Location: Underground shooting range (reserved for the police), near the Paris suburbs
Date: October 1977
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding Focus from Augustus to Lazarus)
Since the incident in the director's office, a new distance had settled in the apartment on rue d'Assas. It was not a hostile wall of silence, but rather a tactical no man's land. Auguste Bonaparte observed his eldest son with the caution of a deminer in the face of an unlisted device.
The DST officer was thirty-nine years old. His career had been built on the rational assessment of threats. He had spent years profiling double agents, anticipating attacks, dissecting the psychology of the enemy. But faced with this eleven-year-old boy who was reading quietly at the breakfast table, Auguste's analytical arsenal ran on empty.
Lazarus had broken the knee of a veteran commando. Lazare had neutralized three teenagers with an efficiency that was akin to pathology or intensive training.
You don't leave a loaded gun lying around on the living room table without explaining how it works, Auguste had said to himself one evening, as he sank into a glass of cognac in his office plunged into darkness.
The officer's mind had worked. If it was impossible to understand the origin of this lethality in his son, it was his duty as a father — and as a cop — to supervise him. Physical violence with his bare hands, as taught by Rossi, had awakened in Lazarus an instinct that the boy clearly did not control. It was too carnal, too animalistic. To discipline a mind as cold and mathematical as Lazarus's, it was necessary to offer it an outlet that was commensurate with it. Precision mechanics. A disembodied violence, subject to absolute rules.
He had to be taught to shoot.
It was a paradoxical reasoning for a civilian, but perfectly logical for a soldier: to learn the sacred respect for human life, one must hold death at the tip of one's own finger.
One Saturday morning in mid-October 1977, when Paris was drowning in a pouring and cold rain that was tearing the last yellow leaves from the chestnut trees, Auguste put down his cup of coffee.
"Take your cloak, Lazarus," he said simply. "We are going out."
Madeleine, who was giving little Camille a bottle, raised her head with an anxious smile. The "outings between men" since the bitter failure of the cryptanalysis center always left the boy in a deeper silence than usual.
"Where are you going in this weather?" she asked.
"A man's business," replied Augustus, closing the discussion with gentle but definitive authority.
Forty minutes later, the Citroën CX entered a discreet access ramp at the back of a soulless administrative building, somewhere in the basement of the southern suburbs. There was no illuminated sign or welcome sign. Only a heavy armored door, flanked by an intercom topped with a security camera.
It was a reserved shooting range. A sanctuary of lead and concrete used exclusively by the police intervention units, the DST and a few hand-picked members of the intelligence services.
Augustus presented his tricolor card to the man in civilian clothes behind the armored gatehouse. The man greeted the colonel with great respect and cast a curious glance at the young boy who accompanied him, but he was careful not to ask the slightest question.
"Cell number four is free, Colonel. I activate the ventilation for you. »
Augustus and Lazarus pushed open a double acoustic door upholstered in black leather.
The change of world was immediate, brutal. The air was drier, almost spicy. A dull and continuous roar testified to the power of the industrial air extractors running at full speed. In the distance, in the other cells, deafening detonations resounded, sharp clicks that reverberated against the reinforced concrete, creating a shock wave that vibrated all the way to the sternum.
And there was the smell.
A pungent, chemical, heady perfume. Sulphur. The burnt cordite. Hot weapon oil and rubbed metal.
Auguste stopped in front of a stainless steel table, in the number four booth. He opened his black leather briefcase.
"Put on that helmet," he ordered, handing his son a heavy olive green hearing protector. "And don't take it off under any circumstances until we get out into the hallway. The sound pressure here can make you irreversibly deaf. »
Lazarus obeyed in silence. He adjusted the headset over his little ears. The outside world choked instantly, reducing the nearby fire to dull drumbeats.
But the silence outside only amplified the din inside his own head.
From the moment the acoustic door closed, Lazarus' brain had shifted. The smell of gunpowder was not a novelty to him, nor a child's curiosity. It was the keystone of his worst nightmares. It was the smell that permeated the fatigues after an ambush in Lebanon. It was the smell that burned his nostrils in the sweltering streets of Kuta, the second before his own life escaped from his body on a mall walkway.
The dead soldier had just woken up.
Lazarus' saliva suddenly took on a metallic taste. The phantom pain, that excruciating burn under his left ribs, radiated with mad intensity. He closed his eyes for a split second, gripping the edge of the stainless steel table to anchor his mind in the present, forcing himself to remember that it was 1977, that his name was Bonaparte, and that he was eleven years old.
Breathe, he mentally ordered himself. Separates memory from reality.
When he opened his eyes again, Auguste had taken the gun out of his briefcase.
The DST officer placed it delicately on the metal surface, with the bow of a priest placing a chalice on an altar. It was a Manurhin MR73 revolver. The mythical weapon of the French police, adopted a few years earlier by the GIGN. A masterpiece of modern armory, heavy, deep black tan, featuring an ergonomic walnut handle.
