April 1983 Telephone booth, Boulevard Saint-Michel 08h15
It was raining. A fine, vicious rain, which transformed the sidewalks of Paris into gray mirrors.
Lazare was in the aluminum phone booth, the smell of urine and cold tobacco taking his throat. He held the handset in one hand, and with the other, he inserted a five-franc piece. Outside, Hubert de La Rochefoucauld was on the lookout, his English umbrella barely protecting his impeccable blow-dry. He looked like an amateur secret agent waiting for James Bond to come out of the bathroom.
"Are you sure it's the right number?" asked Lazare through the window. Hubert nodded frantically. "It's the direct line to his office. No switchboard operator. But hurry, he has a meeting at 8:30 am.
Lazarus dialled the number. Eight figures. A tone. Two tones. Pick up.
"Hello? A masculine voice, deep, hurried. Jean-Luc Delacroix.
Lazarus took his voice from "Masque". Calm, slightly metallic, ageless. — Monsieur Delacroix. This is the student who told you about the sinking of your Radar division on Saturday night. A silence. "How did you get this number?" This is a line reserved for the General Staff. "The telephone network is a sieve, sir." But that's not the point. I read your annual report this morning at breakfast. The DRS (Defence and Systems) division loses two hundred million per year because of background noise problems on the Crotale radar.
Delacroix almost hung up. It was insolent. But the figure was accurate. And confidential. "You have two minutes before I call security to trace this call." "I only need a minute." The problem of the Rattlesnake is not material. Your sensors are good. This is your filtering algorithm that dates back to 1975. He mistakes the foam of the waves for low-level missiles. "So what?" All speed cameras do that. This is the "clutter". There is nothing we can do about it. — False. This is a mathematical error. I can remove 90% of the noise without changing a single component. I'll sell you the solution.
Another silence. Longer this time. Delacroix calculated. "Who the hell are you?" — Lazare Bonaparte. I can be in Bagneux in forty-five minutes. If I don't solve the problem in an hour, you call the police. If I succeed, we talk business.
Delacroix sighed. It was absurd. But he was desperate. The Air Force threatened to cancel the contract. "Come to building B. Ask for Lemoine." And kid... if you waste my time, I guarantee you that you will finish your military service cleaning latrines in Djibouti.
Lazarus hung up. He retrieved his piece that had not been swallowed (he had blocked the mechanism with a paper clip, an old reflex from 1995). He went out. "So?" asked Hubert, livid. "We have an appointment." Lend me your tie, mine is crooked.
Thomson-CSF site, Bagneux Signal Processing Laboratory 10:00 am
The place didn't look like Silicon Valley. It was a concrete hangar from the 60s, filled with brown cigarette smoke and computer terminals with green screens that weighed the weight of a dead donkey. It smelled of ozone, burnt coffee and engineering frustration.
Jean-Luc Delacroix was there, standing, arms crossed. Next to him, a man who looked like a badly licked bear: Lemoine. Lemoine was the Chief Engineer. Fifty years old, white shirt, loose tie, full ashtray at hand. He watched Lazarus enter with his borrowed suit and his student satchel.
"Is that a joke, Jean-Luc?" Lemoine growled. I have a team of twenty physics doctors who have been working on the Doppler filter for six months. And you're bringing me a virgin from Maths Sup? "He says he has the solution, Henri. Let him try.
Lemoine crushed his Gypsy. He turned to Lazarus with a wicked smile. "Very well, Einstein. That's the rundown.
He pointed to an oscilloscope screen that showed a chaotic green line, full of stray peaks. "That's the raw signal of a Rattlesnake radar pointed at the English Channel in bad weather. Peaks are waves. Somewhere in there, there's a target plane flying at Mach 0.8. The radar does not see him. He is drowned. Find it.
Lazarus put down his satchel. He didn't look at the screen. He looked at Lemoine. — What do you use as filtering? A standard Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)? "Of course. This is the NATO standard. "That's why you're blind. The FFT assumes that the signal is stationary. A wave moves. A missile moves. You're trying to take a sharp shot of a Formula 1 race with a ten-second exposure time.
Lemoine narrowed his eyes. The kid wasn't wrong. "And what do you propose?" Black magic? "No. An Extended Kalman filter coupled with wavelet analysis.
