The Italian man in the Ferragamo suit checked his phone as he rode the escalator from the French underground station. He needed to catch up on natural gas futures before he got to the meeting, because once he was there, the guards would confiscate his phone. The precautions regarding communication devices had been established long ago by le commandant, and they were annoying but necessary. They couldn’t take the risk of anyone recording or eavesdropping on what was said in that room.
Protocol also dictated that none of the participants arrive via personal vehicles or car services that could be tracked. Anonymity was key. That meant taking taxis or the Métro, and even taxis were discouraged. A driver might recognize and remember a face. So Franco took the subway, even though he hated it. There were no first-class compartments, the station reeked like a toilet, and the people—mio Dio, the people! Around him, the fat, the loud, the unwashed, and the unemployed thundered up the stairs toward the plaza, waving signs for La Vraie and shouting the name of Raymond Berland.
Le Roi Raymond, they called him.
King Raymond.
The European establishment was scared to death of Berland. The Italian man saw it every day, because he was part of the establishment himself, at least in the eyes of the world. Franco Antonini was only thirty-two years old and already the number four man in the continent’s largest energy company. Within a few years, he would leapfrog from number four to number one as the next CEO. That destination was a certainty, regardless of what it took to eliminate his competitors. His career path had been shepherded by Le Renouveau since he was recruited to the cause at seventeen years old.
Franco enjoyed watching his compatriots squirm about the upcoming French election. According to the newest polls, Raymond Berland, the charismatic young leader of the True France party, was only a point or two behind the current president. This followed the president’s starring role in a leaked video involving thirteen-year-old girls, which was apparently too much even for the jaded sexual mores of France. He had resigned from the race, so the elites in Brussels and the leaders of the largest French companies were scrambling to back a political newcomer, Chrétien Pau, in a last-ditch attempt to stop Berland and La Vraie from staging a right-wing takeover of the Élysée Palace and the Palais Bourbon.
All Franco could do was laugh.
The takeover was unstoppable.
On the escalator, a fortysomething French construction worker in a yellow reflective jacket muscled past him, chanting about Le Roi Raymond. Seeing Franco’s expensive suit, the man hurled angry jibes about the rich and privileged. Franco ignored him and continued to study his phone. No need to feed the beast when the beast already had plenty of food. The man soon found new prey, descending on a small and pretty Muslim woman in a headscarf who rode the escalator a few steps above Franco. The construction worker shouted at her to go back to where she came from, and half a dozen other men joined in, surrounding the woman and screaming in her face. She looked down and said nothing, but that only provoked the men to make their curses more obscene.
Such fools.
At the top of the escalator, Franco smoothly stepped forward between the men, put an arm around the young woman’s shoulders, and guided her under his protection into the plaza of La Défense. The gang followed at first, but there were too many other distractions, and most of them peeled away to join the latest rally for La Vraie. Franco walked beside the woman until she was away from her tormenters, and then he squeezed her shoulder and told her in French, “Tu es en sécurité maintenant, ma chérie.”
You’re safe now.
“Merci beaucoup,” she told him. “Vous êtes si gentil.”
He waved her away with a pleasant smile. She would probably tell her family about the nice man in the suit who helped her ward off the French Nazis. In a few more hours, as the toxin ravaged her body, she wouldn’t remember him squeezing her shoulder or the prick of his ring as it penetrated her skin.
These immigrants had to learn they had no place here.
Franco paused in the huge plaza. He observed the nearby rally and shook his head at the loud idiots of La Vraie chanting their slogans and pretending to be tough. They were ignorant pawns to be moved where they were useful and then discarded like waste. It was the leaders of Le Renouveau—the men and women who had sworn their life and loyalty to the cause—who knew how to take real action.
He continued toward the hotel where the meeting would take place. The white cube of the Grande Arche dominated the plaza, like something out of a science fiction movie, a geometric counterpart to the Arc de Triomphe barely visible in the opposite direction. Some people hated the cube in La Défense, just like they hated the glass pyramid at the Louvre. Franco had no patience for those who were stuck in the past and resisted progress and change. That was the nature of the world. Sweep out the old and the corrupt, eliminate the weak and the cowardly, and let the new order take over. The higher order.
