Location: Quartier de l'Opéra (Paris) / Laboratoire de Tolbiac
Date: Winter 1984 - February 1985
Point of view: Omniscient (Slippery Focus on Karim and Lazarus)
Having forged the absolute weapon in the bowels of Paris was not enough. History is full of revolutionary inventions that died in the anonymity of a basement because their creators had not been able to cross the last front line: that of the market.
The winter of 1984-1985 fell on the capital with relentless harshness. Melted snow carpeted the sidewalks of the business districts, reflecting the yellow lights of the headlights and the gray of the Haussmannian facades. It was in this setting of a bourgeois fortress that Lazarus and Karim tried to launch their offensive.
They had the product. Ten heavy, dense black monoliths, stamped with the Volta seal, rested in an armored leather briefcase that Lazarus carried at arm's length.
But the reality of the corporate world in the 80s was a wall of armored glass. It was an exclusive club, a hushed inner circle dominated by fifty-somethings in double-breasted suits, smoking Havanas in offices covered with thick carpets, and whose technological religion was summed up in three letters: IBM.
On a Tuesday in January, Lazare and Karim were standing in the anteroom of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of one of France's largest investment banks, near the Place de l'Opéra.
Lazarus wore his dark suit tailored to measure. His face, although sculpted by an abnormal hardness for his eighteen years, remained irremediably that of a very young man. Next to him, Karim, twenty-one, was sweating profusely in a shirt whose collar strangled him, constantly adjusting the club tie that Lazare had lent him.
"Monsieur Delarive will receive you," finally announced a secretary whose gaze oscillated between condescending amusement and incomprehension. She was probably wondering how these two kids had been able to get past the switchboard roadblock. (The answer was the social engineering of Lazare, who had impersonated a senior official in the Ministry of Industry to obtain this twenty-minute slot.)
They entered a vast office smelling of wax and cold tobacco.
Behind a huge solid mahogany executive desk, Jean-Marc Delarive, a chubby man with greying temples, was finishing signing a signature. He did not raise his eyes until Lazarus and Karim were stopped in front of him.
The CIO stared at them. His face changed from bewilderment to a faint mocking smile.
"I think there is a mistake. I was waiting for the representatives of the company Volta S.A. for a solution for securing branch networks. Are you their interns? »
"I am Lazare Bonaparte, Chairman and CEO of Volta," Lazare said in a polar voice, sitting down uninvited. "And this is Karim Belkacem, my technical director. We don't have any interns. »
Delarive let out a little fat laugh and leaned back in his leather chair. He clasped his hands to his stomach.
"Is it a hidden camera from the television? What class are you in, boys? Math Sup? »
Karim blushed from ear to ear, the humiliation hitting him hard. He opened his mouth to justify himself, to scream that he had coded a UNIX kernel capable of supplanting everything this bank had, but Lazarus raised his hand to silence him.
Lazare opened his briefcase. With almost religious solemnity, he took out the V-1 module. The black monolith.
He placed it in the center of the mahogany desk. The heavy "clac" of the epoxy resin on the solid wood silenced the director's sneer.
"This is the Volta-1 module, Mr. Delarive," Lazare began, his dark eyes twining in the banker's eyes, instantly sweeping away the age difference with the absolute authority of his tone. "Currently, your branch terminals communicate with your mainframes via rented phone lines. These lines send the financial data in plain text. Any student with a modem and a crocodile clip can intercept your customers' account numbers. You are a sieve. »
Delarive's smile faded, replaced by an annoyed pout. The arrogance of this kid stung him to the quick.
"We work with IBM, young man. Our "strainers", as you say, are the standards of the global industry. »
"American standards," corrected Lazare. "Our module plugs directly into the expansion ports of your servers. It takes control of the processor before the boot sequence and encrypts the entire stream with a tamper-proof asymmetric key. The code is encapsulated in this heat-dissipating composite resin. If your competitors, or foreign intelligence agencies, try to open it up for analysis, the chip self-destructs. It's French technological sovereignty in a twelve-centimetre block. Plug it in. Test it out. »
Delarive looked down at the black block. The object was undeniably beautiful. It exuded a muted menace, an aesthetic mystery that had nothing to do with the usual green electronic cards covered in wires.
