with various analytical and measuring instruments; nearby a stand supporting a drip; a small trolley covered with vacuum-packed syringes and plastic bottles. In the half-light of the room, it made for a strange construction. A sort of massive hieroglyph.
To get access to such a machine, the fugitives had had to go as far as the University Hospital in Reims, some sixty miles from Paris. Eric Ackermann knew the head of its radiology department and had telephoned him at his home. The doctor had immediately dashed out to welcome the neurologist effusively. He looked like a frontier officer, receiving the visit of a famous general.
For six hours, Ackermann had been slaving feverishly around the machine. In the control room, Mathilde Wilcrau watched him at work. Leaning over Anna, who was lying with her head inside the machine, he was giving her injections, checking the drip and projecting images onto a tilted mirror inside the upper reaches of the cylinder. And most of all, he was talking.
As she watched him through the window, running around like a mad thing, Mathilde could not resist succumbing to a certain fascination. This lanky, immature creature, to whom she would not lend her car, had pulled off a unique scientific experiment in a vicious political context. He had made a huge step forward in the understanding and control of the brain.
In other circumstances, this advance could have led to major therapeutic developments. It would have inscribed his name in the history books of neurology and psychiatry. Would the Ackermann method get a second chance?
The tall redhead was still busying himself and twitching nervously. Mathilde read between his gestures. Apart from the tension caused by this special session, Ackermann was drugged up to the eyeballs. He was hooked on speed or other uppers. In fact, as soon as they had arrived in the hospital, he had made a shopping trip to the pharmacy. Such synthetic drugs suited him perfectly. He was a thing possessed, living by and for chemical substances…
Six hours.
Lulled by the purring of the computers, Mathilde had nodded off on several occasions. Then she had woken up and tried to gather her thoughts. In vain. One idea blinded her, like a moth by the light.
Anna's metamorphosis.
The day before, she had picked up a vulnerable creature with amnesia, as fragile as a baby. Then the discovery of that henna had changed everything. The woman had crystallized around that revelation, like quartz. At that moment, she seemed to understand that the worst was no longer to be feared, it was to be sought-and confronted. It was she who had decided to take the enemy by surprise and trap Eric Ackermann, despite the risks involved.
It was she who was now in command.
Then, during the questioning in the garage, Sema Gokalp had appeared. The mysterious working girl, with all her contradictions. The asylum-seeker from Anatolia who spoke perfect French. The prisoner in a state of shock, whose silence and altered face concealed a different past… Who hid behind this new name? Who was this person who was capable of transforming herself utterly into someone else?
The answer would come back with her memory. Anna Heymes. Sema Gokalp… she was like a Russian doll, with layered identities, with each name, each appearance containing another secret.
Eric Ackermann got up from his chair. He removed the catheter from Anna's arm, pushed away the drip and tilted up the mirror in the machine. The experiment was over. Mathilde stretched, then tried one more time to put her thoughts in order. She just couldn't. Another image chased that hope away.
Henna.
Those red lines on the hands of Muslim women seemed to trace out an unbridgeable frontier between her Parisian world and the distant life of Sema Gokalp. A culture of deserts, arranged marriages and ancestral rites. A savage, terrifying universe born of scorched winds, predators and rock.
Mathilde closed her eyes.
Tattooed hands-the brown whirls curling around the palms of callused hands, about dark wrists and knotty fingers. Not an inch of virgin flesh: this red line was unbroken, it stretched out, unraveling, turning back on itself, in loops and curls, giving birth to a hypnotic geography…
"She's asleep."
Mathilde jumped. Ackermann was standing in front of her. His white coat was loose around his shoulders, like a flag. Beads of sweat winked on his forehead. Twitches and shakes racked his body, but a strange solidity also emanated from his figure-the confidence of know-how beneath the nerves of the addict.
"How did it go?"
He took a cigarette from the computer desk and lit up. He inhaled deeply, then replied through a tunnel of blue smoke. "I started by giving her an injection of flumazenil, the antidote to Valium. Then I wiped out the conditioning I had given her, by activating each zone of her memory using Oxygen-15. I retraced my steps precisely"
He sketched a vertical axis with his cigarette. "With the same words, and same symbols. It's a shame I don't have Heymes's photos or videos anymore. But I think most of the work has been done. For the moment, her ideas are rather muddled. Her real memories are coming back, little by little. Anna Heymes is going to disappear and leave her place to the initial personality. But watch out!" he said waving his cigarette. "This is purely experimental!"
A real loony. Mathilde thought. A mix of coldness and exaltation. She was going to say something, but another flash stopped her. Henna, once again. The lines on the hand coming alive. The hooks, whirls and twists slithering along the veins, curling up around the phalanxes, until they reach the nails stained with pigments…
"Right now, this won't be much fun for her," Ackermann went on, taking another drag. "The various levels of her consciousness are going to telescope. Sometimes she won't be able to tell the difference between what is true and what is false. But her original memory will slowly begin to dominate. With flumazenil, there are also risks of convulsions, but I've given her a little something to reduce the side effects…"
Mathilde pushed back her hair. She must look like a ghost. "What about the faces?"
He chased away the smoke with a vague gesture. "That should sort itself out, too. Her reference points are going to become more fixed. When her memory returns, her reactions should become more stable. But I repeat: all of this is extremely new and-"
Mathilde noticed a movement behind the window. She rushed at once into the room. Anna was already sitting on the table of the PET scanner, her legs dangling down, leaning back on her hands. "How do you feel?"
A smile flickered over her face. Her pale lips barely stood out from her skin. Ackermann came back and turned off the last of the machines. "How do you feel?" Mathilde repeated.
Anna glanced at her in hesitation. Mathilde understood at once. This was no longer the same person. Those indigo eyes were smiling at her from inside a different consciousness. "Got a cigarette?" she asked, in a voice that was seeking normal range.
Mathilde handed her a Marlboro. She looked at the slender hand that took it. It was almost as if she could see that henna as a filigree. Flowers, spikes and snakes curling around a clenched fist. A tattooed fist, holding an automatic pistol.
Behind the mist of smoke, the woman with the dark bangs murmured, "I would rather have been Anna Heymes."
52
Falmières railway station, six miles west of Reims. was a solitary building, dropped alongside the tracks in the middle of the countryside. A millstone building stuck between the black horizon and the silence of the night. Yet with its small yellow lantern and laminated glass umbrella roof, it had a reassuring look about it. Its slates, its walls divided into two blue and white bands and its wooden fences gave it the appearance of a shiny toy from an electric train set.