The renewal. Le Renouveau.
It was quarter to two in the afternoon. The meeting was to begin promptly at two. Franco bought a cone of frites and ate them one by one, carefully using a napkin to wipe the salt and grease from his fingers. He hummed as he watched the unrest in the square, which had been carefully orchestrated for maximum effect. Everything was proceeding according to plan. Ten minutes later, he entered the hotel and took the elevator to the private conference room on the uppermost floor. Outside the doors, two armed guards met him, checked his identification—although they knew perfectly well who he was—took his phone, his lethal opal ring, his compact Glock 43, and his SKM stiletto, and then let him enter the room to join the others. He always made sure he was the last to arrive.
The conference room was small, with twenty plush chairs set out around a glass table built in a square U. The angled windows looked down on the plaza and the modern arch. Franco made no small talk with the other members. This wasn’t a place for chitchat. He took his place at the head of the table, and when they saw him, the rest of the participants took their chairs for the beginning of the meeting.
Franco’s gaze went from face to face.
He knew them all well. He had known them and trained with them for years. A few had gone to college with him, and the others had attended similar schools around Europe. There were fourteen men, five women, ranging in age from twenty-eight to thirty-seven. These were the titans of the future, sons and daughters of wealth and power, up-and-coming leaders in government, the military, business, education, media, technology, and energy. Control those sectors, and you controlled the entire world. Like Franco, they had been chosen to rise to the top in their respective fields.
He tapped a pencil twice on the glass tabletop and was rewarded with instant silence.
“Buongiorno, amici,” he said. “Bonjour. Hello. It is a pleasure to be back with all of you again. Let us dial in le commandant.”
Franco reached for the secure phone in front of him and tapped in a number. Almost immediately, a sharp, familiar voice boomed through the room, speaking in a rugged accent that still bore traces of the man’s French childhood. This was his real voice, not the voice he used in public, which he could modulate to sound like a dozen different men. His talent was to make every audience feel that he was one of them.
In this room, with these people, his words had a slashing quality that demanded obedience.
“State your oaths,” the man announced over the phone.
One by one, each person in the room stood up and offered the vow they had made to Le Renouveau in the very beginning after their recruitment. I am here to swear my life and loyalty to the cause. Franco was the last to make his pledge, and then he waited for le commandant to continue.
“The election is in just a few weeks,” the leader announced. “I hardly need to remind you of the importance of this event. This is the culmination of years of planning and patience, of eroding the status quo and feeding instability. Riots over gas prices, over pension reforms, over police shootings. The culture in France and throughout Europe is fragile, looking for change, and we are finally ready to assume power. Each of you has a vital role to play in the coming days. I assume you are ready with your reports. Franco, let’s begin.”
Franco nodded at the woman immediately on his right. Her name was Maryse Rouche, thirty-one years old, the granddaughter of a former German chancellor and head of European operations for one of the world’s largest technology companies. Franco had recruited her to the organization himself when they began an affair in college. She was married now, with two children, but their affair continued at a torrid pace whenever they were both in Paris.
“My team and I have begun overriding elements of the search engine algorithms and replacing them with our own criteria,” Maryse told the gathering, her voice bland, without any intonation. “Essentially, we’ll control the news and narratives on display with stories of our own design. And of course, an evaluation of social media history using the Prescix technology will allow us to tailor posts to specific individuals and reinforce what they want to hear. Our analysis shows that this alone should increase raw approval ratings for our security objectives up to five points in the next polls.”
“Naturally, the print and television media will back up this operation,” added Chester Bagley, senior director of programming at EuroNews, which operated the number one network in most of the EU member states. “Our own stations will be directing content according to our specifications, but we also have people in the international affiliates of the American networks. No doubt you’ve observed that the uprisings are making headlines not just on the continent but around the world. Already we’re enhancing the voices of those who are calling for a greater police and military presence to deal with the violence.”