But the conservatism of the old world was a wall harder than Lazarus' resin.
The banker pushed the module away with the tip of his gold pen, refusing even to put his fingers on it.
"Listen to me, Monsieur Bonaparte. You have a nice vocabulary and your clipboard is very aesthetically pleasing. But there's a golden rule in my job: No one has ever been fired for buying IBM. If the bank's network goes down because of IBM, it's IBM's fault. If the network goes down because I plugged in the magic black brick of two students who come out of the bud, I go to jail and my career is over. I don't plug toys into my bank safe. Take it back, and go back to your studies. »
The sentence had fallen. It was irrational, purely based on fear and corporate politics, but it was definitive.
Lazarus did not get angry. He did not plead his case. The sixty-year-old engineer knew how to recognize an armored door when he saw one. He took the monolith, put it back in his briefcase, and stood up.
"Security is not a question of reputation, Mr. Delarive," Lazare said simply, before turning on his heels. "It's a question of survival. You will remember it. »
February 1985 marked the lowest point in the young history of Volta S.A.
The scene in Delarive's office had been repeated, with a few variations, in six other banking establishments and two ministerial directorates. Everywhere, the same glass wall. Contempt for their youth, dogmatic attachment to American manufacturers, fear of risk. Module V-1, an engineering gem and cryptography masterpiece, was gathering dust on the bench of Tolbiac's lab.
And in the meantime, the clock was ticking.
On a Friday night, the atmosphere in the basement was unbearably heavy. The Parisian rain beat against the basement windows at the level of the sidewalk.
Karim Belkacem was collapsed in his office chair. In front of him were no lines of Assembler code, but a simple rudimentary financial spreadsheet that he had programmed to track their cash flow.
The harsh light of the neon lights deepened her dark circles. The student, who had sacrificed everything to follow Lazarus' madness, was on the verge of a panic attack.
"We're crashing, Bonaparte," Karim whispered, his voice trembling, his eyes fixed on the red numbers on the screen. "We crash at the speed of sound."
Lazarus sat on a high stool, meticulously cleaning the tip of an extinguished soldering iron. He did not raise his head.
"Give me the numbers, Karim. Without any qualms. »
"We've burned sixty percent of your capital," the technical director spat, the anxiety suddenly making him aggressive. "The industrial rent of this fucking basement. The bills of the UNIX stations that we pay every month. Subscriptions for the secure telephone line. Electricity to run these monsters, the purchase of epoxy resins... One spends thirty thousand francs a month without bringing in a single centime! At this rate, in September, we are in suspension of payments. The key is being put under the door. »
Karim stood up, almost overturning his chair, and began to pace back and forth between the straw mattresses.
"They don't care!" he yelled, hitting the edge of a table with the flat of his hand. "These old idiots don't give a damn about our code! The V-1 is perfect. It's perfect, damn it! But until we're fifty, gray temples and an American logo on our business card, they'll treat us like! We're finished, Lazarus. Your father's money... We screwed him up to make something that no one wants. »
Silence fell. Only the heavy hum of UNIX server fans filled the basement.
Lazarus slowly put down his tool. He looked at Karim, seeing the sheer distress of a young man who realized that intellectual genius was not enough to conquer the world.
The sixty-year-old engineer, the former operator of the shadows who inhabited the body of Lazarus, rose. There was no panic in his eyes. Only an analytical coldness, sharp as a razor blade.
"Stop pacing, Karim," Lazare ordered, his voice cracking like a military order, stopping his partner's anxiety attack in its tracks.
"We failed!" moaned Karim.
"We have not failed. We used the wrong doctrine of engagement," corrected the young CEO. He walked over to the safe, opened it, and pulled out one of the V-1 modules. He had it weighed in his hand, gazing at the black monolith under the white light.
