Location: Washington / Rome / Frankfurt / Volta S.A. Factory (Ivry-sur-Seine)
Date: First week of June 1990
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Auguste and Lazare Bonaparte)
For the general public, June 1990 was a month of carefreeness. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the football World Cup was opening in Italy, and war seemed to be a concept banished from the Western dictionary. History was supposed to be over.
But in the geopolitical underworld, behind the veneer of embassies and the smiles of bilateral summits, a war of absolute savagery had just broken out. The law of retaliation had been reactivated between the two oldest allies of the free world.
The hemorrhage began seventy-two hours after the destruction of the CIA team in Paris.
In Washington, D.C., along the peaceful C&O Canal, a commercial attaché from the French embassy collapsed while jogging in the morning. The emergency doctors at George Washington Hospital concluded that his aneurysm had ruptured suddenly. The man was, in reality, the head of the DGSE post for the American East Coast. He had been touched by an umbrella whose tip contained a micro-bead of ricin. The Eagle had scored its first point.
Forty-eight hours later, in Rome. An American diplomat, unofficially the CIA's liaison officer for the Mediterranean, was found drowned in the bathtub of his suite at the Hassler Hotel. The autopsy revealed a record blood alcohol level and traces of barbiturates. A suicide by drowning, typical of a depressive agent. In truth, his lungs had been forcibly filled with water by two shadows of the French Action Service before he was thrown into the bathtub. The Rooster had just evened the score.
The next day, in Frankfurt, West Germany. A senior executive of an investment bank, who secretly managed the black accounts of French counter-intelligence, accidentally slipped from the balcony of his sixth-floor apartment while watering his geraniums. With his skull smashed on the sidewalk, he took with him decades of secrets.
America and France traded corpses at a terrifying rate, using Europe as a deadly chessboard where pawns fell in cathedral silence.
In Ivry-sur-Seine, in his office on the first floor, Auguste Bonaparte contemplated the encrypted dispatches that his former DST networks sent him clandestinely.
The old lion of counterintelligence felt his stomach knot. His office was littered with fact sheets printed on thermal paper. The reports piled up. One dead in Washington. One dead in Rome. One dead in Frankfurt. And rumors of an unexplained "disappearance" in Tokyo.
Auguste passed a trembling hand over his tired face. He knew this language. It was the macabre accounting of empires. The CIA sought to bleed French intelligence to avenge the humiliation of Paris; the DGSE struck back to prove that its determination would not waver. And at the center of this silent massacre was his son.
The fear that gnawed at Auguste was not a patriotic fear. It was the pure, visceral dread of a father who realizes that his child has become the epicenter of a global conflict. Lazare's technology not only upset the economy, it altered the military balance of the world. As long as they were fighting for market share, Auguste could manage. But now that the knives were drawn in the shadows, the situation was completely out of his hands.
Unable to bear this tension alone, Auguste gathered the diplomatic cables and descended into the bowels of the factory.
He passed through the biometric security gates of the Bunker. Thirty meters underground, the sterile and over-lit atmosphere contrasted with the darkness of the files he held in his hand.
Lazare Bonaparte was standing in front of a huge backlit glass board, covered with equations and logical diagrams. He was not wearing a white coat, but his eternal dark sweater. He was working on the topology of the BBI, the Bonaparte Bus Interface, a 64-bit system bus capable of transferring more than 500 megabytes per second. This was the backbone of the 1991 architecture, the one that would allow the future SONG-III graphics processor to communicate directly with the machine's brain.
"Lazare," called Auguste, his voice veiled with anxiety. "We have to talk."
The Builder did not stop writing. His black marker traced logical bridges at lightning speed.
"The Level 2 cache will have to be integrated directly onto the silicon of the VESLA-III, father," Lazare murmured. "The engineers say that it will melt the chip. They lack vision. We need to rethink the heat dissipation of ceramics."
"Stop with your circuits for a second!" Auguste exploded, throwing the encrypted dispatches onto the nearest workbench. "Check this out!"
Lazare suspended his gesture. He slowly turned his head, his black eyes resting on the sheets of thermal paper.
"A French attaché assassinated in Washington. An American agent drowned in Rome. A banker from the DGSE thrown from a balcony in Frankfurt," Auguste enumerated, his breathing short. "They are slaughtering each other, Lazare. The CIA and the DGSE are cutting each other's throats in the street. It's a silent butchery, and it's to protect us! It's to keep control of what you make in this cellar!"
