Location: Private apartments and headquarters of Volta SA (The « Bunker », Level 4), Ivry-sur-Seine.
Date: February 28, 1996, 07:00.
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding focus on Commander Vauquelin and Lazare Bonaparte).
The large control screen in the director's office displayed a time grid whose immaculate purity was dizzying.
At seven o'clock in the morning, in the sterile silence of Level 4, Édouard Renault-Tessier and Karim Belkacem stared at the monitor with a bewilderment bordering on panic. The CEO of Volta SA's schedule for the next twenty-four hours had been completely, methodically, and manually cleared.
No board meeting. No progress report on the 0.4-micron etching at the Alsatian MegaFab. No teleconference with Huawei's assembly subcontractors.
No diplomatic briefing with the Chinese government. The schedule of the most powerful man in the European tech industry was a blank page.
A dead day. An absolute anomaly in the hyper-growth mechanics that had dictated the pulse of the Empire since its creation.
« Is this a synchronization server error? » murmured Edward, adjusting his tortoiseshell glasses, his brain desperately searching for a rational explanation.
« I checked the system logs three times, » Karim replied, arms crossed, his expression darkening. « Lazare overwrote the entries himself, from his private terminal, at three in the morning.
He imposed an administrator-level lockout for the day. No one can force an appointment. »
The former investment banker felt a cold sweat trickle down his neck. Lazarus's absence never meant rest. The erasure of an entire day usually concealed the preparation of a cataclysmic tactical strike.
A hostile takeover, a dismantling maneuver against Intel, or a sovereign crisis.
But at the other end of the factory, in the secure basements reserved for the management's transport fleet, Commander Vauquelin knew the true nature of this date.
February 28th.
The former officer of the 1st RPIMa stood ramrod straight, leaning against the rear door of the thick armored Mercedes sedan. The V12 engine idled, exhaling a white mist into the icy air of the underground parking garage.
Around him, the security detail was at its maximum. Two unmarked SUVs filled with heavily armed personnel flanked the presidential car.
Vauquelin looked at his service watch. 07:15.
Volta's chief of staff had anticipated this day with the meticulousness of a general preparing an assault in hostile territory. Since the death of Alexandre de Vigan, assassinated by CIA agents on a Dutch highway, Lazare Bonaparte had established a ritual.
In 1993, 1994, and 1995, on this very date and at this very hour, the young billionaire demanded to be taken to the Passy Cemetery in Paris's 16th arrondissement. He would stand before the black marble tomb of his former chief strategist for a silent tête-à-tête with his own ghost.
Vauquelin had left nothing to chance. At dawn, he had pre-positioned snipers on the rooftops surrounding the Trocadéro. His men in civilian clothes had combed the cemetery paths, checked neighboring vaults for remote-controlled explosives, and secured every exit.
For one morning, the necropolis had become a paramilitary enclave.
The metallic clinking of the private elevator pulled the veteran from his radio checks. The solid doors opened.
Vauquelin stiffened, ready to open the armored door of the Mercedes, expecting to see the Ogre of Ivry emerge in his usual cold wool armor, that long dark overcoat and double-breasted suit which gave him the appearance of an emperor in mourning.
But the man who stepped out of the elevator froze him in his tracks.
Lazare Bonaparte wore no suit. No black overcoat. He sported an outfit of ascetic austerity, almost brutal in its simplicity: a sturdy black cashmere turtleneck that clung to his lean frame, dark canvas trousers, and supple leather boots.
There was no worldly majesty in his bearing, only the formidable efficiency of a panther at rest.
Lazare stepped forward, his obsidian gaze sweeping over the armed convoy, the switched-off flashing lights and the martial posture of his own militia.
« Cut the engines, Commander, » ordered the Builder's flat, gravelly voice.
Vauquelin blinked, convinced he had misunderstood.
« Sir? The bypass route is confirmed. The snipers are in position on Passy. The cemetery is clear. We can begin our pilgrimage. »
« There is no pilgrimage, » Lazare stated sharply with a wave of his hand. « Tell your snipers to pack up their equipment and return to base. I will not be leaving the bunker today. »
The former commando was speechless. Since he had been serving the young titan, this was the first time he had seen him renounce a directive he himself had set.
« You... you're cancelling the visit, boss? » Vauquelin stammered, trying to decipher his employer's stoic expression. « It's the anniversary of Monsieur de Vigan's death.
The flowers have been ordered. Everything is in place. »
« The device is useless in the face of mathematical evidence, Vauquelin, » replied Lazare, approaching his security officer.