"Come closer, Lazarus," Augustus said, his muffled voice filtering through the hearing protections.
The father stood erect, his face serious. For him, this moment was a rite of passage. He was going to transmit to his son not the taste for murder, but the sacredness of lethal force.
"This is not a toy. That's not what you see in American movies on TV. It is a machine designed for one and only purpose: to destroy what is at the end of its barrel. »
Auguste took the weapon in his hand, his index finger ostensibly extended along the trigger guard, well away from the trigger.
"Rule number one, absolute and universal: a gun is always considered loaded. Always. Even if you just checked the barrel. Even if I'm the one who gives it to you. You never, under any circumstances, point the cannon at something you are not ready to destroy. Is that clear? »
"Yes, Dad," Lazarus replied in a matter-of-fact voice.
He looked at the Manurhin. The four-inch barrel, the massive barrel designed to withstand the phenomenal pressures of the .357 Magnum caliber. A revolver. A reliable weapon, unable to jam due to lack of ejection, but takes a long time to reload in a combat situation. In his previous life, at Service Action, he despised revolvers. He preferred the high-capacity semi-automatic pistols, the Sig Sauer or the Glock that would flood the market decades later.
But he kept this cynical thought to himself.
Augustus swung the barrel with a simple push of his thumb. He showed the six empty chambers to Lazarus.
"Rule number two: the finger only joins the trigger when the sights are aligned with the target and the decision to shoot has been made consciously."
The officer put his money where his mouth is. He adopted a perfect isosceles posture, both arms stretched forward, his shoulders slightly tucked in to absorb the recoil. The geometry of its body became the direct extension of the cannon.
"The physical violence I saw in the office of the director, Lazare... Auguste whispered, slowly lowering the weapon, his gaze fixed on the blank cardboard target hanging at the end of the rail, fifteen meters from them. "It was pure instinct. A wild mechanism. The firearm is the opposite. It is the intellect that dominates instinct. Shooting is not an act of force. It is an act of total control. You have to control your breathing, your fear, your heart rate. The blow must go off by surprise, with such slow and continuous pressure that your brain has no time to anticipate the recoil. »
Auguste took a small box of ammunition out of his briefcase.
"It's a weapon chambered in .357 Magnum. But for you, I brought .38 Special caliber at a reduced load. The recoil of a Magnum would break your wrists. The .38 will shake you up, but if you lock your joints properly, you can take it. »
He slowly inserted, one by one, six cartridges of gleaming brass into the barrel. The metallic clatter of each munition sliding into his room resounded like a countdown in Lazarus' mind.
Auguste closed the barrel with a sharp gesture of his wrist. The weapon was now active. Lethal.
The officer placed the revolver on the table, the barrel pointed in the direction of the firing mound. He took a step back and looked at his son.
"Yours."
This simple order, released into the confined and toxic atmosphere of the cell, marked the tipping point. Augustus expected to see apprehension. He expected the child to hesitate, that the weight of the one-kilogram steel would throw him off balance, that he would need to be corrected about the placement of his hands. This was the whole point of the rite: the father guiding the son through the ordeal of fire, correcting his mistakes, placing his large hands on the small ones to stabilize the shot.
But Lazarus was not looking for a guide.
He walked over to the table. His heartbeat had slowed down to an almost reptilian level. The sixty-year-old engineer had just given way to the DGSE operator. If there was one thing in the world, beyond the architecture of microprocessors, that Lazare Bonaparte mastered to absolute perfection, it was terminal ballistics.
He laid his eyes on the Manurhin.
I remember, he said to himself silently. The weight of the weapon. The reset of the trigger. The line of sight. Nothing has changed. Physics remains physics, no matter the era.
What Lazarus was about to do was not going to reassure his father. He was going to prove once more to Augustus that his eldest son was no ordinary child. But this time, contrary to the DST code that he had pretended to despise, Lazare was not going to lie. He needed to shoot. He needed to feel the explosion in his hands, to spit out the trauma of his own death through the mouth of this cannon. His own mental health was at stake.
He reached for the black tan revolver, ready to reveal the terrifying extent of his unseen heritage.
Location: Underground shooting range (reserved for the police), near the Paris suburbs
Date: October 1977
Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life) / Omniscient (focus on Augustus)
Lazarus walked over to the stainless steel table. The harsh light of the neon lights reflected off the black tan of the Manurhin MR73.
He no longer felt the anguish of reminiscence. The spectre of Bali had been pushed back into the darkness of his memory. All that remained was the cold geometry of the present moment. He raised his right hand, small and smooth, and grasped the walnut stock of the weapon.
