Location: A brasserie (Paris XVe) / Headquarters of the DGA (Balard)
Date: February 1989
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
The atmosphere of the Le Balard brewery, located a few hundred meters from the Ministry of Defense, was saturated by the smell of brown tobacco and the clinking of coffee cups on zinc.
Alexandre de Vigan had ordered a rib steak and fries to celebrate the victory. The sales manager had loosened his silk tie and was scribbling numbers on a paper napkin with a fountain pen. It was already calculating the operating margins of a massive deployment of servers on all French military bases.
Karim Belkacem was drinking half a beer, his face relaxed for the first time in months. The breaking of the Russian code had taken place exactly as his team had planned. The load transfer to the GPU worked without a hitch.
Only Lazarus did not celebrate. He drank a black coffee, silent, watching the ballet of waiters in white aprons. His mind was already analyzing the next step: the port of VoltaOS Server to future IMPERATOR chips engraved at 0.8 microns. The engineer was not a man of celebration; He was a man of process.
Suddenly, a high-pitched, repetitive crackle rose from the leather bench.
Alexandre de Vigan paused, reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a heavy Radiocom 2000 terminal, France Telecom's mobile phone network. The device, the size of a brick, was a rare privilege in 1989. De Vigan unfolded the antenna and put the receiver to his ear.
"De Vigan," he announced with his usual assurance.
His face tensed almost instantly. He put down his pen.
"Calm down, Colonel. I hear you very badly... An attack? What do you mean, an attack? »
Lazare and Karim put down their cups, their attention suddenly focused on the salesman. De Vigan frowned, nodded several times, then hung up, pushing his half-full plate away.
"It was Lemaire," said de Vigan, his voice strained. "He was half screaming. He demands that we return to the meeting room immediately. »
"A problem with pricing?" asked Karim, worried.
"No. He spoke of a security breach. He claims that our machine is undergoing a massive intrusion. »
Lazarus stood up without question. He threw a fifty-franc note on the table to pay the bill. Five minutes later, the three men were running across the avenue in the icy February drizzle to reach the gates of the Balard complex.
The passage of security was expeditious. Two marines on duty were waiting for them at the reception and escorted them at a charge through the maze of basements, without going through the badge office.
When they entered the secure meeting room again, the atmosphere was none of the hushed bureaucracy of the morning. It was a state of siege.
Doctor Arnault was tapping nervously on the table with his pen, his forehead beaded with sweat. Colonel Lemaire was talking into a red wall-mounted phone, the handset glued to his ear. But above all, a new man was present in the room. An officer in impeccable uniform, wearing two stars on his epaulettes. A General of Division.
"Here they are," the General barked as he saw Volta's team enter.
Lazarus paid no attention to the superior officer. His gaze immediately fell on the cathode ray monitor connected to the IMPERATOR server.
VoltaOS's sleek graphical interface, which had been quietly displayed a few hours earlier, had disappeared under a myriad of warning windows. The screen was flashing to the rhythm of dozens of bright red alerts.
[ALERT - INTRUSION ATTEMPT DETECTED - PACKET REJECTED]
[ALERT - UNAUTHORIZED REQUEST FOR ACCESS TO THE /CRYPTANALYSIS DIRECTORY]
[ALERT - DATA EXFILTRATION ATTEMPT - PORT 21 - BLOCKED]
The OS's native security module, managed by the hardware controller, was running at full capacity. It blocked a barrage of aggressive computer requests in real time, all of which sought to reach a single place: the folder containing the freshly decrypted Soviet text.
"What is going on on this machine, Bonaparte?" the General demanded, approaching Lazarus with threatening authority. "Colonel Lemaire has made me a report on your so-called exploit. You broke the GOST standard of the Soviets. Congratulations. But ten minutes after you left, this black box started screaming alerts in all directions! »
"The system is doing its job, General," Lazarus replied in a calm, analytical voice, approaching the screen. "The firewall blocks unauthorized requests. Someone is trying to extract the Cyrillic document. »
"I can read a screen!" the officer said angrily. "What I want to know is how it's possible! The KGB is siphoning off our network! They must have detected the signature of your crypto processing! They launch a massive attack to erase the traces of their security breach or to recover the document! »
Karim approached in turn, watching the lines of alert commands pass by. The engineer shook his head, puzzled. The concept of automated state cyberattack was in its infancy in 1989.
"It's impossible, General," Karim explained, trying to reason with the soldier. "A Soviet attack from Moscow or their embassy would require a direct connection by telephone line or a wide area network. However, we are in a room in the basement of the DGA. »
"The ministry's network is classified and physically isolated," confirmed Dr. Arnault, visibly shaken by the situation. "This room does not communicate with any public network. We are in a closed circuit. The Soviets cannot get through the walls. »
The General turned to Lazarus, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. In the intelligence world, when an intrusion occurs in a physically locked space, the explanation is often human.
