Location: Location Room, White House, Washington D.C.
Date: March 8, 1997.
Point of view: Bill Clinton.
Under the blind woodwork of the western wing of the White House, the air conditioning of the Situation Room had the metallic taste of the day after defeat.
Sitting at the end of the long mahogany table, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled over his forearms and the loose tie, Bill Clinton slowly rotated a pen between his fingers.
Around him, the most powerful men of the American administration, the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Commerce and Defence, the Joint Chief of Staff and the Director of the CIA, silently fixed the wall screen where the English translation of the European Sovereignty Pact, signed seventy-two hours earlier at Laeken Castle, was displayed.
Three weeks had been enough for Jacques Chirac and Helmut Kohl to accomplish in camera what fifty years of Atlantic diplomacy had vowed to prevent: the birth of a continental federal bloc with a single currency, an autonomous military command and a constitutionalized technological monopoly.
"Mr. President, the Secretary of the Treasury began with a white voice, we have to look the numbers in front of us. The era of the unipolar world born of the fall of the Berlin Wall ended Wednesday morning in Brussels."
With pressure on his desk, the great silversmith showed two macroeconomic curves on the central monitor: one red, the other deep blue.
"Our gross domestic product is capped at eight thousand three hundred billion dollars, underpinned by the contraction of our computer exports and our removal from the Asian market last year,"he explained.
On the other hand, the aggregate GDP of the new European Federation, towed by the six decimal one percent growth of France and the heavy reindustrialization of the Rhine basin, has just crossed the equivalent of eight thousand six hundred billion dollars.
For the first time since 1945, the world's first economic mass no longer sits on the banks of the Potomac, but between Paris and Bonn."
Bill Clinton pinched the edge of his nose, with his eyes pleated by lack of sleep.
"This European growth is based on a unique industrial anomaly,"the US President said. Volta S.A.'s hypertrophy artificially inflates French accounts."
"This anomaly ceased to be a mere private company, Bill,"replied the Secretary of Commerce, pushing an open file on the table. By ratifying Articles 12 and 14 of the Treaty of Laeken, Chirac and Kohl merged the European State apparatus with the silicon of Lazare Bonaparte.
Without ever mentioning the name Volta to bypass the World Trade Organisation's courts, Article 12 imposes on all the Federation's administrations, central banks, universities and armed forces the exclusive use of physical and cryptographic architectures designed and melted on European soil."
He then pointed to the second paragraph highlighted in yellow.
"As for article 14, he is disarming our historical commercial lever. So far, when Paris resisted us, we threatened to overtax Bordeaux wines or Airbus aircraft while caring for Germany and Italy.
Now, any US customs sanction for a French product automatically triggers, by constitutional obligation, a symmetric punitive tariff from the whole Federation against Boeing, our soy and Hollywood studios. They turned the Old Continent into a legal hedgehog.
If we hit Ivry-sur-Seine by customs, we lose a market of three hundred and fifty million solvent consumers within the next hour."
To the left of the president, General John Shalikashvili, Chief of the Armed Staff, crossed his broad hands on his khaki file. His stars shone under the neon, but his face bore the gravity of a soldier who refused to tell stories.
"Customs locking is only half the equation, Mr President,"said the general. The real shift has taken place in the Balkans."
On the side screen, the photographs taken by the American reconnaissance satellites KH-11 over Bosnia and Kosovo were displayed: the columns of Leclerc tanks keeping snow-covered passes, Rafale patrols refuelling over the Adriatic, and Serb artillery convoys retreating in good order under the joint supervision of French, German and Russian officers.
"Sixty-five days,"said Shalikashvili in a dry tone. In two and a half months of Operation Vent d'Est, the European coalition led by Paris imposed a total ceasefire, disarmed the militias and folded Belgrade and Moscow without firing a single American cartridge, without a single US Air Force radar aircraft, without a single GPS coordinate provided by the Pentagon.
Their ASTROLABE constellation and tactical data links are ten years ahead of our own battlefield scanning programs. In fact, NATO no longer has any object on the European continent."
Clinton slowly turned his head towards the CIA director, sitting in the darkest corner of the room.
"What about underground? asked the president in a low voice. Bonaparte remains a single man at the top of a pyramid."
Langley's master spy supported the presidential gaze with polar coldness.
"We tried in 1992 at Eindhoven and Avenue de Marigny, Mr. President, and this mistake cost us our hegemony in Europe.
Today, the Ivry bunker and the Meudon campus are guarded by former elite operators of the 1st RPIMa led by Commander Vauquelin, in total symbiosis with the DGSE Service Action. On the cybernetic level, their servers are holding the Wall Street clearing rooms in mind.
