Time drags its heels. The three ministries involved, Defence, Industry and Finance, are one hundred per cent behind us. Our rival, Matra, a company that’s a quarter of the size of the one it wants to take over, is forced to juggle to finance the operation and is teaming up with an unlikely Korean partner to do so. The boss of Matra is a puffed-up frog who thinks he’s bigger than the ox. We have a cast-iron bid: how can it go wrong? Soon, power over a global group. In the arms sector, to boot. The prize industry, politics, superprofits, secret services. Another stomach contraction, almost painful. Playing for high stakes. For the future. And tonight …
The phone rings and Benoît-Rey swings around. In the meeting room serving as their HQ four men — his entire team — are killing time. They exchange the odd word from time to time and a glass tinkles against the whisky bottle. All eyes are glued to the telephone on a corner of the big table in the centre of the room.
‘It’s your call, Pierre.’
He picks it up, listens, nods and hangs up without a word. Sits down, suddenly drained.
‘Our chairman. He’s just had a call from the Prime Minister’s office. It’s Matra.’
A long silence. The men look at each other. This failure is all theirs. They accepted the mission, they gambled, they lost. Their first failure on such a scale. Rossellini, in charge of the financial side of the bid is an elegant and athletic forty-something, a graduate of France’s top management school, the École Nationale d’Administration. He’s doing a stint as an auditor in the Finance Ministry where he still has a discreet, efficient network of personal contacts. He acted as Alcatel’s financial director in the bid, a position that will be vacant in a few months: a financial director of one of the biggest global industrial groups at barely forty, a destiny he believed he was meant for. Only now he’s suddenly relegated to being just another departmental head, and has to stomach it. Then Alain Bentadj, a young engineer trained at the prestigious École Polytechnique, expert in new technologies: a spell at Thomson, highly valued by the military for his technical capabilities, his inventiveness and the clarity of his vision, dreaming of an international career, abruptly finding himself demoted. What can he do at Alcatel if Matra’s the leading arms manufacturer? He came to Alcatel precisely because the Thomson takeover was on the cards. What’s he supposed to do? Change jobs? Not easy after a failure on this scale. And anyway where can he go if Matra dominates the industry? They’re hardly going to welcome him with open arms. Frédéric Marion is head of communications. He thought he’d made a good fist of it, with the ministerial offices in his pocket. He’d dreamed of setting up his own PR and communications agency on the back of all this, its future assured with the giant Alcatel account. Those dreams have all just gone up in smoke. Roger Valentin sits alone on the sofa, the last man. He’s heavily built and older, watching the others and suppressing a smile. Former deputy director of the secret services, he’s now Alcatel’s head of security, making more money in the space of a few years than he ever made in the public sector, but lacking either further ambition or anxieties.
Rossellini breaks the silence.
‘Are we entitled to know why?’
‘No. No other information. The Prime Minister chose Matra. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.’
‘Right. The next question is where’s a good place for a holiday at this time of year? There’s no snow in the mountains and the coast’s horrible.’
‘There’s the islands.’ Benoît-Rey picks up the phone with a half-smile. ‘I’d planned a little victory celebration at Joseph’s too. I’d better cancel.’
‘OK, one last drink and we go home to our families. It’ll be strange for them, after hardly seeing us for four months while we’ve been practically married to each other.’
‘I’ll miss you, darling.’
‘Alain, are you sure the beautiful Madame Bentadj will have waited for you?’
‘Don’t rub salt into the wound. I have no desire to return home unexpectedly.’
‘An evening at Mado’s, blow jobs all round, getting fucked brainless.’
‘Now that’s a much better idea …’
Valentin is still sitting silently on the sofa. The phone rings again. They look at each other. Benoît-Rey says, ‘Nothing worse can happen now,’ and picks up the receiver.
‘Yes, we’re still here, chief. Yes, Valentin too.’ He utters groans and monosyllables, staring around wide-eyed. ‘Yes, we’ll be there.’ And he hangs up.
‘So, has the Prime Minister changed his mind?’
Shrug. ‘Our CEO’s received several phone calls. First of all from Prestat.’
‘Who?’
Half-smile. ‘Very funny. The CEO of Thomson Multimedia. He swears that the entire company, from senior management down to the workers, is going to fight the choice of Matra tooth and nail. They are absolutely against it because Matra’s flogging them off to Daewoo, a Korean company that can’t be trusted at all, in his view.’ A pause. ‘He’s talking about strikes, demonstrations.’
‘Nobody gives a fuck about multimedia. Thomson is first and foremost arms, it’s only arms. We didn’t know what to do about the multimedia arm either, we couldn’t have kept hold of it, we’d have ended up selling it to the Japanese or to another Korean firm.’
‘Maybe, but we never said so publicly. Then our chairman had a long phone conversation with one of his contacts in the Finance Ministry. The minister doesn’t agree with the PM’s choice, but he’ll go along with it, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘Apparently, the senior civil servants at the ministry are firmly opposed to the choice of Matra. Opinion is divided among the senior officials in the other ministries.’ He pauses for breath. ‘In short, the minister is encouraging us not to consider tonight’s decision as final.’
‘He’s taking the piss.’
‘Possibly, but that’s not the view of our chairman. He wants us in his office at six p.m. tomorrow to present a new action plan — with the emphasis on “new” — one that’s appropriate for this second round.’
Rossellini explodes: ‘Now, it’s our chairman who’s taking the piss.’
‘What second round? You’ve got to be joking. Who’s going to overturn the Prime Minister’s decision? The President? They’re as thick as thieves.’
‘The chairman was talking about a vote in the National Assembly …’ An eruption of general mirth … ‘Rejection by the Privatisation Committee or the Commission in Brussels.’
‘Now that makes more sense, although it’s highly unlikely. The Privatisation Committee has always backed the government.’
‘No. It rejected a bid in 1994.’
‘But until now, the government has always gone by the book, and always waited for its approval before making its decision public.’