Auguste approached his son, looking for a trace of humanity, anxiety, or even guilt in that smooth face.
"The situation is out of control. The Élysée and the White House are engaged in a spiral of retaliation. If this continues, they will eventually hit the factory. Or hit you. I'm an old man of the house, Lazare, I know how it ends. No one emerges victorious from the law of retaliation."
Lazare looked at his biological father. There was in Auguste's eyes all the distress of a man of the twentieth century, incapable of conceiving the brutality necessary to forge the twenty-first.
The former Service Action killer, the man who died at sixty in Bali and was reincarnated in this twenty-four-year-old body, took a deep breath. He put down his marker.
"Sovereignty can't be bought with diplomatic smiles, father," Lazare said in a voice of abysmal calm. "It is paid for in blood. This is the toll of history."
"But they are our allies!" Auguste protested. "We belong to the same camp!"
"America has no allies. She has only vassals and targets," Lazare coldly corrected. "As long as French IT remained a joke, we were lovely friends. Now that we control the tool of intellectual production for the coming decade, we are an anomaly to be knocked down. Mitterrand had the courage to break their teeth. The bleeding must continue until Washington understands that the price to pay for our downfall is greater than the price of their own survival."
Lazare leaned against the glass board, the schematics of the future of computing framing his silhouette like digital wings.
"Don't be terrified of these corpses, father. Be grateful for them."
Auguste drew back a step, stupefied.
"Grateful?"
"While the CIA is mobilizing all its clandestine resources to drive our agents out of Europe," the Builder explained with implacable cynicism, "the Commerce Department and the Pentagon are disorganized. They are obsessed with this shadow war. Their eyes are fixed on the morgues of Rome and Frankfurt. They no longer look at our assembly lines."
Lazare tapped the diagram of the BBI bus with his fingertip.
"Production of the V-1 is running at full capacity in Taiwan and Texas. Money is pouring in by the billions. And Intel is crying into the void because the U.S. government has other fish to fry. The blood shed by the DGSE is our perfect smokescreen. Let the great of this world kill each other in the shadows. Meanwhile, we build the matrix."
Auguste Bonaparte remained frozen. His terror gave way to a form of morbid wonder. His son was not only a brilliant engineer. He was a monster of pragmatism. He used the corpses of the Cold War as vulgar logistical diversions.
"The year 1991 will be the year of the final tipping point," concluded Lazare, taking up his black marker. "The VESLA-III will be ready. We are going to announce integrated networking and 3D acceleration. Prepare yourself psychologically, father. Because if a few deaths scare you today, wait until you see what the world will be willing to do to control the Internet."
Location: Private manor house, shores of Lake Geneva, Canton of Vaud, Switzerland
Date: Mid-June 1990
Point of view: Omniscient (Multiple focus on intelligence chiefs)
The surface of Lake Geneva was absolutely black, an obsidian mirror that swallowed the starlight. Nestled at the end of an avenue of hundred-year-old cypresses, far from the curious eyes of Geneva, stood an eighteenth-century manor house with a white stone façade. Officially, the property belonged to a Zurich banking foundation. Unofficially, it was one of the safe houses of the Club of Bern, the ghostly alliance that brought together the heads of Western European intelligence services.
There were no flags, no uniformed guards, no secretaries. Only an invisible electronic security perimeter, provided by the Intelligence Service of the Swiss Confederation, and four men seated at a table in a dining room with dark oak paneling.
The usual cover for these meetings was that of a dinner with old friends. The contrast between the absolute refinement of the scene and the violence of the agenda was striking. A mute butler had just served an Arctic char fillet caught that morning, accompanied by a Puligny-Montrachet of an exceptional vintage. The tinkling of silverware on Limoges porcelain resounded under the imposing crystal chandelier.
Sir Arthur, the director-general of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), savored his wine with the slowness of an aristocrat. Under his air of a harmless gentleman farmer, his mind was running at full speed. He knew why they were there. His Cheltenham ears—the GCHQ—had intercepted the massive anomalies in transatlantic diplomatic traffic. Sir Arthur knew about the hemorrhage. He knew that America and France had just exchanged the corpses of secret agents in three European capitals.
