Some remarks

INDIVIDUAL FIVE (Terrorist Type 12)
X was the son of rich parents, business people who had made a fortune through armaments and industries associated with war: World War I provided the basis of this fortune. His parents had both been married several times, he had known no family life, had been emotionally self-sufficient since a small child. He spoke many languages, could claim citizenship from several countries. Was he Italian, German, Jewish, Armenian, Egyptian? He was any one of these, at his convenience.
A man of talent and resources, he could have become an efficient part of the machinery of death that was his inheritance, but he would not, could not, be any man's heir.
He was fifteen when he brought off several coups of blackmail - emotional legerdemain - among the ramifications of his several families' businesses. These showed the capacity to analyse; a cold far-sightedness, an indifference to personal feelings. He was one of those unable to separate an individual from her, his circumstances. The man who was his real father (though he did not think of him as such, claimed a man met half a dozen times almost casually, whose conversation had illuminated his life, as "father"), this ordinary, harassed, anxious man, who died in middle age of a heart attack, one of the richest men in the world, was seen by him as a monster, because of the circumstances he had been born into. X had never questioned this attitude: could not. For him, a man or a woman was his, her circumstances, actions. Thus guilt was ruled out for him; it was a word he could not understand, not even by the processes of imaginative effort. He had never made the attempt to understand the people of his upbringing: they were all rotten, evil. His own milieu, the "network," was his family.
Meeting The Brand was important to him. He was twelve years younger than she was. He studied her adventures with the total absorption others might bring to "God," or some absolute.
First there had been that casually met man whose ruthless utterances seemed to him the essence of wisdom. Then there was The Brand.
When they had sexual relations - almost at once, since for her sex was an appetite to be fed, and no more - he felt confirmed in his deepest sense of himself: the cold efficiency of the business, never far from perversity, seemed to him a statement of what life was.
He had never felt warmth for any human being, only admiration, a determination to understand excellence, as he defined it.
He did not want, or claim, attention from the public or the press or any propaganda instrument: the world was contemptible to him. But when he had pulled off, with or without the "network" (he often worked alone, or with The Brand), a coup that was always inside the empire of one of his families, he would leave his mark, so that they should know whom they had to thank: an X, like that of an illiterate.
In bed with The Brand, he would trace an X over the raised pattern of the concentration camp number on her forearm, particularly in orgiastic moments.
He was never caught. Later, he joined one of the international police forces that helped to govern Shikasta in its last days.