Chapter 3

Author's Notes: Sorry for the delay; I have been quite busy. Thanks as always to the Wrecking Kru for their outstanding support. I know the chapter ends sort of abruptly, was gonna make this one but decided on two.

"You guys will never guess where I am."

Drake felt a little foolish like he always did while essentially talking to thin air; the wrist comm was recording a holo even as he spoke, and the result would be sent home through an encrypted channel. This had become a tradition of sorts, though, and he was determined to continue it. Besides, the kids absolutely loved the things. He forced a broad grin and continued.

"Once upon a time, this was the tallest building in the world. Look it up on that Project-a-Pal toy of yours if you like, eh? I know it's not the tallest anymore, there's the one in Singapore and that other one in Frankfurt, but…"

He looked down. It would be a hell of a long way to fall. Good thing he didn't plan on falling.

"…anyway, I'm getting off track here. It's still damn impressive. The torus is so bright. I can't tell you exactly where I am now, you know the rules, right? I should be home within the next week, and when I do, I've got some amazing surprises for you all."

That was always fun, picking out gifts for the kids. For most of his life, Drake had wondered if children were strictly for other people, who didn't get shot at for a living. Now, he couldn't imagine feeling complete without them, even if he saw his offspring all too infrequently.

"Listen, I gotta keep this short. You be good, and help your mother. Stay out of trouble. Eat all your greens." That last part was at Rina's insistence; he hated the stuff himself. "I'll see you soon." He pressed the button to end the transmission.

Though it was well into the night, and he'd just completed a bitch of a week-long assignment in South Yemen, Drake wasn't the least bit tired. At least not for the moment. That was what happened whenever he let Crowe, or worse, Tselios, pick the clubs. They wanted to party nonstop, and that required a second wind.

Dubai was a city that demanded second…and third, and fourth…winds. This particular spot, the Jannat al-Adn, was exclusive, high-end, nearly impossible to get into, and popular with nearly every CCB agent who'd ever lived. Meaning, on a Saturday night such as this, it was jam-packed. The club occupied several of the highest penthouse levels of the Burj Khalifa tower, where Drake's three-man crew had checked in for the evening. He hadn't lied in his message; the skyscraper, while no longer the tallest on Earth, was nothing to sneeze at either. Right now he stood on a balcony just over 600 meters above the ground far below. Though he'd never been the least bit afraid of heights, Drake had to remind himself of this sobering fact.

Too bad I'm not the least bit sober. Why the fuck would I come here if that's what I meant to do?

He'd lost count of how much, and what kind of, intoxicants he'd ingested sometime earlier in the evening. This was no hole-in-the-wall in a remote outpost; there was nothing but the finest shit here. It was a fucking buffet of whatever you fancied: uppers, downers, any brand of alcohol known to mankind. High-roller parties all night long, insanely gorgeous, scantily clad women working the floors. The perfect place to visit after a week's worth of hell in the baking sandbox of southern Arabia. Drake smiled to himself. Rina would absolutely kill him if she knew where he was right now.

That's the beauty of it…she doesn't have to know, does she? It's not like she doesn't have fun on her own when I'm away. Heh.

Drake secretly missed her. She was the best cook he'd ever met…her beef stew was simply to die for…and an excellent, natural mother. Just the thought of her made him click at his wrist comm again. He absently scrolled through the few personal photos he kept on it until he found the one he was looking for: his wife, dusky and beautiful in one of her comfortable patterned sundresses, sitting with their small children in the garden, behind their home in Jozi.

"There you are, boss. You're missing all the fun, you know?"

Crowe, clearly drunker than he looked, lurched out of the beaded curtain divider onto the balcony. In one hand he held an enormous beer mug, and in the other, some gaudy silver Mardi Gras beads he must have taken from one of the cocktail waitresses. He wore his civvies and the kind of shit-eating grin he always got after about five drinks.

