Location: Management office, Volta S.A. factory (Ivry-sur-Seine) Date: June 1985 Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding focus on Karim and Lazare)
The month of June 1985 hit the Parisian suburbs with stifling heat. Inside the Ivry-sur-Seine plant, the air extractors were running at full speed to chase away tin vapours and the smell of epoxy resin, but the tension remained palpable. The steel ogress continued to devour the treasury. Every day that passed without a new purchase order being signed brought Volta S.A. closer to the financial abyss.
In the small glass office overlooking the assembly line, Karim Belkacem frantically erased the names written on a whiteboard.
"AGF insurance?" asked Karim, his shirt sleeve stained with chalk dust.
"Refusal of the purchasing department. They're under an exclusive contract with IBM for another three years," Lazare replied, sitting behind a metal desk, poring over prospecting sheets with mechanical coldness.
"The BNP?"
"The CIO got wind of the incident at Courcelles. He refuses to receive us. He literally had our names written down by the security guards at the headquarters," Lazare said without the slightest hint of annoyance.
Karim threw his eraser cloth against the painting.
"It's dead. We're toasted, Lazare! exclaimed the technical director, sinking into a threadbare leatherette chair. "The electroshock worked once with the baron, but the world of finance closed ranks. CIOs would still rather be hacked by Russians than risk losing their jobs by buying our hardware. We are the wolf in the sheepfold. Except that they closed the doors of the sheepfold! »
The student ran his hands over his face. The features drawn by lack of sleep and the anxiety of making ends of the month betrayed his youth.
"We need mid-sized customers," Karim pleaded. "Large SMEs, regional networks... The modules are sold in sets of ten. It will pay the factory's bills while waiting for mentalities to change. »
Lazarus closed the file he held in his hands. The sharp sound echoed in the small, muffled office.
The young eighteen-year-old CEO stood up. He walked around his desk and approached the whiteboard. With a broad gesture, he erased the few names of SMEs that Karim had scribbled in a corner. Then he took a red marker and traced in capital letters, in the exact center of the painting, two words that occupied the entire space:
FRENCH STATE
Karim stared at the painting, then looked at Lazarus as if he had just lost his mind.
"The state?" Karim repeated, a nervous, joyless laugh escaping him. "Bonaparte, you got hot with the polymerization furnaces. The State is not a customer. It is a Leviathan. »
"He's the only customer that can absorb our production capacity and make us untouchable," Lazare corrected placidly, crossing his arms over his chest.
"You're totally delusional!" exploded Karim as he jumped up. "Do you know how public procurement works? Do you think we fill out an order form in triplicate? These are calls for tenders that are a thousand pages long! The specifications are tailor-made by senior officials so that only national champions can meet them. Thomson-CSF, Bull, Alcatel! They have armies of lawyers, lobbyists who have lunch at the Tour d'Argent with the ministers! We're two kids in a shed in Ivry! »
"Tenders are the procedure for peacetime," Lazare whispered, the black eye shining with that predatory flame that Karim was beginning to fear and revere at the same time. "In times of war, the state does not buy according to the rules. He buys what allows his immediate survival. »
"And who are we at war with, exactly?"
"Against their own ignorance," the sixty-year-old engineer decided.
Lazare leaned against the glass wall that dominated the factory. His gaze seemed to pierce the industrial horizon to fix itself on the gilding of Parisian palaces.
"The Ministries of Defence, the Interior and the Quai d'Orsay communicate with each other via the Interministerial Network. Thousands of terminals exchange notes classified as "Defense Secrets", strategic data, and agent identities. Generals and ministers sleep soundly because they have been told that this network is inviolable. »
"And he is!" argued Karim, regaining his technical reflexes. "I studied their architecture. They do not use dial-up public telephone lines. These are digital lines and "dedicated" telex links. It is a closed, physical network. You can't hack it remotely with a modem. »
"Exactly," Lazarus agreed with an icy smile. "That's their certainty. They believe that the absence of an external deck guarantees absolute safety. To win the state contract without going through the lobbies of Thomson or Bull, we must destroy this certainty. We must prove to them that their national safe is a sieve. »
Karim took a step back, terrified by the turn of the conversation. He saw himself again in the council room of the bank of Courcelles.
