Location: Executive Offices, Volta SA Factory, Ivry-sur-Seine
Dates: April 17 and 18, 1990
Point of View: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
The sun rose on the East Coast of the United States on Tuesday, April 17, 1990, illuminating a commercial landscape that America had never known before.
In New York, outside the flagship ComputerLand store on 5th Avenue, the line stretched for three blocks. Wall Street executives in double-breasted suits waited patiently alongside computer science students, freelance developers, and curious onlookers drawn by the morning headlines. The Wall Street Journal featured an incendiary front-page headline: "The Monopoly is Dead: Compaq and a Mysterious European Ally Crush Intel."
At nine o'clock, when the heavy glass doors of the nation's major electronics stores opened, it wasn't a crowd. It was a riot.
The salespeople, hastily trained the day before, didn't even have time to give their usual demonstrations. Customers walked in pointing at the massive matte black towers adorned with the silver holographic lightning bolt. Without a word, they threw their credit cards on the counters, terrified that stocks would run out before they could secure their piece of the future.
By 1:00 PM Eastern Time, all two hundred thousand units of the Compaq Volta V-1 had evaporated.
In Ivry-sur-Seine, night had already fallen. In the vast director's office, illuminated by the cold light of a desk lamp, Lazare Bonaparte contemplated the architectural schematics of the future VESLA-III processor. The silence of the room was abruptly shattered by the ringing of the red telephone, the encrypted transatlantic line.
Lazare calmly picked up.
"Bonaparte."
The line crackled for a moment before letting out a cacophony of voices. Eckhard Pfeiffer and Jerry Sanders had merged their lines from Compaq's headquarters in Houston. Both men were speaking simultaneously, torn between delirious euphoria and absolute panic.
"Lazare!" Sanders cried out, his voice cracking. "This is pure madness! The NYPD had to bring in horses to contain the crowds outside some stores!"
"We're bled dry, Bonaparte!" exclaimed Pfeiffer, his usual German stoicism completely gone. "My regional managers are in tears on the phone. Retailers are threatening to sue us if we don't restock immediately. Two hundred thousand machines... gone in four hours! I don't even have a single display model left in the lobby of my own company!"
Lazare let the two titans of American industry catch their breath. The adrenaline overwhelming them was blurring their vision. They thought they had reached the peak of the mountain, when they had only just brushed the trailhead.
"I warned you that the market's thirst for power was limitless," the Builder replied, his calm voice contrasting sharply with their hysteria.
"We have to restart the assembly lines," Pfeiffer pleaded. "Sanders needs to supply me with chips, immediately. Every passing minute is costing us tens of millions of dollars!"
"You are leaving far more than that behind, Eckhard," Lazare corrected. "You're looking at America, but America is only the first wave. The dam has just broken on a global scale."
Lazare stood up and approached the large map of the world adorning his office wall.
"The Ivry teletypes have been running at full speed since this morning," the Frenchman explained. "The European market has caught wind of the American press. Germany, the United Kingdom, and France are demanding their share. Japan is in an uproar. Sony, which already has a license for our architecture, has just threatened to launch its own computers if we don't supply them with the finalized machine immediately. All of Asia wants a piece of the pie."
A stunned silence settled on the other end of the line.
"We... we don't have the industrial capacity to flood the entire world," Sanders stammered, finally realizing the scale of the tsunami. "My factories in Austin are running at 110% capacity. We cannot produce enough silicon for the whole planet."
"Your Texan factories are no longer enough, Jerry. That is correct," Lazare stated. "Which is why I am lifting the production restrictions."
"You're lifting the restriction?" repeated the AMD CEO, incredulous.
"You will take the VESLA-II etching masks and send them via secure diplomatic courier to Taiwan, attention Morris Chang at TSMC. I had him on the phone an hour ago. His new factories are ready to transition to 0.8-micron etching. They will dedicate 80% of their production capacity to manufacturing our chips. I also authorize you to sub-license production to Siemens in Europe, under the strict supervision of our auditors."
