Abelard reread the three pages he had earlier been handed by the Predator, for the third time. He did not need more than one reading to see that this was the opportunity, after only four short months on the job, he was meant to seize. The other two were for pure enjoyment at the delicious prospects which had warped out into the main pathways of his mind. Under the ‘Top Secret’, ‘For Your Eyes Only’, ‘Highly Confidential’ in light red, stamped across each page, was a brief narrative outlining a ‘Hostile’ takeover target and the proposed ‘Team’.
He and Badger Valois were to contrive the battle plans. The grunt stuff: put together the financials; detail the target’s Strengths and Weaknesses; hazard an opinion of the market’s potential reaction and the effect on their own stock price; find out all they could about the target’s top management. They were to work together and needed to present their findings and recommendations to Robertson in one week. Abelard was overjoyed as he hit the send button on his e-mail to Valois suggesting a first planning session within the hour. The response was immediate. They would meet in a small conference room near to his office.
The target was to be a mid-sized oil company which had nothing at all to do with any of their businesses but was intended as a ‘Triple P’ – Purchase, Pillage and Part with. VBI was evolving into a merchant bank with stock performance providing the single guiding principle by which management lived, prospered or perished. After so many years of blending together all the unrelated businesses which now made up VBI, there was no real business to run other than a money spinning enterprise based mostly on clever financial manipulation by fast men racing to resell acquisitions before the house of money could be blown away by the winds of reality.
This one, though, might be more difficult. Yes, the target had lots of cash, which when it would fall into the deft hands of the VBI team would be used to pay off all their backers – the banks, the senior managers putting their own money in and the idle rich hanging about waiting for their wealth to be multiplied by the clever people at VBI. But the dominant shareholder, also the founder and CEO, had often said he intended to die at the helm – he would never sell.
This would not normally have been a problem for Abelard, at least not in his previous life. He would not hesitate to use any means, including murder, if that’s what it would take for him to succeed. Although killing was not entirely discarded as a fallback position, if it came to that, he hoped it would not since this could potentially cause him much trouble with the authorities. In the meantime he would try and think of something less socially objectionable.
The two ambitious company men worked through the night. They were each quite intent on showing more enthusiasm than the other and neither wished to be the first to pack it in. As the dawn light lifted the darkness enough to make out the magnificent St Laurent, flowing flatly around the maze of artificial islands and seemingly more swiftly under the main bridges, their financial model passed the final reliability test.
“As I see it,” Abelard was the first to interrupt the inspired silence, “we will have to find another route to this prize. There just aren’t enough available public shares floating on the markets for us to ever trigger a takeover. Old Sticky – they had labeled Horst Hecht, the owner, with the mandatory code word to keep the project secret – will have to be convinced otherwise to sell out.”
“Nah,” Valois drawled, the nasal twang irritating Abelard more than usual. “I’m goin ta recommend we pick up all the available shares we can in the markets, Valois countered. There may not be a pile around for a takeover, but it’ll give us enough of a moral toehold to force them to the table.” Fatigue was affecting his grip on the fine practiced diction he normally used in place of his folksy drivel. Either he was abysmally stupid, sort of an idiot savant, remarkably adept at building complex financial models, but utterly out to sea when it came to simple sound reasoning, or he was singularly Machiavellian; to Abelard’s thinking, the least likely scenario. Abelard rather took to the Prince, when he read about him, even though Abelard’s memories predated him by more than a century. There was no possible way, from the information he presently had, for VBI to ever find enough shares on the market to make even the tiniest impact on a takeover decision. Much of the remaining float, not in the hands of Hecht, was held by his close relations.
“Sure thing, Badger,” was the most he was willing to risk with this Machiavellian disguised as an idiot, or the other way around. “Let’s call it a day and I’ll prepare something to present to Robbie, of course passing it by you first,” which he had no intention of doing. This was high theatre and he was the director, producer and principal actor.
His memories were surfacing; Abelard reaching back to find relevant experience that he could draw on for this problem. He was thinking back to the siege of Castle Gard. These crystal clear recollections were reassuring to Abelard. If all this had never happened, would his recall be so vivid, so detailed? Surely not. Regardless, he would draw inspiration from the bloody encounter along the bucolic river. It was to be his roadmap for the takeover.
His father had asked him to handle the matter. It was somewhat delicate since the target castle lay at the frontier between Gascony and the lands controlled by the Counts of Toulouse, with whom they had observed an uneasy peace for more than two years. But the Black Prince was unhappy with the arrangement since the Counts were still nominally loyal to Charles V, King of France, with whom they were at war. And the Black Prince saw the protrusion of enemy territory into his own like the middle finger of a French hand up the Gascon backside.
The situation on the ground was not very favourable to an attacker, even a determined one like Abelard de Buch. The Castle defenders were a bad crowd, who had much to discourage them from giving in. They were a collection of desperate men, routiers – private armies that terrorized the countryside in search of loot – and Gascon mercenaries, who would be put to the sword if they were overrun and hunted down by the French and their Toulousian allies if they fled. The defending captain was, so to speak, holding most of the voting shares.