"Oh no... No, no, no, Lazarus. Don't even think about it. The scholar pointed a trembling finger at his boss. "Do you want to repeat the hostage-taking trick? Do you want to join the Ministry of Defense? Bonaparte, wake up! At Courcelles, it was pot-bellied security guards. On the Boulevard Saint-Germain, it was the Republican Guard and the marines! They have FAMAS! If you approach a terminal with a V-1 module, you get shot in the head or end up in the Health Prison for treason! »
Karim's panic was legitimate. Logical. Any sane and civilian mind would have recoiled from the prospect of infiltrating a military installation.
But Lazare Bonaparte was neither healthy nor civil.
The young man closed his eyes for a second. Behind his teenage eyelids, the former operator of the DGSE's Action Service was taking over the reins. The memories of his first life flooded in. The clandestine operations, the installation of microphones in hostile territory, the secret geography of power. He knew the anatomy of Paris better than any architect, because he had studied it from the angle of vulnerability.
When he opened his eyes again, his gaze had taken on an unbearable density.
"You're right, Karim. The physical perimeter of the ministries is impassable. But this is a surface view. Senior civil servants and the military live on the surface. They are forgetting a fundamental principle of urban engineering. »
"Which one?" swallowed Karim.
"The fortress has no floor."
Lazare stepped forward, put both hands on the metal desk and leaned towards his technical director. His voice was now a conspiratorial whisper, laden with the state secrets of his former life.
"These 'dedicated' lines that connect the Élysée, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of the Interior... they don't magically float in the air. These are copper cables. Large coaxial cables. And these cables come out of official buildings to run under the city. »
Karim's mind, well-versed in the logic of computer networks, suddenly visualized the physical layer of the infrastructure.
"The galleries of the PTT... murmured the scholarship student, his eyes round.
"Exactly," Lazarus confirmed. "The hundreds of kilometres of galleries of the Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones. They run under the streets of Paris, often adjoining the capital's sewers. It is a dark, damp labyrinth, forgotten by all. The Republican Guard protects the solid oak doors of the ministries, but no one stands guard under the cast iron plates of the Parisian roads. »
Lazarus straightened up. The plan was already perfect in his mind. The Doctrine of the Ghost.
"We are not going to rob the Ministry of the Interior, Karim. We are going to descend into the bowels of the Republic. We are going to incise the jugular artery of state secrets. We are going to connect the V-1 module directly to the copper cables, right in the middle of the sewers. And from the darkness, you're going to capture their secrets, encrypt them with our core, and throw them back in their faces. »
Karim felt his legs wobbly. The madness of the enterprise was total. It was sabotage of critical infrastructure. State terrorism. If they were caught in the sewers diverting a line from the Ministry of Defense, they would disappear into dungeons without even a public trial.
Yet, looking at the marble face of his young CEO, Karim knew there was no escape. Lazarus did not offer an option. He was stating a fatality. The Tolbiac factory was hungry, and to feed it, it was necessary to slaughter the Leviathan.
"Do you know the plans for these galleries?" asked Karim, his voice breaking, abdicating all resistance. "There are thousands of cables at the bottom. How will we find the Ministry of Defence's database? »
"My father wasn't the only one in the family who had files, Karim," Lazarus lied with perfect ease, once again attributing to Augustus' legacy the knowledge accumulated in his own previous life as a spy. "I know exactly which collector the connection goes through."
Lazarus grabbed a dark canvas jacket hanging from the coat rack of the office.
"Prepare a portable UNIX station. Buy lead-acid car batteries and a voltage converter to power it in range. Grab your best soldering iron, alligator clips, and a V-1 module set up for a Man-in-the-Middle attack. »
"When is it for?" asked Karim, watching his hands tremble.
"For tonight. The night is advisable, but above all it covers break-ins very well. The age of innocence is over, Karim. Tonight, Volta declares war on the French state. »
PART 2: The Insides of the Republic
Location: Underground galleries of the PTT, 7th arrondissement (Paris)
Date: Night at the end of June 1985
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
Paris, at two o'clock in the morning, is a city that is silent to let its ghosts speak.
