PART 3
The ceremony concluded in a hubbub of barked orders and the clattering of weapons. The perfect ranks broke apart to make way for family reunions. Yet, around Éliane Mercier, a perimeter of absolute void had formed. Rumors of her exchange with Colonel de La Roche had spread like wildfire among the closest officers.
Stéphane, his face deathly pale, covered in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with the Breton sun, stared at his mother as if he were seeing a ghost. Karine, his wife, was trembling, her hands tightly gripping her designer handbag, which suddenly seemed utterly trivial.
“Mom…” Stéphane finally stammered, his voice broken. “What… what on earth was that? Who are you?”
Éliane turned a gaze toward him entirely devoid of any maternal tenderness. The slouched, hesitant grandmother had vanished. Her posture had straightened, her shoulders were square, and her light eyes, usually evasive, now possessed the icy sharpness of a predator.
“I am the one who allowed you to live a mediocre, comfortable life while ignoring the darkness of this world, Stéphane,” she replied in a cutting voice, without raising her tone. “Take your wife. Get back to your car. Do not stop until you are back in Rennes. And forget what just happened.”
“But Noé…” Karine tried to protest, terrified yet curious.
“Noé no longer needs you. He never did. Leave. Now.”
There was an authority so brutal, so definitive in this command that Stéphane took a step back before turning on his heel, dragging his wife toward the parking lot without daring to cast a single glance behind him.
Rid of her family burden, Éliane let her senses reclaim the space. She was no longer at Coëtquidan in 2026. She was back in the grey alleys of East Berlin, in the train yards of Moscow—in every place where her life had hung by a thread. Her right hand, slipped inside her bag, caressed the cold contours of the Swiss vault key. A key that opened far more than a reinforced door in Geneva: it opened the Pandora’s box of Eastern European intelligence services. The “Janus File.” The real reason her daughter, Mathilde, had been murdered.
Mathilde hadn’t died in a mere car accident. Mathilde, a brilliant financial analyst, had accidentally uncovered illicit capital flows linking high-ranking French officials to oligarchs originating from the old KGB. She had wanted to speak out. They had silenced her. And Éliane, the retired legend, had been unable to protect her. But she had saved Noé, hidden in the trunk of the car that night.
Suddenly, a tall silhouette dressed in full ceremonial uniform stopped two meters away from her.
“Grandmother.”
Noé’s voice was deep, steady. Éliane looked at him. He had grown so much. Mathilde’s features were taking shape on this young man’s face, but the steel in his eyes was hers. Éliane’s.
“You were perfect, Noé,” she murmured, a sliver of softness piercing through her armor.
“He is here,” the young soldier replied without preamble, his gaze fixing on a point behind his grandmother’s shoulder. “Chief Warrant Officer Varlot. He is our combat shooting instructor.”
Éliane did not turn around. Rule number one: never look directly at your target if they can see you. “Are you certain?”
“The half-moon scar under his left ear. The way he very slightly drags his right leg. And… his scent. A mix of dark tobacco and gunpowder. The exact smell that lingered in the cabin when he shattered the window of Mom’s car. I was only eight years old, but I never forgot it.”
An undetectable shiver ran down Éliane’s spine. For eleven years, everyone had believed Noé was traumatized, amnesic, fragile. The truth was far darker: Éliane had secretly trained her grandson. She had taught him how to conceal, how to observe, and how to forge a mind of titanium behind a facade of broken glass. Noé’s enlistment in the army wasn’t an escape. It was a hunt. They knew Mathilde’s killer had infiltrated the very heart of the French military institution under a false identity. They had searched for him, and Noé had flushed him out here, at Coëtquidan.
“Colonel de La Roche greeted me earlier,” Éliane said in a low voice. “He broke my cover, but he gave me an opening. Listen to me carefully, Noé. Go rejoin your company. Act normally. I will take care of Varlot.”
“No,” Noé protested, his fists clenched. “This is for her. It’s my turn to do it.”
“You are a soldier of France now, not an assassin,” Éliane cut him off with a severity that masked an immense love. “As for me, I am already a ghost. Ghosts do not answer to human justice.”
She discreetly slipped a small, rectangular object into her grandson’s hand. “If I don’t come back, give this to de La Roche. He alone will know what to do. Go, now.”
Noé hesitated for a fraction of a second, his eyes gleaming with an emotion he immediately swallowed back down. He took a step back, sketched a nearly imperceptible military salute, and walked away.