The ergonomics were disastrous for a child of his age. The combat stock, designed to fill the palm of an adult policeman, forced Lazarus to stretch his fingers to the extreme. His right index finger barely reached the trigger tail. The weapon, with its heavy barrel, weighed more than a kilogram, a mass of dead metal that immediately pulled on the tendons of his young wrist.
But physics is a universal law that the will can twist.
Under the silent gaze of Augustus, Lazarus asked for no help. He came to place his left hand in an inverted cup under his right hand, locking his grip with perfect military orthodoxy. He did not put himself in profile as the sports shooters of the time did; He adopted a modern isosceles posture, facing the target, his feet spread to the width of his small shoulders, his knees very slightly bent to lower his center of gravity.
He raised the weapon to his eye level. The weight of the revolver caused the tip of the barrel to shake at first, but Lazarus contracted his abdominal strap, using the mass of his own trunk as a counterweight. The steel stabilized.
The sixty-year-old engineer knew that the strength of his child's fingers would not allow him to pull the trigger in double action without deflecting his shot. So he raised his right thumb and, with visible effort, pulled the dog of the revolver back until he heard the sharp, metallic click of the lock.
Simple action. Starting pressure reduced to one and a half kilograms.
He aligned the notch and the handlebars with the center of the cardboard figure, suspended in the darkness fifteen meters away.
The world was reduced to this line of sight.
Inspiration. The sulfur-laden air fills his little lungs.
Half exhale. Diaphragm blockage. Total inner silence.
Continuous pressure.
The detonation tore the subterranean cell with the violence of a confined clap of thunder. Even through the thick hearing protectors, the noise was loud. An orange flame shoots from the cannon's muzzle, briefly illuminating Lazarus' marble face.
The recoil of the .38 Special caliber ammunition hit the child's palms with the force of a hammer blow. His arms were thrown upwards by the kinetic shock. A normal child would have dropped the weapon, or taken a step back, moaning in pain.
Lazarus did not back down a millimetre.
His entire body absorbed the shock wave by bending infinitely on his supports, like a hydraulic shock absorber. Even before the cartridge case cooled in the barrel, Lazare had already brought the heavy gun back into the axis. His thumb cocked the dog again. The mechanism of destruction was set in motion.
Boom.
Second shot. Hindsight. The reacquisition of the target. Rearmament.
Boom.
Third shot.
Auguste Bonaparte, standing a meter behind his son, had ceased to breathe. The senior officer of the DST was witnessing a demonstration that defied understanding. Lazarus' rate of fire was not that of a novice terrified by noise, nor that of an exalted amateur. He was the relentless metronome of a sniper. A second and a half between each shot. The exact time to bring the line of sight back to the center of the target, to erase the bearing of the weapon and to press the trigger with the pulp of the index finger without disturbing the axis of the barrel.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The six cartridges were fired.
The silence that fell on cell number four was of a suffocating density. A thin wisp of gray smoke billowed from the Manurhin's cannon, snaking toward the air extraction grille on the ceiling.
Lazarus did not immediately lower his weapon. He kept the line of sight locked for another two seconds, making sure the imaginary threat was eliminated. Then, with disconcerting fluidity, he lowered the barrel to forty-five degrees, pushed the release latch and tipped the cylinder to the side. With a sharp pressure on the stem of the star ejector, he blew up the six hot brass sockets, which jingled happily as they bounced off the stainless steel table.
He set the open revolver on the table, the barrel pointed at the targets, respecting the procedure of absolute safety that Augustus had just taught him—or rather, that he pretended to have just learned.
Lazarus turned to his father, his face inscrutable, his hands folded behind his back.
Auguste Bonaparte swallowed painfully. The colonel walked around his son without saying a word and pressed the big red button on the control console. The rail's electric motor groans, bringing the cardboard target back to them from the depths of the stand.
The metal cart stopped with a small snap.
Auguste slowly took off his noise-cancelling headphones and placed them on the table. He approached the box. The intelligence officer felt an icy shiver, a mixture of sacred terror and pure admiration, run up his spine.
There were not six holes scattered on the figure.
There was only one.
Right in the center of the vital area of the cardboard, at the exact height of the junction between the plexus and the sternum, the paper was shredded by a gaping hole, barely the size of a five-franc piece. Lazare had lodged six bullets in exactly the same trajectory, fifteen meters away, with a gun whose stock was too big for him.
It was a group that the best shooters of the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group would have been proud to display after ten years of intensive service. Produced by an eleven-year-old schoolboy, on his first formal try.
Auguste passed a trembling finger through the jagged hole in the cardboard, still smelling the acrid smell of paper burned by the friction of the lead.
Slowly, the officer turned to his son.
Lazarus had also removed his helmet. He stood tall in his woollen sweater, waiting patiently. Augustus peered into the child's face, looking for what he had hoped to find there all along.