He had not come to Switzerland to ask for explanations. He was there to assess the structural damage and protect the vital Five Eyes alliance. But the British fox had a thorny domestic problem: its own industrialists, including the Cambridge brains behind Advanced RISC Machines (ARM), were screaming that they needed access to the Volta ecosystem to survive the decade. England could neither betray Washington publicly, nor antagonize the Ogre of Ivry. So Sir Arthur ate, listened, and took mental notes.
To his right, Klaus, the director of the West German BND, was sweating slightly in his flannel suit. He was the most torn of the four. Chancellor Helmut Kohl had given him a clear order, whispered in the corridors of Bonn: Maintain bridges with everyone. Germany was in the midst of reunification. It was in dire need of the American security umbrella, but the German industrial titans—Siemens, SAP, BASF—were putting a gun to their government's head. They demanded licenses for French equipment. Klaus had come with a hidden, extremely audacious mandate: to sound out the French mood for an exclusive technological partnership. The Franco-German couple as the driving force behind a new imperial sovereignty.
Opposite him, Massimo Donati, the head of the Italian SISMI, contrasted with the austerity of his counterparts. A charmer, wearing a Milanese suit of impeccable cut, he cut his fish with surgical precision. Donati was the most dangerous at the table, because he was the least predictable. Forged in the Years of Lead, connected to the darkest offshoots of the Gladio network, the Italian knew the CIA's clandestine operations in Europe better than the Americans themselves. He had arrived in Switzerland with invisible files. He knew things about Marcus Vance's cell in Paris that even the DGSE didn't know. But a Roman never gave information for free. He sold it.
And then there was the guest of honor.
Commander Vasseur, a taciturn figure from the General Directorate of External Security, was eating in silence. He was the embodiment of France that night: cold, impenetrable, and dangerously confident.
"The fish is exceptional," said Sir Arthur, wiping his lips with a linen napkin, breaking the long silence that had accompanied the main course. "Switzerland remains the only country capable of offering such culinary neutrality. Although, these days, neutrality is a concept... let's say, put to the test."
Klaus, the BND director, put down his cutlery. He didn't share the phlegmatic humor of the Briton.
"Let's not beat around the bush, Arthur. Blood is flowing in the heart of our capitals. Frankfurt, Rome, Washington."
Klaus turned to Vasseur, his face flushed with tension.
"You shot down an executive of my own financial agency in Frankfurt, Vasseur. And the CIA drowned one of its own liaison officers in one of Massimo's towns. You turned Western Europe into a fucking Cold War shooting gallery, except the Soviet Union has nothing to do with it! We are supposed to be allies!"
Vasseur delicately set down his glass of wine. His gaze, of a reptilian fixity, locked onto that of the German.
"We are allies, Klaus," Vasseur replied in a monotone voice, without raising it. "The Frankfurt incident was a proportionate response to our attaché in Washington's heart attack. A simple conversation between adults."
"A conversation that cost the lives of three American agents in Paris last month!" Klaus interjected, his voice trembling. "America is in a state of shock. Bush is screaming betrayal in the Oval Office."
"The Americans forgot the elementary rules of politeness," replied Vasseur, cutting off a piece of fish. "They believed that our national sovereignty was a negotiable option. They infiltrated the capital of the French Republic with a team from the Special Operations Division armed to the teeth, with the aim of assassinating a French citizen. A citizen whose innovations guarantee the strategic survival of our country. The President of the Republic considered that expulsion would not be enough to get the message across. We cleaned our house."
Vasseur looked up and scanned the table with his dark gaze.
"I have not come to Switzerland to apologize on behalf of France, gentlemen. I am not asking for your permission or understanding. I have come to draw a line."
Silence fell, weighed down by the icy arrogance of the declaration. The DGSE did not apologize. It demanded.
"It's a polite ultimatum," translated Donati, the head of SISMI, with a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Commander Vasseur kindly informs us that France will kill Americans again if they approach Volta. And that if we decide to facilitate Langley's operations on our respective territories to reach Paris, we will be considered co-belligerents. Is that not so, my dear Vasseur?"
"Italy has always had the gift of poetic elegance," conceded the Frenchman.
"You're playing with fire," said Sir Arthur, MI6, folding his hands under his chin. "The Bush administration is not going to let its men go down without reacting. The embargo failed because of the AMD shield, fine. But the CIA never sleeps, Vasseur. And let me tell you one thing: you think you've wiped out Vance's cell, but Langley has resources you don't even suspect."
