Industrial outskirts of Eindhoven, Netherlands — February 17, 1992 — 5:56 p.m.
Omniscient (internal focus shifting between Lazare Bonaparte, Alexandre de Vigan, and the tactical reality of the ambush)
The Dutch rain no longer fell; it hammered against the body of the Mercedes S-Class with the violence of machine-gun fire. On the A2 motorway skirting the centre of Eindhoven, the late-afternoon sky had already taken on the livid hue of a premature night, thick with fog and exhaust. Inside the cabin, though, the atmosphere was that of a bubble outside time, a capsule of beige leather and burr-walnut panelling speeding toward history.
Alexandre de Vigan was euphoric. It was a cold, cerebral intoxication, the kind felt by men who have just bent the world to their will without firing a single shot. The chief strategist of Volta S.A. had opened his briefcase on his lap. The dimmed glow of the dome light lit his face, its features drawn with fatigue but lit from within by triumph.
"Tomorrow morning, when the Paris Bourse opens, I want the financial press flooded," de Vigan was saying, his voice vibrating with ferocious energy. "I have already prepared the talking points for Les Échos and the Financial Times. We are not merely going to announce the purchase of ASML. We are going to announce it as a sovereign restructuring of Europe. Intel will wake up with a monumental hangover. They thought they had us cornered with their lawyers in California, and we have just bought the factory that makes the oxygen they breathe!"
Seated on his left, Lazare Bonaparte listened with half an ear. The Ogre of Ivry watched the yellow glow of the sodium streetlamps melt across the tinted glass. He was twenty-five years old, but his soul was past sixty. And that soul of a veteran of the shadows, forged in the carnage of 2026 and honed by the conspiracies of this second life, did not share his banker's euphoria.
A primal instinct, an imperceptible vibration at the base of his neck, had begun to trouble him. It was the metallic scent of danger — the one he had caught in Bali, seconds before the bomb pulverized the Beachwalk Shopping Center.
Lazare looked up at the rear-view mirror.
At the wheel, Morel — the driver the DGSE had placed "on secondment" to handle Volta's close protection — had stopped breathing calmly. His eyes, usually placid, flicked frantically among the three mirrors. His hands, in thin leather gloves, had tightened on the wheel.
"Morel?" Lazare asked quietly, his voice abruptly cutting off de Vigan's monologue.
"We have a problem, sir," the driver replied, his tone flat, purely professional. "White panel van, Ford Transit, in our left blind spot since we left the ring road. And a black Chevrolet Suburban, tinted windows, that just forced the on-ramp to wedge itself in front of us."
De Vigan looked up from his notes, irritated by the interruption.
"What? A paparazzo? Some financial reporter who got wind of the deal?"
"Reporters do not drive in a V-shaped combat formation, Monsieur de Vigan," Morel said, downshifting hard. "Hold on."
The reality of the technology war tipped over into physical horror in the space of half a second.
Morel wrenched the wheel hard to peel off toward the hard shoulder, trying to break the encirclement. But the attackers were elite professionals. The CIA's Alpha Unit left nothing to chance.
The heavy black Chevrolet Suburban ahead of them slammed on its brakes with unimaginable violence. Tyres screamed on the soaked asphalt. Morel had no time to dodge fully. The Mercedes, doing eighty kilometres an hour, struck the rear of the SUV with a titanic crash of crumpled sheet metal and twisted steel.
The kinetic shock was appalling. The airbags exploded, filling the cabin with white smoke and the acrid reek of propellant. De Vigan was thrown forward, caught at the last instant by his seat belt, his files flying through the cabin like an artificial blizzard.
The Mercedes rebounded off the crash barrier in a screech of blinding sparks and came to rest, wedged, its front end smoking.
At once, the white Ford Transit rammed the rear of the German sedan, locking the trap for good. They were pinned. A perfect pincer.
"Lazare!" de Vigan screamed, breathless, disoriented, his nose bleeding from the impact against the front seat. "What is—"
He had no time to finish.
The sound that followed was nothing like the gunfire of films. It was a dull, deadly mechanical chatter, like that of an industrial sewing machine running flat out. The weapons carried integral suppressors. The eight operators of Alpha Unit had just spilled out of the two vehicles in a ballet of terrifying fluidity, dressed in black, their faces hidden by assault hoods.
They opened fire in unison — compact Heckler & Koch MP5SD submachine guns, spitting 9-millimetre hollow-point rounds.
The Mercedes windshield, certified B4 against handguns, had never been designed to take sustained submachine-gun fire from under five metres. The glass starred, turned opaque, then gave way under the concentrated pressure of the bursts.
Morel had had time to clear his Sig Sauer P226 from its shoulder holster. The former Action Service agent levelled the weapon at the nearest attacker through the shattered windshield. But he was caught in the killing funnel. Three rounds struck him at once: two in the neck, one in the frontal lobe. A scarlet mist instantly coated the inside of the windshield. The driver collapsed onto the wheel, setting off the horn in one long, continuous, mournful wail that mingled with the sound of the rain.
