1: Kuta's Twilight
Location: Beachwalk Shopping Center, Kuta, Bali (Indonesia)
Date: July 16, 2026
Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (1st life, 60 years old)
The air of Bali had this sweet humidity, a mixture of salt spray, incense burned in front of the small altars on the sidewalk and sunscreen, which clung to the skin as soon as you left the airport. At the age of sixty, Lazare Bonaparte enjoyed this heavy heat. It soothed the phantom pains of his old joints, those silent reminders of a youth he had spent running in deserts of dust and blood.
Leaning on the railing of the second floor of the Beachwalk Shopping Center in Kuta, Lazare looked at the crowd below. The architecture of the mall, with its winding open-air passageways and lush vegetation, resembled a canyon of glass and steel plunged into the jungle. Below, on the central esplanade, a human tide flowed at the slow pace of the holidays. Sun-drenched Australian tourists crossed paths with Balinese families, European expats and veiled women from Jakarta or Surabaya to enjoy the luxury boutiques and sea breeze of the Indian Ocean, just across the road.
Lazarus consulted his watch. An old Omega Seamaster, scratched on the dial, a relic of a time when time was measured to the second. His former colleague at ARM Holdings was late. Twenty-three years. Lazare had spent twenty-three years in the leafy suburb of Cambridge, from 1995 to 2018, designing the architecture of the microprocessors that now made the world go round. Twenty-three years of being an ordinary man, a brilliant but discreet engineer, hidden behind lines of code, logic door diagrams and cups of lukewarm tea. No one at ARM had ever known who he was before designing chips. No one could have guessed.
He took a sip of her soda water. The late afternoon sun was setting, casting shadows stretched across the cobblestones on the ground floor.
Then the world was torn apart.
The first snap was sharp, brutal. A noise that the civilian brain always analyzes like a firecracker, a falling board or a bursting tire. But Lazarus' body knew. The Cambridge engineer died at the exact moment the shock wave hit his eardrums. The old source code, buried for decades, reactivated in a quarter of a second.
Caliber 7.62. Assault rifle. Shot by shot, then short burst.
Lazarus did not start. His eyes instantly swept the atrium. On the ground floor, near the main entrance, panic exploded. The crowd, which had been peaceful until then, turned into a screaming and chaotic mass. Three men had just entered the compound. Urban fatigues, black tactical vests, and faces masked by scarves adorned with hateful, supremacist slogans. It was not a separatist attack. It was a punitive expedition, an Islamophobic attack deliberately targeting the local Indonesian population and Muslim families who had come to enjoy the afternoon.
They were shooting into the crowd, methodically.
Lazarus felt his heart rate slow down, a physiological paradox of men who have experienced death too closely. The DGSE's Action Service did not train soldiers, it forged surgical predators. Chad, Lebanon, the moonless nights when the air smelled of cordite and copper... Everything came back. Sixty years old, gray hair, a wrinkled linen shirt, but in his head, Lazarus was thirty years old again.
Tactical evaluation. Three shooters identified. AK-47, or local clones. The first blocked the entrance, shooting those who fled to the beach. The other two advanced toward the escalators, pulling the mass of civilians—more than a thousand people—to the bottom of the funnel-shaped complex. An open-air slaughterhouse.
Lazarus does not think. He thought neither of his retirement, nor of the absurdity of dying in a Balinese shopping mall. He threw his glass, which shattered to the ground without him hearing the sound, and started moving. Not by fleeing to the emergency exits like the rest of the second floor, but by descending, against the current of the human tide, towards the source of the fire.
He slipped along the walls, invisible, using the concrete pillars and hanging planters as cover. His joints creaked, his knees no longer had the flexibility of the special operations of the 80s, but his muscle memory was intact. The Close Quarters Battle (CQB) is a geometry of death: angles, lines of sight, speed, violence of the action.
He arrived on the first floor. Shooter number two was climbing the escalator, his weapon shouldered, laughing behind his scarf when he saw the crowd trapped on the upper bridge. The man was only looking upwards. Fatal amateur error.
Lazarus waited for her at the top of the metal steps, hidden in the blind spot of an abandoned ice cream kiosk. When the end of the AK-47's barrel went over the edge of the escalator, Lazarus struck.
The movement was lethally fluid, erasing the weight of the years. Lazarus' left hand grasped the burning cannon, deflecting it sharply toward the ceiling as a gust of wind pierced the void. His right hand, outstretched like a metal blade, slammed into the terrorist's throat with the force of a piston. The thyroid cartilage gave way under the impact. The man dropped his weapon, his eyes bulging, bringing his hands to his neck in an excruciating gurgle. Even before the body tipped back to roll down the metal steps of the escalator, Lazare had already retrieved the assault rifle.