Donati let out a small muffled laugh, grabbing his glass of sparkling water.
"Sir Arthur is right," whispered the Italian, leaning forward, suddenly the center of attention. "Your Action Service killers are brilliant, Vasseur. Beautiful work on the Périphérique. But your intelligence services are incomplete. Marcus Vance had an emergency communication line that the DST never intercepted. A sleeper network, inherited from the Stay-Behind structures that the Americans financed here in the 70s."
Vasseur squinted imperceptibly. Donati had just put his first card on the table. He knew how Vance communicated.
"If you'd searched the safe in his Neuilly hideout before setting it on fire," the Italian continued, relishing his effect, "you'd have found the encryption keys of a second team. Langley hadn't put all its eggs in one basket. You beheaded the Praying Mantis, Vasseur. But you didn't crush the eggs."
Donati stopped there, taking up his fork again. He wouldn't say more at the table. The bait was thrown. If he wanted the details of this second American team, Vasseur would have to pay a high price in industrial concessions.
Sir Arthur sighed and nodded to the butler, who came forward silently to clear the plates and bring in the brandy and cigars.
The dinner was coming to an end. The real geopolitical interrogation could begin.
The MI6 boss swirled the amber liquid in his balloon glass. He looked at Vasseur with a sudden intensity, stripped of diplomatic courtesy.
"We all know the game of spies, Vasseur," began the Englishman. "We all have blood on our hands. But we kill to prevent terrorist attacks, to stop ballistic missiles, to prevent the collapse of the West. We don't kill to protect a young twenty-four-year-old CEO who makes printed circuit boards."
Sir Arthur leaned back in his chair.
"So answer the question that the whole of Europe is asking itself tonight. What is so special about this damn silicon that the French President orders the murder of American agents? What is Lazare Bonaparte hiding in his factory in Ivry that justifies you starting the Third World War within NATO itself?"
Vasseur took a cigar, lit it with a wooden match, and blew a long plume of blue smoke towards the coffered ceiling.
He did not give the technical specifications of the VESLA-III processor. He did not mention the Out-of-Order architecture, the BBI bus, or the graphics chips. It was not his role to reveal Lazare's secrets. Vasseur maintained absolute silence, drawing on his Havana.
It was Klaus, the director of German intelligence, who answered in his place.
The German opened his thick black leather briefcase at his feet and took out a folder secured by metal fasteners. It was not stamped with the seals of the BND, but with those of the West German Federal Office of Economics.
"I can answer you, Arthur," Klaus whispered, his voice heavy with terrifying gravity. "Because we ran our own simulations with data from the COMDEX in Chicago. My analysts in Frankfurt and Siemens engineers spent a month dissecting Volta's business model."
Klaus slid the folder into the center of the table.
"It's not a processor that calculates faster, gentlemen. What this Bonaparte created was a closed ecosystem. A gravitational black hole. He owns the hardware, he owns the operating system, he owns the communication bus, and with his father's recent takeovers, he owns the critical software."
The German looked at his British and Italian counterparts.
"The projections of our economists are apocalyptic for America. The processor that Volta is about to launch next year will be so far ahead that it will make the entire value chain of Intel, Microsoft, and IBM obsolete in one fell swoop. In five years, eighty percent of the world's information flows, from hospitals to banks to military command posts, will pass through French silicon."
Klaus placed his hands flat on the table, his knuckles whitened by the force of the pressure.
"Volta does not threaten any sector of the U.S. economy. Volta is the new economy. Whoever doesn't have access to that boy's chips in five years will be taken back to the Stone Age. They will be a technological Third World country, dependent on a foreign master to operate their red lights, radars, and stock markets."
The silence in the mansion became oppressive. The lapping of the water of Lake Geneva against the stone pontoons outside suddenly seemed to be the only sound in the universe.
It was this that chilled the blood of the masters of Europe. Not murders. Assassinations were their daily lot, the macabre currency of their profession.
What terrified them was the mathematical and implacable conclusion of the German report. If France controlled the matrix of the future world, and if it had just proved that it was ready to spill American blood to keep this absolute monopoly, then the whole of Europe was held hostage in a binary vice.