"Just getting some fresh air," said Drake. He always felt a little embarrassed about recording his messages home, like it was something he needed to do in private. Even so, he had needed to breathe something other than smoky haze for a few minutes. His men could smoke all they wanted…he didn't give a shit…but the stuff had always made him personally slightly nauseous.

"Ja, boet." Crowe belched and pointed to the holo image. "That the wife and kids there? They're taller every time I see 'em. Kids, I mean."

Drake grinned; even a drunk had to notice something like that. "Jacko's starting school this year. Can you believe that? Five already. Seems like just yesterday he was still in nappies. He's so good with the techie stuff.; picks it up like second nature. Vivy's not far behind. She's a good girl, smart, a lot like her mum. Just as stubborn, too."

"Isn't there a third one now? You and Rina sure been keeping busy," Crowe said, making an obscene gesture with his fingers.

"Tommy. Yeah, he's almost ready for his first steps. Not talking yet, but she says the little bugger's started trying to hump the dog while crawling."

"Just like his dad, eh? A natural-born pervert."

Both agents shared a hearty laugh.

"I still can't believe she's mine," Drake said almost dreamily, looking up at the unusually clear sky through the heat shimmers. Well after midnight, and it was still scorching.

"Who? Rina?" Crowe made another dirty sign, and winked. "I can; you were hopeless from the first time you walked into her place, boet."

"No. The ship," said Drake, and pointed out the landing platform where his pride and joy was currently moored. That had been part of the reason he'd come outside, just to check on her. There were dozens of high-end aircars and shuttles, along with a few military-grade gunships, in and around the Burj Khalifa's hovering docks, but only one Rook ship on this particular night. With his night-vision enhancing implants, Drake could see her clearly even in the darkness: her sleek, lethal form, the custom paint job with the leaping deer silhouette on one side. If the Raven-class had been outstanding, these were superlative. "What'd I do to deserve her?"

Both of them secretly knew the answer, though they never openly discussed it. When Secretary Delacourt decided to reward an agent for good service, she never used half measures. Drake and Crowe, in the weeks following the Kgosi Incident five years ago, had found themselves not just in possession of more credits than they knew how to spend, but reassigned to a newly formed Oryx unit with Drake in command. "I saw potential," the Defense Secretary had said tersely when they'd pressed her. It was what went unsaid that told the rest of the story.

I saw two men who, much as I hate to admit it, saved my niece's life. And I had to find some reasonable, underhanded way to repay that debt.

"I think you're a good boss, Boss," Crowe said thickly, his voice slurred by whatever he'd been drinking.

Whether or not that was true, Drake himself didn't know. Along with Crowe and their new gunner, Tselios, the Oryx Six squad, as they styled themselves, had carried out dozens of assignments and mostly come out unscathed. He had been told, by agents who were in fact sober, that they were now Delacourt's preferred unit for the nastier assignments, especially the ones in the hotbeds of Africa or the Middle East. Drake and his team operated professionally. He got in, killed or neutralized whoever the brass in the Griffins' Nest told him to, then got out without a hitch. Why did the doubts linger? What was he doing wrong?

That was another truth which generally went unspoken: their erstwhile boss' presence, while it could be overbearing, was sorely absent. And whenever Drake got wasted like this, he waxed nostalgic. "Never thought I'd say this, but I miss working for the mouthy old bastard," he mused.

Crowe hardly needed to ask who he meant. "Kruger? Really, boet? You're still thinking about him?" The pilot laughed. "'Course, nothing wrong with that. He's one oke who's hard to fucking forget. 'I just can't quit you' and all that kak."

"You can say that again." It was the worst-kept secret in the world; both of them missed the embodiment of unpredictable volatility that was their former boss, not to mention his twisted sense of humor, uncanny ability for sniffing out trouble, and knack for telling filthy stories at parties. Once in a while they ran into him at a place like this, yet Crowe and Drake hadn't been assigned back to the Raven in five years. That had been Delacourt's doing too. Maybe, Drake guessed, she wanted to keep the original Oryx Squadron apart to try and prevent another Incident from happening. It had all been an anomaly, though, one out of thousands they had run together. That particular mission had gone so horribly awry because…

Because of the girl. If she hadn't run away from home, none of that would have happened. Would it?