The contact of the cold metal and the polymer against his palm had the effect of an electric shock. The AK-47 weighed three and a half kilograms. It was the weight of his past life.
He checked the thumb pull selector. Notch in the middle. Automatic. He took it down a notch. Semi-automatic. Never waste your ammunition.
Below, shooter number three had turned around when he heard the sound of his accomplice's fall. He looked up, looking for the threat. Lazarus shouldered. The eyecup aligned perfectly with the handlebars. Breathing, blocking the diaphragm, soft pressure on the trigger. Two shots. The skull of the third shooter exploded in a scarlet spray against the window of a surf shop.
There was still the first, the leader of the commando, still stationed near the main entrance, who had just understood that the situation was changing. But the most urgent thing was not to kill him. The most urgent was the thousand terrified civilians, trapped in the corridors of the ground and first floors, easy and disorderly targets.
Lazarus stepped into the center of the main walkway. It was now exposed, overlooking the central atrium. The most exposed point of the shopping centre, but also the only dominant point offering a shooting angle on all the access roads. A strategic bottleneck. If he held this position, the last terrorist would not be able to advance without coming under fire, giving civilians time to escape through the rear exits overlooking Jalan Poppies.
" Go ahead! Flee from the rear! Go! He yelled in English, his gravelly voice covering out the panic.
The last terrorist, understanding that the bridge was the keystone of the defense, pointed his gun at the sky. The duel began.
The noise became deafening, a symphony of broken glass, pulverized concrete, and screaming metal. The terrorist's bullets crashed against the wall of the footbridge where Lazare had knelt. Shards of stone cut into his cheek. Lazarus retaliated with clinical precision, forcing his opponent to take cover behind a heavy black marble fountain.
A minute passed. The crowd flowed like a river of terror towards the back of the building.
Lazarus was counting his bullets. Eighteen, nineteen...
Two minutes. The terrorist tried to break through the right flank. Lazarus picked it up with two suppressive shots that tore off pieces of marble millimeters from the attacker's face, forcing him to back down. The agent of the Action Service dominated the fight by his economy of gestures and the cold terror imposed by his shot.
Three minutes. The old body began to scream. The lactic acid burned the muscles in his thighs and arms. Lazare breathed in small, rapid gulps, his eye still riveted in the viewfinder, sweeping the area. He was protecting civilians. He saw children carried by their mothers, old men supported by strangers. He bought their lives with the little time he had left.
Four minutes. The terrorist, mad with rage, understood that he could not outflank this phantom shooter. He changed magazines, stood up in half, and emptied his gun in continuous fire, sweeping the entire width of the bridge.
A 7.62 bale passes through thin concrete with the same ease as paper.
Lazarus felt a phenomenal water hammer hit him on his left side, just below the ribs. The violence of the shock caused him to spin on himself, sending him biting the dust. His breath was taken away, as if a lung had just been ripped off. He stood on the ground for a second, his eyes open, staring at the complex's glass ceiling.
The pain was not yet there. Adrenaline, that great drug, locked the nerve receptors. But the warm blood that instantly soaked his shirt and ran down his thigh told him that the mesenteric artery, or perhaps the spleen, was affected. A fatal wound. He knew it. He had seen enough men die of this kind of wound in the Chadian sand.
A little more, he thought. Just a little.
In a titanic effort, gritting his teeth until his enamel broke, Lazarus stood up. He pulled himself up against the wall, his left side pissing blood with each beat of his heart. He again supported the AK-47.
Five minutes. He fired. The terrorist, believing that he had silenced his executioner, had uncovered himself. Lazarus' bullet shattered his right shoulder, sending him spinning on the pristine floor of the atrium. The assailant crawled, trying to retrieve his weapon from his good hand.
Six minutes. Lazarus' vision was beginning to blur. A gray veil, speckled with black sparks, nibbled away at the periphery of his field of vision. Silence gradually fell around him, not because calm was returning, but because his brain was shutting down. The flow of civilians was almost dry. More than a thousand lives had escaped in the narrow streets of Kuta.
Seven minutes. Eternity ended with the distant, then very close, sound of sirens.
Short, guttural screams echoed from the main entrance. Beams of tactical lights pierced the smoke. Densus 88, Indonesia's elite anti-terrorist unit, was taking over the complex. Men in black, over-equipped, deployed in close formation. In a few seconds, they riddled the last terrorist who tried to stand up with bullets.
It was over. The threat was neutralized.