The sixty-year-old engineer, trapped in the body of a twenty-seven-year-old, placed a firm hand on the armored hood of the Mercedes. His mind was no longer burdened by the weight of bourgeois tradition.
He saw the matrix of survival in all its asymmetrical purity.
« I went there in 1993, 1994, and 1995, » Lazare explained with the clinical detachment of an analyst dissecting a network vulnerability. « Always on February 28th.
Always at sunrise. Always through the same main entrance on Rue des Réservoirs. »
He stared straight into the eyes of the veteran of the 1st RPIMa.
« That's what we call the Rule of Chance, Commander. Repeating an intimate routine on a calendar basis, on a highly symbolic target and in an open environment that we cannot control one hundred percent, is the exact definition of tactical suicide. »
Vauquelin swallowed, his own soldier's instinct finally clashing with the overwhelming logic of the young billionaire.
« The NSA has the same schedule as me, » Lazare continued, his voice sinking into absolute darkness. « The CIA has Alexandre de Vigan's file.
They know I worship the man. If I were in charge of their special operations at Langley, I wouldn't try to hack Level 4 firewalls or sabotage Air France flights. I'd hire a sniper, put him in an apartment overlooking the Passy Cemetery, and tell him to wait until the morning of February 28th, his eye glued to his thermal imaging scope, propped against the marble of the tomb. »
Lazarus straightened up, sweeping away with a wave of his hand the illusory security that Vauquelin thought he was offering him.
« The probability that a sniper rifle is currently aimed at Alexander's tomb is greater than seventy percent. Going there today is like handing them the Empire on a silver platter. »
The special forces officer took the blow hard. His boss's paranoia wasn't an illness; it was Volta SA's ultimate immune system. A hyper-lucidity that sacrificed even grief on the altar of survival.
Yet, a part of the man beneath the uniform rebelled against this cold arithmetic. Vauquelin knew the unique bond that had united Lazare with the old financial shark. Alexandre de Vigan was not just an employee; he had been the cynical mentor, the spiritual father in the jungle of predatory capitalism.
« It's disrespectful, » Vauquelin whispered, risking insubordination out of human loyalty. « Not going... It's letting fear dictate your grief. It's abandoning her. »
The air in the underground parking lot seemed to freeze. The silence became so dense that the faint hum of the neon lights appeared deafening.
Lazare Bonaparte did not shout. He did not call his officer to order. A slow, infinitely cruel grimace, laden with morbid irony, stretched the pale lips of the young leader.
« You never understood who Alexandre de Vigan really was, Vauquelin, » murmured Lazare, gently shaking his head.
He stepped away from the armored car, turning his back on the armed convoy to face the reinforced elevator door.
« Alexandre was a shark. A monster from the old world who delighted in seeing the blood of his rivals spilled on the parquet floors of boardrooms, » Lazarus declared, revealing the dead man's true nature.
« He despised weakness, he abhorred nostalgia, and he considered pity a mere accounting error. »
Lazare pressed the elevator call button. The cold metal beneath his index finger immediately reconnected him to the brutality of his silicon empire.
« If he saw me today, if he saw the CEO of the most powerful technology holding company in the world risking having a .308 caliber bullet lodged in his skull for the simple romanticism of going to place a bouquet of withered flowers on a piece of marble... Alexandre would spit in my face. »
The steel doors slid open with a mechanical hiss. Lazare stepped into the cabin and turned one last time to his head of security, his face devoid of all sentimentality, frozen in the implacable certainty of his duty.
« The only tribute worth paying a man like him, Commander, is to stay alive to finish dismantling America. Dismantle the apparatus. My day belongs to him, but I'll spend it here, in the forge. »
The doors closed on Lazarus, leaving Vauquelin alone in the exhaust fumes. The old soldier shook his head, both terrified and awestruck by the man he was protecting. The CIA would never have him today.
Lazarus had just proven that to rule the future, one had to be capable of erasing one's own rituals without the slightest hesitation. The pilgrimage was canceled. The Leviathan remained safe.
Location: Director's office, The « Bunker » (Level 4), Volta SA factory, Ivry-sur-Seine.
Date: February 28, 1996, 2:00 PM.
Point of view: Internal (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte).
The muffled hiss of the armored door closed on the outside world, and with it, the clamor of the Empire faded away.
Alone in the vastness of his deliberately dimly lit office, Lazare Bonaparte had not switched on the ceiling lights. The weighty midnight-blue velvet curtains remained drawn, blocking out the February rain that continued to soak the steel structures of Ivry-sur-Seine.
On the immense wall of cathode-ray tube screens, the routing maps of the Giga Web Centers and the orbital trajectories of the ASTROLABE constellation had been switched off. The matrix had fallen silent.
