Location: Family apartment, Paris / Autoroute de l'Ouest (A13)
Date : Printemps 1977
Point of view: Omniscient (Slippery Focus from Augustus to Lazarus)
Auguste Bonaparte did not believe in miracles, he despised chances, and he abhorred coincidences. In his profession, a coincidence was never more than a poorly concealed enemy operation.
At the dawn of his thirty-nine years, Auguste already displayed the gravity of a much older man. A senior officer in the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance, he had climbed the ranks of the state apparatus with rare brilliance. For the past decade, he had devoted every ounce of his energy to hunting down Soviet bloc agents, dismantling industrial espionage networks, and probing the human soul for treason. His brain was an analytical machine, calibrated to spot the anomaly, the false micro-expression, the too perfect alibi.
This is why, on the Monday morning after their return from Dunkirk, in February of the previous year, Auguste had closed the door of his padded office at the Ministry of the Interior and picked up his secure phone.
He had called a young inspector in his department, a zealous boy who hoped to rise in rank.
"Find me all the issues of the magazine Science et Vie that have appeared in the last twenty-four months," Auguste had ordered in a neutral voice, without giving the slightest explanation. "Peel through every article, every brief, every advertisement. I'm looking for a specific occurrence: a computer command line containing the exact syntax D U,DASD,ONLINE, relating to the IBM TSO operating system. I want the report on my desk before tonight. »
The report had arrived at 6 p.m., fine, precise, and without appeal. The popular science journal had never published such a line of code. It had vaguely mentioned the new American computers in a popularization file six months earlier, but without ever going into such technical granularity, and even less by providing hexadecimal execution commands.
Sitting in the half-light of his Paris office, Auguste had lit a Gauloise, watching the blue smoke rise towards the stuccoed ceiling.
Lazarus had lied.
And he had lied with appalling aplomb. The boy had not stuttered, he had not looked away, he had shown no sign of the neurological panic that usually grips a child caught at fault. He had served up a plausible story, calibrated to reassure the adult, with the exact tone of childish regret. It was professional work. A cover improvised under pressure, of a quality that would have made the pride of a clandestine agent accustomed to interrogations.
But that was not the only certainty Auguste had acquired that weekend.
The night before the computer incident, in the Dufresnes' large house, Auguste had not slept. His sleep as a cop was always choppy, always on the lookout. Around two o'clock in the morning, he had heard the tiny creaking of a parquet slat in the corridor. He had heard the hissing of the front door, which was being closed with maniacal care. He had risen, without waking Madeleine, and had approached the window. Through the shutters, in the pouring rain of the North Sea, the young DST officer had seen the tall figure of Henri Dufresne rush into his Mercedes, followed by the small silhouette of his eldest son. He had heard the soft roar of the six-cylinder engine recede into the night.
Auguste's fatherly instinct had screamed at him to get out, to stop the car, to demand explanations from his brother-in-law. But the intelligence officer's instinct had nailed him to the spot.
Never confront a target before understanding its objective, said the doctrine. Allow the operation to take place to identify the exact nature of the threat.
Augustus had therefore waited. He had seen the car return in the early morning. He had feigned ignorance at breakfast. He had observed the scene in front of the factory's IBM with redoubled acuity. And he had understood that a pact had just been sealed between the great capitalist industrialist and the ten-year-old child.
For a year, from February 1976 to the spring of 1977, Auguste had been silent.
He had put his own son under surveillance, even in the family apartment. It was an intimate torture and a fascinating intellectual exercise. Auguste observed the mail. The large cardboard packages that arrived monthly from Dunkirk, officially sent by Uncle Henri to "encourage the scientific curiosity of the little one". Auguste steamed the parcels before Madeleine received them. Inside, there are no adventure novels or Meccano boxes. There he found system architecture manuals from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, treatises on discrete mathematics, programming guides in assembly language, often in pure technical English.
Books that a freshly graduated engineer would have had difficulty deciphering.