In the 7th arrondissement, in the shadow of the golden dome of the Invalides and not far from the Ministry of Defense, the wide tree-lined avenues were deserted. The night air was warm, heavy with the humidity that the Seine, nearby, exhaled. The Republic slept, confident behind the gates of its ministries, protected by the assault rifles of the Republican Guard and the high walls of cut stone.
A grey Renault messenger, on the side of which was crudely magnetized a fake "Intervention PTT" sticker, parked silently along the sidewalk, at the corner of the rue Saint-Dominique.
The doors slammed shut with a muffled sound. Two figures descended, dressed in dark overalls, adorned with tired reflective strips.
Karim Belkacem felt his stomach knotting until it vomited. He adjusted his hard hat on his head. In his hands, he carried two heavy army sports bags whose canvas handles sawed off his fingers. Inside, two lead-acid car batteries, an industrial voltage converter, and a heavy "transportable" UNIX terminal weighing fifteen kilos, equipped with a tiny cathode ray screen.
In front of him, Lazare Bonaparte walked with the placid assurance of a workman tired by his years of service. The eighteen-year-old carried a heavy crowbar and a forged steel lifting hook on his shoulder.
"If a police patrol passes... Karim whispered, casting panicked glances left and right.
"The police are looking for thieves who are on the run, not technicians who are working," Lazare cut him off, his voice low and calm. "Look down. Blow hard. You are a proletarian of the night. Live your role. »
Lazarus stopped over a heavy cast-iron manhole cover, streaked with patterns of adhesion.
The sixty-year-old engineer knew exactly where he was. In his first life, in the uniform of the Action Service, he had to memorize the cartography of the capital's technical galleries to plan exfiltrations or to eavesdrop on embassies in Eastern Europe. It was not the map of the sewers of Paris that he had in mind, but the nervous cartography of the State: the galleries of the Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones.
With a sharp blow, Lazarus inserted the hook into the notch of the plate. He pry with the crowbar, using kinetic force and the weight of his own body rather than pure force. The sixty-kilogram cast iron plate lifted up with a creak of rusty metal. Lazarus turned her on her side.
A breath of stale air, laden with the scent of damp earth, ozone, mud and rats, rose from the bowels of the city.
"Get off first. I'll pass the equipment to you," Lazarus ordered.
Karim complied, gripping the iron bars sealed in the cold concrete. Once the technical director was downstairs, Lazare passed the heavy sports bags through a rope and then went down in turn. He pulled the cast iron plate from the inside, closing the lid of the city on them with a heavy CLANG that echoed through the well.
They were in the matrix.
Lazarus lit a waterproof flashlight with a yellow beam. The light swept through a narrow gut, half concrete, half millstone, the floor of which was covered with a few centimeters of brackish water. On each side of the walls ran dozens of thick black, gray and lead cables, fixed by metal collars. It was the other side of the story.
"Turn on your headlamp, Karim. And follow me. Don't touch the walls, some old power cables are poorly insulated. »
They walked for twenty minutes in the underground labyrinth. Karim was panting under the weight of the batteries, the sweat stinging his eyes despite the coolness of the cellar. Lazarus moved forward with the fluidity of a saw-whet predator, counting intersections, reading the blue-studded underground street signs that indicated their position below the surface.
"Here we are," Lazarus said at last.
He stopped in a slightly wider gallery. Above their heads was the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The Ministry of Defense was only a few hundred meters away.
Lazarus directed the beam of his torch towards a heavy metal chute attached to the ceiling, from which a bundle of cables as thick as an arm emerged, sheathed in lead to prevent electromagnetic interference.
"Is that it?" whispered Karim, fascinated and terrified at the same time. "Is it the Interministerial Network?"
"The jugular artery," Lazare confirmed. "The dedicated physical link between the Ministry of Defence, the General Staff and Matignon. No public switching. Only continuous flow in baseband. »
Lazare took out of his overalls a kit of precision tools. He placed his torch on the edge of the chute to illuminate the area of intervention.
