Location: Bonaparte family apartment, rue d'Assas (Paris 6th)
Date: Sunday, October 23, 1983
Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life)
There are dates that fracture the history of a nation, and there are images that are imprinted with a hot iron on the retina of a generation. Sunday, October 23, 1983 was one of those days when the Parisian autumn sky suddenly seemed to darken under the weight of ash from the East.
In the vast living room of the apartment on rue d'Assas, the Radiola television set was spitting out its slobbery colours. The silence in the room was terrifyingly dense, broken only by the deep, almost trembling voice of the news anchor.
On the screen, the images were running in a loop. A pile of pulverized concrete, twisted scrap metal and gray dust. Lebanese rescue workers and French soldiers with haggard faces, digging with their bare hands in the smoking rubble. The Drakkar post, an eight-storey building housing the French paratroopers of the Multinational Security Force in Beirut, had just been pulverized by a truck bomb attack. A few minutes earlier, the American contingent had suffered the same fate.
Fifty-eight French soldiers dead. Dozens of wounded people were horribly mutilated. France had not experienced such military losses in a single day since the end of the Algerian war.
Seated on the velvet sofa, Madeleine Bonaparte put a trembling hand to her mouth, restraining a sob of terror. At her side, Victor, now fourteen years old, stared at the screen with the morbid fascination and incomprehension inherent in adolescence. Even the little ones, Claire and Camille, although too young to grasp the geopolitical significance of the event, had stopped playing, petrified by the heaviness of the atmosphere that crushed their parents.
In the background, standing near the oak bookcase, Lazarus was watching television with the stillness of a statue.
He was seventeen years old. His body had finished stretching. He had grown into a tall, thin young man with dry features and an angular jaw. He wore a dark turtleneck sweater, his unofficial uniform as a student in the Special Mathematics class at Louis-le-Grand.
On the surface, he was the brilliant eldest son, the cold intellectual of the family, the pure spirit who was destined for the great engineering schools. The clandestine nights spent in Karim Belkacem's maid's room welding the components of the first prototype of the Volta-1 map had created slight dark circles under his black eyes, but no one knew the real reason.
However, looking at the images of Beirut in ruins, Lazare was neither a preparatory student nor a future CEO.
He was back in Lebanon.
The images of the Drakkar set were not pixels on a CRT screen for him; they were a sensory reminiscence of absolute violence. The sixty-year-old engineer, the former operator of the DGSE's Action Service in his early life, felt his nostrils dilate. The ghost of the smell of cordite, cement dust and hot blood invades his brain with hallucinatory precision. He remembered the sweltering heat of the Beirut Corniche, the whistling of snipers' bullets from the "Green Line" that separated the city, and the constant paranoia about the vehicles parked on the side of the road.
An icy shiver went up her spine. His post-traumatic stress disorder, which he believed he had securely walled up under layers of mathematical equations and lines of hex code since the night he was eleven, suddenly scratched at the door of his consciousness.
War never changes, Lazarus thought, clenching his fists in his trouser pockets. It only changes theatre.
He observed the disaster with an analytical coldness that would have chilled his mother's blood. He knew that this attack was not an isolated act of disorganized fanatics. It was a very high-level asymmetric warfare operation, probably ordered by Tehran and executed by the nascent Hezbollah, with complicity within the Syrian intelligence services themselves. It was a show of force to expel Westerners from the Levant.
The front door of the apartment slammed heavily, pulling Lazarus out of his thoughts.
Swift, heavy footsteps echoed in the hallway. Auguste Bonaparte appeared in the frame of the door of the drawing-room.
The senior officer of the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance had left the apartment at dawn, as soon as the first agency dispatches had arrived. He was returning from Place Beauvau, the Ministry of the Interior. He was still wearing his beige trench coat, buttoned askew, his usually impeccably combed hair was in a mess, and his face, trimmed with a pruning hook, showed a gray fatigue, that of men who have just endured the unbearable and received impossible orders.
He only glanced briefly at the television.
"Madeleine," he said, his voice hoarse. "In my office. Right now. »
It was not a request. It was a martial order.
Madeleine rose abruptly, smoothing her skirt nervously, and followed her husband without saying a word. The heavy oak door of the office closed behind them.
Lazarus walked slowly towards the corridor. Victor was about to follow him, but Lazarus raised an authoritative hand to stop him.