Yet Lazarus devoured them. Augustus was spying on his son through the crack in the door of his room. He saw Lazarus sitting at his little desk, the architect's lamp lit until odd hours. The child did not read these massive works; he absorbed them. He took notes at breakneck speed in his little black notebooks, filling the pages with equations, logical diagrams, database structures.
The psychological change in the boy was equally troubling. The lethargy, that apathetic slowness which had characterized Lazarus' childhood until then, had evaporated. Now, though still silent, the child radiated a cold, concentrated, almost radioactive energy. His dark eyes, once empty of interest in the world around him, now glowed with predatory hunger. He had found his food.
Augustus had come to a dizzying conclusion. His son was not only gifted. He was not just a precocious child. Lazarus was an intellectual singularity, a monster of cold logic, capable of ingesting and processing complex data with an efficiency that defied biology.
And this potential, left to itself, or worse, manipulated by the commercial greed of a Henri Dufresne, represented a huge waste. Augustus was an absolute patriot. For him, a spirit of such power belonged neither to an individual nor to a private company. It belonged to the State. France, mired in the Cold War, threatened by the Eastern bloc and technologically vassalized by the Americans, was in desperate need of brains capable of thinking about the world of tomorrow.
It was time to lay down his cards. It was time for the interrogation.
The Easter holidays of 1977 stretched a leaden sky over Paris, pouring a fine drizzle that made the sidewalks shiny and slippery.
Breakfast in the Bonapartes' dining room had the appearance of total normality. Madeleine was buttering toast for Victor, who was fidgeting in his chair imitating the sound of an airplane engine, while little Claire was chirping in her park. Lazarus, silent as usual, drank his bowl of hot chocolate while staring at the patterns of the oilcloth tablecloth.
Auguste put down his cup of black coffee and wiped his mouth with his cloth napkin.
"Lazarus, go and pack a little travelling-bag," he ordered, his voice calm but devoid of appeal. "Take warm clothes and something to spend the night. We both leave. »
Silence fell on the table. Victor instantly stopped flying, his mouth half-open. Madeleine looked up, surprised but smiling, seeing in this initiative a rare mark of affection on the part of her husband.
"Oh? Where are you going, the two of you? She asked. "A little trip between men? At your father's house in Normandy? »
"We are going away from Paris, yes," replied Auguste vaguely, adjusting the collar of his shirt. "I have a routine inspection to do at a technical site in the suburbs. I thought it would be good for the boy to get some fresh air and see what his father is doing. »
The justification was perfect. The classic paternal authority, mixed with a desire for educational transmission. Madeleine saw nothing but fire.
But Lazarus had felt the change in atmospheric pressure. He slowly set down his bowl. Her eyes met her father's for a split second. There was no paternal warmth in Auguste's eyes that morning. There was only the cold assessment of an officer summoning a suspect.
Routine inspection. The military vocabulary did not deceive the former agent of the Service Action. Lazarus instantly understood that the year's respite he had thought he had gained was over. The axe was about to fall.
"I'll get my bag ready," the child said simply.
An hour later, Auguste's heavy Citroën CX was inserted into the heavy traffic of the Porte de Saint-Cloud, heading towards the western motorway.
The cabin smelled of blond tobacco, cold leather and the humidity of the fledgling air conditioning. It was a perfect closed-door game. A mobile interrogation cell, speeding at one hundred and ten kilometers per hour in the gray rain. The steady sound of tires on the wet asphalt imposed a hypnotic rhythm, muffling the sounds of the outside world.
Auguste drove with mechanical precision, both hands firmly resting on the single-spoke steering wheel typical of the brand with the chevrons. His profile of a hardened thirty-year-old stood out in the dull daylight. Lazarus, sitting in the front passenger seat, looked tiny. Her feet barely touched the rubber floor mat. He watched the urban landscape gradually give way to the industrial zones of the Paris suburbs, then to the thick forests of the Chevreuse valley.