When a child achieves a feat, especially under the eyes of a demanding father, there is always a reaction. A smile of pride. A light in the eyes. An adrenaline gasp. A request for approval. At the very least, the narcissistic satisfaction of the newly discovered power.
But Lazarus had none of that.
His face was a mask of deadly boredom. His black eyes looked at the revolver on the table, not as an object of fascination, or even as a formidable weapon, but as one looks at a simple screwdriver after having screwed on a hinge. It was a tool. And Lazarus didn't like this kind of tool.
And it was at this precise moment, in the air saturated with gunpowder of this Parisian basement, that Auguste Bonaparte made the greatest discovery of his career, and the most painful mourning of his life as a father.
He is the perfect weapon, Auguste thought, his heart crushed by a dizzying melancholy. He has absolute composure. The murderous instinct. The motor skills of an elite assassin. The computing capacity of a supercomputer.
Auguste looked at this boy who had just proven that he could eliminate a threat without his heart rate accelerating. If Augustus had had such a prodigy under his command at the Ministry of the Interior, he would have made it the jewel in the crown. He would have trained him in shadowing, interrogations, targeted liquidations. Lazarus could have become the sharpest blade of the French Republic, an untouchable specter evolving in the highest spheres of world intelligence.
But there was an essential condition for being a spy. A condition that Lazarus' perfect shot had just swept away forever.
To rummage through the dustbin of history, to manipulate diplomats and break enemy codes, you need curiosity. It takes an unhealthy passion for other people's secrets. It takes the vicious desire to dominate man through information.
Lazarus had none of that. Lazarus didn't care about the secrets of men. The child never asked questions about his father's work, was not interested in the diplomatic crises or political conspiracies that fascinated Augustus. Its physical lethality was only a defense mechanism, a biological firewall that it activated only when its territory was encroached.
He is a builder, Augustus understood at last, the evidence imposing itself on him with the clarity of a cruel revelation. He does not want to destroy. He doesn't want to spy. He only wants to be left in peace to build his machines.
Lazarus' father understood that if he tried to force this boy into the mold of the state, if he tried to make him a soldier of the shadows, Lazarus would turn against him, and break him with the same clinical ease that he had broken that box. Lazarus was a force of nature, a sovereign continent that could not be invaded or colonized.
Auguste Bonaparte, the old wolf of the DST, laid down his arms. The secret war for the soul of his son was over.
He gently closed the empty barrel of the Manurhin and put it back in his black leather case with ritual care. He closed the latches. The rattling of the locks sounded like the death knell of his father's ambitions.
"It is an excellent group, Lazarus," said Augustus in a low, almost gravelly voice, stripped of all overwhelming authority.
"Thank you, Dad."
"You don't like it, do you?" the officer asked, resting both hands on top of the briefcase, refusing to avoid his son's gaze. "The smell of gunpowder. Noise. The violence that this implies. You've just proven that you're better than almost all of my men, and yet, you're bored. »
Lazarus thought for a second. If he were lying now, if he were feigning interest, Augustus would drag him here every Saturday. If he told the truth, he would anchor his freedom.
"It's not boredom," Lazarus replied with calculated slowness, his words cutting through the cold air of the cell. "It's useless. Pulling on a cardboard box doesn't build anything. Fighting in a playground or in a cellar does not change the world. It's a waste of energy. »
Auguste nodded slowly. He accepted defeat.
"What do you want to build, Lazarus?" asked the father. It was the first time since the birth of the child that Augustus had asked a question without trying to impose the answer.
"Something that won't need a weapon to defend itself," replied the sixty-year-old engineer. "Something bigger than us."
The shadow of a tragic smile, a smile of absolute respect and irremediable distance, touched the lips of the superior officer.
"Go home, son."
They left the underground shooting range and found the grey sky of the Parisian suburbs. The rain was still beating on the body of the Citroën CX. The return journey was made in total silence, but it was no longer the heavy silence of an interrogation or the tension of a latent confrontation. It was a silence of armed peace. A border had just been officially drawn and recognized by both sides.
Auguste Bonaparte would never again ask his son what he read in his black notebooks. He would never take him to Rossi again. He would no longer talk to her about the affairs of the DST. In exchange, Lazarus would stand on his own terms, maintain his brilliant student blanket, and protect the siblings without attracting the attention of the authorities.
From the comfort of the passenger seat, Lazarus watched his father drive. He felt a cold burst of gratitude. The greatest obstacle to the foundation of Volta had just withdrawn of its own accord.
February 1976... October 1977... Lazarus was mentally counting. The chronological line drawn in his mind was inevitably approaching the target.
He had seven years left before 1984. Seven years to get through high school and preparatory classes without going crazy. Seven years to design the architecture of VoltaOS in the darkness of his bedroom.
The soldier had died in Bali. The spy died today, on a suburban shooting range. All that remained was the emperor in the making, ready to engrave his reign in silicon.