Predator

by Wilbur Smith

  It was three in the morning in London and Anastasia Vitalyevna Voronova, known as “Nastiya” to her friends, was still asleep when the phone rang.

  “Yevgenia?” she said, once she’d woken up, using her half-sister’s full name because she simply didn’t know her well enough for pet ones, and barely recognizing the muffled, desperate voice on the other end of the line. To her mind, Yevgenia had always been a spoiled, pampered little princess, the child of the trophy wife her father had acquired when he’d found himself seriously rich and wanted to shed any trace of his years of impoverished mediocrity, his first wife and daughter included. But as she listened to Zhenia’s story, Anastasia felt, for the very first time, as though they were truly sisters. For, though she had seldom been the victim of her father’s brutality, she had witnessed it often enough. It was the sight of her mother’s helplessness that had first fired Nastiya’s determination never to allow any man to beat or bully her; from that had come the hunger, drive and unflagging willpower that had made her the woman she was today. The discovery that her own sister had been attacked was enough to waken long-buried feelings and reopen emotional wounds that she had thought were long since healed.

  “Don’t worry,” she told Zhenia. “I’ll take care of everything. First, I want you to go to my mother’s apartment. I’ll let her know you’re coming.”

  “But will she let me in? I mean . . . he left her for my mother.”

  “Believe me, when she hears what he did to you, she’ll be only too glad to help. We’ll get you a doctor and you’ll need a brain-scan to make sure that you’ve not got anything more serious than concussion to worry about.”

  “How can I pay? He’s bound to have stopped my Amex card.”

  “I said, don’t worry. I can pay for everything, and if you want, when this is all over, you can get me a little present—nothing fancy—in return.”

  “I’d like that,” Yevgenia said, almost crying at the relief of being in touch with somebody who was kind to her. Then she remembered the darkness that was still out there. “But . . . but what are we going to do about Papa?”

  “Nothing,” said Nastiya. “Ignore him completely. Do not acknowledge his existence. Let the bastard sweat. But if the day ever comes when he threatens you again, let me know. I will make sure that whatever we do about Papa, he will never, ever forget it.”

  Somehow she knew that her big sister really meant every word said. When Nastiya broke the connection and her phone went dead Yevgenia stared at it for a while and then she whispered, “I love you, Nastiya, like I have loved nobody before you.”

  Shelby Weiss did not appreciate being made to look like a fool by an overgrown gangbanger like Johnny Congo. Of course he’d understood that even in these days of wanton excess among the very rich, two million bucks was a ridiculous price to set aside for a funeral. So he would bet his two million bucks to a nickel that D’Shonn Brown was not really as squeaky-clean as he always claimed. It was also safe to say that Congo had never struck him as a man who would compliantly walk right into the Death House without a fight. But it had never for one second occurred to Weiss that Congo and Brown would turn U.S. Route 190, the goddamn Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway no less, into the East Texas answer to the Gaza Strip. And he really didn’t like having Bobby Malinga come into his office the day after and treat him like some kind of suspected gangbanger himself.

  On the other hand, one message had come through loud and clear from the whole experience: Johnny Congo had money, lots and lots of money. And though, as Weiss now realized, he had made a lot of it in various unsavory business ventures in the heart of Africa, the original source of his wealth was the income his partner Carl Bannock enjoyed as a beneficiary of the Henry Bannock Family Trust. Weiss let the thought of that trust percolate through his mind for a while and his subconscious work at it, the way he did when he was planning a courtroom strategy, letting a sequence of thoughts line up like wagons behind a locomotive until he had a long train steaming down the track, heading full speed toward his destination.

  The Bannock Trust, Weiss reasoned, was a gold mine, not just for its beneficiaries, but also for its legal administrators, who could charge sky-high fees that were just the merest drop in the torrent of Bannock Oil bounty. Weiss himself had never crossed the line and actually stolen from a client, but it occurred to him that a lesser man might be able to skim six- or even seven-figure sums from it every year without anyone ever needing to find out.

