Location: Director's office (The « Bunker », Level 4), Volta SA factory, Ivry-sur-Seine.
Date: December 1995.
Point of view: Omniscient (Internal focus on Lazare Bonaparte).
December 1995 froze the Paris region under a blanket of black frost. The cold bit into the concrete facades of the Ivry-sur-Seine factory, but in the sanctuary of Level 4, the temperature remained invariably fixed at nineteen degrees Celsius.
The Empire's climate was not subject to the vagaries of the Earth's atmosphere; it self-regulated according to the heat dissipation of the servers.
Yet, in the center of the vast mahogany desk, an organic anomaly had just broken the geometric rigor of the room.
The object lay, incongruous, almost obscenely banal, between a deployment report for future Giga Web Centers and the architecture diagrams of the VESLA-III 2390 processor . Lazare Bonaparte had just spent the night planning his world hegemony, moving his factories, his cables and his billions with the coldness of a chess player engaged in a grand strategy game on a planetary scale.
And in the middle of this conceptual battlefield sat a simple, solid, cream-colored envelope with a textured finish. The address had been hand-calligraphed.
Lazare observed her without touching her.
Lazare knew its contents perfectly. The announcement revealed the marriage of his younger brother, Victor, to Valérie, the antique book restorer who had been his partner for over a year.
The ceremony was to take place in exactly three weeks, during the very first week of 1996.
He felt a temporal vertigo seize him. Long time, the time of normal men, had just knocked on the door of his silicon fortress.
While he spent his nights dismantling the world timeline, crushing Silicon Valley, and paving the roads of the twenty-first century with billions of euros in book money, Victor had faced other demons. His younger brother, a young police officer, bore the scars of the bullets from the Avenue de Marigny.
He had seen his own colleagues die on the asphalt, mowed down by an American commando. And yet, instead of succumbing to vengeful paranoia, the cop had chosen to rebuild his life. He had continued to serve the Republic in uniform, he had smiled at Valérie, and he was building a family, oblivious to the financial thermonuclear war rumbling beneath his feet.
One managed industrial empires in the shadows; the other managed the law and the light of everyday life.
The pneumatic hiss of the office doors pulled him from his clinical silence.
Victor Bonaparte entered.
The youngest of the siblings wore neither a dark alpaca suit nor a silk tie. Clad in a thick wool coat, his cheeks reddened by the icy wind outside, he carried with him the scent of the real world. The smell of frost and asphalt.
Victor seemed utterly unimpressed by the Bunker's technological extravagance. The police inspector was used to assessing crime scenes and areas of tension. For him, Lazare wasn't the Leviathan of the European economy.
He remained the taciturn older brother who soldered motherboards in the basement on Rue de la Glacière.
« You should turn up the heat, Lazare, » Victor observed, rubbing his hands together, and strode without hesitation towards the desk. « It's like being in a morgue. »
« The cooling is calculated for the stability of the infrastructure servers, » Lazare replied mechanically, leaning back in his chair, instinctively trying to regain his monarchical posture.
Victor sat down in one of the sturdy visitor armchairs. He glanced at the cream-colored envelope lying on the desk, still sealed.
« You didn't even open it, » he noted, a half-indulgent smile stretching his lips. « Mom told me you looked at it as if it contained anthrax. »
« I know the outcome. I congratulate you, Victor. The commitment you are making is solid. Valérie is a person of great integrity. »
Victor let out a loud, clear laugh that chased away the shadows in the room.
« » High integrity «? My God, Lazarus, it sounds like you're talking about hiring a finance director for your new factory! She's my future wife. That's love, for God's sake! »
The policeman leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. The laughter faded, replaced by a brotherly tenderness, tinged with an unwavering gravity forged by the ordeal of fire.
« That's precisely why I came to see you here, in your lair, before the madness of the preparations begins, » Victor continued. « I want you to be here. I want my older brother to be my best man. »
« I've blocked off the day on my diary, » Lazare assured. « My schedule is locked in. »
« No. You didn't understand me, Lazarus. »
Victor fixed his clear gaze on the obsidian eyes of his elder. As a field cop, he knew how to spot dangerous men, and he wasn't fazed by the aura of cold terror emanating from the Builder.
« I don't want the CEO of Volta SA to come to my wedding. I don't want the Ogre of Ivry. I want my big brother. And that comes with conditions that I've come to dictate to you in person. »
Lazarus's brain went into overdrive, its ballistic analysis algorithms instantly searching for the hidden meaning of the injunction.
« Conditions? » he inquired, his voice cooling by an octave.
« Yes. A truce, » Victor declared.
« I'm a cop, Lazare. I know what it's like to have a target on your back; I paid for it with my own blood. I know your world.
I know what happened on Avenue de Marigny. I know the CIA wants you dead, that you've ruined half the French aristocracy, and that you're the most hunted man in Europe. I know Commander Vauquelin sleeps with his hand on the trigger. »
The younger brother pointed a firm finger towards the glass table.
« But the first week of January is my day. It's Valérie's day. There will be no cold war at the town hall.