Drake still thought about it almost every day, second- and third-guessing himself. Lorelei may have been a Delacourt, with all the weight and implication that name carried, yet he'd come to genuinely like the girl. That was the one dark secret no one, not even Crowe, not even Rina, knew about. His correspondence with her via the back-door channel. It was risky, for sure, since the CCB had doubled down on virtual security ever since the Incident. It seemed to be working much in the same way Lorelei was being kept safe now: hidden in plain sight. Black ops teams like Drake's were strictly off the record. So were their communiqués. At least for now, both of them had managed to keep the exchanges secret, in part thanks to the girl's extraordinary ability at covering up her electronic tracks. The thing that really killed him was the fact that he couldn't reveal his true identity. Oh, well, at least the little meisie has somebody she can talk to. And boy, does she…

"…and, I mean, the way he used to smoke, you know, five fucking cigs at once. Remember that?" Crowe slapped him hard on the back, interrupting his thoughts. Apparently the pilot had been Kruger-reminiscing all the while Drake was thinking of Lorelei.

"Yeah." Drake brought himself back to the present moment, which was difficult considering all the shit he'd done tonight. His head swam. "That voice of his, boet. Like nails on a chalkboard even without the cigs, wasn't it?" Kruger's reedy, harsh timbre had never ceased to amuse Crowe and Drake, though they never would have dared say so to his face. "Gotcha now, boytjie!" Drake made his deep voice half an octave higher for a passably coarse imitation.

It was all Crowe could do not to lose himself in a fit of giggles; while drunk, he always had the stupidest, girliest laugh. "That's fucking hilarious, boet!" he said through gales of laughter, dropping the beer mug to shatter.

Drake couldn't help himself; he joined in too. Maybe it was the MDMA or whatever trendy lab-made stuff was going around, but the giddiness had him fully by the balls. "Okay, how about another one?" He cleared his throat and mimed drawing an imaginary katana. "We can do this the hard way, or the easy way, girl. Though I'd prefer the fucking hard way, eh?"

If anyone had walked onto the balcony at that moment, or flown by in an aircar, they would have seen two burly CCB agents rolling around in hysterics on the floor, howling like a pair of amped-up hyenas. "Fuck me, Drakey. You need to get your own Vegas comedy show!" Crowe hooted.

"If…if I didn't already have the wife and kids, I might just do that." Even through the euphoric haze he always got going during an all-night party, Drake's thoughts drifted back to Rina and his growing family. She knows every time I go out, it might be the last. That's what she married. Still, who says I can't have a little fun when I'm off the clock?

"Good thing he's not here to hear you. If he were, he'd chop your balls off and make you eat 'em, boet." Crowe was wiping tears from his blue eyes.

Drake picked himself up from the floor, and with as much remaining dignity as he could muster, staggered over to the table on the balcony and took a swig of his own half-empty beer. "Yeah, good thing." Kruger had always been the type of guy who loved a good joke…as long as it wasn't on him. Some brash cartel lieutenant in Colombia had made the mistake once of poking fun of the boss' accent and mannerisms to his face. Jesus, that was a long time ago. Kruger had been especially inventive with him, using a full compliment of fireplace tools, all fresh from the flames, all inserted into various bodily cavities. Through the screams of agony, Drake could have sworn the little fucker had been trying to apologize.

The truth was, Drake still felt a little strange being called 'boss' by anyone, even after five years. It wasn't that he lacked the experience, or the know-how, for the job. He'd brought his new Oryx team in and out of dozens of missions, in the worst places on Earth, with only minor injuries. Crowe was as solid as ever despite his quirks, and Tselios had proven just as capable. The doubt persisted anyway, a parasite determined to slowly kill its host body.

