I went back to the table to pick up my jacket, which was hanging on the chair. When I saw the table, I felt my heart race. In my absence, somebody had carefully folded the printout of the article and set a pair of sunglasses on top of it. Ray-Ban Clubmasters with tinted lenses. Who could have played such a horrible trick? I looked around. Dino was talking to someone next to the gas pumps; Hannah was watering the geraniums on the far side of the terrace. A few garbage collectors were taking a coffee break at the counter, and the handful of other customers were all students working on MacBooks or chatting on their phones.

Shit…

I had to pick up the glasses to make sure that this was not a hallucination. As I did so, I noticed that someone had written on the newspaper article a single word in meticulous cursive:

Revenge.

2

Top of the Class
and the “Bad Boys”

1.

“Paint It Black,” “No Surprises,” “One”…

At the gates to the grounds, the school band was welcoming guests with cover versions of Rolling Stones, Radiohead, and U2 songs. The music—as horrendous as it was jaunty—could be heard as far as the place des Marronniers, where the morning’s celebrations were scheduled to take place.

Straddling the borders of several districts (including Antibes and Valbonne) and often dubbed the French Silicon Valley, the Sophia Antipolis technology park was a lush green oasis amid the concrete jungle of the Côte d’Azur. Thousands of start-ups and major corporations specializing in cutting-edge technologies had chosen to base their headquarters in these five thousand acres of pine forest. The area had many benefits that attracted executives from all over the world: the glorious weather (sunshine three-quarters of every year), the proximity to the blue Mediterranean and the ski resorts of Mercantour, the first-class sporting facilities, and the top-flight international schools, of which the Lycée Saint-Exupéry was the exemplar, the pinnacle of academic institutions in Alpes-Maritimes. This was where all parents hoped they might one day send their offspring, trusting in the future pledged by the school’s motto, Scientia potestas est—Knowledge Is Power.