"Stay with the girls, Victor. Keep them busy. »
There was no room for discussion in the elder's tone. Victor swallowed, impressed by his brother's icy aura of command, and returned to sit obediently on the couch.
Lazarus approached the office door at a snail's pace. The thickness of the oak and the bourgeois insulation of the apartment made the conversation inaudible to a normal ear, but Lazarus placed the flat of his hand against the wood, concentrating all his attention on the sound vibrations.
Inside, Auguste's voice, usually so controlled, betrayed extreme tension.
« ... I have no choice, Madeleine. The order comes from the Élysée. The President is mad with rage. We have to strike, and we have to understand how two trucks loaded with several tons of explosives were able to penetrate our security perimeters without any of our sources alerting us. »
"But you're at the DST, Auguste!" Madeleine's voice broke, high-pitched, panicked. "Your job is France! It's counter-espionage on our soil! Lebanon is the work of the foreign services, the DGSE, the military! What are you going to do there? It's a massacre! »
"The terrorists who struck the Drakkar are not just Lebanese foot soldiers," Auguste replied, his tone dry, purely factual, trying to rationalize his wife's terror. "The military-grade explosives, the detonator engineering, the financing... All this leaves a trace. We have strong presumptions that the logisticians of this operation have dormant ramifications in Europe, and specifically in the districts of the Paris suburbs and in Marseille. Networks of sympathizers and suitcase carriers linked to pro-Iranian factions. »
There was a silence, marked by Madeleine's stifled sobs.
"The DGSE is blind on its own soil," Auguste continued, implacable. "And I am the one who knows best the anatomy of radical Islamist cells in France. The Elysée Palace has ordered the immediate creation of a joint task force . A liaison team. We have to interrogate the survivors, recover the evidence from the sites of the attacks and cross-reference it in real time with my DST files to dismantle the Parisian cells before they hit the metropolis. »
"But you are a colonel of the bureau, Auguste!" cried Madeleine almost as much, the naked truth crossing the barrier of conjugal respect. "You're forty-five years old! You haven't been to an active theater of operations since the Algerian war! You spend your days going through files and running spinning mills in Paris! You're not a special forces soldier! »
Behind the door, Lazarus closed his eyes. She is right, he thought, a polar cold gripping his heart. It is an institutional murder. To send a domestic intelligence officer into the absolute chaos of Beirut is to throw him to the wolves.
"I am an officer of the Republic, Madeleine," replied Auguste, his voice veiled with wounded pride and gloomy fatalism. "Fifty-eight of our boys, twenty-year-old kids, have just been reduced to mush under the rubble of Beirut. I cannot, I don't want to , hide behind my desk in Place Beauvau pretending that this is not my war. I'm leaving tonight. The military plane took off from the Villacoublay base at 12 p.m. »
Magdalene's sob broke Lazarus' heart. The engineer stepped away from the door and went back to lean against the wall of the corridor, his arms crossed, his gaze empty.
The trap of duty had just closed on Auguste Bonaparte. The man who spent his life assessing threats with chilling rationality had just accepted a mission whose life expectancy was like rolling the dice. Beirut in 1983 was not a city; it was a giant meat grinder where Christian militias, Druze factions, Palestinian snipers, Syrian agents, Iranian Pasdarans and suicide bombers of the nascent Hezbollah intertwined.
For a sixty-year-old man, trained in the worst theaters of clandestine operations as Lazarus had been in his first life, surviving there required paranoid vigilance and incredible luck.
For a forty-five-year-old man, a brilliant analyst but whose survival reflexes had become clouded under the gilding of the Parisian ministries, it was a one-way ticket to the slaughterhouse.
The door to the office opened.
Madeleine ran out, her face drowning in tears, a handkerchief pressed against her mouth, and rushed to the master bedroom without a glance at her son.
Augustus appeared a few seconds later. He took off his trench coat and carelessly threw it on a chair in the entrance, a messy gesture that was absolutely unusual for him. He loosened his tie. When he met Lazare's eyes, the DST officer stopped.
The two men had not faced each other since the shooting range stage six years earlier. Six years of armed peace, of mutual and silent respect. Augustus had financed the secret trust, convinced that Lazarus would build sovereign machines. Lazare had shone at school to justify his tranquility, while fomenting the creation of Volta in the shadow of his maid's room with Karim.
"You heard," Augustus said, in a neutral voice.
"The acoustics of this apartment have always been deplorable," Lazare replied, without lowering his eyes.