"If they can't get through the walls, the door has been opened to them," the General said coldly. "You bring us a civilian, uncertified machine, and suddenly, an intrusion occurs on a document classified as a Defense Secret. Does your server contain a spyware, Bonaparte? Do you retransmit our data to the outside world via an integrated radio frequency? »
Alexandre de Vigan turned pale. The accusation of spying for a foreign power, made by a DGA General in a secure room, was not a business issue. It was a one-way ticket to high-security prisons.
Lazarus did not back down. He put his hands on the desk, framing the keyboard, and stared at the senior officer.
"If I wanted to steal your documents, General, I wouldn't have programmed my operating system to display flashing red alerts and block the transfer in real time," Lazarus replied with implacable logic.
The General remained silent, forced to admit the relevance of the argument. If Volta S.A. was a mole, the theft would have been invisible.
Lazarus returned his attention to the screen. The machine held firm. The IMPERATOR's chips blocked the rain of requests without showing any signs of weakness, with ECC memory correcting packet corruption attempts on the fly.
"The attack is real. She is aggressive. And it's automated," Lazare said, his gaze focused on the local IP addresses that were showing up in the OS's security logs. "And since you say that this hall is not connected to any public network, Karim is right. The Soviets had nothing to do with it. »
Lazarus pulled out the Formica chair and sat down in front of the keyboard, cracking his joints slightly. He opened a command-line system terminal to examine the raw firewall logs.
He would have to prove to them that the threat did not come from the East, but from within. And the truth was going to do much more damage than a simple accusation of hacking.
Location: Headquarters of the French Defence Procurement Agency (DGA), Boulevard Victor (Paris)
Date: February 1989
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on the flow of the meeting)
The meeting room in the third basement of the DGA was bathed in sticky tension. The Major General, his arms crossed over his decorated chest, glared at the young leader of Volta S.A., waiting for an explanation for the chaos that was displayed on the screen.
Lazare Bonaparte had just sat down in front of the keyboard. He ignored the hostility of the superior officer. His fingers flew over the keys with mechanical precision. He closed the GUI for alerts to switch to terminal mode, opening the raw event logs from the CENTURION hardware controller.
Lines of white text scrolled on a black background.
Karim had leaned over Lazare's shoulder, his developer eyes scanning network frames on the fly.
"Look at the routing," Karim whispered, pointing to the center of the screen. "It's not spoofing. Packages do not bounce from the outside. »
"I see," replied Lazarus, in a dull voice.
He typed a new command line to isolate the attacker's address. He froze. He reread the line, making sure that there was no misinterpretation of the core. Then he swivelled in his Formica chair to face Doctor Arnault, the head of cryptanalysis.
"Doctor," Lazare began, with a cold look. "What exactly happened in that room between the time we walked through the door with Monsieur de Vigan, and the time the alarms went off? What manipulations did you perform on our machine? »
The chief engineer of the DGA was offended, wiping his sweaty forehead.
"We have not tampered with anything, if that is what you are insinuating!" defended Arnault. "We had in front of us a document from the Soviet embassy classified as a Defense Secret. The protocol requires that it be archived on our secure central server. Colonel Lemaire and I simply unplugged your server from the monitor and connected it to our internal LAN via a coaxial Ethernet cable. We wanted to transfer the text file to the database. »
"And what is the machine that hosts this central database?" asked Lazarus, his voice dangerously calm.
"Our main supercomputer," replied Colonel Lemaire. "An American Cray X-MP. We bought it last year from Cray Research to manage all the department's flows. It is installed in the clean room, just above us. It is the most powerful machine in Europe. »
Lazarus exchanged a long glance with Karim. The sixty-year-old engineer, who had returned from the spy wars of the twenty-first century, instantly understood what was unfolding before their eyes in 1989.
"Karim, block the output ports and shut down the IMPERATOR's network card," Lazare ordered.
The technical director immediately complied, physically isolating the machine. Lazarus stood up and turned to the General, whose impatience was beginning to reach a breaking point.
"General, the KGB has nothing to do with it," Lazarus said in a clinical voice. "The Soviets did not penetrate your closed network. No one has crossed the walls of the DGA. »
"So who's launching this saturation attack on your black box?" the soldier growled.
Lazarus pointed to the ceiling.
"This is your Cray X-MP. The attack comes from within. »
Silence fell over the room, heavy, incredulous. Doctor Arnault was the first to react, letting out a nervous and condescending laugh.
"It's absurd. The Cray X-MP is a processing machine, Monsieur Bonaparte. It is not a thinking entity. A computer does not attack another computer on its own initiative. You're looking for excuses to hide a flaw in your operating system! »
"I invite you to look at the source IP address in my firewall logs, Doctor," Lazare retorted, pointing at the screen. "The intrusion comes from the address of your primary gateway. As soon as you connected our server to your local network, your supercomputer scanned our machine. »
The General stepped forward, his jaw contracted. "Explain yourself. Quickly and clearly. »
"It's a backdoor. A backdoor," Lazare explained. He used the terms with chilling precision. "The supercomputer microcode that the Americans sold you contains undocumented routines. It is an automated program, hidden deep in the silicon or in the UNIX core of the Cray. He sleeps. But as soon as he detected that a new machine was connecting to the local network with a high-entropy file... a file containing the Cyrillic alphabet and a Soviet cryptographic signature... The program has woken up. »
Alexandre de Vigan, silent until then, felt a shiver run down his spine. The financial shark was discovering the abyss of industrial intelligence.