  At the present time, the trust was administered by the firm of Bunter and Theobald. Old Ronnie Bunter had not only been a close personal friend of Henry Bannock, he was also as fine and decent a man as had ever stood at the Texas Bar, a Southern gentleman of the old school for whom all who knew him felt nothing but affection and admiration. His wife Betty had in her time been a perfect Texas Rose and long after she ceased to practice law, she was a towering figure in the legal community, organizing charity events, supporting those members of the profession who had fallen on hard times, or who had simply become too old or infirm to look after themselves. All three of Weiss’s ex-wives had simply adored her. But the word was poor Betty was suffering from dementia and her loving husband, being the kind of man he was, had given up full-time work in order to devote himself more fully to care for the woman he loved, and who had sacrificed so much for him.

  As a result, effective control of Bunter and Theobald had passed to Ronnie and Betty’s son Bradley, who was, in Shelby Weiss’s eyes, a genuine freak of nature. Here was a guy who had had it all. Not only were his parents rich and influential, they were also loving, attentive and devoted to their children. Brad himself was handsome, healthy and strong. Yet despite all these advantages—blessings for which the young Shelby Weiss, coming up the hard way, would have killed—Brad Bunter had somehow managed to become an ocean-going, weapons-grade, 24-carat shitweasel. The man was deceitful, treacherous, greedy, ambitious and filled with an undeserved sense of entitlement. Moreover, he was a notorious spendthrift, with a passionate attachment to fast women, slow horses, losing teams and white Colombian powder. His parents, being too decent themselves to even imagine that their son could be the man he was, had somehow never seen through his shiny veneer of surface charm, and Brad had always been smart enough to play nice with them, or as nice as he could manage, anyway. So when Ronnie Bunter’s peers had tried to tell him the truth, he had waved them away.

  But everybody in the business knew that Brad Bunter was a second-rate oxygen-waster and it would surely not be long, Weiss reasoned, before someone took advantage of that fact. That someone, he decided, might as well be himself.

  He called a private detective whom he had often used to check out his clients’ stories and find incriminating information to use against their opponents. “I want you to do a number on Bradley Bunter,” Weiss said. “He’s the acting senior partner of his dad’s law firm, Bunter and Theobald. I need to know who he’s screwing, what he’s snorting, how much he owes, and to whom, and what the vig is. And a word of advice, take a big shovel. Believe me, you’re going to dig up a ton of dirt.”

  A week later, having received a full and very informative report, and having the strong sense that he would be pushing at an open door, Shelby Weiss picked up the phone, was put through to Bradley Bunter’s office and said, “Brad, it’s been too long. I just wanted to say, I’m so sorry to hear that your dear mother is unwell. Please send her my kindest regards. Listen, I don’t know if this is a good time or not, but I have a business proposition, and I think you might be interested to hear it. Let me buy you a drink and tell you what I have in mind . . .”

  Brad Bunter couldn’t believe his luck when Shelby Weiss offered him a million-five in cash, a partnership in a new, enlarged firm with his name in its title and a massively increased annual remuneration package in return for merging Bunter and Theobald into Weiss, Mendoza and Burnett. The other junior partners in Bunter and Theobald burst into applause when Bradley presented the equally sweet deals, relative to th
eir current earnings, that were on the table for them.

  “Here’s to the Hebrew!” Brad toasted, downing a double Jack Daniel’s at the bar to which he and his colleagues had retired to celebrate their imminent good fortune.

  “The Hebe!” they all chanted, even the ones who were, in fact, Jewish.

  The toasts continued: “Here’s to the Wetback! Here’s to the WASP!”

  At the Bunter family home, however, the news of the proposed merger was received very differently. “I’m so sorry, Ronnie,” Jo Stanley said as she relayed the details of the partners’ meeting to her boss. “The deal’s going to be accepted. They were unanimous.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Bunter said. He looked suddenly older, shrunken and more fragile, as though he had received a physical blow. “It’s not possible. Are you sure it was Brad that suggested this? My own son, throwing away our family firm . . . It’s not possible.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Ronnie,” Jo said, moving closer to him, wanting to offer him some kind of comfort, but unable to hold out any hope. “From what I could make out it all happened very quickly. Shelby Weiss came to Brad with a deal, he jumped at it and, well, I guess it was just too rich for anyone to say no to it.”