In the back, hell broke loose.
Lazare did not think. He let the muscle memory of his former life take command. Before the first round even pierced the rear window, he had seized de Vigan by the collar and forced him down to the floor of the car, throwing himself across the seat.
The rounds shredded the leather headrests, blew apart the panelling, filled the air with glass dust and metal fragments. It was a storm of spall. Every impact on the bodywork threw off secondary shards as deadly as shrapnel.
Then came the burn.
A searing, blinding pain radiated from Lazare's left shoulder. A 9-millimetre round had just punched through the weakened door to lodge beneath his collarbone, pulverizing the bone and tearing the muscle. The hydrostatic shock robbed him of breath, dragging a hoarse grunt from him. A split second later, a second round gouged deep across his right flank, ripping the flesh above his ribs.
The Ogre of Ivry sagged onto the debris-strewn leather, fighting for air. His brain, though flooded with pain signals, stayed cold. He did not panic. He analyzed.
Eight shooters. Crossfire. Subsonic ammunition. This is an execution ordered by a state. The horn went on wailing.
Beside him, curled on the floor mat, Alexandre de Vigan was gasping. The great financial strategist — the man who juggled billions and brought governments to their knees in the hushed salons of palace hotels — had been reduced to the state of a terrified animal. His eyes were wide with absolute incomprehension.
Suddenly de Vigan flinched violently. His hands went to his stomach. He let out a liquid, almost childlike sigh.
"Lazare..." he murmured, his voice clotted with thick liquid.
Lazare turned his head. Through the darkness of the cabin, lit by the intermittent flash of the SUV's headlights, he saw the wide dark stain spreading across his strategist's white silk shirt. A stray round, having ricocheted off the door reinforcement, had entered de Vigan's flank, ravaging his liver and perforating the abdominal aorta. It was a catastrophic wound.
The CIA's suppressing fire stopped all at once.
The silence that fell was frightening, broken only by the heavy beat of the rain, de Vigan's rattling breath, and the unbroken blare of the horn jammed beneath Morel's body.
Lazare knew what was coming. It was the standard tactical procedure of American assault doctrine. The clean-up. The cessation of fire meant the operators were closing in to confirm their targets by sight and administer the double confirmation round to the skull.
Lazare looked at his own shoulder. Black blood pulsed in the erratic rhythm of his heart, staining his luxurious overcoat. If he got out of the car, if he tried to run, they would cut him in two with crossing bursts. If he stayed where he was, they would open the doors and execute him at point-blank range.
He was no superhero. His current body had never undergone the commando training of his first life. His muscles burned, his vision was narrowing. But his mind held forty years' experience in the art of dealing death.
The survival instinct displaced the engineer's intellect. The CEO's suit tore away, freeing the black-operations operator of 2026.
Ignoring the searing pain in his shoulder, Lazare crawled toward the front of the wreck. He hauled himself between the front seats, brushing past Morel's lifeless body. The driver's hand, stiffened by the impact, still gripped the Sig Sauer P226.
Lazare wrenched the weapon from the dead man's fingers. The cold steel in his palm was like an anchor dropped into reality. Twelve rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber. No suppressor.
He let himself fall back, flattening into the rear seat, his body largely hidden by the shredded leather. He played dead, holding his breath despite the excruciating pain of his developing pneumothorax.
Outside, the sound of tactical boots crushing the wet asphalt drew nearer.
One CIA operator advanced on the right rear door, the kerbside one, while another came around the wreck from the left rear. They were methodical, professional, sure of themselves. They had just poured seventy rounds into the car. As far as they were concerned, only the corpses of businessmen remained inside.
The operator on the right gripped de Vigan's door handle and yanked it open. The door gave with a creak of twisted metal, exposing the dark interior.
The masked man pushed his head and the muzzle of his weapon through the opening, the flashlight on his MP5 sweeping the cabin.
He saw de Vigan, bathed in his own blood. He saw Lazare, apparently inert.
The killer's mistake was to relax his guard for a split second, believing the mission accomplished.
Lazare opened his eyes. Eyes of an absolute black, voided of all humanity, burning with the cold flame of the ultimate predator.
Lying on his back, Lazare raised the Sig Sauer one-handed. The weapon carried no suppressor. In the Dutch night, the report was deafening — a raw, savage clap of thunder that tore the air apart.
The first 9-millimetre round struck the American operator full in the throat, just above his body armour. The man was hurled backward, his weapon loosing a reflexive burst into the sky. Before he even hit the ground, Lazare had spun on himself, screaming with pain as his shattered shoulder ground against the leather.
The second operator, on the far side of the car near Lazare's broken window, flinched at the sound of the unsuppressed report. He tried to swing his weapon inward.