The lines of code no longer scrolled.
The silence that then settled in was not a mere absence of noise. It was a physical mass, an invisible block of granite that repelled the frenzy of hyper-growth, leaving only the slow breathing of Lazarus.
Lazare approached the mahogany console. His long, pale fingers brushed the crystal of a short glass, in which rested an index finger of an extremely old, amber-colored, broad cognac, its aromas of rancio and ancient oak permeating the room's air conditioning.
He picked up the glass, swirled the liquid with a slow, mechanical motion, and took a tiny sip. The warmth of the alcohol burned his throat, a raw, biological sensation that, for a few hours, shattered the executive's clinical paranoia.
He sat in the dim light, his back against the black leather of his armchair, and let his mind drift away from the present.
For the sixty-year-old man trapped in the twenty-seven-year-old body, time was not a straight line, but a network of sediments. And on this February 28th, the anniversary of Alexandre de Vigan's death, Lazare Bonaparte's synaptic memory underwent a forced regression, a return to the system's original root.
His brain, freed from the algorithms of global cyberwarfare and the 120 billion euro balance sheets of the French Ministry of Finance, plunged vertically into the abyss of his own beginnings.
The year 1987. Nine years earlier. A chronological eternity.
In the darkness of the Bunker, Lazare relived the cellar. The primitive sanctuary on Rue de la Glacière, in Paris's 13th arrondissement. A cramped, unsanitary space, suffocated beneath a leprous concrete slab where dampness seeped along the walls, tracing maps of brackish mold.
Central heating was a pipe dream in winter; a simple oil-filled electric radiator, pushed to its limits, spewed out a dry heat that struggled to dissipate the frost seeping in through the basement window opening onto the street.
The air in that cellar had a unique texture, a chemical signature that Lazare could almost smell reborn in his nostrils: a pungent mixture of overheated tin, rosin-based soldering flux, cheap instant coffee, and stale tobacco. The ashtrays, simple tomato paste cans, overflowed with cigarette butts that Karim Belkacem nervously stubbed out between lines of code.
Karim. Lazare saw his lifelong friend again, the shy scholarship student from Jussieu, his hair disheveled, his face lit green by the pale glow of a dismantled Amstrad CPC 6128 monitor. The young Kabyle spent his nights tearing his hair out over lists of instructions in pure assembly language, hammering away at a noisy plastic keyboard to optimize the first tentative steps of the VoltaOS kernel.
They didn't have Class 1 cleanrooms, ASML lithography machines, or floating earthquake-resistant floor slabs on hydraulic jacks. Their worktables were simple plywood boards placed on rickety construction trestles.
Their oscilloscopes were secondhand models bought from bankrupt university labs.
They were outcasts. Artisans of the invisible, manipulating the geometry of microcontrollers by the light of an articulated architect's lamp whose spring creaked with every movement.
It was in this chaos of tangled cables, blank circuit boards and empty pizza boxes that Alexandre de Vigan descended for the very first time.
Lazare recalled the aesthetic rupture of that moment with eidetic clarity. The creak of the worm-eaten wooden door opening onto the street, the chill of the icebox rushing into the cellar, and that figure emerging from the gloom of the staircase.
Alexandre. A man in his forties, strikingly elegant, wearing a double-breasted gray wool flannel suit from Caraceni, a substantial silk tie, and polished Oxfords that had never trod any floor other than the carpets of the Right Bank's grand hotels or the marble floors of investment banks.
A shark of high finance, lost amidst the technological mire of two suburban kids.
De Vigan had stopped at the bottom of the last step, observing the makeshift laboratory not condescendingly, but with that predatory smile, that grimace of a predator who sought not morality, but the flaw in the system. He ran his gloved finger across the top of a cathode-ray tube television used as a diagnostic monitor, collecting a layer of carbon dust.
Then he looked at Lazare.
One glance into the taciturn teenager's dark eyes was all it took for the capitalist shark to understand. Alexandre hadn't seen a computer whiz or an inventor of civilian gadgets. He had perceived a temporal anomaly, the telluric power of an iron will poised to bend the century to its will.
He understood that the cellar's exterior concealed the engine of a Leviathan that would devour the world.
« We don't sell silicon, Lazarus, » de Vigan had told him that day, his muffled, fear-mongering voice echoing between the damp bricks of the Glacière. « We sell the terror of becoming obsolete. America has gold and armies, but you… you have time.
Give me your machines, and I'll build you a throne whose rent the kings of Wall Street will pay on their knees. »
The Faustian pact had been sealed on a Formica coffee table, between a smoking soldering iron and a wad of cheap banknotes. Alexander had brought the venom of commerce, the suicidal audacity of the world's predatory elite, and the swagger of dominant minorities.
