The Predator

by Denis Pitts

He woke in a room which was long and filled with light. It was some time before his eyes could focus properly, and in a moment of blind panic when he saw other beds lined up against the wall opposite, he thought he was back in the dormitory of Camp Five; but then he realized that his head was resting on a pillow and not on a sack filled with straw.

  In the next bed, a boy of his own age was reading a comic book. The boy looked over and saw that Jean-Paul’s eyes were open.

  “Hello,” he said. “You’ve been in hibernation for a long time.”

  “Where is this?”

  “Hospital, of course.”

  “Where?”

  “In Marseilles, of course. Look out of the window. You can see the cathedral.”

  “Where is Marseilles?”

  The boy shouted around the ward. “Hey look, this one’s been hit on the head with a bomb. He doesn’t even know that Marseilles is in France.”

  Jean-Paul said, “Thank you.” He laid his head back on the pillow and smiled and went to sleep again.

  *

  “But surely you can remember your mother and father?”

  “No, madame.”

  “But think. You must remember your mother. Did she have light-colored hair like you? And eyes like yours? She must have been very pretty.”

  “I do not know.”

  “And poppa — what was he like? A big man, a fat man, a bald man?”

  “I do not remember.”

  “Your home. You must have lived somewhere in that town. Do you not remember?”

  “I do not remember, madame.”

  *

  “Jean-Paul, come in here and sit down.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I am sorry, Jean-Paul, but we have done everything to trace your parents. We have shown your face on television all over France, and it has been in every newspaper, in the hope that some relative would come forward and identify you. Five hundred people have wanted to adopt you. What a pity we can’t do that.”

  “Why not, sir?”

  “Because the law insists that we know for sure that your mother and father are dead; and if they are alive, that they approve of your being adopted.”

  Jean-Paul thought of all the mothers who had adopted him as a baby.

  The social worker was a humane man whose recent life had been a daily diet of similar misery due to the Algerian War. He took off his steel-rimmed spectacles and cleaned them on a sheet of tissue paper, looking long and hard at the boy, who sat bolt upright and confident, watching his every move with intelligent interest.

  “So I’m afraid, Jean-Paul, that you will have to go to an orphanage. Please do not let the word ‘orphanage’ frighten you. You will be well looked after. Remember that many of our greatest men began their lives in such places.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man put his spectacles on again and signed his name on a sheet of paper in front of him. He stamped it with three separate stamps from a rack on his desk.

  “Give this to the young man outside. He will make all the arrangements. I wish you good luck.”

  Jean-Paul remained on his seat.

  “Sir.”

  “What is it?”

  “I had a briefcase.”

  “But it contained only some papers which we could not understand.”

  “It is mine, sir.”

  “Very well, Jean-Paul. I shall see that it remains yours.”

  The man picked up the telephone.

  *

  It was a peculiar tradition of the l’orphelinat de St. Pierre, a mild joke, to name children who arrived there pères inconnus after statesmen or film stars of the age whom they most resembled.

  In the case of Jean-Paul, who arrived at a later age than most, the priests who ran this establishment decided, on the basis of his blue eyes, that he would be Bardot after Brigitte. It was a fair indication of the mismanagement of the orphanage that any male child should be casually named in a way which automatically exposed him to teasing and ribaldry from the older boys.

  He had entered the institution most unhappily. He had spent too much of his life with other boys and men and had suffered badly in such places. He was also deeply afraid that, sooner or later, he would be found out and returned to Egypt and prison.

  Once again he found himself using the combat techniques which he had learned in Camp Five. The result was that the older boys quickly dropped the soubriquet “Brigitte Blue Eyes” for him and treated him with considerable respect.

  His teachers, on the other hand, marked him as a surly troublemaker, and he found himself, more often than not, in a queue for punishment outside the office of the principal.

  Corporal punishment was a rarity in French schools. In that bleak orphanage, which reeked of incense and disinfectant, punishment took various forms, the mildest being the deprivation of le sportif, the most serious being a form of detention in a cell-like room with a small barred window.

  The unfortunate boy in punishment would be locked in this cell and given a passage of scripture to learn by heart. If he had not learned it after four hours, he was given a plate of bread and a jug of water and left for a further four hours.

  It became Jean-Paul’s favorite punishment. His memory was good and he could remember his piece of scripture after two quick readings. But in the cell he had time to reflect: and his principal reflection was upon the contents of the briefcase which lay in a locker at the foot of his bed.

  The authorities were quite sure that the numbers contained in the files were a code of some kind, and they had taken them and tried to decipher them in the search for Jean-Paul’s father. But all attempts to make sense of the figures had been fruitless, and the briefcase had been handed back to the boy as a gesture.

  He studied the figures nightly. The punishment periods were useful for working out new possibilities; and he frequently contrived to make mistakes in his scriptures in order to stay in confinement with his private mystery.

  As at Camp Five and the prison, he made few friends at the orphanage, even though, as before, he showed an almost contemptuous facility in all subjects; by the time he was eleven, he was in a grade with sixteen-year-olds.