The words floated in the stale air. Wavelets. In 1983, it was pure theory, a trick of obscure Russian mathematicians. No one applied it to industry. Too computationally intensive.
"You don't have the computing power to do that in real time," Lemoine retorted. We need a Cray-1. We have Mitra 15 mini-computers. — Not if you optimize the code in assembler and remove floating points. Give me a paper and pencil.
Lazarus sat down at a corner of the table, pushing away a cup of cold coffee. For twenty minutes, the silence was disturbed only by the screeching of his pen and the hum of fans. He wasn't looking for the solution. He had it. He remembered the source code that he himself had audited in his previous life, in 2004, on Thomson's archives. He was rewriting the future from memory.
He drew wombs. He simplified the equations. He replaced the (slow) divisions with (fast) bit shifts. He got up and handed the paper to Lemoine. "Type that." This is the prediction loop.
Lemoine took the paper with disdain. He read. His eyebrows furrowed. He read it again. He took his glasses out of his pocket. He sat down in front of the control terminal. He began to type the lines of code, murmuring curses. — Mov AX, BX... Shift Left... Damn, it's aggressive as an optimization...
Ten minutes later. Lemoine pressed ENTER. He restarted the simulation with the recorded data.
On the oscilloscope, the green chaos disappeared. The line became flat, quiet. And in the middle, a single, clear, stable peak appeared. The target.
Lemoine froze. He tapped the screen with his finger, as if to check that it wasn't a stain. "For God's sake... He turned to Delacroix, his face pale. "Jean-Luc... We have gained twenty decibels in signal-to-noise ratio. It is... it is impossible. The radar saw a seagull fifty kilometres away.
Delacroix approached, fascinated by the green woodpecker. He put a hand on Lazarus' shoulder. "You did that in twenty minutes?" "No. "I have done this in forty years," replied Lazarus enigmatically. But the execution took twenty minutes.
Jean-Luc Delacroix's office 11:30 a.m.
The atmosphere had changed. Real coffee was served, in porcelain cups. Delacroix was seated behind his mahogany desk. Lazarus was opposite, his back straight, his hands on his knees.
"Good," said Delacroix. Lemoine is crying tears of joy in the lab. You saved us the Crotale contract. I'm not going to beat around the bush. You're hired. Summer internship, then apprenticeship contract. You will be paid double the scale. Let's say... four thousand francs a month.
Lazarus smiled politely. "No thanks. Delacroix blinked. "Excuse me?" This is an entry-level engineering salary for a freshman. "I don't want to be a salaried employee, Mr. Delacroix." I don't want to point out. I don't want to belong to Thomson.
Lazarus leaned forward. It was time. The pivot of his life. "What I have just done is not a trick. It's a software brick. I call it VOLTA S-1. "Volta?" "The name of my company." I offer you a deal. I am granting you an exclusive license to use the Crotale radar. You can use it, sell it to the Army, export it. But the source code belongs to me.
Delacroix frowned. — We don't buy external software for the Defense. This is contrary to safety procedures. You buy the code, you own it. "Then you won't have the code." And Lemoine will take two years to reverse engineer what I wrote, because I used mathematics that he doesn't yet understand. In two years, the Americans will have released the Patriot, and you will be dead.
It was blackmail. But it was rational industrial blackmail. Delacroix observed this 19-year-old boy who negotiated like an old investment banker. He saw the absolute determination in her gray eyes. He understood that he could not twist it.
"How much?" asked Delacroix. "Five hundred thousand francs." For perpetual license. And an external consultant contract for integration this summer.
Delacroix almost choked on his coffee. "Half a million?" That's the price of a house! — It's 0.2% of the contract that you're going to save with Saudi Arabia. This is a rounding error for you. For me, it's the starting capital.
Delacroix rose and went to the window. He looked at the gray buildings of the industrial area. He knew the kid was right. If they lost the Crotale, it would be hundreds of redundancies. He turned around. "Okay. But on one condition. You spend the summer here, in the hold, checking every line of code. If it crashes once, I'll destroy you. I blacklist you of all the companies in France.
Lazarus stood up and held out his hand. "Prepare the order form, Mr. Delacroix." And tell Lemoine to prepare a desk for me. I like to work in peace.