The silence stretched for forty minutes.
It was not a silence of embarrassment, nor a peaceful silence. It was a heavy, tactical silence, weighed down to the gram. Lazarus knew this technique like the back of his hand. This was the basis of psychological warfare during an interrogation. We let the silence settle in, thicken, become so heavy that the target, eaten away by anxiety and guilt for what it hides, ends up cracking and speaking first to fill the void.
But Lazarus did not crack. He possessed sixty years of emotional control. He set his breath to a slow tempo, cleared his mind, and waited for the mountain to come to him.
Auguste, observing his son's cadaverous immobility out of the corner of his eye, felt a hint of professional respect. Most adults, even seasoned diplomats, would have already started sweating or asking futile questions to break the ice. The child, on the other hand, remained as impenetrable as marble.
Finally, Auguste lit the cigarette lighter, took a Gauloise from his packet, and raised it to his lips. The small incandescent click of the resistance broke the spell.
"The issue of Science et Vie never existed, Lazare," Auguste blurted out, the cigarette on the edge of his lips, keeping his eyes fixed on the road.
The voice was sluggish, devoid of anger. It was the statement of a mathematical fact.
Lazarus did not start. His heartbeat accelerated briefly, imperceptible to the naked eye, which he mastered in a second. The worst-case scenario had just come true. His father, the young wolf of the DST, had not swallowed the pill. Worse, he had investigated.
Lazarus' brain, accustomed to dealing with lethal emergencies, calculated the options at the speed of light. Denial? Impossible, Augustus had to have material proof. Crying? Ineffective in the face of a man who hated sentimental outpourings.
All that remained was tactical silence, waiting to see the extent of the damage. Lazare continued to stare at the white line of the highway that passed by in the rain.
"I was not asleep at Dunkirk the night your uncle came to fetch you from your room," Auguste continued, exhaling a long stream of bluish smoke which crashed against the wind-screen. "I saw the car leave. I saw her come back two hours later. I saw how your uncle looked at you the next morning in front of the machine in his factory. He didn't look at you as a gifted child. He looked at you like a goose that lays golden eggs. »
The air in the car suddenly seemed to be sorely lacking in oxygen. Lazare clenched his fists very lightly on his knees, his nails digging into the corduroy of his pants. His father knew everything. For a year, he had lived with an invisible sword of Damocles hanging over his head, and Augustus, as the absolute master of control, had left it there, watching his son struggle.
"You're probably wondering why I didn't tell your mother, and why I didn't have this conversation with you the next day," Auguste said, turning his head briefly to look his grey into his son's ink-black eyes.
"Yes," Lazarus finally answered. His thin voice, though he tried to keep it neutral, betrayed a tiny crack in tension. A single word, weighing a ton.
"Because I don't give a damn about Henri Dufresne's little financial shenanigans," Auguste explained with deep disdain. "For him to use his nephew's abnormal skills to optimize the performance of his textile factories is morally pathetic, but from a national security point of view, it is insignificant. Henri was a luxury grocer. He sees the world through the prism of his order book. »
Auguste crushed his cigarette in the ashtray on the dashboard. The Citroën left the motorway to enter a departmental road lined with tall dark trees, going deep into the national forest.
"What interests me, Lazarus, is you," replied the officer. "It was not the lie that disappointed me. Children lie, it's in their nature to escape punishment. What hurt me, what insulted my intelligence, was the mediocrity of your cover. You thought I was an idiot. You thought that a dentist's waiting room story would be enough to put a man whose job is to read between the lines to sleep. »
"It was an error of judgment," Lazarus admitted softly, choosing his words with surgical precision. He no longer spoke like a son apologizing to his father. He spoke like an agent admitting an operational fault to his superior.
This linguistic shift did not escape Augustus. The father grinned as much fascination as terror.
