The narrator describes the scarce public imagery of Pascal Balmy, noting that journalists covering the Times Square incident had circulated a wrong photo of a different man on a jet ski. Her dossier, by contrast, contains genuine images, including one in a Parisian bar where Pascal's haircut mimics Guy Debord's signature 1950s-60s style, suggesting deliberate emulation of the Situationist icon.

She examines a curious baby photo she initially took for Pascal as a toddler, only to later discover it captioned online as Guy Debord, 1932. She speculates that either dossier files were mixed up, Pascal passed it off as his own, or it functions as a borrowed image of universal innocence.

Most adult photos are surveillance shots: Pascal at the 2001 Genoa G8 protests circled amid riot police, and her favorite set, telephoto images of Pascal and fellow climate activists walking down 44th Street in New York in 2008 ahead of a clandestine meeting. Pascal walks hand-in-hand with a petite, deliberately downscaled bourgeois Parisian girlfriend, all unaware they are being photographed.

The narrator reveals the betrayal embedded in the scene: a UK undercover agent walking behind them had tipped off the FBI, claiming the group planned a Times Square terror attack. The agent reported the plan was cancelled (his microphone conveniently failing during the meeting). Days later, an army recruitment center was bombed, injuring no one. Pascal and the girlfriend had already flown back to Paris via Canada, where border agents found Times Square photos in Pascal's backpack; he claimed tourist status. After this episode, Pascal relocated his committed followers from Paris to the Guyenne.

It later emerged that the undercover agent, Marc Cutler (aka Marc White), had bombed the recruitment center himself, acting alone, apparently because he was in love with Pascal's girlfriend. Cutler sued the UK Metropolitan Police for failing to protect him from ultraleft indoctrination and from falling in love. The girlfriend, daughter of a high Justice Ministry official, was scrubbed from French police files, but the narrator identified her: now married to an EU consultant, working at Gallimard, her radical past discarded like her old wool cap.