Augustus nodded slowly, accepting the affront. He seemed to hesitate for a second, to seek a fatherly word, a speech on the responsibilities of the elder, but Lazarus' dark gaze stifled this inclination.
"I have to pack my bag," Auguste finally said, walking down the hall.
Lazarus let him pass. He waited ten minutes, listening to the muffled noises coming from his father's locker room, before deciding to act.
I can't let him go like this, Lazare said to himself, the cynicism of the engineer bending the knee to the duty of the son and brother-in-arms.
He crossed the corridor and stopped on the threshold of the room, the door of which was wide open.
The scene was pathetic in its dignity. On the large matrimonial bed, Auguste Bonaparte folded his clothes with the meticulousness of an inspector of an academy. Khaki shirts, fatigues pants that he hadn't worn for decades, impeccably polished jumping boots, but whose dry leather cracked under the wear and tear of time. The smell of mothballs and old leather hung in the air.
On the bedside table, heavy and black, rested his revolver, the famous Manurhin MR73. Next to it, two cardboard boxes of ammunition and a leather shoulder case.
Augustus was a master of interrogation, a strategist in the shadows, but in the face of this war package, he looked dramatically anachronistic. A theater actor getting ready to go on a stage where live ammunition was being fired.
Lazarus entered the room. He made no noise, but Augustus felt his presence.
The senior officer stopped folding a t-shirt and sat up. There was a mixture of fatigue, carefully contained fear and unwavering pride in the father's eyes.
"If you come to convince me to stay, like your mother, it's not worth it, Lazarus," Augustus warned, in a firm tone. "The minister has signed my mission order. I represent the DST in the investigation. The integrity of our territory is at stake. I can't run away. »
"I am not here to detain you, father," replied Lazarus, in a voice so low, so devoid of childish emotion, that it made Augustus shudder. "I'm here to make sure you don't die needlessly because you forgot how to fight."
The sentence, of absolute insolence and cruelty, fell like a guillotine cleaver in the bourgeois chamber.
Auguste tensed, his jaw clenched, the pride of the officer stung to the quick by his seventeen-year-old son.
"I am a colonel, Lazare. I know how to survive. »
"You know how to survive in the corridors of the Place Beauvau and in the Parisian brasseries," corrected Lazare, advancing to the bed, staring at the Manurhin. "Algeria was more than twenty years ago. The world has changed. Urban warfare has changed. They are no longer maquisards in the djebels. They are urban ghosts. Fanatics who are willing to die to turn a city block into ashes. »
Lazarus looked up and anchored his dark gaze, saturated with the experience of his first life, in his father's. The mask of the Math Spé student had just cracked completely, revealing the face of a veteran with invisible scars. Auguste took half a step back, struck by the lethal intensity that suddenly radiated from his son. It was the same look as in the cellar with instructor Rossi, years earlier. The killer's gaze.
"Listen to me carefully, Auguste," Lazare whispered, allowing himself for the first time to call his father by his first name, breaking the final family hierarchical barrier. It was no longer a son talking to his father. It was an operator from the Action Service who was briefing an analyst sent to the wreckage.
Augustus remained silent, hypnotized by his son's metamorphosis.
"In Beirut, you don't rely on the color of the uniform," Lazare began, his voice metallic, delivering tactical instructions with the precision of a watchmaker. "The Lebanese Army is gangrenous. The Christian militias will smile at you during the day and sell your itinerary to the Palestinians at night. You never, under any circumstances, get into a vehicle that has not been guarded by one of your own men from the DGSE. If there has been a blind spot for ten seconds, you consider the vehicle to be trapped. »
Lazarus pointed to the air around him, illustrating the topography of hell.
"Death in Lebanon often comes from below or from above. Truck bombs are the new heavy weapon. Look at the axles of parked vehicles. If the shock absorbers are crushed while the cabin looks empty, you order your convoy to turn around, regardless of your superiors' orders. If there's a sudden traffic jam near a checkpoint, you don't stay in the car. You go out and take shelter from a load-bearing wall. The sheet metal of the Peugeot armored vehicles of the embassy will not protect you from a hollow charge or the blast of half a ton of TNT. »
Augustus' breathing had slowed down. His hands trembled slightly. He did not understand how his son, who had never left France other than for a holiday on the Atlantic coast, could know the visual signature of the shock absorbers of a booby-trapped vehicle.
