Page 14 of Marcellus: House of Drakos

The motorcade with police escorts roared through the streets of Chicago as if speed limits and red lights and traffic backups didn’t apply to them. They didn’t stop once.

Marcellus sat in the backseat of the limousine watching the various news accounts over the car’s multiple television screens.

It was breaking news all over the twenty-four-hour cable news channels.

Politicians of every stripe were howling for the chairman to come before Congress and explain what was wrong with his planes.

Citizens were up in arms about how every Drakos plane should have been grounded long ago.

As if it was a systemic problem. As if Drakos Aeronautics was no longer the safest aircraft maker in the world, but was instead, because of a few months of failures, the leader of disasters.

Which wasn’t true. But that was the narrative.

All because of a problem with one of their models, only one, that had since been taken out of commission.

He could explain away issues with just one model.

And he successfully, he thought, explained it away.

But even Marcellus was going to have a difficult time explaining away this new disaster.

Two-hundred-and-seventeen souls lost? There was no explaining that away.

As the motorcade turned onto Wacker Drive, Marcellus could see in the distance a mob of reporters, seemingly a hundred strong, camped out in front of the Drakos office building in downtown Chicago as if they couldn’t wait to shove their microphones and cameras into the face of the reclusive and rarely photographed chairman that many of them didn’t even know by sight.

Drakos Aeronautics, unlike Boeing and Airbus, flew under the radar for decades.

They were reliable and capable and safe.

But now, after such an incredible string of disasters, they were front and center.

They wanted to know who was the man behind the monumental problems plaguing the corporation, and why he had installed his thirty-two-year-old son as CEO.

Inside the building, the top three corporate officers stood in the lobby awaiting the boss’s arrival too.

Besides Olivier and Freddy were their sister Kalayna Drakos, the Chief Financial Officer.

A graduate of Princeton, she knew numbers like she knew the back of her hand.

But nothing had prepared her, or any of them, for this latest disaster.

All three were so anxious that none of them could stand still.

All of them were moving around. It had been, and still was, the most stressful week of their entire careers.

Their father had tried to delay coming to America to as close to the family monthly dinner as possible, but after last night he could delay no longer.

Olivier looked at his Rolex again. His father was never late, but he was running late today.

Not by much – he knew the motorcade would be pulling up at any moment, but his father was so exacting on everybody else that whenever he faltered, even so slightly as being a few minutes late, it felt like a crime was being committed.

“He may fire us all,” Freddy said, “after last night.”

“Maybe the two of us,” said Olivier, “but never Kalayna. He lets little sis get away with murder.”

“Don’t even start that, Ollie,” said Kalayna. That family line was beginning to irritate her. “It’s not true.”

“Am I lying, Freddy?” Ollie asked his half-brother.

Freddy never liked being put in the middle, but that was always where he found himself.

It was no secret that Kalayna was their father’s favorite hands down, but it was hard to say why.

Maybe because she was the only girl in the family.

Maybe because she was the youngest in the family, with Kalayna only twenty-seven years old.

Maybe because of all of Marcellus’s five children, Freddy and Kalayna were the only ones with the same mother.

As if their father went back for seconds with their mother, but not with any of his other baby mamas.

And although they both favored their father in many ways, Kalayna was the spitting image of their mother, who also happened to be the only black woman of Marcellus’s baby mamas.

Many in the family speculated that the fact that Kalayna favored her mother so completely was the real reason he favored Kalayna.

Freddy couldn’t begin to know the reason why. But he knew Olivier wasn’t wrong. “You aren’t lying,” he said to his brother. “I can’t say why she’s his favorite, but she is.”

“Thank you!” said Oliver.

“Thanks a lot,” said Kalayna.

Freddy laughed. “Can’t please everyone,” he said.

But what he and Kalayna also had in common was that they, like their other siblings, looked up to Olivier.

Although he and their other half-brother Scottie were both thirty-two years old, and Olivier was the oldest by only four hours, he was their big brother, the undisputed leader of the siblings.

And they knew he was going to take the most heat from their father.

“He’s here,” Freddy said wide-eyed as they all looked out at the motorcade pulling up.

They also saw the press go wild as soon as their father’s bodyguard hopped out of the front passenger seat and opened the back passenger door.

Marcellus stepped out buttoning his suit coat.

But even though four security personnel were waiting to escort the chairman into his own building, the media was pressing hard against the security ring around him.

The questions came fast and furious. So fast that Marcellus, even if he wanted to, couldn’t answer one before another one was coming.

Since he wasn’t answering any of them anyway, he couldn’t care less.

“What’s wrong with your airplanes, sir?”

“Why didn’t you ground them all after that second crash?”

“Why are you making American skies unsafe?”

“What do you have to say to the families of the deceased, sir?”

“How can you live with yourself after what’s happened?”

“Why haven’t you addressed the media, sir? The public has a right to know.”

“Why did you install your own children to run your corporation?”

“Critics believe it was the youth and inexperience of your corporate leadership that led to these disasters. What say you, sir?”

“Have you spoken to Alex Drakos about this disaster?”

Marcellus almost stopped in his tracks when he heard his half-brother’s name.

All his life he lived in that man’s shadow.

All his life he tried to run away from his name because of Alex Drakos.

Alex was the son of the married wife. He was born in Greece and lived there with his wealthy parents.

Marcellus was the son of the French whore.

He was the left out and forgotten bastard child, and his mother, a Parisian courtesan, was left near-penniless.

She gave him his father’s last name in spite of his complete abandonment of them, but that only made Marcellus determined to make that name his own.

He didn’t even know Alex Drakos on any personal level, and Alex didn’t know him personally either.

And neither had ever tried to change that.

But he didn’t stop in his tracks to air his grievances with that man and that side of his family. He kept on walking.

When he entered the lobby and saw three of his children staring at him with even more stress on their faces than was on his own face, his hard heart melted inside.

There was his oldest child Olivier, who tried to be the rock of the family in his absence, but was perhaps more vulnerable than all of his other children combined.

There were Fredrick and Kalayna, his two youngest children and the only two whose mother he still adored.

Freddy, like Niko, took after him in temperament.

They both were the most unyielding of his children.

But Kalayna took after her mother. Inwardly he always smiled whenever he saw her gorgeous face.

He would do anything for all of his children, but he’d go even beyond that for Kalayna.

It broke his heart that she was caught up in this crisis too.

He wanted to pull each one of them into his arms and tell them not to worry, that he would make it right the way he always did, but he wasn’t built that way.

He never wore his feelings on his sleeve and didn’t care to see such outward displays of weakness on his children either.

They were enduring a very rough patch, but they had better man up.

It was only going to get rougher while the NTSB dragged its feet investigating.

They could have months, even years of nothing but negative publicity.

Their company stock was already beginning to tumble so badly, and was taking other stocks with it, that many feared the markets might have to initiate a circuit breaker.

And that was why he didn’t placate them or massage their wounded egos.

He also never aired dirty laundry in public spaces.

He walked right past them even as they were greeting him, and headed straight for his private elevators.

All three looked at each other, not to mention the members of the lobby staff staring at all of them.

What kind of father was he, the staff wondered. But his children wondered it more.

They hurried behind their father.