  It was in this class that he found himself next to a particularly big and powerfully built older boy with thick dark hair and the nose of a professional boxer. He had been given the name of Leon Blum and he had lived in the orphanage for as long as he could remember. The teachers regarded him as a harmless dullard — and as a very useful heavyweight in inter-school boxing competitions. He was amiable, slow-moving and willing.

  Blum came into the classroom one morning with a large patch of plaster over one eye. The whole side of his face was swollen. During a break in the lessons, he saw the fair-haired younger boy next to him smiling broadly.

  Blum spoke with difficulty.

  “So what’s so funny?” he said.

  “Your face. Isn’t it sort of silly to ask to have your face punched?”

  “I won the fight.” Blum was proud.

  “You wouldn’t think so to look at you. Boxing is a stupid sport.”

  The boy who sat at the desk in front turned and joined in.

  “I’d like to see you beat Blum with your clever karate.”

  “I don’t have any reason to fight Blum,” said Jean-Paul coldly. “I only fight people I hate. Like you.”

  The boy in front turned quickly back to his papers. He had already had one clash with Jean-Paul and he remembered only too clearly the humiliation of being thrown about like a sack.

  Later, as they walked in file along a corridor, Blum said, “Would you teach me karate?”

  “They won’t let you use it in the boxing ring.”

  Blum fingered his swollen face. “If you must know, Jean-Paul, I hate the boxing ring. They make me go into it because I am big.”

  A few nights after this, in the otherwise deserted gymnasium, Blum found himself being lifted and thrown over Jean-Paul’s shoulder. No matter how hard he tried to hit the smaller boy
, he couldn’t find the target.

  Finally, after one mad, bull-like rush at Jean-Paul, which brought vivid, frightening memories to the smaller boy of that last charge by Sergeant Fahmy, the giant ended up on his back, all breath smashed from his lungs.

  It was at that moment that their friendship began.

  The encounter had another result: Blum refused to box again, and then, instead of being the object of mild ridicule, he became the target of contempt. He took this with an adult stoicism until after a day of vituperation from one teasing prefect, the big boy lashed out and broke the other boy’s jawbone.

  Blum was confined to the detention cell. He failed abysmally at the memory test. After he had been in the cell for three days, Jean-Paul determined that it was time for them both to leave.

  That night, he waited until the school was asleep and dressed very quietly. He took the briefcase from the box at the foot of his bed and crept through the darkened corridors to Blum’s cell.

  For reasons of safety in case of fire, the key was always kept in the lock.

  He released Blum, and together they made their way out of the building and onto the main road, where a truck driver gave them a ride into the center of Marseilles.

  ELBA, 1500

  He walked for an hour that afternoon, alone through the chestnut glades, his hands clasped behind his back, his step slow and measured. It was the last of the summer, but the October sun was still strong, especially in this dustless, clear-aired atmosphere. Each thing about him, each leaf, each piece of bark on the heavily laden trees, stood out vividly.

  Tonight there would be a rainstorm, which would probably wash out the village fiesta; and he was sad about this because he was especially fond of this village and its inhabitants. Quite often he would walk down from the house to the Bar Guido for a Campari, or a game of boules with the men of the village.

  No child was born in that village without receiving a christening spoon from him; and, using the local priest as his agent, he ensured that no one even went hungry. It was a hidden subsidiary of one of his companies that bought the excess wines at somewhat inflated prices from the village cooperative.

  It was a simple kind of patronage with no ostentation. It was goodness done by stealth; for these men and women were hardy and independent despite the frugality of their existence. They would have resented any blatant show of charity from the man in the big house on the mountain.

  Above him, in that house, the two Presidents, the Chancellor and the Prime Minister were probably still sitting, bewildered by the suddenness of their impotence in confinement.

  They had made a great deal of noise, especially the Englishman, who had slammed his open palm on the table and threatened the direst kinds of revenge. In his anger, the Prime Minister had accused the French President of being part of this plot; and this, in turn, had led to a fresh row between the two.

  From Becker’s point of view, the German had been the most impressive. Far from storming or shouting, he seemed suddenly to shed the layers of tension which had surrounded him since his arrival. He alone appeared to enjoy the novelty of the situation. He listened to the others for a while and then yawned and left them at the table. He took off his jacket and tie and shoes and lay back, totally at ease, in a sun lounge.

  “This Becker is mad,” the French President had said. “Completely, utterly crazy. A megalomaniac. Thinks he is Napoleon — we should have known. Does he not realize that we are less than one hundred kilometers from the main base of the Foreign Legion in Corsica? You can almost see it from this mountain. There will be thousands of paratroopers — the finest in the world — here on this island within a matter of hours.”

  “And there is the Royal Navy,” said the Prime Minister. “Half the British fleet is on exercise at Malta. It won’t take them long to get up steam.”

  Then the Italian President rose on shaky legs.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “This outrage has taken place upon Italian soil. I am deeply grieved that this is the case. All of us, yes, all of us, had complete faith in our host. Alas, we have been tricked and duped.”