“That brings us to intelligence,” Franco said. “Justin?”
Justin Ely nodded from the far side of the room.
He was a recent recruit to the leadership committee, having spent years as a field operative. He was also the only American in the room. Unlike the others, who had separate careers in their public lives, Justin worked only within the organization. He was the son of an American ambassador, which had led him to an elite European education in Brussels. With recommendations from senior members of Le Renouveau, he’d been recruited to the CIA after college. He’d spent ten years doing wet work for the agency. After his work for the Americans, he’d gone private, building relationships with contractors and mercenaries around the world. All of those contacts were now paying off.
Justin wore jeans and a leather jacket, the only person in the room not formally dressed for the meeting. He was thin to the point of being gaunt, with a bony frame that belied his strength and skills. His jet-black hair was cut short and neat. He had pale skin, reddened by sunburn, with narrow dead eyes and a thin mouth that rarely smiled. Franco liked him for his ruthlessness and cunning, although it was impossible to know what he was thinking, because nothing ever showed on his face.
“We’ve developed street-level chain of command with regard to the protests—” Justin began, but le commandant unexpectedly cut him off.
“Yes, yes, Justin, I have confidence in your strategy for the unrest. The violence is spreading as we wished. You’ve done well, and I acknowledge your success. Now skip ahead and tell me about your failure.”
Justin glanced down the table at Franco, his jaw jutting slightly with annoyance. Franco’s mouth pursed, as if to say: Hold your tongue.
“I assume you mean David Webb,” Justin went on.
A clipped reply came from the phone. “Yes.”
“All right. As you know, we recently received a tip that we believed would help us locate the assassin at the mountain chalet. The man we’ve been pursuing for years. The man who murdered four of our recruits.”
“And almost murdered me,” the voice on the phone added acidly.
“Yes, sir. He was trying to penetrate our organization back then, but fortunately, you tagged him as a mole from the beginning. His name is David Webb, but he left that identity behind not long after the incident at the chalet. That’s one of the reasons he’s been so difficult to find. We’ve now confirmed that he’s an American operative known as Cain, also called Jason Bourne. Originally, he was run out of the CIA’s Treadstone unit, but his relationship with them seems to be arm’s length at this point.”
“I’m more interested in why he’s still alive,” the leader snapped over the phone.
Justin took a deep breath. “He’s alive because I fucked up, sir. This was my mission, my responsibility. If you want to have Franco shoot me for it, go ahead.”
Franco winced. No one else in the room had the balls to talk to le commandant like that, not even Franco himself. But Justin didn’t pull punches, and that was one of the reasons the leader had brought him into the inner circle.
After an uncomfortable silence, the phone speaker came alive again. “Continue.”
“Yes, sir. We maintained surveillance on the café in Zurich, and we sent in two of my best men when we knew he was inside. But Cain spotted our men and took out one. A third party intervened and disabled my other man.”
“And Webb?” the leader asked.
“He’s gone underground again, unfortunately. However, I’ve alerted all of our cells to watch for him. He won’t get far.”
“I trust you’re right. We can’t afford any setbacks at this juncture. The last thing we need is a wild card like Cain getting in our way. We’ve been trying to find him and eliminate him for years, and we need to get the job done. He saw me in that chalet. If he makes the connection and figures out who I am, he could blow up the entire operation.”
“Understood, sir. We’ll find him. Now that I know he’s Treadstone, I know how he thinks. I’ve already activated a team in Engelberg. My expectation is he’ll go there next, and we’ll be waiting for him.”
“Except now he’ll be on guard,” Franco pointed out at the head of the table. “He knows we’re looking for him.”
“Yes, he does,” Justin acknowledged, “but that may turn out to be an advantage. With Bourne on the run, I expect he’ll lead us where we want him to go. To our other target. He’s going to help us find the woman named Monika Roth.”