— But I haven't heard from them!
— Those are the instructions, we must not try to reach anyone until this bitch's death is official.
— What the hell time it is! That woman is a psychopath, I saw it in her eyes. I've never met anyone like her before. It's like... she has no... soul. It's hard to explain. This woman, she's a black hole. She's terrifying, I felt sucked into her presence. You know me, I'm not afraid of heights, but I think that's what people feel when they see emptiness. And I failed to bring her down. I failed! Erwan, she's gonna come after us, she's never gonna let go.
— I hear you're having second thoughts, that's normal. Last night, you were perfect. We have to be patient. I'm sure it's just a little setback.
— A little hitch? Really? Really? I'd like to believe you...
Claire's crying her eyes out. Anxiety invades her.
The pressure is too high, the night was too short, and the flow of intense stress finally finds a way out. She feels like she's been crushed by a steamroller.
— Claire, come here. Come here. Come here. Come here.
Claire gets up, puts a bare foot on the carpet and sits down on the floor next to Erwan. They hug each other.
— I mourned your death for hours, days and nights. I tried to forget you. I took the weight of Lana's sadness off my shoulders. When she started asking me about you, I tried everything I could to give her the best explanation I could...
— I'm listening, go on.
— And then I met Benedict. I managed to fall in love again, to have a new life, to rebuild everything, even if, somewhere here - she shows her heart - I felt like killing you a second time by voluntarily forgetting you. Deep down, I knew that you were not dead...
Claire delicately places her soft hand on her prickly cheek. She looks at him with wet eyes, blurred by emotion.
— I felt like I was burying you alive. I thought you were out there somewhere, calling for help, asking me to come get you, but I didn't know where. I looked for you every night in my dreams. I fought against this feeling that wouldn't let go. And I ended up doing what I didn't want to do: I isolated it, compartmentalized it, and buried it.
Claire strokes his hair and massages his brown curls. He listens to her attentively.
— You let your hair grow, it looks good on you," she says, staring at him.
Erwan sketches a smile that makes his dimples appear. Claire continues, tenderly.
— And you... ...you come back, as if by magic. Now, I know that feeling was right, and everyone was wrong. Erwan, I'm so scared. And I hate it!
Claire's getting tough. Her eyebrows form a "V" full of reproach.
— You know I hate being scared.
Erwan does not disassemble and gently takes Claire's hand, reassuring. The two eyes meet, deeply, intensely.
Time is stretching.
Erwan's phone suddenly started vibrating.
It's an anonymous call. Erwan picks up immediately. His heart is beating so fast that Claire can see his white shirt pulsing.
— Hello? He said in a worried voice.
A male voice, cavernous, like that of a heavy smoker, speaks slowly and distinctly. If you concentrate, you will perceive a slight echo.
— Your friend Pierre just fell from the seventh floor of the Soufflot Street building. It was a tragic accident. The President sends her condolences.
Instinctively, Erwan throws the mobile phone on the wall, which breaks into several pieces. He smashes the SIM card with all his might, with the heel of his shoe.
— She's alive!
Chapter 2
Erwan feels his inner world toppling over. He feels dizzy, he feels like vomiting. They got rid of Pierre, they can find Lana too! Claire is furious, anger has replaced anguish and is starting to invade her too.
Erwan takes the head.
— Fuck her! Rage Erwan.
— It's my fault, I must have made a mistake somewhere!
— No, no! It's not your fault! It's mine. I endangered your life, you're going to be charged with attempted assassination of the President. She will kill you. You have to find the children now, Lana... and your husband, you'll find him too, I swear. You have to protect them! If anything happens to them, I'll never forgive myself. We have foreign supporters, people we trust, they're Americans... I can't tell you any more than that. As you know, we are close to civil war, the factions hostile to the President have formed. Tonight, a huge wave of arrests will take place among the highest leaders, including prefects, accused of high treason. This is what Michèle Desrivières has been preparing for months. It may even have already begun. Tonight, she is making the coup official, after setting fire to her campaign office herself. We now know what President Michèle Desrivières' real motives are. She wants to seize power by force, because she knows she was threatened with assassination. She wants to break our military alliance with our American friends, to get rid of NATO's tutelage, and dreams of reforming the Empire. The price she wants to make us pay is the external war, the war that is coming back for the conquest of Europe. England will not budge, it has long since left the European game, Germany is weakened by internal wars, and Russia is only the pale reflection of an ancient power. She'll take advantage of it.