"The Green Line... Lazarus continued, his jaw clenched, images of his former life flashing behind his pupils. "The old demarcation. It's a sniper's paradise. Don't go in broad daylight if you can avoid it. And if you have to cross it, you don't stop at red lights, you don't slow down for potholes. You drive fast and erratically. »
Lazarus approached the bedside table. He laid his long hand on the cold steel of the Manurhin revolver.
"Your weapon," the young man whispered, brushing the barrel. "Don't wear it in its shoulder holster under your jacket like a police inspector in Paris. It will take you two seconds to draw it, and in Beirut, two seconds is eternity. If you have to go down the street, you have the gun in your hand, barrel to the ground, finger along the trigger guard. And if someone robs you, you don't shout the French legal summonses. You don't shout "Police". You shoot first. Always. French law stops on the tarmac of Villacoublay. There, only survival prevails. »
Lazarus withdrew his hand from the weapon and stood up, looking at his father.
The silence in the room was sepulchral. All that could be heard was the distant noise of Parisian traffic and Auguste's jerky breathing.
The senior officer of the DST wiped the cold sweat that beaded on his forehead. The lesson in urban tactics he had just received was not drawn from a theoretical textbook. It oozed blood, raw experience and absolute pragmatism from the field. It was the macabre wisdom of a man who had walked in the valley of the shadow of death.
Augustus could have demanded explanations. He could have grabbed Lazarus by the collar and screamed to find out how he knew the doctrine of asymmetric warfare. But it was not time for questioning. It was time for humility. Faced with imminent death, the officer recognized the survival instinct of a superior creature.
He closed his khaki canvas travel bag and pulled the zipper tightly.
Auguste straightened up, smoothed the jacket of his civilian suit, and put on the leather harness of his shoulder holster, adjusting the heavy revolver against his ribs. He took his trench coat.
Then he advanced towards Lazarus.
Father and son, now almost equal in size, stood face to face. The physical resemblance was striking: the same high forehead, the same square jaws, the same apparent coldness. But where Auguste was just an intelligent cop sent to the political wreckage, Lazarus was the wolf in sheep's clothing.
Augustus placed his two large hands on his son's shoulders. The grip was strong, desperate, laden with all the love and paranoia he felt for this anomaly he had engendered.
"Thank you, Lazarus," Augustus said simply, his gravelly voice broken with emotion. An admission of weakness, a thank you for the lesson of survival.
Lazarus did not answer, but he held his gaze.
"I'll be back in a month at the most," Augustus promised, trying to reassure both his son and himself. "As soon as we have identified the Parisian sector, I will return. Until then, you're the man of the house. Watch over your mother. Watch over Victor and the girls. Leave no one... »
The officer's voice broke. He had to swallow to swallow his own anxieties.
"Don't let anyone destroy what you build. Next year, you'll be eighteen. Things... will change. Keep working. »
The sibylline mention of the year 1984 slipped on Lazarus' shell without scratching it. The engineer knew nothing about the financial trust, convinced that Augustus was simply referring to his legal majority.
"Stay alive, father," Lazarus blurted out, his tone devoid of any sentimentality, sounding like an operational order. "Your corpse will be of no use to us."
Auguste Bonaparte flashed a tragic smile, the smile of an old soldier who understood the modest roughness of his son.
He let go of Lazarus' shoulders, grabbed the handle of his travelling-bag, and left the room.
Lazarus remained motionless. He heard his father go and kiss Madeleine in the bathroom, the tears and maternal pleas muffled, then the brief words exchanged with Victor in the hallway.
The heavy armored door of the apartment slammed slammed with the sinister resonance of a coffin lid.
Lazarus went to the bedroom window and pushed aside the velvet curtains slightly. Three floors below, in the Parisian night pierced by street lamps, a black Peugeot 504 was waiting, engine running, waiting on the wet sidewalk of the rue d'Assas. Auguste got out of the building, threw his bag in the back seat, and rushed into the vehicle. The car's lights glowed red before the sedan disappeared southwards, towards the Villacoublay military air base.
The patriarch was going to war, armed with the advice of his reincarnated son.
Letting the curtain fall, Lazarus ran his hand over his tired face. The night promised to be long. Karim was probably already waiting for him in the maid's room on rue Mouffetard, impatient to test the new encryption routine on the Volta-1 module.