"An error of judgment... Auguste repeated, as if he were savoring the weight of the words in the mouth of an eleven-year-old child. "Since you were two years old, I've been watching you evolve, Lazarus. Your mother sees in it the wisdom and early maturity of a firstborn. I see it as a permanent control. You hold back from existing. You calculate every smile, you dose your grades at school with the precision of an apothecary so that you are never at the top of the class too early, but never disappoint my expectations. You have built a character. »
Lazarus felt a drop of icy sweat slide down his spine. The interrogation was not a warning; it was a complete undressing. The architecture of lies, which he believed to be so perfect, had been nothing more than a house of cards in the face of the analytical hurricane of a DST officer. Augustus may not have pierced the metaphysical secret of reincarnation — it was beyond his rational reading grid — but he had dissected the mechanics of imposture.
"For a year I have been intercepting the books your uncle sent you," Augustus continued, driving the point home without the slightest pity. "Algorithmic topology, machine language, IBM architecture manuals. Things that my own engineers in the department take years to master. And you, a kid who should be playing marbles, you spend your nights scribbling notebooks with the rage of a mad scientist. You are hungry, Lazarus. You have an all-consuming hunger for calculation, for logic, for the machine. »
The road became narrower, winding between barbed wire half-hidden by spring vegetation. Heavy yellow signs warned of a military zone forbidden to the public.
"Then I asked myself a question," Auguste said at last, slowing his pace as he approached a vast complex of concrete-gray buildings, surrounded by fences topped with concertina. "I wondered what a brain like yours could be used for. I am your father, Lazarus, and I love you with all my heart, even if I do not know how to say it like your mother. But I am also a soldier of the Republic. And the Republic is losing a silent war. »
The car came to a stop in front of a first checkpoint. Two Republican Guards armed with machine guns approached in the rain. Auguste rolled down his window and held out his official button. The guards bowed rigidly, and the heavy red and white steel barrier slowly rose.
The Citroën entered the site classified as a defence secret.
Lazarus looked at the huge satellite dishes and microwave beams that bristled the roofs of the windowless buildings. It was an interception center of the DST, one of the beating hearts of French signals intelligence, where France was desperately trying to listen to the murmur of the Soviet world. The smell of the shadow war, familiar and toxic, fills the nostrils of the former Service Action agent.
"Your uncle wants to make you his production tool. He wants you to make him money by optimizing his weaving machines," Auguste said as he parked the car in a space reserved for the management. He turned off the engine, but didn't make a move to get out, turning entirely to his son.
The atmosphere in the car was electric. The final confrontation.
"I refuse to let you be the improved accountant of a sock salesman, Lazare," Augustus said, his voice vibrating with cold patriotic fervor. "You have a gift. I can't explain it. I don't know how such a thing is biologically possible. But you have it. Your brain is a calculator of abnormal power. And this power must serve only one cause: the protection of the state. The West is in the process of tipping over into an information war. Those who will control the code, those who will decipher the messages of the adversary, these will rule the world of tomorrow. »
Augustus reached out and brushed his son's cheek. It was a rare gesture, almost shocking in its tender brutality.
"I brought you here for a reason, my son. I'm going to show you what real war is. I'm going to put you in front of a real machine, in front of a real problem, not in front of payslips and stocks of cotton yarn. I want to know if you are able to break the codes that our enemies use to threaten the Nation. I want to know if the genius you hide under your bed can serve France. »
Lazarus closed his eyes for a second. The horror of the situation hit him hard.
Augustus did not seek to help him. He was trying to recruit him.
If Lazarus passed the test that his father was about to make him take within these walls, his life would be over. The state trap would close in on him. Auguste and the DST confiscated his spirit. He would be classified, locked up in bunkered basements for the rest of his life, transformed into a super-cryptanalyst condemned to decipher Russian diplomatic interceptions. He would never have his independence. He could never start his own business. Volta, the project of his life, the silicon empire that was to offer true industrial sovereignty to France, would die before it had even seen the light of day.