This is a Mexican impasse: if we touch a hair of a Volta framework, Paris will blow up our financial networks the next morning with the constitutional blessing of Berlin."
A burial silence fell on the Situation Room. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, the American superpower was touching the physical limits of its empire.
Bill Clinton rose and walked slowly to the world map illuminated on the bottom wall. The political man of the South, pragmatic and resilient, knew that anger was the worst strategic adviser.
The Messianic arrogance of the Reagan and Bush years had just broken against a wall of silicon and federal law; lingering in the frontal diplomatic confrontation would only further bind Helmut Kohl's Germany to Jacques Chirac's Gaullist tank.
"We will not beg, and we will not launch an ultimatum that we cannot execute,"Clinton turned to his cabinet. The cowboy era is over. In Europe, we will play long time, cold courtesy and patience."
He placed the index on the west coast of the United States, between Seattle and San Francisco Bay.
"If Lazare Bonaparte built this federal empire, it's because he took three years ahead of Santa Clara and Redmond. On the day our national champions, Intel and Microsoft, take over the crown of computing power and software, Volta's invincibility mystic will crack itself.
Unlock the second tranche of federal research credits for Andy Grove smelters in Oregon and Arizona this evening, and tell Bill Gates that the Department of Justice is freezing any antitrust proceedings against Microsoft until it regains the global market. We will not beat European Leviathan in Brussels; we will beat it in silicon."
While the strategists of Washington, Moscow and Beijing searched the maps of staff by lending to the"Emperor of Ivry"plans for planetary domination, an anthracite-grey Peugeot 605 without any official badge rolled unhurriedly on a departmental bordered by silver birch and red heather, in the heart of Sologne.
At the wheel, Commander Roland Vauquelin kept his eyes on the wet asphalt tape, driving with this smooth and silent flexibility that was only acquired after twenty years of special operations at the 1st Parachutist Regiment of Marine Infantry.
At the age of fifty, the grey temples were cut low, the thick neck marked by an old pomegranate from Lebanon, the head of Volta's security was one of the few men before whom Lazare had never needed to play a role.
On the passenger seat, clothed with a green waxed canvas jacket over an unbleached wool sweater, Lazare watched the foggy ponds fly away from mallards. On the back seat were four boxes of illustrated books, thirty boxes of watercolorable pencils chosen the day before by Linh in his stationery on Rue du Bac, and two boxes of leather balloons.
"The regional prefect once again tried to find out which Swiss foundation had bought the 300 hectares of wood around the estate last year,"Vauquelin said with his low and rocky voice, demolishing as a forest road approached. Delacroix sent him back to a civil farm real estate company domiciled in Luxembourg. The prefect thought it was a private banker hunt."
Lazare looked for a quiet smile.
"Let him believe we're hunting the boar, Roland. As long as politicians and journalists imagine that my personal dividends are used to maintain game reserves or safes, no one will come looking behind these gates."
The sedan crossed a wrought iron gate hidden between two soft brick pillars, where two former NCOs of the 1st RPIMa in forest guard uniforms quietly greeted Vauquelin, and climbed up a long driveway of white gravel lined with centuries-old cedars from Lebanon.
At the end of the aisle stood a vast rose brick and 19th-century stone gentilhommière, flanked by two recently renovated bright wings whose large bay windows gave onto an orchard and a grassy sports field.
It was the Domaine des Cèdres.
No Volta S.A. badge, no Ministry of Finance documents mentioned its existence. Even within the group, only Vauquelin, Édouard Renault-Tessier, who was transferring funds from Lazare's personal account without ever asking a question, and Aliénor knew the exact nature of this place.
When Lazare opened the door in the bright and soft air of Sologne, the joyful cry of some twenty children playing the ball on the wet lawn burst under the large trees, followed by the barking of two young Belgian shepherds.
A woman about 50 years old with a bright look and a chiffon pepper and salt, Dr.Hélène Courtois, a former pediatrician of Médecins du Monde and a clinical psychologist, went down the steps of the perron by wiping his hands at his apron.
"You're just in time to taste it, Lazare! She smiled when she came to kiss her without a ceremony. And if you didn't bring the drawing books Linh promised to little Mila, I'm not answering your safety anymore!"
"They are in the trunk, Helen, laughs Lazare by raising two heavy cases of books himself while Vauquelin took the boxes of balloons. How did they spend the week?"
The smile of the pediatrician was softer, tinted with the attentive gravity of the whole house.
"The four little ones that your teams evacuated from the suburbs of Mostar and Sarajevo at the end of January are finally starting to sleep again without a watch,"she says, walking beside her towards the large heated veranda.