— Erwan, you know you can count on me. But you know as well as I can't join the kids and leave you here alone! The children are safe, aren't they? Erwan? Are they safe?
— Claire, we're at war, and if we're not now, we will be tomorrow. I can't guarantee anything.
— But Pierre said they were on a boat...
— Pierre is dead! She killed him! And tonight others will be murdered or arrested! You must not stay here!
— Erwan, look at me, I know that you have always been for the construction of Laurent Terrier's European sovereignty, for the United States of Europe, for peace and democracy. But look where your good intentions have led us? It is fear and withdrawal that rules with Michèle, it has brought us war! I refuse to be afraid, do you hear? Damn it! I refuse to be afraid!
— Claire, your courage is what I value most about you, and I knew when I went to see you, we could count on you. Today, I think the least bad solution is for you to go find them and get out of here.
Claire sighs. She has to face the facts. He's right. He's right. She failed. She needs to step up, protect the people that matter most, and protect herself.
Claire reaches out, resigned.
Erwan gives him information.
— Here, it's all on this paper, read it, memorize it, destroy it and be careful.
— Erwan, tell me how can we stop it? She's all-powerful. The army is at her side, the police...
— Not all of them. We'll come up with a plan. No one's indispensable, if they don't need me, I'll join you. But if anything happens to me, there's a safety deposit box in Switzerland, in the KSBH bank, in my name and you have power of attorney. It's all in there. We may have one last plan to avoid the point of no return.
— Erwan, I don't want to lose you a second time. Lana needs a father... and I need... a friend.
Claire plunges her head into Erwan's neck.
This is the first time their two bodies have touched each other so intimately in all these years.
Erwan and Claire are alone in that cramped hotel room. Outside, France has fallen into an authoritarian regime that nothing seems to stop anymore, that no one has been able to stop. To save France, or to save his family: this is the implacable dilemma that comes to his face like a boomerang. She is sure of only one thing now: Erwan has become again the friend, the partner he has always been. He has the difficult task of facing the hydra and she has the difficult task of protecting their loved ones with a sword in her hand.
Chapter 3
Claire's on the bedroom doorstep. She has hidden her big brown hair under a soft grey felt beret. The long skirt and the frock coat give her the look of a Parisian woman of the 50s. Her name is now Céline Trudeau, she is a Canadian citizen and she is a journalist, co
rrespondent for a local newspaper in the Province of Quebec, who will confirm her position, just in case. The farewells are long. Claire and Erwan look into each other's eyes for a long time.
She whispers a few words.
— Erwan, they say that if you look into someone's eyes for too long, you can fall in love.
— Then get out of here. And give Lana a kiss for me. Tell her I'll be back. I will. I promise.
— Swear to me.
— I swear to you.
Claire comes closer and kisses Erwan on the cheek, as close as possible to her ex-husband's mouth, to breathe his scent one last time, to soak it in.
— Erwan, you're my first love, and Lana's father. If anything happens to you...
— Get out of here.
Erwan, feel the warmth of Claire leaving him.
She had soft skin, she smelled good that rose scent that characterizes her so well and whose name he has forgotten. Yet he remembers having offered it to her on his way back from Rome, in a Duty Free. It was another time, a time of peace, of roses and flowers.
She's already gone, there's no one left in the dark corridor of this small Parisian hotel in the nineteenth arrondissement. He just hears her footsteps, walking away down the waxed wooden stairs.