You can never get me out of your head, boytjie, Drake could almost hear Kruger's raspy hiss in his ear, as if the man he still thought of as 'boss' were standing right behind him, whispering salaciously. Maybe he was; that damn stealth cloak hadn't been destroyed after the Incident. For all Drake knew, Kruger was listening right now, eavesdropping and waiting for the right moment to jump out from under the cloack and yell 'Boo'. It would be just like him to go and do something like that. "What do you think he's doing now? The boss, I mean?" he asked Crowe, trying to both change the subject and get someone else's perspective on the matter, even if that someone else was shit-faced drunk.

"No idea. Same kak we are, probably." Crowe joined him at the table, leaning heavily against it. "I saw him taking off at that one club in Kyoto a few months ago. You were out with Tselios and I was there watching the ship. Dunno if he saw me, he probably did, but he looked pretty pissed about something." The bald man frowned. "He had a couple new guys with him, too. That huge blond Scandinavian oke with the funny name? I think he's flying the Raven now. The fucker. Not that I don't like your ship, boss."

Drake nodded, ignoring the slight. "Hornqvist? Something like that?" He searched his memory, a difficult proposition at the moment. "Everybody called him 'Horny,' which he couldn't stand. I remember him from the academy. Good fighter, pretty smart, just no sense of humor. Like a fucking iceberg, eh? Who's the other?"

"Oh. Didn't recognize him; some buzz-cut guy, also huge. Must be their new gunner."

"So what d'you think the boss was pissed off about?" asked Drake, knowing the question was probably rhetorical.

A dark chuckle from Crowe. "No telling, boet."

Offhand, Drake knew of a few times he'd seen Kruger in a relatively good mood. The times they used to go to Rina's, when she was still in the business. The occasions they went up to his house on Elysium for a braai party or a World Cup match, then sat up all night telling the dirtiest stories imaginable. And…he grasped desperately for some hidden memory…something else that made Kruger happy, too. It was to do with the girl, with Lorelei.

Fuck it, I'm not taking all this shit next time. I can't think straight.

"Anyway, I haven't talked to him, if that's what you mean. He's not the kind of oke who writes fucking letters or holos, you know." Crowe shrugged and pointed to the beer bottle. "You gonna finish that, boet?"

"No. All yours."

As Crowe pulled at the warm dregs of the lager, Drake looked up one more time at the ship, his Golden Hind. She was still there. Good. Still, the thought that he was missing something much more important loomed at the back of his hazy brain.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, gentlemen," came a feminine voice from behind them. It was one of the waitresses, a stunningly lithe raven-haired woman in a gold minidress, stilettos, and not much else. "You're with Agent Tselios, right?"

Drake immediately felt a surge of panic through the cobwebs; their new gunner, while almost too good at his work in the field, could be a wild card when it came to off-duty time. "That's right. Is he okay?" he asked the girl, picturing Tselios passed out in a puddle of his own vomit in one of the toilets.

"I…I think you'd better come with me," she said nervously. "We'll head down to the club; you can see for yourself."

"Shit," Drake muttered under his breath, beckoning to Crowe to come with him. "What's that crazy fucker gotten himself into now?"

"Who cares? It's probably nothing, just more of his usual kak," Crowe slurred, stumbling toward the beaded curtain. "At least we can go inside and get some more beer, eh?"

As the two of them hurried downstairs, Drake didn't notice that his wrist comm was blinking Message Received, Private Sender.

~~s~~

Twenty Minutes Earlier

"…so this chick, see, she walks in on me in the bathroom, and I'm using one of them electric hair dryers to blow myself, right?"

Agent C.M. Kruger was holding a rapt court. Half a dozen agents, including his two teammates, were gathered around the table, along with several of the floor girls who were listening so intently to him they'd momentarily forgotten to deliver drinks to customers.

"And then she asks me, 'What are you doing there?' She wasn't too fucking pleased when I said, 'Heating up your dinner, sweetheart.'" He grinned.