Lazare gave him no time to aim. Using the gap of the destroyed window as a loophole, he aligned the Sig Sauer's sights on the silhouette etched against the rain.
Double tap. Two sharp cracks, a tenth of a second apart.
The first round punched through the polycarbonate visor of the CIA shooter's helmet. The second pulverized his left eye socket. The American's heavy body slumped against the door, sliding slowly down the wet bodywork, leaving a long smear of blood across Volta's black paint.
Panic seized the rest of Alpha Unit. In the space of three seconds, two of their best operators had been gunned down by what they took to be a French technocrat in a flannel suit.
"Man down! Man down! Fire on the vehicle!" the team leader screamed, backing behind the Suburban's heavy armour.
The six survivors opened concentrated fire, hosing the Mercedes in the hope of finishing off the ghost gunman.
Inside, Lazare had curled into a ball on the floor, using the engine block and the reinforced axles as cover. Rounds whistled over his head, disintegrating what was left of the cabin. He spat a mouthful of blood. His body was failing. Adrenaline would not be enough to make up for the massive blood loss from his shoulder.
He looked beside him. Alexandre de Vigan, short of breath, his lips pale, was watching him.
The rain rushed in through the open door and the broken windows, washing the blood from the faces of the two men. The sound of the Americans' suppressing fire rang against the sheet metal, but for de Vigan the world had already shrunk to the square metre of floor on which he lay dying.
Volta's chief financial officer coughed, spitting a scarlet spray across his bespoke suit. His eyes met Lazare's. He had seen the scene. He had seen the clinical precision with which Lazare, wounded, had cut down two highly trained men.
In that death-torn darkness, de Vigan finally understood. Everything fell into place — the rumours, the brutal kidnapping at Pantin, the way Lazare had always seemed one move ahead of the world's intelligence services. The man he had served was no mere genius; he was a sovereign monster.
And yet, strangely, de Vigan's terror dissolved, replaced by a lucid, almost peaceful acceptance.
"Don't... don't look at me with those eyes, Lazare," de Vigan murmured, his voice now only a pained whistle drowned beneath the crash of rounds against the metal.
Lazare moved closer to him, clamping a hand over the gaping wound in his friend's stomach, trying vainly to staunch the bleeding.
"Save your strength, Alexandre. Stay with me," Lazare ordered, his voice flat, fighting back the horror of the moment.
"Don't play undertaker..." de Vigan smiled faintly, blood beading at the corners of his lips. "It's finished. My aorta is hit. I can feel it. The warmth... it's going."
Outside, the suppressing fire was slowing. The Americans were reloading. They were about to try a grenade or a ballistic-shield approach. Only a few seconds remained to them.
De Vigan raised a trembling hand. His blood-slick fingers gripped the collar of Lazare's black overcoat with unexpected strength, forcing him to lean down. The negotiator's eyes — usually cold and calculating — burned with a feverish intensity, the kind that belongs to the dying who see what matters.
"I regret nothing," de Vigan breathed, a grin of defiance stretching his pale features. "Boredom... the boredom of the banks would have killed me by inches. These seven years... God Almighty, Lazare, these seven years with you and the team were the only thing worth living for. We... we humiliated the whole world. We were kings..."
A fresh fit of bloody coughing cut him off. Lazare tightened his grip, his own face freezing into a mask of marble. For the first time since the death of his sister Camille, a crack threatened to split the Ogre's wall of ice. De Vigan had been his first apostle — the man who had translated his mathematical vision into a financial empire.
"You will not die here, de Vigan. I forbid it," Lazare said, working the slide of the Sig Sauer to be sure the next round was chambered.
"Stop your nonsense..." Alexandre gasped, the life draining visibly from his eyes. "Listen to me. Do not die with me on this filthy road."
The diplomat's fingers tightened once more on the fabric, conveying one final urgency.
"Promise me one thing, Bonaparte. Promise me you will put Volta on the goddamned roof of the world."
De Vigan fought for breath, the air escaping his lungs with a wet hiss.
"Don't... don't kill them all with bullets. That is too easy. It is the language of the poor. Avenge me in the only way that matters... Crush them under gold. Suffocate their country with our money. Buy up their future and destroy it."
He swallowed hard, his breathing broken, his gaze clouding for good.
"Swear it to me, Lazare. Swear that you will wipe them off the economic map."
Lazare looked into the face of the man who had helped him build Volta. De Vigan's loyalty, even in death, was owed not to the fatherland, nor to God, but to the empire they had forged together.
Lazare laid his good hand over de Vigan's, slick with blood.
"I swear it, Alexandre. On what remains of my soul. I will bleed them of every dollar. They will have no empire left. Only ruins, which I will buy back for a pittance."
A faint, almost peaceful smile touched the lips of Alexandre de Vigan. His eyes fixed on the perforated roof of the Mercedes, through which a few drops of rain were falling.