"The traditional trading system is based on trust," Lazarus explained, as if he were teaching a course in cynical geopolitics. "Now, a sixty-year-old banker will never trust an eighteen-year-old boy to protect his billions. It is an insurmountable psychological bias. The tie, the polite appointments, the catalog demonstrations... All of this only works when both parties see each other as equals. This is not our case. We are an anomaly. And the anomaly is frightening. »
"If we scare them, they will never buy!"
"On the contrary," smiles Lazarus. The predatory grin distorted the features of his youthful face. "They won't buy out of confidence. They will buy out of terror. »
Karim frowned, panic slowly giving way to curiosity at his boss's dark tone.
"What are you talking about?"
"If you stand in front of a fortress and politely ask the lord to buy you reinforcements for his door, he'll laugh in your face and tell you that his door is strong," Lazarus said as he put the V-1 back on the table. "But if you blow up his door in the middle of the night, and walk into his room and put a quote on his chest while he's sleeping..." He will pay a high price the next morning. »
Karim's mind, accustomed to the logic of computer hacking, suddenly made the connection. He looked at the black module, then at Lazarus, his eyes wide open with the suicidal audacity of the plan that was taking shape.
"You want... Do you want us to hack them? But we don't have access to their networks from the outside! And if we get caught, it's a prison sentence, Lazarus! The DST, the Intelligence, we end up in jail! »
"I have no intention of acting from the outside," Lazarus replied with absolute serenity.
The shadow patriarch of the rue d'Assas now gave way to the industrial warlord. Augustus' money was melting. The time for politeness was over.
"Prepare a new EPROM chip for the V-1," Lazare ordered. "Configure the kernel to instantly lock host CPU requests as soon as it is powered on, and to display our logo with a decryption key that only you will have. A total digital hostage-taking, executed in half a second. »
"On what target?" whispered Karim, feeling his heart racing again.
Lazare turned to the wall where he had pinned the business cards of the directors who had turned them away. His gaze was fixed on the rectangle of white bristol stamped with the logo of a large bank on the Place de l'Opéra.
"Monsieur Delarive said he would never plug our toy into his safe," whispered Lazare, his black eyes shining with icy determination. "So we're going to plug it in ourselves. In front of its board of directors. Prepare the module, Karim. Next month, we commit our first robbery. »
Location: Head office of an investment bank, Opéra district (Paris 9th) Date: March 1985 Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
On Tuesday, March 12, 1985, at ten o'clock sharp, a light rain washed the Haussmannian facades of the Opera district.
In front of the heavy smoked glass doors of the bank's headquarters, Karim Belkacem felt his stomach contract violently. He wore a beige raincoat over his suit, and held a black leather satchel against his chest. Inside rested the Volta-1 module. Only one copy. The black monolith.
"Lazarus, we're going to do something stupid," the technical director whispered, gasping for breath, watching the uniformed security guards stationed behind the windows. "This is the national headquarters. It's armored. If you force your way through, they call the police in thirty seconds. We're going to end up in handcuffs. »
Lazare Bonaparte, impeccable in his dark woollen overcoat, did not look at the security guards. He was looking at the architecture of the security system. In his first life, he had infiltrated Soviet embassies and terrorist finance banks in the Middle East. A Parisian bank headquarters from the 80s, protected by retired gendarmerie officers and analog cameras, was only a formality.
"Physical security is an illusion, Karim," Lazarus replied with abysmal tranquility. "Humans don't control the badges. They control the attitude. If you act like the building belongs to you, they'll hold the door for you. Take off your raincoat. Keep your eyes fixed in front of you. Don't look any guard in the eye. And above all, don't talk. »
Lazare advances.
He did not walk hesitantly. He cut through the space with the overwhelming authority of an inspector general of finance. He pushed open the revolving door. Karim, paralyzed, followed suit.
In the huge hall lined with Carrara marble, the ballet of executives in costume was in full swing. Lazarus walked across the hall without a glance at the reception desk. He knew exactly where he was going. The previous week, a series of meticulously manipulated phone calls to the executive secretariat had enabled him to map the agenda of the Director of Information Systems, Jean-Marc Delarive.