This was not the only problem he had to get around. If he devastated all the land about, and killed every human being he could catch, the castle gave onto the Garonne River, wide enough to carry large supply barges and these Abelard was not equipped to stop. He would have to do his murdering quickly, before the barges made their way to the castle. Also, the rebels had sent word to Arnaud de Cervole – the Archpriest – and he would be coming with his “Bandes Blanches” – the white group – to reap the rewards such saviours – white knights – usually demanded.
The captain of the castle, a wily old Norman, held several other good cards. Like shareholder rights agreements – poison pills – he also had more than a few strong defenses, not the least being ten meter crenellated walls, no less than three meters thick at the base and not much thinner at the top.
Added to the already seemingly insurmountable objects, Abelard had also to contend with the fragile confederation which was his own force. Many of the Captains who had accompanied him had come for the rewards that only enthusiastic pillage could offer and would not stay around forever. Like the merchant bankers willing to backstop a takeover bid, who would only keep their money tied up for so long before looking elsewhere for more promising opportunity, the Captains and their men knew that in those perilous times they could easily find potentially profitable engagements elsewhere if this one dragged on too long. All in all, these takeovers could be tricky affairs.
Abelard’s plan was simple but forceful. The rushing pressures of time would be his biggest worry. He needed to strike quickly, forcefully and convincingly. He would leave half his force before the castle walls, to guard against a preventive sortie and with the remainder he would launch a chevauchée of, at most, five days, before any barges loaded and dispatched from Toulouse could reach the defenders. The chevauchée was an English improvement of an age old tactic that fit remarkably well with the general disregard for human life in the Fourteenth century. I
t involved large, heavily armed, ruthless men who would quickly ride across huge swathes of countryside killing every creature they caught. It was really nothing more than a scorched earth action, stretching over days and, sometimes, over weeks. It was meant to deprive the enemy of resources, terrorize populations that had yet to be overrun and, of course, to enrich the attackers. These were extremely callous affairs, with unmatched levels of violence, cruelty and limitless brutality. Nothing was spared - man, woman, child, old, infirm, animal, abode. Everything was put to fire and the sword.
This was nothing new to Abelard. He had taken part in many of these murderous outings. He knew they were effective. His mob of men-at-arms knew their jobs. They had not the slightest scruple about impaling infants on their pikes or burning alive the inhabitants of entire villages should they make the inevitably fatal mistake of taking refuge in their local house of prayer that had nothing worth looting. Perhaps not to his credit, Abelard was utterly dispassionate in these matters. He was never moved by hatred towards the enemy, as were many of his associates. He was motivated entirely by practical considerations – the quintessence of rational self-interest. He knew that to successfully encourage enemy populations to abandon their crops and workshops and so deny any material advantage to their armies all and sundry within reach would have to be put to death. Any show of mercy would most assuredly send the wrong message. There was also the matter of providing sport, not to mention opportunities for personal enrichment to keep his troops motivated and willing to take the serious personal risk of death or mutilation inherent in such enterprises.
Abelard, with 200 men-at-arms and 300 archers headed due south along the river; where he would find everyone he needed to kill or frighten off in order to deprive the castle of its needs. They rode hard and they raised so much dust and made so much noise, the peasants a long way off had ample warning to flee into the surrounding forests and low hills. The first two villages were practically deserted except for a few elderly peasants too sick and too slow to run. They were quickly dispatched and the village put to the torch. At the third stop, the men in need of some diversion were luckier, the peasants had been crowded in the church for a wedding ceremony and by the time they heard the noise of approaching horsemen it was far too late to flee. All but the females were ruthlessly dispatched and as was customary Abelard left his men enough time to satisfy their lust before also putting them to the sword. Impatient as he was, Abelard knew he could not deprive his soldiers of their expected pleasures. The church, obviously meant to service more than just the local peasants, contained objects of some value and was dutifully pillaged.
Chance always had a role in such a venture, and in this one it was felicitously lined up in Abelard’s favour. A landside up river had lowered the water level at the castle sufficiently to prevent any and all barge traffic. By the tenth day, the Norman had wisely decided he had little choice but to negotiate a surrender that would spare him and his men from immediate annihilation. His last gambit had failed. He had sent a small party of men-at-arms along the river, to float to a landing a little behind the besiegers, hoping to take them by surprise and so inflict enough damage as to scare them off. But Abelard had anticipated such a move and set up a visual signaling network from his spy in the woods across from the castle, through a man on his bank and back to him. He was prepared and annihilated the raiding party. Now his cold calculation had convinced him his chances, albeit still very small, were far better trying to outrun the retributive French than to hold off against the determined Gascon, while his own resources were being quickly depleted from the effects of the chevauchée. With no sign of the Archpriest he knew he was out of time.
Abelard would suggest a similar strategy to the Predator. While Badger was still trying to figure out how he could miraculously multiply the meager available float, he was already preparing his presentation. As a personal touch he would use the Castle takeover as the contextual metaphor.
*
The Perfect Human: An Abelard Chronicles Book Page 13