The seven-year-old boy Luka, who hasn't spoken since the explosion of his parents' building in November, spoke his first words in French yesterday morning with the carpentry teacher. As for the pupils transferred from the homes of the Public Assistance of Seine-Saint-Denis and of the North, they adopted the newcomers in forty-eight hours."
Lazare stopped on the threshold of the veranda.
Inside, around long tables of light oak where hot chocolate bowls and bits of buttered bread smoked, thirty-eight children aged four to fourteen laughed, drew or read, surrounded by educators, a music teacher and two teachers.
There were orphans in the French working-class suburbs who no one wanted, the children of a subcontractor engineer who died in a road accident two years earlier, and children who were torn from the rubble of the Balkans.
When Lazare placed his bookbox on the buffet, he suddenly felt the space and time superimposed in his chest.
He had never pronounced the name of the orphanage Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in front of anyone in this life, since in this chronology, born on June 15, 1966 in the loving home of Auguste and Madeleine Bonaparte, he had never known abandonment.
But in his memory of sixty years, the first fourteen years of his other existence remained engraved with red iron: the glacial dormitory of the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, the smell of bleach and cooled cabbage soup.
The cracked grey tile that was silently fixed on rainy Sundays when no visitor was pushing the door, and the silent rage of the child, who understood from six years that he had to rely only on his fists and brain to survive.
It was this invisible wound that pushed him, in 1986, when he was only twenty years old and his first million had barely fallen, to fly to N!ng to adopt Linh and Minh. And she was the one who gave birth to the Domaine des Cèdres.
He could not save all lost children from the earth; But as long as his factories spit billions, not a single orphan crossing his road would grow in the smell of bleach and the cold of an anonymous dormitory.
A little boy with a black hair in battle, about seven years old, approached the buffet timidly, holding against his sweater a small wooden car that he had just sanded at the workshop. It was Luka, the orphan of Sarajevo.
Lazare put a knee on the ground to place himself exactly at his height. Any trace of the strategist shaking the White House and the Kremlin had disappeared from his face; There was only a patient, almost fraternal sweetness in his dark eyes.
"You miscentered your two-millimetre left front axle,"said Lazare gently, pointing at the little beech wheel. If you throw her on the floor, she'll shoot right. Do you mind?"
The child stared at him long with his big serious eyes, then handed him the toy without a word. Lazare pulled out of his pocket the small multifunctional canif that he always wore on him, touched the wood notch with a sure artisan gesture, made the ash ankle and rolled the car over the terracotta slabs: she ran straight for four meters.
A shy, bright smile splits the boy's face.
"Thank you, sir,"whispered Luka with a slight Slavic accent."
"You're welcome, champion,"smiled Lazare, pulsing her hair before giving her Linh's first box of coloured pencils. Next time I come, you show me how you build a plane."
An hour later, as the sun of March declined behind the pine bushes by tinting the red gold ponds, Lazare and Vauquelin walked side by side along the enclosure wall to inspect the perimetric sensors.
The commander walked his hands behind his back, observing the warm light filtering windows from the veranda away.
"I read the summary of the treaty that Chirac and Kohl signed in Brussels last week, sir,"Vauquelin said after a long silence. Édouard thinks the Elysée locked you in a golden cage by putting our standards in their federal constitution. That you have become the prisoner of the European Empire."
Lazare stopped at the edge of the pond, picked up a flat cake and ricocheted it five times on the surface of the still water.
"Édouard is a banker who hates that a state dictates his statutes to him, Roland,"Lazare replied in a calm and profound voice. It is true: by making our silicon the constitutional spine of the European Federation, Chirac forbids me to ever cut the current or to play the free-shooter. He welded me to the locomotive."
He turned to the large pink brick house where the laughter of the children returning from the orchard sounded.
"But why do you think I've sunk all this concrete and drawn all these chips for thirteen years, Roland? For the pleasure of intimidating ministers or looking at my name in the Wall Street Journal?
A armor doesn't make any sense if it's empty. If Europe has become an unassailable bloc that neither Washington, Moscow, nor Beijing dare to strike, then those who grow up behind our walls, my parents, Aliénor, twins, and those thirty-eight kids there, will never have to know the war on their soil."
The old commando of the 1st RPIMa looked at this thirty-year-old man who spoke as a veteran of all the countryside of the century, and slowly bowed his head with silent respect.
"Seen from this angle, sir,"said Vauquelin,"the cage has beautiful bars. Are we going back to Paris? Madame Bonaparte is waiting for you for dinner on Rue d'Assas."
"We go home, Roland,"smiled Lazare, buttoning his canvas jacket. And don't drive one hundred and eighty on the Orléans highway, I promised Aliénor to bring back intact Sologne honey."