He had evangelized Europe, robbed the boards of Bull and Siemens, terrorized the Paris Stock Exchange, and imposed the Voltaic Trinity on bankers who didn't even understand the difference between a bit and a transistor. He had been the armed wing of commercial enlightenment while Lazarus forged the sword in the darkness of Level 4.
And two years later, the shark had its throat cut on a Dutch highway.
Lazare raised the glass to his lips again, the burning sensation of the cognac bringing him back to the stark reality of his utter solitude. The disappearance of Alexandre de Vigan in Eindhoven in February 1992 remained the only wound that none of his supercomputers had been able to cauterize.
It was the original tactical miscalculation, the flaw in the matrix of his prescience that Lazarus could not forgive himself for.
In seeking to honor his friend's memory, in applying to the letter the doctrine of total violence that Alexandre had instilled in him, Lazare had been transformed. To avenge de Vigan's blood, he had drowned Europe in the blood of CIA agents during the Night of the Long Knives in the spring of 1992.
To protect his pack from American reprisals, he had personally executed the SAD operatives on Avenue de Marigny before Victor's eyes. And to force them to survive in this geopolitical slaughterhouse, he had shattered the innocence of his own family on Christmas Eve in Rouen, appearing before them as the necessary monster hidden beneath the bed of their republican illusions.
The price of continental technological independence had been exorbitant. Pure autarky demanded sacrificial sprees, a constant immolation of flesh on the altar of national interest. The year 1995 had just ended with the explosion of the Alsatian MegaFab, where the madness of the production rates imposed to saturate the Chinese market had nearly vitrified the factory and liquefied the bones of three technicians in the hydrofluoric acid fumes.
The blood of the workers from the Rhine plain had stained the bricks of its fortress, reminding the demiurge that matter had limits that its lines of code refused to acknowledge.
He had damned himself so that they could keep their hands clean. He had become the pariah, the outcast whom his own clan fled from during family meals, the man whose soul Madeleine prayed to for salvation while Auguste sealed top-secret decrees at the Élysée Palace to protect his assets.
Lazare placed the empty crystal glass on Macassar's table. The dimness of the Bunker seemed to reflect the utter desolation of his own mind. The anachronism of his existence as a time traveler weighed on his shoulders like a leaden cloak.
He had the gold, he controlled the single European currency that now circulated in the pockets of three hundred million citizens, his ASTROLABE microsatellites monitored the Atlantic from low Earth orbit... He possessed the reality of this planet.
But the cellar on Rue de la Glacière was a distant memory. Karim's bursts of laughter over hardware glitches, the smell of lukewarm coffee shared in the honest fatigue of the early days, Alexandre's predatory good humor adjusting his cuffs amidst the chaos of integrated circuits...
All of that had been crushed, metabolized by the monstrous growth of the 120 billion Euro Leviathan that he himself had engendered.
The blood-red digital clock, embedded in the brickwork of the technical wall, silently ticked off the seconds, inexorably approaching midnight.
February 28th was coming to an end. The dead day was drawing to a close.
Lazare Bonaparte rose from his armchair. His body, aching from the scars of past battles, betrayed no weakness as he straightened his high shoulders in the dim light. He approached the main console and placed his index finger on the main switch on the monitoring wall.
A sharp clicking sound tore through the silence of the room.
Instantly, the Bunker lit up. Dozens of CRT monitors blazed with a bluish light, flooding the executive office with the cold luminescence of lines of code and variable matrix graphics. The load cards of the IMPERATOR II servers resumed their green pulses.
Logistics flows to Asia blinked across the screen. The Volta Empire was awakening from its enforced lethargy, demanding its sovereign with the ruthless voracity of the global economic machine.
Lazare adjusted the collar of his black sweater. The interlude of remembrance was over. The ghosts of Alexandre de Vigan and the Rue de la Glacière had just been relegated to the dead zones of his working memory, archived under the seal of the purest secrecy.
The winter truce was over. The war of attrition against America and the future industrial assaults of Samsung demanded the full allocation of his computing power. Lazarus stared at the screens, his face like marble, ready to drown the century under his own laws.
Location: Crisis Room (Level -1), Ministry of Defence, Hôtel de Brienne, Paris.
Date: February 28, 1996, 11:45 PM.
Viewpoint: Omniscient (Focus on the French intelligence apparatus).
While the sovereign of Ivry-sur-Seine sealed his own mourning in the gloom of his bunker, the Republic, for its part, kept its watchmen on alert under the frosty lawns of the Hôtel de Brienne.