Lazarus exhaled for a long time, a wet rattle that echoed in his own chest. The mission was accomplished. The tacit contract he had made with the Grim Reaper so long ago had come to an end. His numb fingers let go of the AK-47's stock, which clicked on the slabs of the bridge.
The gray veil became absolute black. His knees gave way.
Lazare Bonaparte, a former soldier of the shadows, a master of silicon architecture, collapsed heavily on his side, his blood drawing a dark halo around him. The cold rose from his feet to invade his chest. He did not hear the screams of the Densus 88 operators rushing towards him. He did not feel the gloved hands trying, in vain, to compress his wound.
His last thought was not for Cambridge, not for the Action Service, not for the man he should have found that day. It was a strange, irrational sensation, that of an infinite fall into a light that refused to be extinguished.
Then, nothing. The Balinese twilight engulfs the man.
Here is the second and last part of this opening chapter. The objective here is to mark the striking contrast between the public and posthumous glory of the man, his profound personal solitude, and finally, the metaphysical vertigo of his rebirth.
Locations: Cour des Invalides, Paris (France) / Notary's office / Val-de-Grâce Hospital
Dates: End of July 2026 / 15 June 1966
Point of view: Omniscient
The repatriation of the body took place in the hushed silence of affairs of state. When an Air Force transport plane landed on the tarmac of the Villacoublay air base, the news had already leaked to the Parisian and London newsrooms, sowing a shockwave of an unprecedented nature.
The whole world mourned the tragedy of the Beachwalk Shopping Center in Kuta. The news channels were running in a loop with terrifying amateur images of the crowd fleeing under the bullets. But very quickly, the media narrative focused on the "ghost of the bridge", the man in a linen shirt who, for seven timed minutes, had held the terrorist commando at bay with a weapon recovered from one of the attackers.
When the identity of the hero was revealed, there was total incomprehension.
In Cambridge, in the glass-enclosed offices of ARM Holdings, engineers stared at their screens in disbelief. Lazare Bonaparte? Their colleagues described a solitary, courteous, low-key man who had spent twenty-three years of his life, between 1995 and 2018, designing the architecture of the most complex microprocessors on the planet. The man who debugged RISC instruction sets while drinking black tea, the man who had laid the silent foundations of the mobile revolution. How could this silicon theorist be the relentless sniper who had just saved more than a thousand lives on the other side of the world?
The response came from the Élysée Palace, in the form of a laconic press release and then a solemn announcement. Before becoming the master of electronic chips, Lazare Bonaparte had been a soldier. An agent of the Action Service of the General Directorate of External Security. Twelve years spent in the absolute shadow of the Republic. Chad, Lebanon, operations whose files would never be declassified.
It took ten days to organize the ceremony.
The courtyard of honour of the Invalides was suffocating under the sun at the end of July. The centuries-old cobblestones reflected an overwhelming heat. In the centre of the courtyard, placed on a black catafalque, the oak coffin of Lazare Bonaparte disappeared under the perfect folds of the tricolour flag.
In the stands, two worlds that had never crossed each other before faced each other. On one side, a delegation of British ARM executives and engineers, their faces closed, wearing dark suits. On the other, men with anonymous, stiff faces, their eyes hidden behind dark glasses, come to pay their last respects to a brother in arms whom they had not seen for more than twenty years.
The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, slowly advanced towards the lectern. The silence of the court was disturbed only by the flapping of the flags of the Republican Guard in the summer breeze.
"There are men who are building the future of our world, and there are men who are willing to die to protect it," the President began, his voice echoing against the golden facades of the dome. "Lazare Bonaparte was, in the absolute secrecy of his soul and the humility of his existence, both at the same time."
The speech lasted twenty minutes. The head of state painted a dizzying portrait of a double life. He spoke of the visionary genius, the architect of the invisible technologies that now equipped every phone, every computer. Then the tone became more serious. He evoked the young man who, many years earlier, had chosen the sands of the desert and the rocks of the mountains to defend the vital interests of France, leaving a part of himself there and bringing back wounds of which he had never complained.
"In Bali, in the face of the blind hatred and barbarity of a cowardly Islamophobic fanaticism, Lazare Bonaparte did not flee. He became again the soldier he had never really stopped being. Through his composure, his technical mastery and his ultimate sacrifice, he offered life to a thousand innocent people. The Nation bows before this singular son, this rampart of flesh and intelligence. »
The President descended the steps, approached the coffin and pinned the Knight's Cross of the Legion of Honor on the velvet of the red cushion. The Sonnerie aux morts tore through the hot air of Paris, a stretched and mournful bugle that brought tears to the eyes of the Cambridge engineers, while the veterans of the Service Action remained unmoved, freezing their mourning in military stiffness.