At 10:15 a.m. on Tuesday, the bank's executive committee met on the eighth floor, in the large board room. Delarive was to give a live demonstration of the new IBM terminal network, linking the branch offices to the central supercomputer. It was the CIO's moment of glory.
Lazarus and Karim rushed into the executive elevator just before the doors closed, politely ignoring the inquisitive gaze of a senior executive.
Eighth floor.
The doors opened onto a thick carpet that muffled the slightest sound. The air smelled of beeswax, full-grain leather, and cold cigars. At the end of the corridor stood heavy solid oak doors. Two executive assistants were talking in low voices behind a curved desk.
Lazarus advanced straight on them.
"Hello," he said in a polar voice, not slowing his pace. "Emergency technical audit of the ministry. Mr. Delarive is waiting for us for the network demonstration. »
Lazarus' confidence, coupled with the use of the word "ministry," caused the senior assistant to experience a cognitive short-circuit. Before she could even check her register or pick up her phone, Lazare had already put his hand on the brass handle of the double doors.
He pushed them on the fly.
The Board of Directors room was a cathedral of money. A ten-metre-long elliptical mahogany table occupied the centre. Around her, twelve middle-aged men, dressed in dark suits, with closed faces, listened. At the head of the table was the bank's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Baron de Courcelles, a stern man with white temples.
At the other end of the room, Jean-Marc Delarive, red with pride, stood next to a heavy IBM 3270 terminal, whose green phosphor screen was broadcasting lines of live data. Two IBM sales engineers, recognizable by their strict suits and thin ties, stood in the background, complacent.
« ... and as you can see, gentlemen," Delarive boasted, pointing to the screen, "this new dedicated network allows instant querying of the balances of our provincial agencies. The reliability of the American architecture guarantees us an uninterrupted flow and absolute fluidity. »
The irruption of Lazare and Karim cut off the CIO's speech.
Twelve pairs of eyes converged on the intruders. Silence fell, heavy and incredulous.
Delarive frowned, narrowing his eyes. When he recognized the ice-eyed eighteen-year-old and the scholarship student he'd thrown out of his desk a month earlier, his face changed from red to scarlet.
"What are you doing here?!" exploded Delarive, his voice trembling with fury and panic. "How did you get in? Get out immediately! Security! »
Lazarus did not stop. He ignored the CIO, ignored the screams, and walked straight to the lit IBM terminal. Karim, livid, clung to her wake, opening the leather satchel.
"Mr. President, this man is a madman! He is a student who... Delarive stammered as he stepped forward to intercept Lazarus.
The Service Action operator is not slowing down. With a simple movement of his shoulder, executed with surgical precision and kinetic force unexpected for his age, Lazare pushed the heavy fifty-year-old CIO away from his trajectory. Delarive staggered and struck the edge of the mahogany table with a thud.
The members of the Council rose half in outrage. The President de Courcelles struck the table with the flat of his hand.
"Enough is enough! What is this circus? »
Lazarus had reached the machine.
"Proof of the reliability of your networks, Mr. President," Lazare said in a voice that instantly chilled the assembly.
He reached out to Karim. The technical director, his hands sweaty, handed him the V-1 module.
Under the light of the crystal chandeliers, the black resin monolith seemed to absorb the light of the room. Lazarus pivoted the IBM terminal. In 1985, computer security was a purely perimeter concept: once physically in front of the machine, there were no hardware barriers. Lazarus identified the direct diagnostic extension port on the data bus.
"Don't touch it! You're going to have everything planted! One of the IBM engineers yelled, rushing towards him.
Too late.
With a sharp blow, Lazarus plugged the black monolith into the port of the machine. The metallic clack of the gold connectors biting into the motherboard echoed in the room.
The material miracle, forged in resin and alumina in the rue de Tolbiac, was carried out.