But for now, Lazarus had to play his part. He left the master bedroom and went to the living room to console his mother and take control of the siblings' discipline. The clan chief, by proxy, was now him.
What Lazarus did not know, on that October night in 1983, was that the proxy would soon be transformed into absolute power, forcing the premature emergence of his financial empire, in blood and tears.
This is the second and final part of Chapter 13. I deployed all the dramatic tension necessary for this shift. The arrival of the bad news, Lazarus' icy seizure of power over the family, and the shocking revelation of Augustus' financial will. It is the dawn of the empire, born in the sterile corridors of a military hospital.
Location: Apartment on rue d'Assas / Val-de-Grâce Army Training Hospital (Paris)
Date: December 1983 - January 1984
Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life)
November had passed in a sticky expectation, and December had just covered Paris with a mantle of grayish frost. In the apartment on the rue d'Assas, silence had become a living entity, an intruder who sat at the table with them and weighed on every conversation. Auguste's rare phone calls, made from the crackling secure lines of the French embassy in Beirut, were brief, laconic, and systematically redacted of any operational details.
Then, nothing. The absolute radio vacuum for seventy-two hours.
It was a Tuesday evening, December 13, 1983.
Lazare was in his room, leaning over his desk, the architect's lamp violently illuminating pages of architecture calculations of memory addressing. He was seventeen and a half years old. In the kitchen, Madeleine helped Claire and Camille finish their dinner, while Victor listened to an English rock vinyl in his own room, the volume turned up just loud enough to drown out the angst.
At fourteen p.m., the doorbell rings.
It was not the cheerful ringing of the postman's bell or the familiar of Uncle Henri. It was a long, continuous, solemn pressure.
Lazarus' brain, programmed by fifteen years of clandestine service in his previous life, instantly ceased all mathematical activity. His pen stopped above the paper. He knew the ringing of the bell. It was that of the emissaries. It was the chimes of the crows.
He jumped up, his chair scraping the floor brutally, and went out into the corridor at the exact moment when Madeleine, wiping her hands on a cloth, approached the armored door.
"Leave it, Mom, I'm going," Lazarus ordered in a cutting voice, physically interposing himself between his mother and the entrance.
Madeleine stopped, taken aback by her son's harshness, but the authority that emanated from him forced her to take a step back. Lazarus turned the bolt and opened the door.
In the half-light of the landing stood two men. They wore dark suits of classic cut, drab ties, and overcoats buttoned up to the neck. Their posture, stiff, almost mortuary, and their closed faces immediately betrayed their function. The eldest, whose temples were gray, held his hat in his hands.
Lazare did not need to see their tricolor cards to know that they came from the Place Beauvau.
"Madame Bonaparte?" asked the eldest, his gaze sliding over Lazare's shoulder to look for Madeleine. His voice was charged with that professional, almost surgical compassion of the officers charged with announcing the unspeakable.
"It's me," stammered Madeleine, the rag slipping from her hands to fall on the carpet at the entrance. His face instantly lost all color. "Auguste... It's Augustus, isn't it? »
"I am Divisional Commissioner Lemaire, and this is Commander Vasseur," the man said, taking a step into the apartment, lowering his voice. "Madam, your husband was the victim of a major incident this afternoon, on the road to Beirut International Airport."
The word "incident" was the semantic shield of the state. Lazarus felt the blood leave his own extremities. The cold invades him, absolute, total. The wolf had not survived the forest.
"Is he... Is he dead? Madeleine's cry tore the heavy air of the apartment. The little girls in the kitchen froze. Victor's music stopped abruptly.
"No, Madame," Lemaire replied immediately to stop the haemorrhage of panic. "Colonel Bonaparte is alive. But he is in critical condition. His convoy was targeted by an improvised explosive device hidden on the side of the road. He was seriously injured by the blast and shrapnel. The prognosis is life-threatening. It has been stabilized by surgeons from the French military contingent on site, and it is currently being repatriated by medical plane. It will land in Villacoublay in three hours. He will be transferred directly to the Val-de-Grâce army training hospital. »
Madeleine's knees gave way.
She did not collapse to the ground, for Lazarus caught her. The seventeen-year-old had just slipped a powerful arm under his mother's armpits, holding her upright by the sheer force of his muscles and will.
In a fraction of a second, the brilliant son, the self-effacing student of Math Spé disappeared. The Service Action operator, the blood-hardened veteran, took full control of Lazarus' body. There was no room for tears. No time for the shock.