I refuse to have the church combed by bomb-sniffing dogs. I refuse to have half the wedding party made up of DGSE operatives or mercenaries disguised as groomsmen. And above all, I absolutely forbid it, Lazare: I don't want Vauquelin snooping around the caterer's kitchens or tasting my wine to see if it's poisoned. »
Victor took a deep breath, dictating his law with the courage of those who face danger daily.
« You will come. But you will come alone. Without an earpiece.
Without a Kevlar bulletproof vest under your jacket. Without your court of miracles in black suits. I ask you to lay down your armor, Lazarus.
Just for twenty-four hours. »
Silence fell once more on Level 4, with a dizzying thickness.
In the leader's mind, the alarm sirens were wailing. The tactical heresy was total. Leaving the protection of the Bunker, exposing oneself in a civilian, public event, with a time and date known in advance, without biometric coverage, without a security perimeter and without emergency extraction planned by the 1st RPIMa... it was the very definition of operational suicide.
Silicon Valley had just been gutted by its patents and was struggling to survive. The French aristocracy had been disintegrated by its tax algorithms. Noble families, ruined with a single phone call to the Quai d'Orsay, could very well have hired hitmen.
The American secret services were just waiting for a crack in his paranoia to put a .308 caliber bullet in his skull and end the European monopoly. Blind spots in a Parisian church or town hall numbered in the hundreds.
If Lazare accepted, he would be voluntarily putting himself in the crosshairs of the entire world. He would be offering his enemies the perfect opportunity to decapitate Volta SA with a single bullet.
But Lazarus glanced down at the invitation. He thought of Eleanor. Of that evening amidst the Byzantine archives when she had made him realize that the fortress he had built was becoming his own emotional tomb.
He had just invented the future of the internet to escape the boredom of his own invulnerability. If he was no longer capable of sharing the joy of a free man without being surrounded by assault rifles, what was the true value of the empire he had forged?
To live in terror of death was tantamount to conceding victory to his enemies. Lazarus had tamed the atom, bent physics to his will, and conquered America; he would not be terrified by the mere fact of attending a civil wedding.
Slowly, Lazare Bonaparte uncrossed his hands. The muscles in his jaw, usually so tense under the weight of macroeconomic responsibilities, relaxed. He looked at his younger brother with a rare, pure sincerity, devoid of all geopolitical cynicism.
He saw the man who had almost died for his own sins, and who was simply asking for the right to peace.
« The armor will be removed, Victor, » Lazare promised, sealing the pact in a low, almost imperceptible voice. « No Volta Secure operator will cross the threshold of your wedding.
I will be there. Naked and defenseless. Like a normal man. »
Victor broke into a broad smile, his face lit by absolute relief. He knew how colossal this concession was for the control-obsessed engineer.
« That's all I wanted to hear, big brother, » replied the policeman, standing up and approaching Lazare to place a firm, affectionate hand on his shoulder. « See you in early January. And try to get some sleep until then.
You've got dark circles under your eyes that would scare a medical examiner. »
Victor left the room, the sound of his footsteps fading into the long concrete corridor.
Left alone, Lazare remained motionless. His obsidian gaze plunged once more into the void of the night, beyond the bay window. The year 1995 ended in absolute industrial triumph, the infrastructure network weaving its web across the globe with the planned birth of the Giga Web Centers.
But 1996 would open with the greatest security breach it had ever conceded.
The challenge of this new year would not only be to power the global internet. It would be to survive, for one day, one's own accepted vulnerability. The moment of truth was approaching.
Location: Volta Secure Command Room (Level 4), Ivry-sur-Seine.
Date: End of December 1995.
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding focus on Commander Vauquelin, Karim Belkacem and Lazare Bonaparte).
Volta Secure 's central cell with the dull violence of an orbital strike.
In the command center, usually shrouded in a studious gloom where encrypted communications crackled, the silence that followed Lazare Bonaparte's directive was absolute, almost suffocating. Security analysts, former DGSE agents, and surveillance operators stopped typing.
All eyes turned toward the center of the room.
Commander Vauquelin, the bald giant who led the praetorian guard of the Volta Empire, had just broken the tip of a ballpoint pen between his thick fingers.
The former officer of the 1st RPIMa was breathing with exaggerated slowness, desperately trying to contain the incandescent fury that made the vein in his temple bulge. Facing him, Lazare Bonaparte stood with his hands folded behind his back, his face as impassive as a slab of granite.
To the right of Lazarus, Karim Belkacem nervously ran a hand over his face. The technical director, urgently summoned for this impromptu crisis meeting, was struggling to grasp the information.
« I beg your pardon, Mr. President, » Vauquelin said, his voice hoarse with professional anger.
« I think the acoustics of this room have played tricks on me. You have just ordered me to lift the entire close protection detail for the first week of January? »
« The acoustics are perfect, Commander, » Lazare replied in an icy voice. « For my brother's wedding, I will be attending in civilian clothes.
Alone. Without an escort, without an armored vehicle, without any advance security perimeter. And I strictly forbid you from pre-positioning men for cover or using sound equipment at the ceremony venue. »
Vauquelin closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, summoning all the discipline of his years of service not to scream.