Chapter 4
Claire takes a step into the street, swarming. No one knows that the President almost died last night, that she participated in a failed coup d'état, and that all the police in France are after her. Claire, with a serious face, starts to smile. A little selfish grin, just for her. Fear is gone, she who can't stand being dominated by her feelings has regained all her strength, in contact with the fresh air. She has only one goal: to find those she loves. She promises to return as soon as possible, when she is sure that Benedict and the children will be safe. Her great-grandmother was a member of the Resistance, and she feels the power of her grandmother rising within her. She talks to her, she invokes her, even if she only knows her through family histories, and through archives found when she started genealogy. In her veins, she feels the same force vibrating. Claire feels powerful again. She concentrates, focuses on her short-term goal: leaving Paris. For this, she has only one contact: a redheaded woman at the Gare de Lyon, wearing a red scarf. She has to get to Marseille as soon as possible. There, another contact will give her the name of the boat she will take to reach Oran.
We have to hurry.
Claire plans to take the automatic metro line five, which she will join at Stalingrad. There was a time, far away, when she used to come to drink jars and eat boards of cold cuts with friends after concerts. Today the square is completely militarized, and the Rotunda is no longer a restaurant, but a barracks. It is occupied twenty-four hours a day by gendarmes. This requisition is explained by its strategic location. It makes it possible to control an artery of Paris, and to be in the heart of a district known for its acts of rebellion. What an irony of History when we know that the monument was one of the rare buildings of the grant to have not burned during the Revolution of 17895 . It even housed the municipal guards when it was reassigned in 1830. History sometimes tends to repeat itself, tirelessly. Claire knows this, and that is what she tried to avoid last night, in vain.
Chapter 5
Claire's a lucky girl.
As she prepares to get off in the subway, a public transit officer closes the entrance just behind her. He tells her that a large-scale wild demonstration has begun, hundreds of people have gathered on Stalingrad Square out of nowhere: the CRS companies will soon gas and retaliate with weapons. Usually, this kind of violent demonstration lasts only a short half-hour, before the cloud disperses as quickly as it arrived. Already, the first projectiles on the Rotunda whistle, the red smoke colours the sky to prevent the drones from spotting them, and the homemade bombs explode to disperse the CRS companies that retaliate. The transport agent presses Claire. We need to move fast and seal off the subway entrance. These are lightning actions designed to alert Parisians with protest slogans: "Ci-toy-en, ré-veille-toi! Paris, get up, get up!" resounds on the surface, as she runs down the stairs four by four. Claire has just narrowly escaped the riot. The Constitution of the Fifth Republic gave birth to a devil. It was conceived, written to be a "permanent coup d'état" according to François Mitterrand. By an irony of history, fascism is now in power. No one suspected that the wife of a former President, herself an unhappy former presidential candidate, would do anything to become one and above all... to remain one, whatever it takes. She managed to get herself elected President of the Senate by co-option and service to the nation. Patient, like a spider that has woven its web, she waited for her time, then murdered her ex-husband, and took power in France. No one suspected that such a scenario was possible, and yet it happened. A few decades ago, everyone remembers falling asleep thinking that Clinton was going to be elected, and the worst President of the United States was elected in his place. On the other hand, everyone knows how his term of office ended... The worst thing is that many people still think today that Michèle Desrivières is the only one who can govern this country, while they do not know that she has been manoeuvring since the beginning to destabilize all the institutions, and to appear as the heroine, the figure of the mother country, the providential woman, the Marianne, the guarantor of a fantasized and eternal Republic. This is the technique of the pyromaniac firefighter, and it works perfectly with the support of the army generals and senior police officers, who back her in her rise to power: as her own father - the former chief of staff of the army6 - had prophesied shortly before his death in 2018: "The world will slowly die out because of climate change. The more it sinks into chaos, the more authoritarian power will be needed to guarantee security and what remains of freedom. Only strong men and women will be able to rule this country. We will not be able to escape the return of war on the European continent". Inequalities have never been so strong since the advent in our lives of two irreversible phenomena that few people have been able to anticipate: Artificial Intelligence and global warming. Millions of people have found themselves unemployed, and the State has deemed them useless, constantly accusing them of being responsible for their own situation, while knowingly forgetting to adapt the obsolete National Education system to the new forms of silicon thinking. The temptation to infantilize citizens has been too strong, even for the most honest elected representatives. The more AI progressed, the more the people had to be prevented from reaching a high level of education, because AI made better political decisions than elected officials. The elites very logically defended their status by carefully avoiding the emancipation of biological brains. At the same time, the living species on Earth have become extinct, one after the other, and global tensions have never been so high. Immense waves of migration from countries devastated by desert sand and famine have since tried to find refuge in Europe. Walls and barbed wire have changed nothing. Tensions are everywhere, and the temptation of authoritarianism has sprouted. It has lurked in the shadows, biding its time. Just like Michèle Desrivières, who is convinced, deep down inside herself, that she is on the right path: she has booed her husband, who comes from technocratic schools of which she herself is the enfant terrible. She has booed those closed, secret or discreet meetings where elites stuffed with gold and silver believed they dominated the world when they were dominated by their own impulses. She firmly believes she is the cure for this fever, because she knows them, because she has been around them, because she has dined with these greedy monsters, these new all-powerful lords, because they thought they had AI. She took back the reins of power, like Bonaparte taking over a fragile Republic. Tonight, the permanent state of emergency will be further strengthened and a wave of mass arrests will take place. It is said that a hundred large ships are anchored in the port of Le Havre, with the aim of taking political prisoners to a secret dungeon on the Kerguelen archipelago, a land lost in the Southern Ocean .
Claire is thinking, and trying to analyze the situation. She is sitting in the automatic metro, with
the resigned Parisians, or those who pretend to be. A good actress, she also takes this wax mask, and now has only one idea in mind: to join her husband, and her children, as soon as possible. In Oran, where her husband has family, she will be able to rebuild herself and look to the future more serenely. At least, that's what she hopes, to find a bit of calm, a bit of peace.
Suddenly, the subway lights went out, one by one.
The train stops dead, trapped in a hose, between two stations. Is it a banal power cut, as the people of Ile-de-France are used to, since the old nuclear power station in Nogent has been idling? You can hear a few people grumbling, yes, the train is still stopped. Claire looks around her, no one is moving. Everyone waits for instructions, nose up.
A service message resounds, a soft reconstructed female robot voice finally warns passengers, and gives some uncomfortable information.
— Ladies and gentlemen, a police check is in progress in the train, please do not leave your seat and extend your right arm in front of you. We remind you that failure to present your ID chip may result in prosecution and immediate arrest. Following this check, traffic will resume as normal. Thank you for your understanding, and have a good trip on our lines.
Claire doesn't move, and pretends to read on her backlit reading light, reaching out her right arm. Her transport ticket has been loaded in her new chip, and Erwan has assured her that the other identity is completely deactivated. Her name is Celine Trudeau. Céline Trudeau, Claire repeats it like a mantra. Travellers can't help but raise their right arm a little higher, out of ignorance, stupidity, provocation, or zeal... Suddenly, she sees a young woman in front of her, her eyes revolted. She has just taken a box cutter out of her handbag. She is nervous and feverish. The girl, with a sharp and precise gesture, opens her arm, without shouting. Claire is the only one who has noticed her. The girl makes a grimace, she clenches her teeth with all her might. The policemen in dark outfits, whose eyes can only be seen, hidden under black masks, seem to control only women. They get closer. Maybe they're looking for her? What if it's Claire? Claire looks at the doorknobs, just in case, and feels a cold sweat all over her body. She hasn't finished thinking about her escape plan when the injured girl jumps out of her seat and pulls the emergency stop lever twice to try to force the doors open. Claire does not intervene and remains frozen, mute. The policemen start running in the train, they are about ten meters away. The young girl finally manages to get the doors open, and an icy air rushes into the subway. The blood from her arm runs down to the ground, in circular red stains, she tries to jump, but too late, the policemen throw themselves on her, like dogs on the priest.
The Last President- The Complete Trilogy Page 12