He was going to have to make a devastating tactical choice. He would have to convince the smartest man in his circle that he was extraordinarily talented, but basically useless to the secret services. He would have to manipulate his father's patriotic love to save his own freedom.
"Get out of the carriage, Lazarus," Augustus ordered, opening his door. "It's time to see what you're really made of."
Lazare pushed open the heavy door of the Citroën and set foot on the wet tarmac of the military zone. The cold wind rushed in under her little navy blue coat. In front of him stood the concrete fortress, the labyrinth of French intelligence, the belly of the monster that wanted to swallow it.
The reincarnated engineer imperceptibly straightened his shoulders. The fight for Volta's creation had officially begun, and his first opponent, the most formidable of all, was none other than his own father.
This is the second and final part of Chapter 5. The closed door moves into the bowels of the state, where Lazarus must fight the most perilous psychological battle of his young existence to save his future empire.
Location: DST Interception and Cryptanalysis Centre, Paris suburbs
Date : Printemps 1977
Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life)
The building had no windows, no soul. It was a reinforced concrete cube, half buried underground, designed to withstand an electromagnetic pulse or direct bombardment. As he passed through the heavy brushed steel doors, Lazarus felt as if he had entered the belly of a metal beast.
The air was artificial, filtered, conditioned at a constant freezing temperature of eighteen degrees to prevent the equipment from overheating. A characteristic smell reigned supreme: a pungent mixture of cold tobacco, stale coffee, perforated paper dust and electric ozone. The smell of the Cold War.
Augustus walked in front of him, guiding his son through the labyrinth of corridors lit by pale neon lights. The few men and women they passed, dressed in gray blouses or short-sleeved shirts, stepped aside in the path of the superior officer with respect mixed with fear. No one asked about the presence of this ten-year-old child, almost eleven, with a marble face, who walked in his father's footsteps with the stiffness of a little soldier.
Lazarus observed everything. His mind recorded the topography of the place, the thickness of the armored doors, the analog locking systems. But above all, he listened to the song of the machines.
In vast glass rooms, he could see rows of teleprinters spitting out miles of perforated tape. Technicians were busy around huge patch cabinets, plugging in and unplugging coaxial cables like switchboard operators from another age. It was the heart of French signals intelligence. Here, shortwave was listened to, communications from Warsaw Pact embassies were intercepted, signals from Soviet nuclear submarines sailing in the North Atlantic were tracked.
For Lazarus, the former architect of ARM, it was a museum of prehistoric horrors.
Auguste stopped in front of a numberless door, equipped with a heavy mechanical digicode. He dialed a series of numbers by hiding the keyboard with his free hand, an old cop reflex, and pushed the door.
The cryptanalysis room was smaller, plunged into a half-light that could only be pierced by the green lights of several terminals. At the center of the room was the technological pride of the French administration: a Bull mainframe, a monster of grayish metal and Formica panels. A man with thinning hair, his complexion washed by years spent under artificial light, was typing frantically on a keyboard.
"Moreau," said Auguste in a loud voice.
The cryptanalyst jumped and hurriedly stood up, crumpling a paper listing in his nervous hands.
"My colonel... I wasn't expecting you today. »
"Rest, Moreau. Where do we stand on the Frankfurt interception? »
The technician glanced at Lazare, visibly uncomfortable talking about classified operations in front of a boy in short pants. Augustus intercepted his gaze.
"He's with me. Speak. »
"Still at a standstill, Colonel," sighed Moreau, wiping his forehead. "It is a digital stream intercepted on a line rented by the Soviet commercial representation. It's encrypted in blocks. We have been submitting the sequences to the machine for forty-eight hours, we are running frequency search algorithms, but the Bull is slipping. The substitution keys change in a seemingly random way. It's a maze. »
Auguste approached the lectern. He turned to Lazarus and motioned for him to come forward.
The child complied. He came to stand in front of the cathode ray screen. Columns of hexadecimal characters cascaded by, a soup of numbers and letters without head or tail. It was the purest form of organized chaos.
