The narrator details her months-long secret surveillance of Paul Platon, deputy minister in the Ministry of Rural Coherence, whose portfolio is security and who is tasked with promoting unpopular rural state projects—prisons, nuclear-waste sites, and now the megabasins in the Guyenne. After the Tayssac excavators were burned, Platon publicly declared the megabasins vital to rural France, aligning his agenda with the interests of those who hired the narrator.

She has trailed him through Paris meetings, domestic trips, and twice to Spain, where he meets with Catholic clergy in dealings she suspects are not spiritual but tied to some Church-connected racket. In Vincennes, he visits a wealthy blond divorcée mistress who owns small dogs—an observation that inspired the narrator's cover story as a dog walker.

The narrator catalogs Platon's vanities (an aesthetic clinic visit, hair work, dyeing at the Hotel Meurice) and his temper, including arguments with staff, his Serbian security guard, and his chauffeur Georges. Platon was assigned security after receiving threats, suggesting he or those around him recognize real danger.

She explains Georges's contempt: Platon, born Pablo Platon y Platon in Palafrugell, Spain, gallicized his name and lacks the grandes écoles pedigree Georges respects. To Georges, serving a low-class Spaniard masquerading as French is an indignity before his retirement. The chapter establishes Platon as a despised, vulnerable political figure whose promotion of the megabasins ties him directly to the narrator's mission.