  “I could veto it,” Bunter said, regaining a flicker of energy. “I don’t get to the office much these days, but I’m still the senior partner, I could do that.”

  “What would be the point?” Jo asked. “Brad would hate you. The others would quit. You’d still have Bunter and Theobald, but there wouldn’t be anything there. If you want to preserve your legacy, Ronnie, the best thing you can do is demand a partnership in the new firm. They won’t say no to you. And screw every last dime you can out of Shelby Weiss. If he’s going to take your firm, make him pay. And think of Betty . . . this way she won’t ever want for anything and neither will you.”

  “I guess so,” said Bunter regretfully. “But to see it all go like this: three generations’ work, lost in an instant. It’s hard to take, Jo . . .”

  She patted his hand, saying nothing, knowing from the look on Ronnie’s face that he was thinking about something and trusting that he’d share it with her soon enough.

  “You say Weiss was the man behind this?”

  “That’s right. Bradley was very insistent about the fact that he had Weiss’s personal assurance for all the terms he was offering.”

  “I’ve never liked him, you know. Shelby Weiss, I mean. Oh, I know about his hard-luck story, how he worked his way up from nothing and I admire him for that. He knows his law, too, there’s no doubt about that, and he can put on a helluva show in court. If he’d been born a hundred years earlier, he’d have been selling snake oil at county fairs and making a good living at it, you can bet.”

  Jo laughed. “Roll up! Roll up! Just a dollar a bottle!”

  “Exactly, my dear, a dollar a bottle indeed. So what’s he peddling now, eh? What’s got him so excited that he’s willing to throw millions of his firm’s dollars at a stuffy old law firm like Bunter and Theobald? What do we have that he wants?”

  “Why do I get the feeling that you already know the answer, Ronnie?”

  Bunter laughed. “Ah, Jo, you know me too well! Let me elucidate . . . I don’t have to tell you that Weiss was the lawyer representing Johnny Congo in the time between his arrival here in Texas and the appalling disaster of his escape. Now, Betty gets tired very easily these days and needs to rest, which means I have a lot of time on my hands. So I’ve filled some of it by doing a little digging into the events of that terrible day. I still have a few old friends around the place, codgers just like me . . .”

  “Those codgers run the state, Ronnie, as you very well know.”

  “Not as much as they used to, but never mind. My point is, I have it on good authority that Congo, the professional and personal partner of Carl Bannock—wherever he may be—gave Weiss a great deal of money, millions of dollars in fact, a significant proportion of which ended up in Weiss, Mendoza and Burnett’s bank account. Just a couple weeks later, here comes Mr. Weiss, knocking on our door, using that very same money, I dare say, to present an offer that makes no financial sense, unless . . .” Bunter left the sentence unfinished and gave Jo a look inviting her to finish it.

  “Unless he knows just how much money there is in the Henry Bannock Family Trust.”

  “And he wants to get his greedy hands on it,” Bunter concluded. “Very well,” he went on, his energy now fully restored. “Here is what we are going to do. I will take as much money as Weiss is desperate enough to give me, and in cash. I will demand an emeritus partnership at the merged firm, with full rights to view the company accounts and attend partners’ meetings, or have a representative attend them on my behalf. As before, you will be that representative. I want you to watch Weiss like a hawk. Keep an eye on everything he does and let me know the instant you get any hint that he is trying to interfere with the administration of the trust. Henry Bannock was my dear friend and I promised him that I would make sure that all his descendants would be able to enjoy the fruits of his labors.”

  Bunter looked Jo in the eye. “I may not be able to preserve my legacy. But I’ll fight till the very last breath in my body to preserve Henry Bannock’s.”

  Among the many things Johnny Congo and Carl Bannock had learned through experience was this: If you wanted to buy political influence or protection, always go to the socialist governments first. It had nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of any political ideology; it was more a matter of psychology. “In life, a certain proportion of people realize that they are superior to the common herd,” Carl had theorized, one hot, lazy, drug-fuelled afternoon in Kazundu.

  “Amen to that, bro,” Congo had agreed.