"You like puzzles, Lazarus," Auguste whispered, leaning over his son's ear, his deep voice vibrating with a new intensity. "You spend your nights reading MIT textbooks that even my engineers find indigestible. Here's a real problem. Not a school exercise. It's a Russian code. Behind these figures may be hidden the names of our agents, troop movements, direct threats against France. Watch the footage. Look for the flaw. Tell me what you see. »
The trap was closed.
Lazarus stared at the screen. He didn't need forty-eight hours. The engineer who would soon design "Volta Secure," the most tamper-proof encryption architecture of the twenty-first century, needed only thirty seconds to read through the Soviet matrix of the 1970s.
His brain, accustomed to thinking in terms of asymmetric cryptography and public-key algorithms, dissected the logic of the code with disconcerting ease. The Russians were not using a true randomness generator. It was a simple polyalphabetic cipher backed by a linear feedback shift register (LFSR). The encryption key was generated by a polynomial equation of fixed degree. All you had to do was capture a fairly long sequence of interception — which the screen showed — to deduce the equation, invert the matrix and break the code. From his head, Lazarus could almost guess the periodicity of the key.
He opened his mouth. The answer was at the tip of his tongue. A simple matrix equation. If he gave it, the Bull would grind it in ten minutes and the message would appear in plain text. He would prove to his father that he was the absolute genius that Augustus hoped for.
What's next? The question struck Lazarus' mind. Then, Augustus' pride would be transformed into a duty of state. After that, the colonel of the DST would never let him go again. Lazarus would become his father's secret weapon. We would isolate him. It would be stuffed with Russian, East German, American codes. He would be transformed into a workhorse of French intelligence. Goodbye control, goodbye independence, goodbye the creation of Volta, goodbye true technological sovereignty which came through industrial domination, and not through the little war of spies. If he gave the secret of this code, he gave his soul to the State.
He was to destroy the hope of Augustus, here, now, and irrevocably. He had to prove that he was unusable for intelligence.
Lazarus closed his mouth. He narrowed his eyes, looking away from the screen to ostentatiously examine the Bull's huge console, its cables, its flashing status lights, and the heavy hum of its fans.
"So?" urged Auguste, whose hand had rested on his son's shoulder, his fingers slightly clenched with anticipation.
Lazarus turned around slowly. His face was a mask of icy contempt, pure intellectual arrogance, that of a genius engineer in the face of defective mechanics.
"I see you're trying to win a Grand Prix with a tractor," he said in a scathing voice that echoed through the silence of the room.
Moreau, the cryptanalyst, stifled an exclamation of indignation. Auguste, surprised by the reply, frowned. The officer expected a mathematical theory, a dazzling intuition, or even the admission of a childish failure. But not to that.
"What are you talking about?" asked the colonel curtly.
Lazarus took a step back and pointed to the Bull's metal frame with an accusing finger. The tone he used was no longer that of a child caught in a trap, but that of the condescending lecturer he had been at Cambridge, crushing a junior during a code review.
"I don't care about the Russian sequence. It doesn't matter," Lazarus said, looking his father straight in the eye. "You don't break it because this code is brilliant, you don't break it because your machine is an architectural abomination."
He turned to Moreau, who was looking at him with round eyes.
"You're running a sequential brute-force algorithm on an architecture with a throttled memory bus," the child snapped with unbelievable brutality. "I read the specifications of these calculators in the books that Uncle Henri sent me. The arithmetic and logical unit of this Bull spends eighty percent of its clock cycles waiting for memory to send it data. You ask it to calculate a giant die, but the machine spends its time going back and forth between the processor and the magnetic stripe. You're wasting computing power. »
"It's... This is the standard procedure of the Ministry! Moreau stammered, his professional ego stung to the quick by a little boy in velvet pants.