"Magnificent..." he murmured, with a final breath.
The grip of his hand on Lazare's collar abruptly went slack. His head lolled to the side. The chief strategic officer of Volta S.A., the wolf of sales, had just died on the filthy floor of a car, far from the gilding of the Ritz.
Lazare stayed still for a second that felt like an eternity. The sound of the rain seemed to recede, drowned beneath the dull roar of adrenaline and the pounding of his own blood in his ears.
The anger that rose in him did not burn. It was not the blind rage of a man who has lost a friend. It was the icy fury of a tyrant whose sanctuary has just been desecrated. The United States had not merely killed an employee. They had destroyed part of Lazare's work. They had proved that they preferred blood to arithmetic.
The Ogre gently closed de Vigan's eyelids. He wiped away the blood blurring his own sight.
Outside, American voices were screaming orders.
"Flank left! Flashbang! Move in!"
They were going to throw a stun grenade and finish the job.
Lazare knew that all he had left was one magazine and a mutilated body. He was not going to step out for a duel. This was not a film. He was about to use his last asset: his knowledge of the anatomy and the psychology of an assault.
Then, over the howl of the wind and the shouts of the CIA operators, another sound rose into the Dutch night.
A two-tone wail. Distant at first, then closing at blistering speed.
Sirens. Dozens of police sirens.
The alarm had been raised. The shots from Lazare's Sig Sauer, unmuffled by any suppressor, had rung out for kilometres around, waking the entire industrial district. And the car's emergency beacon had tripped on impact.
The Alpha Unit leader raised a hand, freezing his men.
"Police inbound! Abort! Abort! Extract now!" he yelled.
The doctrine of black operations on the soil of an allied country was strict: no capture, no engagement with local law enforcement. The risk of a major diplomatic incident if they were taken alive outweighed the importance of the target.
The American operators, disciplined despite the panic and the loss of two of their own, abandoned the assault on the wreck of the Mercedes. They recovered the bodies of their dead comrades, threw them into the back of the Suburban and the white van, and scrambled aboard.
With a scream of tyres, the two CIA vehicles tore away from the crime scene, vanishing into the mist and the rain, fleeing toward the motorway before the perimeter could be sealed by the Dutch police.
Silence settled over the devastated avenue, broken only by the crackle of flames beginning to lick the engine block of the Mercedes, and by the swelling sound of the sirens.
Inside the ruined car, Lazare Bonaparte at last released his grip on the Sig Sauer. The weapon slid from his numb fingers to fall heavily onto the blood-soaked carpet.
He was alone. The most powerful man in the European tech industry lay in his own blood, surrounded by corpses. His breathing became a wheezing rattle. The shock, the massive blood loss, and the collapse of his left lung began to overwhelm even his veteran's consciousness.
He looked one last time at the body of Alexandre de Vigan.
The contract for ASML had not been physically signed at six o'clock. On paper, America might have managed to delay the deadline. But by opening fire, Washington had just made the most fatal mistake in its history. They thought they had gunned down an ambitious French CEO.
In truth, they had just woken an absolute predator — and handed him the one justification he needed to burn their empire to its foundations.
The strobing blue lights of the first Dutch tactical-police cars swept across the wreck of the Mercedes through the rain. Lazare closed his eyes, sinking into darkness, as the shock wave of this carnage prepared to strike every capital of the free world.
⁊
Eindhoven / Paris / Langley / Berlin — February 17, 1992 — 6:02 to 6:12 p.m.
Omniscient (multiple focuses on the world's centres of power)
T+2 minutes — Eindhoven, Netherlands. The Epicentre.
The Dutch rain, indifferent to human tragedy and geopolitical upheaval alike, went on falling over the crushed sheet metal of the Mercedes S-Class. The industrial avenue, deserted minutes earlier, had become a macabre theatre of shadows, swept by the blue and yellow strobes of six Regiopolitie vehicles and two black armoured vans of the DSI, the formidable Dutch special intervention unit, first on the scene after the terrified calls of local residents.
Chief Inspector Pieter Van der Weyden, a placid veteran of the Brabant criminal police, approached the smoking wreck with caution. His service weapon was still drawn, pointed at the ground, his finger along the trigger guard. His heavy boots crunched over a glittering carpet of shattered glass, charred plastic, and brass 9-millimetre Parabellum casings rolling through the puddles.
The smell turned his stomach. This was not the familiar metallic stench of a drug-traffickers' settling of scores in the port of Rotterdam. It was the acrid reek of a war zone. Burnt cordite mingled with the fumes of petrol leaking from the punctured tank, the steam of coolant escaping the ruptured radiator, and the heavy, ferrous, unmistakable scent of warm blood.
The shot groupings on the windshield of the German sedan told a terrifying story. They were diabolically precise, concentrated on the passengers' vital zones. A paramilitary execution.