Lazare's contractual engineering was deployed with surgical precision. He was relinquishing physical production to flood the world, while maintaining absolute control over the intellectual property. Every chip smelted, regardless of the continent, would bring a substantial cut to Volta SA and force the user to adopt the VoltaOS ecosystem.
"And what about assembling the cases?" asked Pfeiffer, his brain desperately trying to calculate the logistics of global expansion.
"You keep the exclusive name, Eckhard. But you will have to open relay factories in Ireland for the European market and in Southeast Asia. Put your subcontractors in their place. I want five hundred thousand more machines delivered before the end of May. And a million by the summer."
"A million units..." Pfeiffer murmured. "Lazare, if we hit those numbers, the combined revenue of AMD and Compaq will surpass the GDP of some countries."
"I am not interested in your money, Eckhard. Just take the market before Intel comes back to its senses. Time is our only true bargaining chip."
Lazare hung up the red receiver without waiting for a polite goodbye.
He returned to his seat. On his desk, a freshly printed report from Auguste's finance department was waiting for him. The numbers were staggering. Thanks to the sensational launch of the V-1, patent royalties, direct sales of the operating system and hardware, and the collapse of production costs due to the Soviet mines, Volta SA was no longer just profitable.
The Ivry-based company was literally vacuuming up the liquidity of the global tech sector. In a matter of days, its profits were reaching billions of dollars. The opaque startup had become a financial behemoth.
But Lazare knew full well that such an accumulation of power, concentrated in the hands of a sovereign private actor, would not go unanswered for long.
In the shadows, state predators were observing this anomaly. An anomaly that threatened the geopolitical balance at the end of the Cold War. Blood would have to be spilled to protect the gold. And the Builder already knew exactly where the blow would come from.
Location: Élysée Palace / Streets of Paris / Volta SA Factory
Date: Late May 1990 (one month after COMDEX)
Point of View: Omniscient (Multi-focal)
The month following the shock of Chicago was one of collective hysteria in the free world. In the span of thirty days, the VESLA-v2 architecture and its VoltaOS operating system had turned the American economy upside down. Compaq's black tower had sold over a million units worldwide. In Santa Clara, Intel's stock price had plummeted by forty percent, causing deep concern even within the American military-industrial complex. In Redmond, Bill Gates had set up a permanent crisis task force in a vain attempt to stop developers worldwide from abandoning Windows for the new French ecosystem.
But while the general public celebrated the dawn of a new computing era, in the hushed corridors of geopolitics, this dazzling commercial victory was perceived as an act of asymmetric warfare.
America, the undisputed hegemon of the late 20th century, was losing control of silicon, the oil of the new millennium. And an empire never surrenders its crown without a fight. When free market laws and commercial courts fail, Washington resorts to other levers. Much darker levers.
Marcus Vance hated Paris. He hated the arrogance of its inhabitants, the complexity of its circular streets, and above all, this country's insufferable ability to still believe it was the center of the world.
Officially, Vance was a cultural attaché at the United States Embassy on Avenue Gabriel. Unofficially, he headed a clandestine CIA unit attached to the Special Operations Division. A veteran of dirty wars in South America and the shady maneuvers of the Cold War.
On this late May evening, a fine, freezing rain lashed against the windows of his safe house, a vast Haussmannian apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine, rented by a Panamanian shell company. Vance, a man with graying temples and eyes of steel, was finishing assembling the parts of a Walther WA 2000 sniper rifle, a jewel of West German engineering. The weapon, when dismantled, fit perfectly into a neutral diplomatic briefcase. Its heavy barrel and infrared scope commanded deadly respect.
Scattered across the large oak table in the living room were dozens of black-and-white photographs. They all depicted the same man: a young man barely twenty-four years old, with a smooth face, unfathomably dark eyes, and invariably dressed in a dark turtleneck sweater.