"It's a fool's procedure," Lazare said. He turned to his father again. "If you want this machine to be used for anything, you have to rewrite the low-level compiler. You have to bypass the factory operating system, create a direct access to memory (DMA) to feed the processor in continuous stream, without going through the central scheduler. Otherwise, you can leave your tractor running for three weeks, the Russians will have changed the code before you read the first line. »
The silence that followed was absolute. All that could be heard was the heavy roar of the ventilation.
Auguste Bonaparte, a senior officer in the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance, looked at his eldest son with utter amazement.
Lazarus had played his shot perfectly. By spitting out the theoretical concepts learned in Henri's American textbooks, he had just justified his extraordinary intelligence while emptying it of his interest in a treating officer.
Augustus was looking for a spy, a breaker of secrets, a boy fascinated by the geopolitical mysteries and conspiracies of the Eastern Bloc. What he had just seen was an autistic mechanic, a pure obsessed with physical architecture, totally indifferent to the magic of secrecy. Lazarus had not even tried to look at the interception; he had contented himself with criticizing the pipes through which it passed.
For a cop like Auguste, obsessed with human information and the psychology of targets, this profile was desperate. The child was a genius, yes. But a genius of tools. Not a genius of shadow warfare. Lazarus had not the vicious curiosity of the spy. He had only the maniacal coldness of an engineer.
The tension in Auguste's shoulders suddenly subsided. The father had just realized that his patriotic fantasy was stillborn. You don't force a watchmaker to become a secret agent: he will spend his time dismantling his watch instead of watching the target.
Augustus sighed. A heavy sigh, charged with a tiny touch of disappointment, but also with a paradoxical relief. His son does not belong to the DST.
"Very well," said the colonel, drawing himself up, resuming his impassive officer's mask. "Continue your research, Moreau. Forget what the boy said. He is a child who has read too many theoretical books without understanding the reality on the ground. »
"Good, Colonel," the technician murmured, visibly reassured to see adult authority restored.
« Viens, Lazare. On rentre. »
The ascent to the surface took place in the same deathly silence as the outward journey. But the power dynamic had irreparably changed.
Lazarus walked a step behind his father, his heart pounding, the adrenaline slowly flowing through his veins. He had just bluffed the cream of French counter-espionage. He had survived. He had saved his trajectory.
When they found the Citroën CX in the parking lot, the rain had increased in intensity. Auguste got behind the wheel, turned on the engine, but stayed in the parking lot for a few moments, his gaze lost in the hypnotic sweep of the windshield wipers.
He turned to Lazarus. His thirty-nine-year-old face suddenly seemed tired. The harshness of the interrogator had disappeared, giving way to the father who had just accepted the definitive strangeness of his son.
"You don't care, do you?" asked Augustus softly. "What's in these messages. What the Russians are preparing. Politics, state secrets... All this makes no sense to you. »
"I only see machines that work badly, Dad," Lazarus replied with feigned sincerity, locking his character in. "The rest is your war. Not mine. »
Auguste nodded, slowly. He shifted into first gear and the car shook away, leaving the military zone.
"Henri has won, it seems," Auguste said bitterly, lighting another cigarette. "You're just an engine designer. You will end up optimizing production lines or inventing faster calculators. It's a shame. France needs men who protect it, not just men who matter. »
Lazarus looked out the window, watching the silhouette of the DST fortress disappear into the mist.
"You are so mistaken, father," he thought, an invisible smile forming in the depths of his soul. You protect France with your little ears and your broken codes. But in thirty years, the France you protect will be naked in front of the Americans. It is not your spies who will save her. It's me. With my engines. With my calculators. I will build the shield that will protect you all, and you will not even realize it.
The journey back to the family apartment was peaceful. The tacit pact was now sealed. Auguste Bonaparte would never again try to recruit his son for the state, and Lazare would have free rein to sink, far from the eyes of the DST, into the madness of his calculation notebooks.
Moscow's eye had closed. The countdown to 1984 could resume, silent, methodical, and inescapable.