"You're telling me," Colonel Lemaire said slowly, livid, "that the machine that manages our defense secrets is programmed to steal our own discoveries?"
"Of course," Lazarus replied, as if he were stating a fundamental law of physics. "Do you really believe that the United States sells its most advanced supercomputers to foreign militaries, even allied ones, without slipping a line of code into them to keep an eye on what they are doing? As soon as your Cray detected the decrypted GOST document, its automated routines attempted to penetrate our server to copy the information silently. The next step would probably have been to exfiltrate this file during the next routine network communication from your Cray to the outside. Probably to an NSA relay server. »
Doctor Arnault leaned against the wall, floored.
"Our dear allies... murmured the cryptanalyst, his voice trembling. "For a year now, all our intelligence flow has been going through this computer. All our deciphering work. If they have a backdoor, they know everything we are looking for, everything we find. »
The General banged his fist violently on the Formica table. The shock startled de Vigan.
"This is an act of war!" the senior officer exploded, his face flushed with rage. "The Americans are spying on us in the very heart of Balard! I'm going to pull the plug on that damn Cray right now, summon the American ambassador and... »
"You're not going to do any of that, General," Lazarus interrupted him in a curt tone that froze the soldier. "When it comes to intelligence, outrage is a weakness. If you make a diplomatic scandal, they will deny it. They will blame a computer virus or human error. And you will be seen as incompetent and unable to secure their own premises. »
Lazarus walked toward the center of the room, regaining full control of the space.
"The only important thing today, General, is not the betrayal of the Americans. It's the fact that they failed. »
Lazarus laid his hand flat on the brushed aluminum chassis of the IMPERATOR server.
"When the Cray's automated script tried to penetrate this machine to siphon off the Russian document, it expected to find a standard UNIX system. He expected to find vulnerabilities known to the NSA. But he came across VoltaOS. A sovereign, closed system, whose architecture does not exist anywhere else in the world. And it smashed into the hardware firewall of our CENTURION chip. The theft did not take place. Your document is always safe on this hard drive. »
Silence returned to the meeting room, but it had changed in nature. It was no longer the silence of incredulity, it was that of absolute capitulation.
Colonel Lemaire looked at the young CEO with a dread mixed with respect. Two hours earlier, Lazare Bonaparte had sold them the theory of technological sovereignty. The threat seemed distant, almost philosophical. Now the evidence of their vulnerability flashed before their eyes, red and relentless.
The United States had, in spite of itself, just offered Volta the most powerful selling point in its history.
Doctor Arnault ran his hand over his face. The grey-haired academic had just turned ten in a few minutes.
"We are blind," Arnault said in a faint voice. "If our core supercomputer is compromised at the microcode level, we can no longer trust any calculations, any archives. Our entire data center is gangrenous. »
"We're going to have to purge him," the General said, regaining his military composure. He looked at Lazarus. It was no longer the look of a senior officer addressing an arrogant young civilian, but that of a staff commander asking for the support of the heavy artillery. "How long will it take for you to deliver your machines to us, Bonaparte? Not the trial order. A complete replacement infrastructure. Servers, terminals, routers. Everything. I don't want to see a single ounce of U.S. silicon in our critical departments anymore. »
Alexandre de Vigan, whose heart was beating wildly, did not even need to look at his files.
"The production lines of our Ivry plant can switch to National Defense priority mode tomorrow morning, General," announced the sales director in a smooth and reassuring voice. "We can equip the cryptanalysis department with an IMPERATOR compute cluster within thirty days."
"Do it," the General ordered, before turning to Colonel Lemaire. "Colonel, initiate an immediate decommissioning procedure for the American machine. And write the purchase orders for Volta. You have a blank cheque on the secret funds. »
The senior officer picked up his cap, took a last look at the black waiter on the table, and strode out of the room, followed closely by Lemaire and Arnault. They were going to have to isolate an entire building from the rest of the army.
Volta's team was left alone in the basement room, surrounded by cups of cold coffee.
Karim leaned against the wall and let out a long sigh of decompression. Alexandre de Vigan slowly closed his briefcase. The financial shark realized the magnitude of the contract they had just locked. They were not simply going to equip the state; they were to become the State.
"It was... unexpectedly," murmured de Vigan, his voice slightly hoarse. "If they hadn't plugged the server into their internal network right away, we would have left with a simple test command. The Americans offered us a monopoly on a silver platter. »
Lazare Bonaparte calmly unplugged the electrical outlet of the IMPERATOR. The fans stopped with a slight hiss, plunging the room into a final silence.
The young CEO is not smiling. He methodically put the keyboard and mouse away in the carrying case.
"There is no chance in the networks, Alexandre. Only data streams and closed doors," Lazare says, locking the latches of the metal suitcase with a sharp blow. And we just fired the first bullet. Let's go back to Ivry. »