Van der Weyden aimed the powerful beam of his flashlight into the devastated cabin.
In the front, the sight was clinically brutal. A man of athletic build was slumped over the buckled wheel, his skull devastated by multiple impacts. In the rear, the vision was more disturbing still for the contrast. The beige leather of the seats and doors had been literally repainted scarlet. A man of about forty, in a bespoke suit whose priceless cloth was soaked with blood, lay on the floor. His eyes were closed, his features slack. He did not wear the mask of terror of the victims of street shootings. His face was frozen in an expression of strange serenity, as though he had simply, peacefully fallen asleep in the midst of the carnage.
And then there was the survivor.
A young man with a corpse-pale face, in a luxurious black overcoat soaked with blood and rainwater. He was still breathing. An irregular, wheezing rattle escaped his lips — the unmistakable sign of a tension pneumothorax. His left shoulder was no more than a mass of crushed flesh and tissue.
But what chilled the old Dutch inspector's blood was not the severity of the wounds. It was the weapon the injured man had just let fall onto the floor mat: a Sig Sauer P226, its slide locked back — a sign that the magazine had been emptied entirely. Van der Weyden swept the area with his lamp, lighting the asphalt a few metres from the car. He saw wide trails of blood leading away toward the spot where the attackers had evidently parked their vehicles.
The young man in the overcoat had not merely absorbed the assault and survived by some miracle; he had fought back from the heart of the ambush, and he had drawn the blood of an elite commando.
A young police officer, his face wan in the rain, leaned cautiously through the smashed door and, with latex gloves, retrieved the wallet that had fallen from the pocket of the dead man in the suit. He opened it and drew out a French diplomatic passport.
"Inspector..." the young officer murmured, his voice trembling, struggling to speak through the shock. "The dead man... it is Alexandre de Vigan. And the wounded one... I know his face from this morning's papers. It is Bonaparte. Lazare Bonaparte. The French industrialist. The man who bought ASML this very afternoon at the Philips headquarters."
Van der Weyden felt an icy shiver — far sharper than the winter wind — climb his spine. Philips. The American ultimatum. The rumours of unheard-of diplomatic pressure that had been circulating the corridors of the Binnenhof for forty-eight hours, of which even the police had got wind.
"God Almighty..." the inspector breathed, lowering his flashlight. "This is not murder. This is an act of war."
He turned to his liaison officer, suddenly shouting over the deafening noise of the rain and the sirens of the first approaching ambulances.
"Call The Hague! Wake the Prime Minister immediately! Contact the AIVD! I want this perimeter sealed and airtight for three kilometres in every direction! And someone save this French boy before our country becomes a battlefield for the Third World War!"
T+5 minutes — Paris. The Patriarch Awakens.
On the Rue d'Assas, the sanctuary of the Bonaparte family lay wrapped in the thick, reassuring calm of early evening. In his study — a veritable personal fortress lined with works of military history, staff maps, and souvenirs of the Republic's black operations — Auguste Bonaparte was reading an article from Le Monde diplomatique by the sole light of a brass banker's lamp.
Fifty-one years old, the former colonel and senior officer of the DST (Directorate of Territorial Surveillance) had never truly left the trade. He belonged to that breed of shadow men, forged by the betrayals of the Cold War and the secret interventions on the African continent — those who knew the unspeakable workings of the deep state and never slept with more than one eye closed.
On his heavy solid-oak desk, a red telephone, archaic and massive, stood beside an ashtray. It did not run through the household switchboard. It was a direct line, unlisted, encrypted end to end by Volta's own engineers. It rang only in cases of absolute emergency, when the survival of the empire was at stake.
Auguste picked up on the first ring. His face remained marble.
"Bonaparte," he said, his voice gravelly, charged with natural authority.
"Auguste, it's Vasseur." Commandant Vasseur. Head of the DGSE's Action Service. The master of the spooks, the man who ran the shadows on Lazare's behalf. But tonight, Vasseur's voice did not carry its usual clinical, reptilian calm. It was taut, metallic, almost breathless.
"They have hit him, Auguste." The colonel's heart skipped a beat. A single second of silence smothered the room. The blood of Auguste — accustomed though he was to the loss of his men, to violence and to mourning — froze abruptly in his veins. He shut his eyes. The terrifying image of his daughter Camille, her face streaked with dust, her eyes bulging with terror during her abduction at Pantin by Serbian mercenaries a few months earlier, crossed his mind with the suddenness of a stab. The family sanctuary had already come close to shattering.
Not again, thought Auguste with a dull fury. I refuse to lose another of my children in the gears of this cursed war.
"Be specific," Auguste demanded, his tone of polar coldness, suppressing the father's anguish so that only the commander's rationality could speak.