A few days later, in the air-conditioned and sanitized atmosphere of a notary's office in the 8th arrondissement, the mystery of the man thickens even more.
The notary, Maître Flaubert, went through the holographic will of Lazare Bonaparte. Around the large glass table, there were no grieving widows, no children to fight over the inheritance, not even distant relatives. Lazarus had died as he had lived: alone. Only an attorney mandated by ARM and a representative of the state attended the reading.
The document was in the image of the deceased: clear, concise, structured like a perfect equation. Lazare, thanks to his salary as chief engineer, his initial patents and his stock options accumulated over two decades, left behind him a considerable personal fortune, close to twelve million euros.
There were no complex clauses, no financial packages. The entire capital, after liquidation of the material assets and its London pavilion, was to be transferred to an independent trust. The mission of this fund was unique: to finance directly and without intermediaries a strict selection of orphanages, in equal parts between France and Southeast Asia, with a special mention for Vietnam.
The notary closed the cardboard file. He looked up at the other two men in the room. No one commented. The former state killer, the silicon millionaire, the man who had never started a family, had just given his life's work to children he would never know. The case was closed. The story of Lazare Bonaparte was coming to an end.
At least, that's what the archives of the French state retained.
Death had not been cold.
When Lazarus' heart had stopped on the blood-stained floor of the Kuta shopping mall, his mind had not sunk into the nothingness he had been waiting for. The transition had been gentle, insidious. The deafening sound of Indonesian sirens and the cries of Densus 88 had faded to give way to a dull, rhythmic hum, similar to the beating of a huge heart.
Lazarus had initially thought he was in a coma. A residual hallucination of a brain deprived of oxygen. He floated in a warm, heavy, infinitely reassuring darkness. The searing pain in his left side was gone. His old joints no longer made him suffer. He didn't even feel like he had a body anymore. He was nothing more than a pure conscience, burdened with the crushing weight of sixty years of untouchable memories: the lines of code of RISC architecture, the smell of cordite in N'Djamena, the taste of English tea, the face of the last terrorist who collapsed under his bullets.
Then, the space shrinks.
The gentle heat became stifling. The darkness began to pulsate, to contract around him with an incredible force. Lazarus tried to move, to struggle, but his limbs did not respond. They were numb, as if imprisoned in a liquid gangue. Panic, an emotion he had not felt since his first missions in the Action Service, overwhelmed him.
A monstrous pressure crushed him on all sides, pushing him downwards, towards a blinding light that tore through the darkness.
The passage was absolutely violent. The cold brutally assaulted him. The air, dry and stinging, rushed into lungs that seemed new, tiny, burning. The harsh light of a neon ceiling light twisted his eyes, forcing him to squint at them. Metallic noises, voices muffled by surgical masks, the smell of ether and iodine.
"It's a boy, Madame Bonaparte. He's beautiful," said a man's voice, distant but distinct.
The mind of Lazarus, the brain of a sixty-year-old man, a Cambridge engineer, a DGSE soldier who died in 2026, analyzed the information at lightning speed. Madame Bonaparte. He tried to speak, to ask where he was, to demand a situation report. But what passed his lips was not an articulate sentence. It was a cry. The high-pitched, powerful, terrified cry of a newborn baby whose lungs are unfolding for the first time.
A soft, rubber-gloved hand grabbed it and quickly cleaned it, before placing it against bare, warm, sweat-scented skin.
"Lazarus... murmured a woman's voice, trembling with exhaustion and instantaneous, absolute love. "My little Lazarus."
He wanted to open his eyes, to focus his gaze on this woman who called him by her first name, but his vision was only a blur of pastel colors. His mind was running at full speed, locked up in this prison of powerless flesh.
He heard another voice, deeper, more authoritative.
"June 15," said the man. "At two forty-seven p.m. It is punctual. He will make a good soldier. »
June 15. The date resounded in Lazarus' walled-in mind. June 15. But in what year? The air did not smell of modern pollution. The voices spoke French with slightly old-fashioned, almost formal intonations. And the man was talking about making him a soldier.
Lazare Bonaparte had just been born at the Val-de-Grâce Military Hospital. He didn't know it was 1966 yet. He did not yet know that the man with the authoritative voice was Auguste Bonaparte, an officer of the domestic intelligence, and that the woman with the heart beating under his cheek was Madeleine Dufresne.
He knew only one thing, a terrifying truth that would shape the rest of his life: he had forgotten nothing.
He had just arrived in this world totally naked, but suffocated by everything he already knew. The silent race had just begun.