In the Cyber Defense crisis room, the atmosphere was one of military severity. Inspector General François-Xavier de Montcalm stood behind the row of terminals where the officers of the Third Class were busy at work.
Lieutenant Chaland, his eyes ringed with dark circles from analyzing transatlantic traffic, was manipulating the diagnostic modules of Project Richelieu , the steganographic parasite that France had discreetly planted in the NSA's communication networks.
« No suspicious activity in the Passy area? » asked Montcalm, his voice echoing dully between the bare concrete walls.
« Nothing, Inspector General, » replied the lieutenant, without taking his eyes off the encrypted logs. « Our DST teams providing perimeter coverage around the cemetery recorded no anomalies. The American services didn't move.
The three snipers from CIA's Alpha Unit whom we spotted yesterday afternoon in an apartment on Rue des Réservoirs left the scene at 10:00 p.m., visibly disappointed by the complete absence of their target. »
Montcalm let out a thin, wolfish smile, rubbing his cold hands together.
« Bonaparte has outmaneuvered them once again, » the technocrat noted. « His mathematical paranoia is an exact science. By sacrificing his own mourning ritual, he has just squandered their best opportunity to strike this year.
Washington was expecting the man; they found only empty marble. »
The Director of the DGSE, who had just entered the crisis room, took off his coat and approached Chaland's console.
« Lazare Bonaparte's silence is our best life insurance, gentlemen, » the spymaster declared in a hushed tone. The Ministry of Finance has just approved the repatriation of two billion euros in Japanese royalties for the first month of 1996.
The Treasury is flush with cash, and Jacques Chirac signed the decree extending the customs extraterritorial zone for the Alsatian MegaFab this evening. The Franco-German axis is cemented by Volta's gold.
The Director leaned over the young lieutenant's shoulder, his gaze fixed on a green gauge that was oscillating slightly at the bottom of the central screen.
« And our parasite? What's the status of the Richelieu project ? »
Lieutenant Chaland gave a sharp smile, his fingers typing an interrogation command on the isolated terminal.
« The molecular infiltration is a complete success, Mr. Director. The export routers that Volta Hardware delivered last month to major communications hubs on the U.S.
East Coast are incorporating the boot microcode without the knowledge of the Federal Reserve engineers. The Richelieu virus has lodged itself directly in the Level 2 cache of their new Intel processors.
It's lying dormant inside their own silicon. »
The officer zoomed in on a tree of encrypted data, encrypted by Volta Secure's asymmetric protocols.
« The exfiltration works drop by drop, » Chaland explained with the precision of a scientist. « The micro-fragments of stolen data, containing the U.S.
State Department's diplomatic cables concerning Clinton's trade blockade and the details of their 'Pivot to Asia,' are discreetly camouflaged within the TCP/IP headers of their own ordinary civilian traffic. Their servers think they're sending routine administrative emails to the base at Pearl Harbor or Tokyo, but in reality, they're transmitting their entire strategic secret to us in chunks of a few bytes.
It's pure, invisible, and completely undetectable by their security probes. »
Montcalm nodded, an intellectual vertigo seizing him at the monstrosity of the vise that the State and industrialist had just closed on the West.
« Lazare Bonaparte designed the needle, and our military mathematicians inject the serum, » summarized the Inspector General of Finance. « America has barricaded itself behind its tariff walls to save Intel and Microsoft, thinking it had secured itself against our trade dumping.
They don't realize that we already inhabit their microprocessors. We read their thoughts before they even reach their hard drives. »
The clock in the crisis room showed 00:00. March 1, 1996 was beginning.
The Director of the DGSE retrieved his tortoiseshell glasses and put them back on his nose, his face assuming the imperturbable severity of a master of the shadows. The commemoration of de Vigan's passing was officially over.
The time for nostalgia gave way to the reality of global surveillance.
« The century promises to be magnificently dark, gentlemen, » concluded the head of French intelligence, turning toward the exit of the Brienne bunker. « Bonaparte has stabilized his forge. Our eyes are lighting up one after another with the ASTROLABE program .
Keep an eye on Project Richelieu . The Eagle thinks he has closed his borders, but he has just entrusted the keys to his own cage to the silicon of the Republic. Get to work. »
The officers of the Third Class plunged back into their lists, keyboards resuming their frenetic clatter in the dim light of the Parisian basement. Miles away, in Ivry-sur-Seine, Lazare Bonaparte's monitors cast the same green reflections on the brick walls of his ivory tower.
The Volta Empire and the French Republic marched in step, implacable, cold, and sovereign, toward the absolute conquest of the new century. The silicon symphony no longer tolerated any false notes.