"Victor!" barked Lazarus, his voice cracking like a whiplash in the hallway, resonating with a martial authority that no one in the family knew him to have.
Victor appeared, pale as a sheet, trembling.
"Take the little ones," Lazarus ordered, staring at him with his black eyes, devoid of the slightest warmth. "Take them to their room. Close the door. You read them a story, you put music on them, I don't care what you do, but they shouldn't go out. Not a word about Dad. Is that clear? »
Victor, terrified of his older brother's transmutation as much as the news, nodded frantically and ran to the kitchen.
Lazarus helped his mother, who was gasping with terror and almost suffocating, to sit on the phone chair in the hallway. He then turned to the two DST officers. His gaze looked up and down, assessing the messengers with the coldness of an inquisitor.
The two elite policemen, used to managing hysterical or collapsed families, were brutally destabilized by the teenager. There was in Lazare's eyes a demand for operational truth, a refusal of compassion that made them uncomfortable.
"Accurate situation report," Lazarus demanded, lowering his voice so his mother wouldn't hear him. "Not the version for the press. I want the details. Armoured or civilian vehicle? »
Commander Vasseur, the youngest, looked at his superior, taken aback. A seventeen-year-old kid wasn't supposed to ask these kinds of questions. Lemaire nodded briefly.
"Light armoured vehicle. A Peugeot 504 from the embassy," Lemaire murmured. "The load was heavy. Hidden in a car carcass on the road to the airport. Remote triggering. The driver and the DGSE security officer in the front were killed instantly. The engine block took most of the shockwave. »
"My father was in the back," Lazarus deduced, his fists clenched until his knuckles whitened. He listened to my advice. He did not get behind the wheel. He didn't put himself forward.
"Yes. The interior was blown away, but the integrity of the rear seat was barely preserved. He suffered severe head trauma, bilateral pneumothorax caused by overpressure, and multiple lacerations due to the glass armor that gave way. He is in a deep coma. Doctors in Beirut intubated him and placed him on artificial respiration. »
The verdict was in. Auguste Bonaparte was no more than a handful of flesh kept alive by pipes, floating in chemical limbo. The most brilliant spirit of French domestic counterintelligence had been crushed by the stupidity of steel and fire.
"We have a carriage downstairs," replied Lemaire. "We are in charge of escorting you to the Val-de-Grâce, so that you will be there when he arrives."
"I follow you," Lazarus said. He turned to his mother. "Mom. Get up. Put on your coat. There we go. »
The Army Training Hospital of Val-de-Grâce, in the fifth arrondissement, was a monastery of military pain. A large complex of blond stones, with endless, immaculate corridors, where a tenacious smell of ether, bleach and cold wax floated.
The December night enveloped the building, but inside the trauma intensive care unit, the harsh light of the neon lights abolished time.
For hours, Madeleine had cried in the waiting room, collapsed on a green leatherette bench, surrounded by the heavy silence of the security guards and military nurses. Lazarus, for his part, had not shed a single tear. He paced the corridor, straight, his hands crossed behind his back, standing guard in front of the double doors of the operating room. He was the centurion. The interim clan leader.
Around four o'clock in the morning, a surgeon in a sterile green outfit, his features drawn under his cap, emerged from the recovery room.
Lazarus was upon him in three strides. Madeleine staggered to her feet.
"He's past the point," the surgeon said right away, getting to the point. "We drained the lungs and reduced intracranial pressure. The armor slowed down the glass shards, they didn't touch the carotid artery, which is a miracle. But the kinetic shock to the skull was of unprecedented violence. He is in a stage 3 coma. His constants are stable, but the heavy resuscitation will last. »
"Neurological sequelae?" asked Lazare, his voice as dry as a rifle shot.
The doctor cast a surprised look at the young man, surprised by the cold terminology, before addressing Madeleine, out of a reflex of decency.
"It's too early to say, Madam. The brain is plunged into darkness to repair itself. This can last for weeks, months. He might wake up tomorrow with all his faculties, as he might... never fully wake up. We will have to be strong. You can see it for a few minutes. Only one person at a time, in the sterile room. »
Madeleine went first. When she came out ten minutes later, supported by a nurse, she was nothing more than an empty shell, drained of all energy by the vision of her husband's broken body.
It was Lazarus' turn.
He pushed open the heavy glass door, put on the sterile apron, and entered the resuscitation room.
