The narrator ("Sadie") reflects on the fragility of her new friendship with Aurélie, noting that women in infiltrated groups can compare notes and unmask infiltrators. She cites the cautionary example of Narc Cutler, who blew her cover by sleeping indiscriminately with targets. Sadie keeps her own sexual involvement limited to René, though she acknowledges the recklessness of even this.

She describes the routine she has developed for René's late-night visits to the Dubois house: hiding her surveillance gear, weapons (including a Glock 43X, Sig Sauer 365, mini-revolver, fixed blade, and a Walther P38 reserved for a potential recruit), and the empties and cups that would betray her cover. René arrives around ten in the commune's truck, knocks twice, and they typically have sex immediately in the front hall.

Sadie observes René clinically: his strength, his armpit smell that reminds her of industrial marijuana from a past Idaho bust, and his practiced, intense gaze, which she recognizes as a tool he uses on every woman rather than anything personal. Afterward, she brings him beer (never one for herself) and listens as he talks, never asking her questions, treating pleasure, beer, and conversation as men's domain—an arrangement that suits her need to remain opaque.

René recounts his backstory: from a small town in Alsace, he worked a Daimler assembly line outside Stuttgart, stamping car door panels alongside Greek and Turkish workers. He describes how line workers, drunk on schnapps from dawn, deliberately maimed themselves in the stamping machines to claim compensation and lifetime pensions—enough to buy an E-Class Mercedes. Witnessing this radicalized him; he began talking with political workers, joined a strike that ended with Daimler firing everyone, and emerged a committed subversive.