  “Now, a country like America is filled with opportunity for someone who knows they deserve more than those around them, and who understands that the dumb masses deserve to be ripped off, screwed over and trampled underfoot, just for walking around, the way they do, like big, fat cattle too shit-stupid to know they’re heading for the slaughterhouse.”

  “They got it coming, no doubt about it.”

  “Say you’re someone who wants to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the pathetic state of the mass of humanity. If you come from a nice, prosperous home, get a good degree, know how to present yourself properly, well, then you can go to Wall Street and make a killing. Did you know that ten percent of Wall Street bankers are clinical psychopaths?”

  “Only have to see that American Psycho movie to know that, babe.” Congo laughed. “Christian Bale cutting up all the rich white girls. Whoo-ee! The Batman getting his evil on.”

  Carl smiled. “Ha! Plenty of opportunity for being bad and getting away with it in Hollywood, too! But a man like you came up a different route. You didn’t have the advantages that the kind of guy who ends up as a banker enjoys. You came from the street. So you committed what the law calls crime. But, let’s get real, there’s no moral difference between someone dealing drugs and someone selling securities that turn out to be worthless junk. They’re both doing wrong, if you care about that. It’s just that one of those people is wearing a suit, sitting in a fancy office, and the other’s on a street corner, wearing a wife-beater and dirty jeans.”

  “One’s white and the other’s black, man, that’s the frickin’ difference.”

  “I’m white. Look where I ended up.”

  Congo laughed. “Only ’cause you met me, baby. I remember it like it was yesterday, the new boy, all sweet-assed and innocent, being brought to my cell to get his lesson in prison manners. Well, I taught you good. Made a man of you.”

  “You put me in the prison sanatorium. I had internal bleeding, my rear end all shot to pieces.” Carl gave a wry smile. “Hard to believe that was the start of a beautiful friendship.”

  “Gotta start somewhere. So, ’bout these bankers and gangbangers, what’s your point?”

  “My point,” said Carl, drawing the smoke from some locally
grown weed deep into his lungs, “is they’ve got a million ways to thrive in America, or anywhere like it. But in a communist country, like a people’s republic or whatever, the State controls everything. So the only way the superior individual can screw the people is by ruling them, being a politician. So that’s where the people like us end up. And that’s why we can always make a deal in a place like that.”

  “Plus, they hate the U.S.A. And when they find out we’re on the run from Uncle Sam, it’s like, my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

  “And if my enemy’s enemy has millions of my enemy’s dollars they like it even better.”

  Venezuela was the proof of that. Carl and Congo had flown in, put some serious coin in a few very well-placed back pockets and the result had been a pair of Venezuelan passports and an assurance that although an extradition treaty between Venezuela and the United States had been in force since 1923, there was no chance that they would ever be handed over to the gringos as long as the United Socialist Party of Venezuela was in power. And they intended to stay in power for a good long while yet.

  And so, having left the U.S. as a ruler of Kazundu, Congo flew into Caracas as Venezuelan citizen Juan Tumbo. That was where he was now, sprawled in a leather recliner with a Montecristo No. 2 Cuban cigar clenched between his teeth, a magnum of Cristal in an ice bucket on the floor beside him and a heap of coke on a mirror on the side table: that and a big, fat tube of lubricant.

  Congo had spent three weeks in the godforsaken Texas death cell. He’d been much too close to death for comfort. Now he wanted to live it up. He’d got R. Kelly on the sound system, laying down some old school R ’n’ B, telling his woman how her body was calling for him. And as Congo got into the music, feeling the slow, sexy rhythm, there were two bodies calling for him, too: perfect young bodies with flawless café-au-lait skin and tumbling blond hair the color of dark, sweet honey. Carl watched them dancing to the music, mirroring each other’s movements. Their every facial feature was drawn as perfectly as if God himself had said, “This is what I want humans to look like.” And what made them even more extraordinary was that they were identical. Looking from one to the other, Congo was unable to detect a single imperfection. There was not the slightest facial blemish to mark one out as different to the other, not a solitary hair on their heads cut to a different length or colored a contrasting shade.