"Set up the station. Plug in the V-1. »
Karim opened the sports bags, trembling. He connected the voltage converter terminals to the terminals of lead-acid batteries. The UPS made a small crackling sound, and then the heavy UNIX terminal lit up. The clatter of the floppy disk drive echoed through the damp gut. The monochrome CRT screen radiated a ghostly green glow, casting dancing shadows on the scholarship student's sweaty face.
Karim took out one of the Volta-1 modules—a cold, terrifying black monolith—and connected it to the serial port of his war machine, coupled with an analog acquisition interface. At the end of the interface hung two tiny copper alligator clips, connected to high-frequency probes.
Meanwhile, Lazarus was operating.
The sixty-year-old engineer incised the lead sheath of the large cable with a tungsten blade. He made a window a few centimeters long with the precision of a neurosurgeon, without touching the core of the cable so as not to create a loss of signal that would trigger an alarm on the desks of the ministry.
Inside the mass braid, about twenty pairs of twisted copper wires appeared.
Lazare selected a specific pair, relying on the military color code of the 80s that he knew by heart. He stripped the plastic over two millimeters.
"Probe one, connected. Probe two, connected," Whispered Lazarus, pinching the wires with the probes on Karim's device.
"The module is primed," Karim replied, his fingers hitting the keyboard at breakneck speed, forgetting the smell of the sewers, forgetting the prison, caught up in the purity of computer infiltration. "Launch of the bus listening... Wait... Baud Synchronization... »
The cathode ray screen was crossed by lines of incomprehensible interference.
"It's a number," Lazare said.
"yes, but it's dinosaur encryption," Karim sneered nervously, adrenaline replacing fear. "It's a symmetric substitution algorithm of the 56-bit DES type, probably with a daily rotating key. They set it up in the 70s. Their algorithm has mathematical flaws as big as the Arc de Triomphe. I run the module's cryptographic analysis routine. »
The core of Volta, thought up by Lazarus and coded by Karim, was not just a shield. It was also an electronic warfare weapon. The black monolith began to heat up slightly. The alumina powder in its resin began to pump heat from the processor, which calculated mathematical collisions on the fly.
Three minutes passed. Three minutes of heavy silence in the sewers of Paris.
Suddenly, the text on the green screen froze. The hexadecimal chaos gave way to the Roman alphabet in plain text. The terminal began to scroll through notes, intercepted on the fly, in real time.
Karim leaned over the screen. He swallowed so hard that Lazarus heard him.
"Holy fucking shit, Lazarus..." The scholarship student whispered, his voice breaking by the enormity of what he was reading.
"What have we got?"
Karim read aloud, wide-eyed:
" Synthesis note to the Minister of Defence. Ref: DGA/034. Defense Secret. Subject: Delays in the deployment of the Le Redoutable-class ballistic missile submarines at Île Longue following cracks in the primary cooling pumps... »
Karim stopped. He looked up at his boss. In the underground gut, in the face of these luminous words, the reality of the power of the state had just jumped in their faces. They were no longer hacking into the balance of a Crédit Lyonnais branch. They held in their hands France's nuclear deterrent.
"It's plain, Lazarus. The continuous flow from the naval staff to the minister's office. You can read everything. Vulnerability is absolute. If there was a KGB spy here in our place, with a simple tape recorder... the Soviet Union would know the exact position of our submarines. »
Anger rose in Karim's voice, terrified by the fragility of his own country.
"They believe that because the cable is buried, the data is safe. It's criminal stupidity, Lazarus. »
The sixty-year-old engineer is not smiling. He felt the same feeling of patriotic gagging that he had felt when he saw his father's body broken in Lebanon because of a lack of intelligence. The state was naked, out of pride and technological incompetence.
"That's exactly what I forged Volta for, Karim," the Shadow Patriarch replied solemnly, resting a gloved hand on his lieutenant's shoulder. "To protect them from themselves. Save this packet. Don't copy it. Let the flow flow. But isolate the next document that bears the stamp of the minister's office. »
Karim complied. A few seconds later, a new data packet appeared. A confidential budget note concerning the land forces.
"I have it in the memory buffer. What do we do? »
"The robbery begins," Lazarus decreed, his gaze hardening.