The hardware interrupt (IRQ) struck the American processor in less than a picosecond. The host machine was totally short-circuited. On the screen, bank data flows, branch balances, and transfer lines faded into a crackle of green pixels.
Silence fell. Then, the screen dims completely.
In the center of the cathode ray tube, a huge stylized "V" appeared, of arrogant graphic purity, followed by a few lines of text:
VOLTA KERNEL V-1.0 SECURE MODE INITIATED. ENCRYPTION ACTIVE. RSA ASYMMETRIC LOCK. ALL BANKING SYSTEMS LOCKED. > ACCESS DENIED.
A gasp of stupor ran through the table of the Board of Directors.
"What have you done?!" choked Delarive, gasping for breath. "The central flow... You have disconnected the network! »
"I didn't pull the plug, Mr. Delarive. I stole it," corrected Lazare, turning to President de Courcelles.
The eighteen-year-old crossed his hands behind his back and held the baron of finance's gaze.
"The device that your CIO presented to you as tamper-proof has just been totally compromised. My hardware module has taken control of the data bus. As I speak, the entire flow exchanged between this headquarters and your central servers is encrypted by a proprietary algorithm. You no longer have access to your databases. You are blind. You are at my mercy. »
"It's a bluff!" yelled the IBM technician, shoving Karim to fall on the terminal keyboard.
His fingers hammered the keys to force a restart (Control-Alt-Delete), to invoke the interrupt routines of the American system. Click, click, click. The screen didn't blink. The majestic "V" remained displayed. The machine was completely unaware of the keyboard controls. Lazare's module had physically cut the link between the processor and the peripherals. The technician, sweating, tried to pull on the black monolith to tear it out of its port.
Lazarus violently placed his hand on the IBM engineer's wrist, stopping him in his tracks. Lazarus' grip was of an iron hardness.
"I strongly advise against it," Lazarus whispered in the technician's ear, with terrifying calm. "The resin is welded to the circuits by a composite glue. If you pull it cold, the module will trigger a power surge that will burn out the terminal's motherboard, and it will send a loop of corrupted requests that will cause your core mainframe to collapse. Don't touch anything. »
The IBM technician recoiled, livid, the terror of the fatal error legible in his eyes. He had just confessed his powerlessness before the bank's staff.
The door of the Council Chamber opened on the fly. Four security guards, called by the secretaries, burst in, their hands on their batons.
"Master them!" ordered Delarive, drooling over his lips. "Call the police! This is industrial terrorism! »
"Stop!"
The order, dry and sharp, came from the end of the table. The Baron de Courcelles had just risen. The old bank CEO looked at his bodyguards, then raised his hand to freeze them in place.
He stared at Lazare Bonaparte. The experienced businessman did not see a delinquent. He saw the insane audacity, the predatory genius, and above all, the gaping hole that this kid had just revealed in the armor of his own bank.
"Get out," the Baron said to the security guards. "And you," he added, pointing to IBM engineers, "get away from this machine. You've just proven that your equipment is worthless compared to a simple piece of resin. »
He turned to Delarive, whose career had evaporated in less than a minute.
"Sit down, Jean-Marc. You have made me lose enough money today. »
The Baron de Courcelles advanced slowly along the mahogany table. He stopped a meter from Lazarus. The aristocrat of finance and the Builder of the Shadows gauged each other.
"Who are you, young man?" asked the Baron, his voice tinged with respect tinged with distrust. "And what the hell did you just plug into my network?"
"My name is Lazare Bonaparte. I am the founder of Volta S.A., a French high-tech industry," Lazare replied with perfect diction. "And what I've plugged into your network, Mr. President, is the only reason your competitors aren't siphoning off your accounts right now."
Lazarus pointed to the black monolith.
"Your CIO threw me out of his office a month ago. He claimed that no one could infiltrate an American machine. It took me two minutes to walk through your lobby, and half a second to take your network hostage. If I were a KGB agent, or a Silicon Valley hacker, your financial data would already be up for sale. However, the tool I just plugged in is an active shield. Once installed on all your sensitive terminals, no external control can force the machine. The door is sealed in silicon. »
The Baron de Courcelles looked at the lock screen. He immediately understood the strategic stakes. It was not a gimmick; it was the guarantee of the absolute impermeability of his financial empire.