"A heavy ambush, military weapons, in Eindhoven, exactly five minutes ago. The signature is unmistakable: the CIA's Alpha Unit. They used the motorized pincer technique. Morel died on the spot. Alexandre de Vigan was hit; he died in the car. Lazare is alive, but gravely wounded. A severe pneumothorax and a left shoulder shredded by a 9-millimetre round. He has just been loaded into the ambulance to the trauma centre in Eindhoven. The Americans fled before the police arrived."
The grief of losing de Vigan, an invaluable ally, had no time to settle. It was instantly vaporized by a rage of absolute, destructive purity. The United States of America had just tried to murder his son on European soil. They had just spilled Bonaparte blood out of simple technological greed. America had just torn up the peace treaty.
"What is the Élysée doing?" Auguste asked, jerking open the locked drawer of his desk to pull out a thick black notebook crammed with confidential numbers.
"They are still asleep. The cable has only just gone out to the general secretariat. You know politicians, Auguste. When they wake, they will convene endless crisis cells, draft notes of diplomatic protest, and try to calm things down to preserve NATO."
"Not this time," growled Auguste Bonaparte, rising from his leather chair with the vitality of a man of twenty. "America has forgotten that you do not touch a family of soldiers with impunity. Vasseur, listen to me carefully. Do not wait for the order of the President of the Republic. Mobilize your Omega teams at once. I want total coverage, an invisible cordon sanitaire around the Eindhoven hospital within the hour. If the Americans missed their shot, they will try to finish the job on his hospital bed. You shoot anything that does not wear a medical or police badge, and anything that speaks English. I will personally handle the extraction logistics."
Auguste slammed the phone down. He did not call Madeleine, his wife, who was no doubt cooking a few metres away. Not yet. This was not the hour for a mother's tears, but for the implacable brutality of the founding fathers.
He dialled a direct number on the keypad — that of the general commanding the Rapid Action Force, based at Villacoublay, one of his old classmates from Saint-Cyr, a brother-in-arms who owed him his career. He pulled the man out of his evening.
"Hello? Auguste? What is happening at this hour?" came the surprised voice of the senior officer.
"Paul. Listen to me carefully. The CIA has just struck a strategic French civilian target in the Netherlands with automatic weapons. It is my son. Lazare. The blood of France is running on their pavement, and the Americans are in the wind. I do not give a damn about the Quai d'Orsay's intervention protocols or the squeamishness of the Élysée. I want a medevac C-160 Transall on the tarmac of Eindhoven airport in forty-five minutes, with an escort of two Mirage 2000 fighters armed to the teeth. And you put a platoon of paratroop commandos inside to secure the transfer of my son."
There was a gasp of disbelief at the other end of the line.
"Auguste, have you lost your mind? You are asking me to violate Dutch airspace with armed fighters, without the approval of the Defence Minister or of Matignon! That is an act of war! I would face a court martial!"
"I am asking you to save the industrial jewel of our country and the son of a brother-in-arms, Paul!" Auguste thundered, his voice suddenly charged with the crushing fury of thirty years of unconditional service to the state. "If the minister weeps tomorrow morning, you will tell him you obeyed the sovereign reason of state! The Americans shot him down like a dog to steal our future! Show them the French Army protects its own — or I swear on my life I will come and see to your stars myself!"
There was a heavy, leaden silence, in which military regulation clashed with the loyalty of the brotherhood of shadows. The general knew what Auguste Bonaparte was capable of, and above all he knew the vital, almost nuclear, importance of Volta S.A. to French national defence.
"The Transall takes off in ten minutes, Colonel," the general capitulated, his voice once more professional and martial. "The Mirages will follow and force the air corridor."
Auguste hung up. The patriarch had just short-circuited the highest authorities of the Republic to save his son. The networks of the old French military guard had just closed around Lazare with the solidity and impermeability of a titanium vault.
T+8 minutes — Paris. The Élysée Palace.
In the vast private apartments of the President of the Republic, the white encrypted telephone rang with the strident insistence reserved for nuclear crises or the fall of a regime. François Mitterrand — his face parched by the years of power and by the illness he hid from the country, in a simple silk dressing gown — listened to the breathless report of the DGSE director, who had just burst into his private office, bypassing all protocol.
"The Americans have broken the truce unilaterally, Mr. President," the spymaster announced, out of breath. "An ambush with military weapons in the very heart of the Netherlands. Alexandre de Vigan has been killed. Lazare Bonaparte hangs between life and death, hit by gunfire. The Dutch are in total panic. The French Army, evidently on the unofficial orders of Colonel Bonaparte, has already launched a unilateral military extraction operation without waiting for Matignon's approval."
Mitterrand kept his silence. The old republican monarch laid his hands, mottled with age, on his Empire-style desk. He felt the insult first — the personal affront. President George H. W. Bush had given him his word. The tenant of the White House had sworn to him, statesman to statesman, that the extrajudicial killings would cease if France did the same. And now the CIA was assassinating the head of Europe's largest technology company, in broad daylight, in the very heart of the Union, treating France like some Third World country to be purged of its inconvenient elements.