"We are in the 'Man in the middle' position. Cut off the outgoing flow, intercept this file. Uses the Volta kernel to encrypt it in RSA with a 1024-bit asymmetric key. Something that their mainframes would take three centuries to break. And put the encrypted file back in the pipe so that it arrives on the Ministry of Defense's ticker. »
Karim tapped frantically. He applied the VoltaOS encapsulation algorithm. The legible document turned into an illegible mush of characters.
"It's done. It's indecipherable. Except for us. »
"Very good. Now, inject a plain text header, just above the encrypted document. Write what I dictate to you. »
Lazarus crouched in the dirty water of the gallery. Under the light of torches, surrounded by mud and lead cables, the Builder formulated the declaration of war on French technological sovereignty.
" To the Minister of Defense. Your dedicated lines are compromised. Your secrets are read in real time. The Republic is naked. The attached document has been locked by us to prove our control. We have the key. Only the VOLTA architecture can secure your network. »
Karim knocked the last letter. He watched the text flash on a green background.
"Do you realize this is an act of computer warfare?" the student whispered. "Tomorrow morning, the DGSE, the DST and all the country's counter-espionage services will be on high alert. They will look for the source of the flight, they will turn all over Paris. »
"I count on that," replied Lazarus. "Send him."
Karim pressed the Enter key.
The black monolith on the UNIX station flashed for a fraction of a second. The lightning data packet went at the speed of light through the copper cables of the underground gallery. He ran straight to the servers of the Ministry of Defense, shattering all their beliefs in computer security.
"Unplug," Lazarus instantly ordered.
Karim ripped off the alligator clips. The workstation was turned off. The cathode ray screen turned black again, plunging the underground gut back into darkness, torn only by the two headlamps.
Lazarus grabbed a Kapton adhesive tape and a cold solder paste. With astonishing speed, he closed the lead sheath he had incised, smoothing it so that the cut was invisible to the naked eye. If PTT technicians came to inspect the network in the coming days, they would only find the break-in point after a millimetre inspection. The cable was intact.
"Put the gear away," Lazare said, painstakingly erasing his footprints on the metal chute with a cloth soaked in alcohol.
Karim stuffed the batteries, the inverter and the laptop into the army's sports bags. The return was silent. Exhausted, drenched in cold sweat, carried by the adrenaline of the state crime they had just committed, they went up the galleries to the extraction point.
At half-past four in the morning, Lazare lifted the heavy cast-iron plate in the Rue Saint-Dominique.
The fresh air of Paris swept away the smell of the sewers. The first bluish glimmers of dawn began to appear above the zinc roofs, outlining the massive silhouette of the Invalides. The sky was clear, indifferent to the unseen storm brewing in the Republic's servers.
They threw the bags into the back of the unmarked messenger. Lazare got behind the wheel, Karim collapsed in the passenger seat, breathing deeply.
Lazarus turned on the ignition. The engine coughed and then purred in the silence of the sleeping capital.
The young eighteen-year-old CEO glanced at the gates of the ministries at the end of the avenue.
The trap was closed. By the time the first secretaries and security officers took up their duties, they would discover the message on their secure printers. Panic would invade the corridors of power. The terror of a massive leak of information to the East would paralyze the chains of command.
The Leviathan had been stung to the quick, where it hurt the most: in his pride.
"It's done, Bonaparte," Karim stammered, wiping his forehead, gazing at the filth-stained hands he had just used to hack the state. "And now? What do we do? Shall we hide? Are we preparing fake passports to flee to Brazil? »
Lazare shifted gently, the messenger leaving the sidewalk to blend into the sparse traffic of the early morning.
"We are not fleeing, Karim," the Builder replied with sovereign calm, his adolescent face lit up by the yellowish light of the street lamps. "We are going back to the factory. We take a shower. We put on our most beautiful double-breasted suits. And we wait quietly for the phone to ring. For the State does not negotiate with shadows; the state pays to bring back the light. »
Operation Leviathan had succeeded in its infiltration phase. Tomorrow, the invisible man would have to face the generals and ministers of the Republic in broad daylight. The confrontation promised to be titanic.