The rhythmic, shrill noise of the ventilator and the regular beeping of the electrocardiogram saturated the space. On the hospital bed, surrounded by flashing machines and monitors, lay what was left of Auguste Bonaparte.
His head was fully bandaged, a thick, bloody bandage covering his forehead and left eye. Tubes gushed out of his mouth, forcing oxygen into his failing lungs. His arms, bruised by dozens of shards of glass, were pierced with infusions of painkillers and serum. The man who terrified the Parisian underworld and foreign spies, the man who had imposed silence on the court of Stanislas by his mere presence, was no more than an inert mass, subject to the adjustments of the peristaltic pumps.
Lazarus approached the bed. He did not take his father's hand. Gestures of tenderness did not belong to their dialect.
The sixty-year-old engineer felt a crack open in his armor of ice. A dull, tectonic anger began to rumble in his bowels. Augustus had never wanted to be a martyr. He had been sent to the slaughterhouse by a blind state, by a slow and incompetent administration that had failed to anticipate the technological evolution of terrorism.
They broke you because they are weak," Lazarus thought, staring at his father's swollen face. They have sent the man of the situation to the wrong field, because they do not have control of the information.
If France had had sovereign satellite intelligence, encrypted communication networks inaccessible to foreign eavesdropping, operating systems capable of cross-referencing the financial data of terrorist cells in a few seconds, the Drakkar might not have exploded. Augustus would not have been sacrificed on the altar of incompetence.
At the foot of the medical bed, Lazare made a decision that would alter the face of the industrial world.
The founding of Volta was no longer just an engineer's project to build machines out of intellectual pride. It had become a state revenge. Lazarus was going to create the technological shield that the nation lacked. He would build the silicon armor that would prevent the American empire and foreign powers from gambling with the lives of French soldiers and officers.
"I take command, Augustus," murmured Lazarus in the concert of the engines. "Rest. The rest is mine. »
He left the room without looking back, leaving behind his childhood, dead under the rubble of Beirut.
The weeks that followed were a deep dive into the bureaucracy of misfortune.
The winter of 1983 turned into the year 1984. January set in, cold and pitiless. Auguste Bonaparte remained plunged into a deep vegetative coma. His body, repatriated to a long-term room in the Val-de-Grâce, refused to capitulate, but his spirit refused to return.
Material reality, however, did not wait. The state machine demanded order.
Augustus' legal incapacity, confirmed by the military medical corps, led to the preventive freezing of some of his personal accounts and the appointment of a supervisory council for the management of current affairs. Madeleine, crushed by depression and daily trips to the hospital, was in no condition to take care of the family's finances. Lazarus assumed this role in his own right. Although he was only seventeen and a half years old, his icy authority swept away any maternal or administrative resistance.
Thus, on a Thursday afternoon at the end of January 1984, Lazare was summoned to the offices of Maître Delcourt, the notary and manager of the Bonaparte family's historical heritage, installed in a luxurious office on Boulevard Raspail.
Maître Delcourt was a dry, elegant man, whose face betrayed a certain discomfort in front of the teenager sitting on the other side of his heavy mahogany desk. The notary expected to receive a weeping high school student; He was facing an entity with black marble eyes, who demanded that the assets be read without the slightest tremor in his voice.
"Monsieur Bonaparte," began Maitre Delcourt, coughing to clear his throat. "Your father's situation is tragic, and the procedures for enhanced curatorship to protect your mother's assets are underway. However... There is one element that I must inform you of personally, because it concerns you exclusively. »
Lazarus crossed his legs, propping his back against the leather chair.
"I am listening to you, Master."
The notary opened a thick file of strong cardboard, stamped with the seal of the office.
"Six years ago, in November 1977, your father came to see me. It demanded the opening of a financial trust of a very special nature. A term deposit account, with a total invisibility clause. Your mother knew about it, but she didn't know the exact set-up. As for your uncle, Mr. Dufresne, he was formally and legally excluded. »
Lazarus raised an imperceptible eyebrow. November 1977. The exact month after the incident at the shooting range, the perfect shot with the Manurhin. The month of his night terrors and Augustus' definitive abandonment of his training as a soldier.
"What is the purpose of this trust?" asked Lazarus, his voice strangely calm.