But with the Florentine, anger — even the most visceral — always turned instantly into high political calculation.
"They have made a terrible mistake," the President murmured, his eyes suddenly narrowing like those of an ancient reptile fixing an imprudent prey. "America acted out of panic. The prospect of losing supremacy over silicon has blinded them. They thought they were killing a mere commercial rival and breaking the ASML takeover. In reality, they have just handed us the perfect moral, legal, and geopolitical pretext to expel their influence from our continent for good."
"What are your instructions, Mr. President?" asked the DGSE director. "Do we call the Oval Office and demand an explanation?"
"We demand nothing," Mitterrand cut in, with the authority of a cut-throat. "We note the betrayal, and we make them pay for it. Wake the Foreign Minister immediately. Call Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Bonn and British Prime Minister John Major in London on the emergency lines. Tell them, with proof in hand, that America is using death squads in our streets to steal our technological sovereignty. Tell them that Volta S.A. is now officially placed under the protection of the absolute defence secrecy of the French Republic. And summon the United States ambassador in Paris. I want him at the Quai d'Orsay within the hour. Drag him out of bed. Let him come in his pyjamas if he must. I want him to understand that France regards this act not as a blunder, but as a major economic and political casus belli."
T+10 minutes — Langley, Virginia. The Collapse.
Across the ocean, at the CIA's Special Activities Center in Langley, the initially triumphant atmosphere had curdled into suffocating panic. Arthur Vance, the young, sharp-fanged deputy director, stared at the encrypted communications screen. The voice of the Alpha Unit leader, broken up by satellite encoding and charged with terrified adrenaline, rang through the morbid silence of the great hall.
"Command, this is Alpha One. Extraction in progress. The mission failed. I say again, for the record, the mission failed completely. The target returned fire. It was a goddamned trap. The target had high-level tactical training. He killed Miller and Jenkins at point-blank range. Dutch police sealed the perimeter faster than expected. We had to run, leaving Bonaparte alive in the back seat."
Vance felt the blood drain abruptly from his face. The Yale man's arrogance evaporated.
"Alive? You left Lazare Bonaparte alive?" the young wolf yelled, slamming his fist on the aluminium console. "You had a total execution order! He was an engineer in a suit, for God's sake!"
"Go to hell, Command!" spat the highly trained soldier from the other side of the planet, terror erasing all respect for the chain of command. "He blew Miller's skull apart through a shattered window while he had a 9-millimetre round in his own shoulder! That was no CEO — that was a goddamned professional killer! We're breaking contact before the French or Dutch army cuts us down!"
The transmission was cut in a dry crackle.
Vance took a step back, swaying. He had failed. The catastrophe scenario was taking shape before his eyes. Lazare Bonaparte was alive. Alexandre de Vigan, a high-profile French citizen, had died from their bullets, officially turning the CIA into a band of cold-blooded assassins. And the forensic police of a founding NATO member state held a crime scene flooded with evidence of American military involvement.
The heavy double doors of the operations room flew open, slamming into the walls.
Robert Gates, the Director of the CIA himself, burst in. He wore only a coat thrown hastily over pyjama trousers, his grey hair in disarray. But his gaze was that of hell incarnate. He marched straight at Vance, shoving the technicians aside.
"You arrogant little fool," Gates spat, his voice trembling with a rage so intense, so low, and so ferocious that the whole operations room shuddered.
"Director, I thought I could save American industry by—" Vance tried to stammer.
Gates struck him. A masterful slap, of unheard-of violence, dealt with the flat of the hand before the entire SAC staff. The crack rang out like a gunshot. Vance staggered, a hand flying to his instantly scarlet cheek, unable to respond.
"You thought?" roared the head of the CIA. "The President of the United States of America gave you a formal order to wait for the diplomatic channel! You have just violated a direct agreement signed in blood between George Bush and François Mitterrand!"
Gates seized Vance by the collar of his overpriced shirt and dragged him close, nearly lifting him off the floor.
"You think you arranged the assassination of an inconvenient industrialist? You have just committed a flagrant act of state terrorism on the sovereign soil of the European Union! British MI6 called me on the red line two minutes ago. The German BND is going to maximum alert. Every one of our allies has just understood that if they refuse to obey us in technology, we send death squads to gun down their industrial elites in the street! You have destroyed forty years of Atlanticist trust and the nuclear umbrella in ten miserable minutes!"
Gates shoved him away so violently that Vance nearly collapsed onto the communications desk.
"And the worst of it, you blithering idiot, is that you missed the primary target," Gates spat, pointing at the satellite map of Eindhoven projected on the giant screen, where dozens of blue police dots were converging. "Bonaparte is alive. And his genius knows it was us. This man commands more than seven billion francs in pure cash, an inextinguishable grudge, and an unlimited black budget at the DGSE. You have just declared war, in the name of the United States, on the smartest and most dangerous man in Europe. And you have made us look like fanatical aggressors."
