Located just a short ride from the popular Place du Capitole and the Garonne River, the Rue St. Rome is one of the shopping streets in old Toulouse. Many of the two- and three-story medieval structures there sag or slant with age. The floors are buckled due to their proximity to the river. But these buildings do not fall. It's as if they're telling the brash, new, out-of-place signs for Seiko watches or mopeds, the once-new TV aerials and still-new satellite dishes, "No. We won't surrender this street to you." And so, after centuries of watching ramparts come and go, of bearing silent witness to countless lives and dreams, the facades still look out on the crooked network of narrow roads and hurrying masses.

Situated in a third-floor room of one of those structures, a dilapidated old store called Magasin Vert which he had rented, Colonel Bernard Ballon of the Gendarmerie Nationale was watching the live pictures being broadcast from outside the Demain factory to four small TV monitors. The plant was located some thirty kilometers north of the city center. But for all the intelligence he was collecting, the plant might just as well have been situated thirty kilometers north of the earth's center.

Ballon's men had placed hidden cameras at all four sides of the ancient edifice in the ancient town of Montauban. They videotaped every truck and employee that entered or left. All they needed to see was one known member of the New Jacobins. Once one of the terrorists had been spotted, Ballon and his elite tactical squad would be inside within twenty minutes. The cars were parked nearby, the men were sitting around audio equipment and other video monitors, and the weapons were in duffel bags in the corner. The search warrants, too, were in order provided they had what the courts called "raison de suspicion." Reason for suspicion. Reasons which would survive a defense assault in court.

But however close Dominique's "big push" might be, the reclusive tycoon wasn't getting careless. And Ballon suspected that the push was close indeed. After seventeen long and frustrating years of following the elusive billionaire; after seventeen years of tracking, arresting, and trying to break members of the New Jacobin terrorist organization; after seventeen years of watching his own interest become an obsession, Ballon was certain that Dominique was ready to make something happen. And not just the heralded launch of his new video games. He had launched new games before and they had never required this level of manpower.

Or this level of commitment from Dominique, Ballon thought.

Dominique was staying at the factory more and more at night instead of going home to his red-brick estate in the countryside outside of Mountauban. Employees were working longer shifts. Not just the company's videogame programmers but also the technicians who worked on Internet projects and hardware. He watched their comings and goings on the monitors.

Jean Goddard… Marie Page… Emile Tourneur.