Lazare Bonaparte. The Ogre of Ivry.
The trade embargo devised by the US State Department had been a stinging humiliation. The young Frenchman had used his own American partners—AMD and Compaq—as human shields, making any customs sanctions impossible. The Bush administration, terrified by Texan lobbies and the panic on Wall Street, had caved.
Faced with this legal dead end, Langley took the reins. The CIA Director's report, validated by a handful of hawks at the Pentagon, was definitive: Volta SA is not a commercial enterprise, but a hostile state sovereignty program aimed at destroying the technological and military advantage of the United States. The mastermind behind this program represents an absolute threat to American national security.
The diplomatic solution having failed, the lethal option was now on the table.
"Team Bravo is in position around the Ivry plant," said a voice behind him.
Vance turned around. It was Miller, his second-in-command, a specialist in sabotage operations and disguised assassinations.
"The factory's security system is impenetrable," Miller continued, approaching the table and glancing at the surveillance photos. "Reinforced perimeter walls, next-generation night vision cameras, and a private militia made up of former Foreign Legion paratroopers. Auguste Bonaparte, his father, has turned this site into a fortress. It's impossible to breach the complex."
"We won't go near the complex," Vance replied in a dull voice, snapping the Walther case shut with a sharp click. "The subject has his habits. He sleeps very little. He sometimes leaves the factory late at night, often around three in the morning, to walk along the banks of the Seine. Alone. Without a bodyguard. It's the hubris of genius, Miller. He thinks he's untouchable because he brought our industry to its knees."
Vance pointed to a photograph showing Lazare Bonaparte from behind, walking along the industrial river, hands in his pockets.
"We take him tonight. A hollow-point bullet to the cerebellum, fired from the opposite bank, a body tumbling into the Seine. Unseen, unrecognized. The Ogre of Ivry joins the statistics of accidental drownings in the Paris region, or suicides linked to the unbearable pressure of success. Without its chief architect, Volta's innovation will collapse from within in less than a year, and Compaq will go crawling back to Intel for chips. Prepare the extraction vehicle. We move out in an hour."
What Marcus Vance didn't know, as he silently loaded his weapon, was that Paris was neither Bogota nor Beirut. In this city, the walls had ears, the telecommunications networks belonged to the state, and the sky, on that particular night, belonged to the Rooster.
In the solemn silence of the presidential office at the Élysée, the large gilded bronze clock ticked away the seconds with menacing regularity. François Mitterrand, President of the French Republic, sat behind his imposing desk, his hands folded over a thick cardboard file stamped with the red seal of Secret Défense.
Facing him stood Commander Vasseur, a taciturn and ruthless figure from the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), and the Minister of Defense.
The atmosphere in the room was charged with that singular tension that precedes irreversible decisions. Mitterrand, the "Florentine," the man of complex political maneuvers and shadow games, wore the look of an offended monarch that evening, ready to declare total war.
"Summarize the situation for me, Commander," the President ordered in a low, almost cavernous voice, without taking his eyes off the file.
Vasseur stepped forward with military precision.
"Mr. President, our teams from the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (DST) have formally identified a critical escalation in our capital. The American services are no longer settling for economic intelligence gathering. Since the failure of their technological embargo, the CIA has activated a clandestine action cell on our soil."
Vasseur opened the file and slid several briefing notes onto the President's leather desk pad.
"The head of this cell is Marcus Vance, a specialist in clandestine elimination operations. They have placed the Ivry-sur-Seine complex under permanent surveillance. They have rented safe houses under false identities, acquired heavy weaponry on the Eastern European black market, and leased untraceable vehicles. The analysis of their encrypted transmissions, which we were able to intercept last night thanks to the new computing power of the servers supplied by Volta, leaves no doubt as to their intentions."
Vasseur paused, his jaw clenched.