  With his high sense of drama, the old man pointed a gnarled hand toward the distant mainland.

  “Have no doubt that help is at hand,” he said.

  There was a low chuckle from the sun lounge.

  “Really, all of you surprise me,” said the German. “Monsieur le President, as I remember it, you are having a quiet weekend in Brittany. Even your wife thinks that. You are not to be disturbed under any circumstances, correct? And your advisers had not the slightest idea where you were going. Such was our mutual insistence on secrecy. We were picked up by Becker’s helicopters and flown from his private airports.”

  “Yes, but ...” the Prime Minister began.

  “But nothing, Prime Minister. You are away walking in the mountains of Wales, are you not? Not expected to appear until Monday morning. My cabinet believes that I am trout fishing in Bavaria. And the Italian government is happy in the belief that their President is resting at his villa on Ischia, which has no telephone.”

  The German clicked his fingers at a waiter who hovered at a nearby bar. He ordered a lemonade.

  “You see, and please try to see it, the situation is that we are prisoners. We have been very smartly and cleverly hijacked — and I, for one, propose to submit gracefully and enjoy a weekend free of responsibility.”

  The Chancellor stretched contentedly.

  “But you heard what that bastard said,” the Prime Minister seethed. “He could take over Europe ...”

  “It has long been the contention of economists that sooner or later the multinational corporations would assume complete responsibility for the states in which they operate,” said the Chancellor. “The annual budget of the Becker Group is bigger than that of your own country, Prime Minister. And there are some who would say that they look after their money better than our governments look after the public money.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” said the Prime Minister. “Just as soon as I get back to London there’ll be a bill before Parliament to nationalize every Becker company in Britain.”

  The French President said, “You presume that you will get back. Assuming that you do get back, what possible reason do you have to think you will have a Parliament? If I know anything about Becker, your whole country will be run by monthly board meetings. I mean, why not? Why not the whole of Europe, indeed?”

  *

  Becker had heard only a little of this conversation. He had been sitting in a large, well-lit and airy room that guests did not see.

  This was Centra, a room hewn out of the mountain during the early days of the construction of the house. It was, as far as modern technology could ensure, bombproof and radiation-proof, it contained sufficient emergency supplies of fuel and food and contingency power systems to withstand a lengthy siege.

  Centra was, in effect, the biggest, the most sophisticated, and the most ingenious computerized communication system ever devised by man. But it had never been fully described in the technical press because of Becker’s insistence on total security at every stage of its construction.

  It controlled the Becker Group; but it did far more. Its microwave and satellite links with the stock markets and banking centers of the world enabled it to analyze and predict business trends well in advance of any competitor. It could move billions of dollars from one Becker-controlled bank to another in a matter of milliseconds; it could instantly produce, at the press of a key, balance sheets, or any other statistics, for any of the nine hundred companies in the Becker Group. It could throw onto a giant screen details about every man and woman employed by the group; it sent birthday cards to their children as well as messages of congratulation and condolence — each of which it wrote in Becker’s own hand.

  Through Centra, Becker could talk to anyone on the most remote of his company oil rigs in the North Sea, or the captain of any of the three hundred aircraft owned by the Group, or one of its tanker
and freighter people.

  It could scan and preview a design for a new automobile made by any of the Becker manufacturing companies and predict sales to the nearest one hundred cars; and it could criticize or praise the most intricate engineering draftsmanship.

  Becker Farms, which controlled 250,000 acres of Britain and France, relied on Centra for direction on crops and cattle, on foodstuffs and their availability, and for advance warnings of diseases. Centra’s weather predictions were considerably in advance of any government meteorologists.

  Centra selected horses from the Becker stables in France and England for race meetings all over the world. It advised on breeding — and produced legendary winners. Its race predictions were so accurate that Becker could, with ease, bankrupt every major gambling industry in Europe — except that these were owned by a Becker finance house in London.

  But the greatest gift possessed by this computer was its ability to predict political trends and the results of any country’s general election by margins which left the pollsters standing.

  Every conceivable item of political information was fed into Centra’s data bank daily throughout the year: every speech, every poll result, every minor piece of political scandal, every item of trivia from every country in Europe. A subsidiary company took a monthly poll of such a broad spectrum of the European population that the machine, having scanned everything fed to it, could confidently narrow its margin of error to six decimal points.

  It was this information, known only to Becker in the final analysis, that enabled the group to grow so rapidly and flourish. Always one step ahead of the politicians, Becker never openly abused this knowledge, but he was able to move Becker funds ahead of heavy-taxing socialist governments into those countries in which capitalism was better rewarded.

  He had thus gained the awe, even though it was tinged with suspicion, of the leaders of Europe. He was popular, even though he was rarely seen in public and rarely photographed. He shunned publicity, but he encouraged it in his managers.

  His house on the mountainside was a natural meeting place for the four leaders. They were not to know it, but their confinement in that house had been largely decided by the computer.