"It was made for your exclusive benefit, Lazarus," the notary revealed, adjusting his tortoiseshell spectacles. "Colonel Bonaparte has taken his risk premiums from the Ministry of the Interior for six years, as well as a portion of your mother's dividends. He invested this money with rare aggressiveness, demanding safe but high-yielding bond investments to counter inflation. The instructions were clear: you were not to be aware of this fund under any circumstances before the exact day of your legal majority, in September 1984. The colonel said that you had to "keep hungry" until the end. »
Lazarus took the blow in silence. The revelation was an earthquake of lightning magnitude, but no tremor appeared on his face.
The father he thought was distant, the DST officer whom he thought was blind to his ambitions for technological sovereignty, had in fact understood everything. He had orchestrated everything. Augustus had never sought to destroy his son's dreams of silicon. By retiring from his educational life, he had transformed himself into a shadowsmith, secretly accumulating the war chest that would allow the empire to be born. The oath of the night of 1977.
"Why are you talking to me about it today, then? I won't be eighteen for another nine months," Lazare retorted, controlling the slight tremor that threatened his voice.
Master Delcourt sighed.
"Because the colonel's major incapacity clauses trigger an emergency safeguard clause. The trust was to be given to you when you came of age to, I quote your father's notes, allow him to finance his machines and not depend on anyone, especially not on the banks or his maternal family. With your father's current condition, and considering the strength of your academic record and your obvious maturity... The firm and the supervisory judges agree to proceed with an early release in the form of financial emancipation, as of next month, if you make the justified request. »
Lazarus' heart missed a beat. The barrier of time had just collapsed. He didn't need to wait until the fall. The timetable had just accelerated suddenly.
"How much is this fund, Master?" asked Lazarus, staring at the notary with the intensity of a predator staring at his prey.
Master Delcourt slipped a printed sheet of paper onto the green leather desk.
"With the capitalization of interest over six years, net of our management fees... The amount available in the blocked account amounts to four hundred and thirteen thousand francs. »
Four hundred thousand francs.
Lazarus fixed the cipher printed in black ink. The sixty-year-old engineer felt the breath of fate rush into the room.
It wasn't pocket money. It wasn't a teenager's legacy. It was the starting capital of a real industrial development structure. With four hundred thousand francs in 1984, Lazare could rent offices, buy dozens of Unix workstations, recruit graduate engineers, order entire batches of blank chips, and launch the production of the V-1 module designed with Karim in the clandestine of a maid's room.
It was the spark of creation. And it was her father's blood that had paid for it. Augustus had swapped his presence, and finally his body, to offer him this financial arsenal.
Lazarus rose from his chair. His shadow stretched out on the mahogany desk. He towered over the notary with all his stature.
"I am launching the emancipation procedure tonight, Master," Lazarus said with absolute authority. "Prepare the legal statutes. I don't want this money to be transferred to a current account. I want you to integrate it directly into the starting share capital of a public limited company. »
The notary, astonished by the lightning speed of the decision, stammered:
"A ... a public limited company? But Lazare, you're in preparatory class... Creating a company requires a registered office, a board of directors, a clear corporate purpose! What will be the name of this company? »
Lazare turned to the large window of the study, which looked out on the Parisian boulevards plunged into winter. The invisible war, which he had been preparing since his awakening in this new body, was finally about to break out in broad daylight. The matter and the spirit were to merge into the market.
"It shall be called Volta S.A.," Lazarus solemnly announced, engraving the name in the legal history of the Republic. "Its corporate purpose will be the design and development of secure high-tech hardware and software architectures. I will be the majority shareholder. Karim Belkacem will be the technical director. And we will set up the head office in the thirteenth arrondissement. Prepare the papers, Master Delcourt. The world won't wait for my birthday. »
The young man left the notary's office, leaving the door open behind him.
When he found himself on the icy sidewalk of the Boulevard Raspail, Lazare raised the collar of his coat. He breathed the pungent air of the capital. He thought back to his father's ravaged face on his hospital bed, to the lungs breathing to the rhythm of the machine, to the silence of the resuscitation room.
The pain of loss was there, cold, insidious, but it was instantly sublimated by the fire of creation. The sacrifice of the patriarch had not been in vain. The wolf had fallen, but he had bequeathed his fangs to the emperor.
The year 1984, the year of all American dystopian prophecies, had just begun. But that year would not be the year of control by a Big Brother on the other side of the Atlantic. It would be the year of the foundation of the European empire.
The year of Volta's birth. The gun was loaded; The invisible man was about to fire his first salvo.