"They intend to assassinate Lazare Bonaparte. The execution is scheduled for tonight, between two and four in the morning."
Mitterrand didn't blink. His face remained impassive. His reptilian gaze swept over the photographs of the CIA agents spread before him. The Americans never backed down. When the free market slipped from their grasp, they sent assassins.
"The Volta company is currently generating revenues that exceed the budget of some of our ministries," the President of the Republic noted coldly. "It has become the primary engine of our technological independence. Our defense systems, the encryption of our nuclear deterrent force, our military communication networks... Our entire sovereign apparatus is shifting toward the architecture designed by this young man."
Mitterrand brought his piercing gaze back to Commander Vasseur.
"America considers anything not under its exclusive control to be an anomaly that must be eliminated. It is a vision of hegemony that I categorically refuse to accept on the territory of the Republic."
The Minister of Defense interjected, his voice strained with anxiety over a major diplomatic crisis.
"Mr. President, if we arrest these American agents, it will be an unprecedented diplomatic earthquake. The United States will never accept CIA agents being paraded through our courts. They will deny everything, cry conspiracy, and we risk brutal economic retaliation on the rest of our exports."
Mitterrand smiled. A dry, icy smile, devoid of any pity. It was the smile of a man who knew the weight of history and who knew that sovereignty is not pleaded in embassy drawing rooms; it is imposed through brute force.
"The Minister is right, Commander Vasseur," Mitterrand declared. "An arrest would be an admission of weakness. A public trial would be an insult to our intelligence. Great empires do not engage in verbal jousting or official protests. They only respect the terror they themselves strive to inspire."
The silence in the presidential office was suffocating. Vasseur knew exactly what the President was going to say. It was an exceptional order, an absolute sovereign prerogative, used only to protect the vital interests of the nation. The Alpha Order. The license to kill on national soil.
"I want no arrests. I want no interrogations. And above all, I want to leave no trace," decreed François Mitterrand, his pale, long-fingered hands slowly closing the files. "Lazare Bonaparte is the jewel in the crown. He is the keystone of our power for the century to come. No one touches the Builder."
The President's gaze locked onto the high-ranking DGSE officer.
"Initiate the intervention, Commander. Clean the streets of my capital. I want this American cell annihilated tonight. Without exception. Make it look like a stroke of fate, an inevitability, the brutal and sordid randomness of a major metropolis. But I want them gone before dawn."
Vasseur clicked his heels, a shiver of pure adrenaline running down his spine.
"By your orders, Mr. President. The house will be cleaned."
At half past two in the morning, the rain continued to flood the arteries of Paris, turning the asphalt into a black mirror streaked by the reflections of the orange neon streetlights.
The Action Division of the DGSE was not a police squad. It was the ultimate elite of the shadows, a clandestine military unit composed of the most fearsome snipers, saboteurs, and phantom operatives in Europe. Ironically, it was precisely within this unit that Lazare Bonaparte, in his past life, had served for nearly thirty years, hunting down terrorists across the globe.
These men didn't know Lazare, but tonight, they were going to kill for him. Operation Praying Mantis had just received the green light from the Élysée.
Target 1: Agent Miller (Ivry-sur-Seine). Miller was stationed in an unmarked van, five hundred meters from the monumental gates of the Volta factory. Equipped with a high-sensitivity directional microphone and infrared night vision binoculars, he watched for the slightest shadow emerging from the complex. The engine was idling to power the heater.
He never saw the man in the black raincoat who slipped into the back of his vehicle, picking the lock on the double doors with supernatural ease.
The Action Division operative slipped into the cabin without making a sound. Miller barely felt the prick. An ultra-fine hypodermic needle, containing an undetectable derivative of pure potassium chloride, pierced the thick fabric of his turtleneck to reach his carotid artery directly. The American agent's heart instantly raced, frantically searching for oxygen, before abruptly stopping in a silent, violent convulsion. He slumped over the steering wheel.
