Page 20 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 naïve 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.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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 andAirbus, 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 saywhy. 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.”