Gates turned to the dozens of petrified analysts, who no longer dared breathe.
"Put all our European stations at DEFCON 3 immediately. Initiate the cyber-surveillance and mass-espionage protocols. Evacuate our non-essential embassies in France under cover of security exercises, and ready our battalions of lawyers. And have Security take this idiot to the internal-affairs cells," Gates growled, jabbing a finger at Vance. "The Ogre is going to retaliate. And God help us, because I do not know how we will stop him now that you have given him the moral and legal right to exterminate us."
T+12 minutes — London / Berlin. The Solidarity of Fear.
At the fortress headquarters of MI6 at Vauxhall Cross, in the heart of London, "C" — the Chief of Her Majesty's Secret Service — slowly laid the GCHQ intercept report on his heavy desk of dark wood. The great British ears had intercepted, without difficulty, the panicked communications of the American Alpha Unit as it fled Eindhoven.
British Prime Minister John Major was on the secure speaker line, his voice betraying an anxious sleeplessness.
"Is it confirmed, C? Did the Americans truly dare such a thing on the continent?"
"It is absolutely confirmed, Prime Minister," replied the British intelligence officer, his tone weighted with unprecedented gravity. "They mounted a military ambush to liquidate Lazare Bonaparte, and shot Alexandre de Vigan dead in cold blood in the process. Langley's arrogance has lost all limit and all moral compass."
"My God... If President Bush allows himself to assassinate the industrial leaders of our French allies on the pretext that they outperform Silicon Valley, who is to say they will not send killers to gun down the directors of ARM or British Aerospace tomorrow morning? This is sheer madness!"
"That is exactly the chilling analysis our BND counterparts in Germany have just shared with me, Prime Minister. The Americans believed they were making a show of imperial force. On the contrary — they have just terrified us all. France will never forgive them this bloodshed. And Europe can no longer decently trust Washington's protection."
In the shadows of the European intelligence services, a chilling, historic consensus was forming at the speed of digital light. The capitals of the Old Continent had little love for the triumphant arrogance of French diplomacy, nor for the brutal, monopolistic genius of the Ogre of Ivry. But faced with the openly murderous tyranny of the United States — ready to kill to keep its market share — Europe, out of a primal instinct of survival, chose its side. In the space of twelve minutes, the post-Cold War American supremacy, certain it had won the end of history, had just committed suicide on the wet and bloody asphalt of the Netherlands.
T+15 minutes — Catharina Hospital, Eindhoven.
The two-tone sirens wailed heart-rendingly through the black Dutch night. The intensive-care ambulance raced toward the doors of the trauma centre. Inside the bay, bathed in the harsh, almost surgical light of the fluorescent tubes, Lazare Bonaparte fought with all his psychic strength not to sink into final unconsciousness.
The Dutch paramedic, his face slick with the sweat of panic, bore down with all his weight on the gaping wound in Lazare's shoulder with heavy haemostatic dressings. Physical pain radiated through every cell of the Builder's body, an absolute, volcanic burn that threatened to short out his central nervous system with every jolt of the road.
And yet, sheltered in the limbo of his own compartmentalized mind, Lazare felt neither the animal fear of death nor the despair of failure.
His eidetic memory kept replaying the sensation of the dead weight of Alexandre de Vigan's body slumped against him. He could still see, projected behind his retinas, the closed eyelids of his chief strategist, fixed in the marble peace of death. He heard his last words, breathed out in a gasp of blood, his morbid and final oath of allegiance.
"Don't kill them with bullets. Crush them under gold. Suffocate their country with our money."
The shadow war, which he had believed he could contain, had just devoured one of his most loyal lieutenants — one of the few men capable of translating his technological madness into market conquest. The United States thought it had taken from him a vital asset. It thought it had weakened him. In reality, it had just freed Lazare Bonaparte of his last chains of humanity and restraint.
Politics, courteous diplomacy, the unfair competition of the courts — all of it now belonged to a bygone past. The world had just tipped violently into the age of monsters and predatory monopolies.
The neat mask of the young visionary CEO, the reassuring image of the Mozart of French computing that the business magazines so loved to paint, had all just been pulverized for good by the hollow-point rounds of Alpha Unit. All that remained on this blood-soaked stretcher was the pure Ogre. And the Ogre no longer hungered for mere patents, bilateral agreements, or market share. The Ogre hungered for ruin and absolute supremacy.
The ambulance passed through the doors of the emergency room with one last screech of tyres. Before he sank inexorably into the artificial mists of morphine and the numbing cold of haemorrhagic shock, Lazare Bonaparte's last rational thought was of absolute clarity. A resolution as sharp and merciless as the surgeon's scalpel that awaited him.
I am going to buy their world. Piece by piece. Patent by patent. And once it is mine, I will let it burn.