« That's clinical dementia, Lazare! » Karim suddenly exploded, unable to maintain the officer's military composure. « You want to parade around a Parisian church and town hall, in full view of everyone, on the day of a wedding whose date and time are printed on invitations circulating all over Paris?
It's pure and simple suicide! »
The technical director approached, pointing a trembling finger towards the control screens that were mapping global threats.
« Have you lost your mind? The CIA hasn't gotten over the Intel crash! They're bleeding dry in Washington, and they know you're the one holding the knife.
You've ruined half of the French aristocracy with your tax algorithms; the La Rochefoucaulds and their allies can afford to pay any hitman in Eastern Europe to get revenge. You're the most hated and most powerful man in Europe! »
« Mr. Belkacem is right, » the special forces officer agreed, stepping forward to join forces with the engineer. « Boss, a wedding is an absolute security nightmare.
A dense crowd, unpredictable movements, guests bringing unknown plus-ones, an outside caterer… The blind spots are countless! A sniper positioned on a rooftop opposite the entrance, a delayed-action poison slipped into a champagne glass, a lone gunman in the nave… I can't secure an environment like that without deploying fifty men! »
Lazarus did not back down. He let the fire of their anxieties burn against the wall of his own stoicism.
« I'm not asking you to secure the area, Vauquelin. I'm ordering you to stay out of it. »
« But why?! » Karim shouted. « Why take such an absurd risk when we're just months away from launching the global infrastructure for the Giga Web Centers ?
If you get shot, the Empire collapses with you! The stock will plummet, the Americans will tear us apart! »
Lazarus stared at his technical director. In his obsidian eyes, Karim did not read the suicidal madness he feared, but an abyssal weariness, the fatigue of a king imprisoned within his own walls.
« Because Victor asked me to, » replied Lazare with a simplicity that clashed with the paranoid logic of the play.
« Victor is a traumatized cop who wants to play at being part of a normal family! » retorted Vauquelin, forgetting all respect for hierarchy. « He almost died on the Avenue de Marigny! He knows better than anyone what the enemy is capable of! »
« And it is precisely because he nearly died for my sins that he has the right to demand a day of peace, » Lazarus declared, his voice hardening as he regained his imperial authority. « Listen to me carefully, both of you. »
Lazarus stepped forward, forcing the officer and the engineer to take a step back under the pressure of his aura.
« We have built the most impregnable fortress on the planet. We control information, we dictate our law to banks and armies. But if this power prevents me from attending my own little brother's wedding without turning the church into a militarized war zone, then we have lost.
If Washington's terror forces me to live cloistered in this bunker for the rest of my days, then I am their prisoner. And I refuse to be a captive of the empire I myself created. »
He swept his gaze around the operating room, his verdict falling like a guillotine blade.
« If they want to kill me, they'll try. But on January 4th, I won't be the president of Volta SA. I'll simply be the groom's older brother.
I'm imposing a total blackout on my movements for those twenty-four hours. If I see even the slightest trace of one of your operators, Vauquelin, I will consider you a hostile threat. Is that perfectly clear? »
Commander Vauquelin clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles turned white. The rage of the thwarted protector burned in his veins, but he knew the futility of disobedience against this man. He swallowed hard, the bitter taste of surrender lingering in his mouth.
« At your service, sir, » murmured the veteran, his face ravaged by worry.
Lazare nodded slowly, then pivoted on his heels to leave the operating room.
In the days that followed, the atmosphere in Ivry-sur-Seine became stifling. December dragged on in a pervasive, underlying tension. Deep in the basements, the first IMPERATOR server racks destined for the Giga Web Centers began to spin in the dark, devouring terabytes of data to prepare for the birth of the global Internet as Lazare had envisioned it.
The supply chain was stabilized, the Strasbourg foundry churned out its silicon wafers with clockwork precision. The machinery of the Empire ran flawlessly, cold and methodical.
And yet, as the new year approached, the engineer's mind was no longer focused on mathematics.
On the morning of January 4, 1996, the sky over Paris awoke under a veil of frost. The cold was sharp, silent.
In his apartment on the rue d'Assas, Lazare Bonaparte stood before the large mirror in his dressing room. He wasn't wearing armor. No Kevlar vest.
No hidden earpiece. He put on a simple three-piece suit of dark wool, adjusted his tie, and placed his watch on his wrist.
His lower drawer, the one that usually held his loaded Walther P228, remained hopelessly closed.
For the first time in years, the former shadow operative felt the bite of emptiness. He was naked. Stripped of the lethality that defined him.
A moving target, isolated, preparing to walk into the daylight.
Lazare looked at himself one last time in the mirror. He knew that in the shadows of the civilized world, on the other side of the Atlantic or in the backstreets of the capital, the wolves were waiting for the slightest opening.
The slightest lapse in attention.
But thinking of Victor's smile, Lazarus closed his eyes, breathed in the room's icy air, and turned his back on the mirror. He opened his apartment door and walked toward the light of 1996, ready to confront his own blood, and the terrifying fragility of peace.