Page 13 of Marcellus: House of Drakos

Olivier Aurelius Drakos stood at his office window staring down at the pedestrians that peppered the sidewalks like ants on a march.

They were all heading into the various office buildings to begin their busy work day.

He would bet the farm that none of them were CEOs.

That none of them had the weight of a multi-billion-dollar corporation on their shoulders.

They did their work and went home. Home for Olivier was Drakos Aeronautics.

Even when everything was going great, he was rarely off work.

Now that everything was going sideways with no end to their slide in sight, he was never off work. As CEO, it was all on him.

He was at that same window when he heard about the crash. About all those poor souls dead and gone. He’d never overseen a disaster of that magnitude in the five years he’d been CEO. It jolted him. It still did.

He turned at the sound of his office door opening. It was his secretary. “The motorcade is arriving, sir,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, grabbed his phone off his desk, and hurried to the private elevators.

Fredrick Tiberius Drakos, his half-brother and the Chief Operating Officer at Drakos, was coming out of his office and heading for the elevators too. They got on together and headed downstairs.

“Did you round up the department heads?”

“They’re waiting outside his office.”

“Good. We need a show of strength. It’s all-hands-on-deck and we need him to see it to believe it. And they’re prepared to answer any questions he throws their way?”

“I told them they’d better be.” Then he looked hard at his brother. “Spoke with Dad yet?”

Olivier hesitated. “He called.”

“With yells and screams? Or both?”

“Both,” said Olivier. “He’s pissed we haven’t figured out why that plane went down yet.”

“Are you kidding me? It just happened! We have no data yet. Logic dictates we have no way of knowing yet.”

Olivier looked at his younger brother. Of all the siblings, he was by far the smartest. And the most na?ve about their father’s rage.

“Yes, logic would dictate that more time is needed, Freddy. But our father isn’t logical nor data driven.

He’s just driven. He’s going to chew our asses out because we know nothing more than we knew when he was screaming on the phone. ”

Freddy exhaled. The strain of the past few months was all over his handsome face too. “It’s going to be another long week.”

Olivier patted his brother on the back. He hated that his siblings were going to get some of the blowback too.

But it couldn’t be helped. Their father expected excellence from them and when excellence wasn’t achieved, he did what anybody who grew up in the gutter and never let them forget it would do: He pounced.

“Just be prepared,” he warned his brother. “Just be prepared.”