"Unlock my machine, Monsieur Bonaparte," the Baron ordered softly.
Lazarus nodded. He gave Karim a slight nod with his chin.
The scholarship student, who had been shaking in all his limbs five minutes earlier, felt the adrenaline of victory replace the fear. He approached the keyboard. He didn't even look at the keys. At lightning speed, he typed a sequence of sixteen alphanumeric characters generated by his own kernel.
He pressed Enter.
The majestic "V" disappeared instantly. The module gave the host processor back control with perfect algorithmic smoothness. The screen returned to its usual greenish display, the bank's flows resuming their course as if nothing had happened.
With a firm hand, Lazarus grabbed the black monolith, pressed the safety lugs, and pulled it out of the harbor. The silence in the room was absolute.
With a fluid movement, Lazarus opened the inside of his overcoat. He took out a heavy envelope of wove paper, which he placed on the mahogany table, just in front of the President of Courcelles.
"Inside this envelope, you'll find the technical specifications of the V-1 module, as well as an equipment contract," Lazare said, his icy gaze not blinking. "Fifty monoliths to equip all your central communication nodes in Paris, Lyon and Marseille. Five million francs. The master decryption code will be delivered to you in person. »
Delarive let out a choked groan.
"Five million? It's blackmail! It's pure and simple extortion! »
"This is the price of your sovereignty, Monsieur Delarive," Lazarus said coldly without even looking at him. "And it's infinitely cheaper than the bankruptcy you'll cause that bank when your open network is hacked next year."
The Baron de Courcelles did not look at his DSI. He opened the envelope. He read the first page of the contract, printed on the majestic letterhead of Volta S.A., with the address of the head office on rue de Tolbiac.
The old banker smiled indecipherably. He loved strength. He respected commercial cruelty. And this young man, barely out of his teens, had just humiliated IBM, bypassed its security, and proved to it by terror that his product was indispensable. It was the very definition of the perfect sale.
The Baron took his gold fountain pen out of the inside pocket of his jacket.
"Jean-Marc," said the Baron, without looking up from the document. "Prepare an immediate line of credit for Volta. I want these modules installed on our main servers before the end of the month. If any data leaks by then, I will hold you personally accountable. »
He signed the order form. The golden pen scratched the paper with a sharp sound.
He closed the file and pushed it towards Lazarus.
"Welcome to the world of business, Mr. Bonaparte. I hope your technology is as strong as your nerve. »
Lazarus took the contract. He doesn't smile. He showed no jubilation. The sixty-year-old engineer had just won his first battle against the system.
"Our technology is immortal, Mr. President," Lazare replied calmly.
He put the contract in his pocket, slipped the black monolith into his purse, and nodded to Karim. The two young men turned on their heels and left the Council chamber, under the dumbfounded gaze of the assembly of American bankers and engineers.
When they found themselves in the elevator heading to the lobby, the doors closed with a muffled hiss.
Karim leaned against the mirror wall, his knees wobbly. Her forehead was drenched in sweat. He looked at Lazarus, who was simply adjusting the knot of his tie.
"You're a very sick man, Lazare..." The student whispered, a laugh of hysteria rising in his throat. "You're the greatest psychopath the earth has ever carried. We have just robbed the first bank in France with a piece of epoxy resin. And they gave us five million francs for that. »
A thin grin finally stretched over the lips of the Shadow Patriarch.
"They didn't give us five million, Karim. They have financed our next factory. And as of tomorrow morning, this contract will serve as proof to make Société Générale, the Ministry of Finance and the Health Directorate bend. »
The elevator doors opened onto the large marble hall.
The air of Paris greeted them, fresh, electric. The first blow had just been dealt to the old world. The glass wall was broken. The asymmetric silicon war was on, and Volta S.A. had just collected its first war chest.
The empire was on the march.