The French operative carefully wiped away every single one of his fingerprints, generously doused the inside of the van and Miller's clothes with cheap whiskey, half-opened a bottle on the passenger seat to stage the scene, and then vanished into the night mist. To the Parisian police who would discover him the next day, it would be nothing more than a tragic cardiac arrest linked to drunk driving.
Target 2: Agent Hayes (Underground Parking, Châtelet). Hayes, the cell's technical and communications expert, was leaving a secure phone booth near the Les Halles district after transmitting an encrypted geolocation code to Langley. He quickly descended the wet concrete steps leading to the third basement level of a public parking garage.
The parking lot was completely deserted, bathed in the sickly light of flickering fluorescent tubes that crackled strangely.
As he slid his key into the lock of his rental Peugeot, his survival instinct warned him a fraction of a second too late. Two massive silhouettes detached themselves from the nearby concrete pillars. Hayes, a close-quarters combat expert, reached for the automatic weapon concealed at his belt, but the Intervention Division was relentless. A violent blow from a steel telescopic baton shattered his wrist, followed by a second that smashed his kneecaps, sending him crashing heavily onto the greasy floor.
Before he could even let out a cry of pain, a thick, leather-gloved hand clamped a cloth soaked in a powerful anesthetic over his face. The struggle lasted less than ten seconds. Two minutes later, Hayes' lifeless body was hanging by the neck from an exposed pipe on the ceiling, a thick nylon rope compressing his trachea. Into his jacket pocket, the French agents slipped a fake suicide note, perfectly drafted in English, typed on a machine identical to the one in his safe house, citing insurmountable gambling debts and deep depression following a recent divorce. A sordid suicide in the underbelly of Paris.
Target 3: Marcus Vance (Inner Ring Road). At the wheel of his powerful black sedan, Marcus Vance was approaching Porte d'Ivry, speeding through the rain. His dismantled sniper rifle lay in its case on the backseat. His instinct, sharpened by decades of survival, was screaming at him that the situation had completely slipped from his grasp. Miller was no longer answering calls on the encrypted radio. Hayes had missed his communication window by two and a quarter hours.
Vance realized that the hunter had become the prey. He decided to abort the Bonaparte assassination. He grabbed the radio to signal a general retreat for the unit.
"Alpha here. Operation compromised. Code black. Immediate abort. I repeat, immediate abort. Scatter."
The only response was a continuous burst of static—the chilling sound of a radio jammer.
Vance slammed the accelerator and aggressively merged onto the ring road on-ramp to flee the area. The torrential rain severely reduced visibility. He cast an anxious glance in his rearview mirror. Two large round headlights, abnormally high—those of a massive garbage truck belonging to the city of Paris cleaning services—were following him far too closely.
The CIA agent instantly understood the deadly choreography unfolding. French counterintelligence wasn't just intercepting communications; they were physically eliminating the threat. Cold sweat beaded on the Langley veteran's forehead. He revved the V6 of his sedan into the wet night, trying to lose the truck.
But the Intervention Division had prepared the execution with mathematical rigor. Just as Vance hit one hundred and thirty kilometers per hour, a second street cleaning truck, all lights off, suddenly surged from a service ramp closed to traffic and deliberately cut across all three lanes of the ring road.
A wall of green metal blocked the horizon.
Vance screamed and swerved to avoid the fatal collision. His brakes locked. The tires screeched on the wet asphalt, losing all traction. The heavy sedan began to hydroplane, spinning like a top. It slammed into the massive concrete pillar of a bridge spanning the ring road at over a hundred kilometers per hour.
The crash of mangled metal and shattered glass echoed like a bomb explosion. The cabin was instantly sheared in half. The completely deformed sedan came to rest on its roof in the middle of the road, its wheels spinning pathetically in the air, the engine smoking in the pouring rain.