He shook hands with the director. A firm, dry grip. As he left the office, Lazare finally loosened his borrowed cravat. He hadn't sweated. He had just earned ten years' salary in one hour. But above all, he had just introduced his own code, his digital DNA, into the nervous system of the French defense. The Trojan horse had entered the city.
July 1983 Basement of Building B, Thomson-CSF Bagneux
The Parisian summer was a steamer. Outside, the asphalt was melting. Inside, the computer center's sluggish air conditioning maintained a polar temperature of 18 degrees to protect the precious Mitra 15 computers.
Lazarus lived there. He had negotiated a 24-hour access badge. While the titular engineers went to La Baule or Saint-Tropez in a Peugeot 504, he remained locked in with the electromagnetic spectrum.
His desk was a gray formica countertop, cluttered with paper listings, freeze-dried coffee cups, and flow diagrams. He would sometimes sleep for three hours on a camp bed folded in a corner, awakened by the hum of the magnetic tape units.
He was not content with cleaning the code of the Crotale radar. He was cheating. He was incorporating routines that he had written in his head for years. Kernel pieces. Ultra-fast real-time interrupt managers. Officially, it was to "optimize filtering". Unofficially, he installed VOLTA OS v0.1. He was building a library of proprietary functions that would make Thomson's software dependent on him for the next twenty years. Every line of code was a barbed wire around its intellectual property.
One evening, around 11 p.m., he met the night watchman, a certain Mamadou, who was doing his rounds. "You are not going home, boy?" There is no one left. Lazarus looked up from his green screen. His eyes were dark circles, the pale complexion of creatures of the deep. "I am at home, Mamadou." It's the outside world that is visiting.
August 14, 1983 Sabotage
On Tuesday morning, Lazarus arrived with a ham triangle sandwich. He sat down, typed in his password. INCORRECT LOGIN.
He frowned. He tried again. INCORRECT LOGIN. LOCKED ACCOUNT.
He felt a flush of heat. Don't panic. Analysis. He bypassed security (he had left a backdoor in the system the week before, out of paranoia). He went into shadow administrator mode. He checked the directory /PROJECT/CROTALE/DEV. Empty. Nothing. Three weeks of work erased.
He looked at the system logs. Someone had logged in at 07:15 with the main administrator account. The command DEL *.* had been executed. Lazarus did not scream. He did not run to see Delacroix. He looked for the IP address of the terminal he was using. Terminal 4, office 212. The office of Dubois, Lemoine's assistant. A forty-year-old guy, embittered, who couldn't stand it when a 19-year-old kid gave him lessons in system architecture.
Lazarus got up. He took a backup copy on cassette that he always kept in his pocket (golden rule: never trust the server). His work was not lost. But the affront had to be dealt with.
He went up to the second floor. Dubois was drinking coffee with two colleagues, laughing soundly. He saw Lazarus coming, pale. He smiles. "A problem, the intern?" Have you lost your files? It's stupid, magnetic storms...
Lazarus did not stop. He entered the office, locked the door behind him, and pulled the blind. The laughter stopped. "What are you doing?" Open this door!
Lazarus approached. He laid his hands on Dubois's desk. He spoke in a low voice, terrifying with calm. "I have the logs, Dubois." I know it's you. I know you deleted the phonebook at 7:15 a.m. "Prove it." It's my word against yours. I will say that you made a mistake. Delacroix will believe me, I have been here for ten years.
Lazare took a floppy disk out of his pocket. "It's not your word against mine. It's you against your wife. Dubois turned pale. "What?" "While searching the logs to find your trace, I came across your personal emails stored on the company's server. It's imprudent, Dubois. "My little", "Rendez-vous at the Ibis hotel"... Your wife's name is Monique, isn't she? The one who is the daughter of a general?
Dubois collapsed in his chair. He was sweating. "You... You wouldn't do that. It's illegal. "Erasing the code of a defense project is an act of treason, Dubois. This is the Court Martial. I offer you a deal. "Which one?" — You give me your "Root" (Super-Administrator) access to the central mainframe. And you never bother me again. You become my best friend. You're going to tell everyone that I'm a genius.