Sir Arthur understood. The geopolitics of the last forty years had just collapsed. NATO was no more than a relic in the face of this new reality. They had only two choices.
To ally with Washington to bring down France. But in doing so, they were allying themselves with a desperate America—an America that had just proven it was willing to murder the citizens of its own allies to maintain its declining hegemony. An America that would keep them in perpetual technological servitude if it regained the throne.
Or to ally with Paris. Bend the knee to the Ogre of Ivry to obtain licenses, save their own industries, and accept that the center of gravity of the twenty-first century had shifted to the banks of the Seine.
"The White House has achieved what Germany has just understood," Vasseur concluded, breaking the silence, his incandescent cigar between his fingers. "The Americans were afraid. They wanted to cut off the head of the genius to save their empire. We prevented them from doing so. Europe now has an opportunity to cease to be America's vassal. Want your industrial licenses? Do you want your countries to have access to the network of tomorrow? Then choose your side wisely. Because the era of Uncle Sam is over."
Vasseur's ultimatum hung in the air, saturated with the smell of cognac and cold tobacco.
There was no vote. The Club of Bern was not a democratic institution. There would be no press release, no joint statement at the end of this dinner. But the fault lines of the new Cold War had just been irremediably drawn on the linen tablecloth.
Sir Arthur emptied his glass at once. The British fox stood up, buttoning his tweed jacket. He would not make any promises tonight. He had to return to London and explain to Margaret Thatcher that the world had just changed ownership, and that England was going to have to play a deadly double game to save its Cambridge factories.
"It was an instructive evening, Vasseur," said the MI6 boss, in a perfectly smooth tone. "I fear, however, that the convulsions of the Eagle will still claim many victims. Good night, gentlemen."
The Englishman left the dining room without a backward glance.
As soon as the door closed, bilateral diplomacy began, in the shadows and with the most absolute discretion.
Klaus, the BND director, immediately leaned towards the Frenchman. His face betrayed the urgency of Bonn.
"Germany doesn't want to get involved in your bloody differences with Langley," Klaus whispered, his voice low. "But Chancellor Kohl is proposing a bilateral channel. Secure. Between the Élysée and the Chancellery. He wants to discuss the integration of Siemens into Volta's production line. If we find an industrial agreement, the FRG could... let's say, turn a blind eye to some of your cleanup operations in Eastern Europe."
"I will pass it on to my government," Vasseur replied, impassive, knowing that France had just fractured the German-American axis with a pile of silicon.
Massimo Donati, the SISMI director, stood up in turn. The Italian wore a carnivorous grin. Economic horror seemed to have no hold on him; only the great game mattered.
He walked around the table and placed a delicate hand on Vasseur's shoulder.
"Breakfast tomorrow, my dear Vasseur? Seven o'clock, on the terrace, facing the lake. I will bring the files of the CIA's sleeper networks. I'll give you the name of the man Langley put in reserve to replace Marcus Vance."
Donati leaned over, his breath smelling of strong coffee and grappa.
"In exchange, Italy wants to be the first country in southern Europe to receive the new generation of Volta servers for our entire tax and military administration. An absolute priority on the assembly lines."
Vasseur crushed his cigar in the heavy crystal ashtray.
"Seven o'clock suits me perfectly, Massimo. France has an appetite."
The Italian left in a silent burst of laughter, exiting the room.
Left alone in the half-light of the dining room, Commander Vasseur looked at his reflection in the large window overlooking Lake Geneva. The conclave had unfolded exactly as the Presidency of the Republic had anticipated. Technological terror was a far more powerful diplomatic lever than nuclear blackmail.
Germany begged for an alliance. Italy was selling America's secrets to get equipment. The United Kingdom was hiding behind a cautious silence.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Vasseur knew that the previous evening, at a highly confidential meeting in Madrid, the Spanish government of Felipe González had already officially chosen its side, signing secret agreements to secure the computerization of its future Olympic infrastructure with French architecture.
Fortress Europe was being built. Not out of ideology, but out of a need for survival. And Lazare Bonaparte was its sole architect.
Vasseur poured a last drop of cognac into his glass. Blood had been shed, the web was spreading, and America was bleeding. The Builder had been right from the beginning: sovereignty was not negotiable. It was necessary.
The French commander raised his glass in the direction of the Swiss night.
"To the age of the Ogre," he whispered in the silence of the manor.