The driver of the first garbage truck, a clandestine operative from the DGSE special operations, calmly stepped out of his cab. He buttoned the collar of his jacket and approached the twisted wreck. Vance, half-conscious, his skull fractured and trapped in the heap of scrap metal, was spitting blood. He feebly tried to raise his hand to grab his sidearm.
The French officer said nothing. He cast a clinical, cursory glance at the Walther WA 2000, whose case had torn open on the asphalt, then opened a small metal cylinder containing a highly flammable chemical accelerant. He silently doused the interior of the crushed cab, took a few steps back, turned on his heel, and tossed a lit match over his shoulder.
An infernal blaze of heat instantly erupted into the Parisian night, consuming the metal, the plastic, the flesh of the American killer, and the pride of the Langley eagle.
Operation Praying Mantis was over. Blood had washed away the threat. The Republic had protected its Ogre.
The next morning, at exactly eight o'clock, the night's rain had given way to an almost indecently clear sky over the Île-de-France region.
In his armored office, Lazare Bonaparte was already hunched over the screen of a next-generation workstation. The complex blueprints of the future VESLA-III processor's motherboard and the out-of-order architecture were taking shape under his frantic typing. The outside world, its dramas, and its stock market panics did not exist for the Builder; only the perfect arrangement of millions of transistors dictated the rhythm of his breathing.
The heavy door to his office opened without warning. Auguste entered first, looking grave, his jaw tight, followed very closely by Commander Vasseur.
The high-ranking DGSE officer, still in civilian clothes, wore a beige raincoat slightly damp from the morning humidity. His eyes were ringed with exhaustion after a sleepless night of surveillance, but his military bearing exuded absolute coldness.
Lazare stood up and switched off his workstation monitor with a mechanical gesture. He immediately sensed the shift in the room's atmosphere. The air was no longer permeated with the financial euphoria of the COMDEX sales; it suddenly tasted metallic—of blood, gunpowder, and state secrecy.
"Commander," Lazare greeted politely, gesturing toward the two heavy leather armchairs in front of his desk. "I wasn't expecting you so early this morning. Have the army servers encountered a latency issue?"
Vasseur sat down, crossing his legs with calculated slowness. He cast a heavy glance at Auguste, then stared intently into Lazare's unfathomable eyes.
"Our network infrastructures are running flawlessly, Mr. Bonaparte. The purpose of my visit is entirely different. I have come to inform you personally of a series of tragic events that took place last night in the capital."
Lazare leaned against the edge of his mahogany desk, arms crossed, his face perfectly impenetrable.
"I'm listening."
"The night was particularly deadly on the roads and in the homes of the Paris region," Vasseur began in a monotone voice, weighing each word with a subtle, almost surgical insistence. "Three foreign nationals, Americans, lost their lives in isolated accidents. One of them, apparently depressed, hanged himself in an underground parking garage in the Les Halles district. A cultural attaché from the embassy was the victim of a terrible car crash on the ring road... a crash so violent that the vehicle caught fire, leaving its occupant no chance. And a third person succumbed to a sudden heart attack in his van, parked—brace yourself—only a few hundred meters from the gates of this very factory."
Auguste felt his blood run cold. His face froze.
Long before becoming president of Volta, Auguste had been a feared senior officer in the DST, the French counterintelligence service. He had run networks, handled moles, and fought in the shadows during the Cold War. Up until that devastating bombing in Lebanon, in Beirut, which had broken him physically and forced him into early retirement.
The instincts of the old DST wolf awakened in a fraction of a second. He perfectly understood the semantics of the deep state. He knew how to translate the clinical death in Vasseur's words. Three Americans died the same night, one of them right outside his door. Convenient "suicides" and "accidents." It was the classic signature of a state purge. A "cleaning" carried out by the Action Division.
The United States had sent killers to take down his son, and the DGSE had eliminated them preemptively.