Dubois was trembling. He looked at the floppy disk, then at Lazare's gray eyes. He saw that he had no chance. He scribbled a password on a post-it. "Here. Take that and get out of here. "Thank you, colleague.
Lazarus went out. He threw the floppy disk into the trash can in the hallway. It was empty. He had never read Dubois' emails. He had just bluffed about the statistical probability that a frustrated middle manager would cheat on his wife. Social engineering was also maths.
September 15, 1983 Simulation Room, Thomson-CSF D-Day
The atmosphere was solemn. A smell of cheap cologne and starch. In the front row: Lieutenant General Morvan (not yet friends, just a customer), two Air Force colonels, the CEO of Thomson, and Delacroix, who was sweating profusely.
On the large wall screen, the tactical simulation was running. "Scenario 4," Lemoine announced into the microphone. Attack on low-altitude saturation by heavy seas. Strength 5.
Lazare was at the controls of the console. He typed RUN VOLTA_S1. The radar screen came to life. A cloud of green dots (the sound of the waves) appeared. The generals grimaced. It was the usual mush. "Activating the filter," said Lazarus.
He pressed ENTER. Instantly, the screen cleaned itself. The noise disappeared. There were only three red dots left that rushed towards the center. Three simulated Exocet missiles. "Acquired targets," said the system's synthetic voice. Shot lock. Calculated firing solution. Probability of impact: 99%.
A cathedral silence fell in the room. General Morvan rose. He approached the screen. He had white hair cut into a brush and his face was cut with a pruning hook. "Is this a recorded simulation?" he asked, suspicious. "No, General," replied Delacroix. It's real time. "Iron it." With electronic jamming in addition.
Lazarus executed. The result was the same. The filter pierced the jamming like a needle pierces paper. Morvan turned to Delacroix. — Jean-Luc. What's this thing? We didn't have that last week. "It is... a new software architecture, General. "I want it." On all the Crotale. And on the Georges Leygues class frigates. How much does it cost? "It's included in the update," Delacroix lied.
Morvan nodded his head in satisfaction. "Good. Because if the Iraqis have that before us, we're screwed.
He went out, followed by his staff. Delacroix collapsed in a chair, loosening his tie. He looked at Lazarus who was quietly turning off the console. "You almost gave me a heart attack, Bonaparte. "The customer is happy. Where is my check?
September 20, 1983 Lycée Louis-le-Grand The start of the school year
The schoolyard was buzzing with holiday stories. "I was at Cap Ferret..." "We sailed in Corsica."
Hubert de La Rochefoucauld was tanned, radiant, his hair blonde by the sun. He was wearing a pink polo shirt and new loafers. He saw Lazarus sitting on a bench, reading Le Monde. Lazarus was pale. He had lost two kilos. He looked like a specter from a crypt.
"Lazarus!" cried Hubert, sitting down. My God, you look sick. Did you spend the summer in a cellar or what? "Exactly. In Bagneux. "What a horror." Did you work for Thomson? They exploited you?
Lazarus folded his newspaper. He reached into the pocket of his jacket (which was now a well-cut navy blue blazer, his first expense in clothing). He took out a business card. Thick paper, ivory grain. Black, sober print.
VOLTA CONCEPTS Lazare BONAPARTE President Critical Systems & Architecture
He handed it to Hubert. Hubert took it and turned it over. "What's that?" A joke? "No. It is a limited liability company with a capital of fifty thousand francs. I filed the articles of association yesterday. I have a perpetual license contract with Thomson-CSF which has just brought me five hundred thousand francs net.
Hubert let go of the card. She fell on the gravel. "Five hundred..." thousand? "Yes." And that's just the down payment.
Lazarus picked up the card, dusted the dust, and put it back in Hubert's hand. "I told you I needed a partner for public relations. You got Delacroix's number. You have done your part. Are you serious? "Very. I bought a war this summer, Hubert. Now, we're going to win it. Get ready. This year, we are not only targeting. We are aiming for a monopoly.
The bell rang. The students went to the classrooms, carefree, thinking about homework and girls. Lazarus got up and adjusted his jacket. He no longer walked like a student. He walked like a landlord. Hubert followed him, clutching the little white card in his hand as if it were a winning lottery ticket. And it was one.