Éliane took a deep breath. She adjusted the bag on her shoulder, resumed her demeanor of a slightly tired old lady, and began walking toward the administrative buildings, located away from the bustling esplanade. She knew that Varlot—or whatever his real name was, Soviet archives called him Korsakov—had recognized her. He wasn’t here by accident. He had been waiting for her for eleven years. He knew she held the key to Geneva, the sole physical evidence of his treason and that of his handlers at the highest levels of the State.
She turned into an alley lined with old oak trees, leading toward the indoor shooting ranges, deserted on this day of ceremony. The shadow of the trees offered a striking contrast to the crushing light of the esplanade. The silence was broken only by the distant song of a brass band and the crunch of her footsteps on the gravel.
Behind her, heavier, regular footsteps approached. A slightly asymmetrical gait. He had bitten the hook.
Éliane pushed open the heavy metal door of shooting range number 4. The familiar smell of cordite and lead filled her nostrils. She advanced to the center of the room plunged in semi-darkness, dimly lit by the pale neon lights of the hallway. She stopped and faced the door.
The man entered. He locked the door behind him with a calculated slowness. He was tall, athletic, his uniform impeccable. His face was a geographical map of violence, slashed by that famous half-moon scar beneath his ear.
“Éliane Mercier,” he said with a very slight gravelly accent that he no longer even bothered to hide. “Or should I say, Commander Louve?”
“Korsakov,” she replied without trembling. “You’ve aged. Is field work exhausting you to the point that you have to hide among children to play soldier?”
The man gave a chilling smile. He slowly drew a weapon from his holster—a pistol equipped with a silencer—and aimed it at the old lady. “You were wrong to crawl out of your hole, Éliane. I hoped you would eventually die of old age, taking Mathilde’s secret with you. But when my informants told me that little Noé was enlisting, I knew you were plotting something. Did you bring the key?”
Éliane pulled the brass key from her bag and held it between her thumb and index finger, making it gleam in the dim light. “The ‘Janus File.’ All your transactions, all your names, all the proof of your infiltration at the summit of the French State. That is why you killed my daughter. Because she was too smart for you.”
Korsakov’s expression hardened. “She was snooping where she shouldn’t have been. When I pushed her car into the ravine, she still had the strength to look me in the eyes. She begged. Not for herself. For the kid in the back.”
A flash of piercing pain struck Éliane’s heart, but her face remained a mask of stone. “And you left him alive. That was your mistake, Korsakov. You thought an eight-year-old child, traumatized in the dark, would forget. You underestimated my blood. You underestimated my family.”
“Enough talk,” the undercover agent spat, cocking the firing pin. “Drop the key at my feet. Afterward, I’ll make this look like a suicide or a heart attack. An old woman loses her mind and wanders into a shooting range… Tragic.”
“There is a detail you are missing, Korsakov,” Éliane said softly, letting go of the key. It hit the concrete floor with a clear chime. “Do you really think the ‘Louve’ of Berlin would come confront her daughter’s killer without a plan? You thought you lured me into a trap because I am old and defenseless. But I am the one who led you into it.”
Korsakov frowned, suddenly suspicious. He took a step toward the key but kept his weapon trained on Éliane’s heart. “Bluff. You are alone. Your grandson is on the parade ground, and your idiot son is on the highway.”
“I wasn’t talking about them,” Éliane whispered.
At that exact moment, the artificial lights of the shooting range cut out all at once, plunging the room into pitch blackness. Surprised, Korsakov recoiled. In the absolute darkness, a voice echoed through the shooting range’s loudspeakers. A deep, gravelly, authoritative voice. That of Colonel de La Roche.
“Chief Warrant Officer Varlot. Lower your weapon. You are surrounded by Military Security special forces. Every exit is blocked.”
Korsakov panicked. He fired blindly in the direction where Éliane had been standing. The shot, muffled by the silencer, hissed through the air, striking the back wall. But Éliane was no longer there. Despite her 84 years, her reflexes, conditioned by decades of survival, had taken over. The moment the lights went out, she had let herself drop to the ground, rolling silently behind a heavy ammunition crate.
In the dark, Korsakov heard a metallic sound a few inches away from him. Before he could react, a 50,000-volt electrical discharge from the miniaturized taser Éliane had hidden in her compact case struck him dead in the thigh. The massive man collapsed, howling in pain, dropping his weapon.