"Vasseur..." murmured Auguste, his voice hoarse, the horror of the ghosts of Beirut rising to the surface of his memory. "You shot CIA officers on our soil? Do you realize the red line you have just crossed? It's an act of war!"
The Commander of the DGSE turned his marble face toward the former spy.
"They are the ones who crossed the red line, Monsieur Bonaparte. They were targeting your son. They believed that they could act in Paris as they act in banana republics. The President of the Republic has simply decided to remind them of the geographical limits of their jurisdiction."
Auguste's hands began to tremble, not from fear of geopolitics, but from the visceral terror of a father. They were aiming at Lazare. His own son. The CIA had ordered the murder of his child. He looked at Lazare, that son of unfathomable intelligence, the target of the world's leading power.
But Lazare did not blink. Not a muscle in his face twitched.
The former Service Action sniper, reincarnated as the CEO of a tech empire, instantly recognized the methods of his former brothers-in-arms. The perfect planning, the lack of evidence, the crude but legally unremovable cover-ups. He knew the cold precision required to execute such acts.
The Ogre of Ivry understood what had just been sealed that night. The CIA had wanted to eliminate him to regain control of the digital world. And François Mitterrand, the supreme political animal, had unleashed his own dogs of war to save him.
A deep shudder—a mixture of bitter irony and absolute power—ran down Lazare's spine. In his former life, he was the one who pulled the trigger to protect France's interests. He had staged murders on country roads or in hotel rooms. And today, this same Republic was murdering to keep him alive, totally unaware that it was protecting one of its oldest soldiers.
"It is indeed a series of eminently regrettable tragedies," murmured Lazare, with a calm from beyond the grave that made Auguste shudder. "The Parisian rain is often fatal to those who have the arrogance to drive too fast on our territory."
Vasseur gave a very fine grin of connivance. He recognized in this young computer genius the ice that flowed in the veins of true statesmen.
"That is exactly the analysis of the Presidency's services, Mr. Bonaparte. President Mitterrand has asked me to convey to you a personal message on his behalf."
The commander stood up and buttoned his raincoat.
"He said, 'Tell the Builder that the house has been cleaned. That he can continue to erect his walls in peace. France is watching over its foundations.'"
Vasseur bowed very slightly, greeted Auguste with a brief, respectful nod of the head for the former DST, and left the office without adding another word. The heavy padded door closed with a thud.
Silence fell heavily in the room. Auguste approached the desk, leaning on the solid wood, his knuckles whitened by the tension.
"Lazare... The Élysée just killed for you. Do you realize the Faustian pact we've plunged into? We are no longer mere industrialists, my son! We are at the heart of a fucking secret war! If they sent one team, they will send others."
Lazare Bonaparte turned toward the large bay window. The rain had finally stopped. Paris was awakening beneath a steel-blue sky, cleansed of its nocturnal impurities.
The gold had attracted the blood, just as he had always foreseen. It was the immutable law of humanity. But for the first time since his return to the 1980s, Lazare knew with absolute certainty that he was no longer alone in this crusade. The French deep state, with all its ruthless cruelty and lethal striking power, had just tied its fate to that of Volta SA.
The Blood Pact was signed. He was no longer just a visionary architect; he had become the ultimate weapon of the French nation, the spearhead of the resistance against the technological enslavement of the coming century.
The Builder turned back from the window, his dark eyes glowing with an incandescent light, ready to consume the world.
"The matter is closed, Father," he said in an icy tone. "The Americans have received the only message they are capable of understanding. They will not be sending more assassins anytime soon, because they now know that if they strike in Paris, our shadows will go bleed theirs in Washington. Let the diplomats handle the still-smoldering ashes. We have a technological revolution to see through."
Lazare sat back down at his desk and turned his workstation monitor back on. The chip's schematics appeared, labyrinths of silicon of a deadly beauty.
"The year 1991 is fast approaching," concluded the Builder. "And the VESLA-III must be ready to connect this miserable world before the enemy rises."