The reaction, as he'd expected, was immediate and raucous. Everyone roared with laughter, and even Kruger chuckled at his own joke. His skills as a raconteur had become the stuff of legend among the CCB. Some of the guys preferred to sit at his table all night rather than enjoy the many other delights the Jannat al-Adn had to offer: the girls, the rooftop pools, the casino, the cornucopia of available narcotics. This last was something Kruger particularly sought out at the clubs.

He had already done several lines of coke tonight, and craved yet more. Sure, there was newer, and even more potent, stuff to be had at these places. Kruger liked to stick with what he already liked…and the strains they had at these high-end clubs were always the best. Not to mention, it was all free. I gotta hand it to the CCB; they show their best employees a lot of fucking appreciation.

"That was sooo funny!" giggled the girl sitting closest to him. She was, like all the other females present, not wearing much other than a drunk smile. Blonde, stunning body, perfectly arched eyebrows over dilated green eyes. She placed her hand flirtatiously on Kruger's forearm. "You know any other funny jokes?"

"Ja." He leaned in as if to kiss her. "I'm sitting across from one right now."

It took her a moment to pick up on it, but when she did, she giggled even more hysterically. "You are a riot! Oh, my God."

"Yeah, I suppose I am."

More laughs, even from the men. On any other night, Kruger might have followed such a nice piece of ass to her suite, fucked her all night long, enjoyed himself, woken up with no regrets the next morning. Looking her up and down right now, he just couldn't concentrate. For an instant, just then, when she'd touched him, his mind had wandered.

Am I gonna get that golden thread from her? Fuck, I'm craving that right now.

There were so many things Kruger got cravings for sometimes. Mostly, he could get a fix at one of these exclusive clubs: women, drugs, booze, any brand of cig he wanted. The queen mother of all cravings, though, could only be found in one place. It was risky as hell getting it…the last few times, he'd have sworn he was being watched…but oh, was it worth the risk. Standing there, his hand almost tenderly taking the sleeping girl's in his own-it always had to be when she slept, because of the security around her-and the feel of that elated, orgasmic,soul-shaking thrill coursing through his body…

No cocaine or any other drug could match that sensation. Kruger wanted it. Needed it. Had sought it out for five years now, and still couldn't get enough. The golden thread, at least for tonight, was far away. There were other delights to be sampled. He'd just have to find another way to scratch that pesky itch.

"Another round, girl," he ordered the drunk blonde.

"I don't actually work here. I came in with Agent…what was his name? she slurred, hiccupping.

"Just get us some more fucking beers, eh? Castles."

"Okay, okay," she muttered, and as she walked away serpentine, Kruger thought it must be a miracle she didn't trip over her five-inch heels. Not a bad view, either. I might have use for her yet.

Kruger's squad mates, who also sat at the table, handed her their empties. He'd observed, over five years, that the two of them-Hornberg, the stoic Swedish pilot, and Petrov, the even quieter Belorusian gunner-were good listeners, but hesitated to join in on the fun off-duty. It was like they were afraid of stepping on his toes somehow. Not that he blamed them. They'd heard the stories through the CCB agent grapevines about what always happened to Oryx Squadron members who talked too much.

Besides, I fucking hate it when someone else upstages me.

Despite his lingering high from the last line, Kruger was sharply observant of his surroundings. He noticed everyone who came and went from the smoky room. One of the guys, a tall, rangy type with the manner and bearing of a cocky, newly minted agent, had been watching him steadily from across the table for a few minutes now. Dark hair styled in an elaborate faux-hawk, lots of colorful tattoos down both muscular arms, the kind of scruffy beard that spoke to not being able to grow one properly.

He's no trouble…he's just a fucking kid, for Christ's sake…but he's looking at me like a dog looks like a thick steak. What the fuck does he want?

"Enjoying the view?" Kruger stretched out to his full, lean height, putting his booted feet up on the table and his arms behind his head. "I got something you can snack on if you're hungry, boytjie."

"No, it's just…" The guy's accent was South African, to Kruger's great surprise, with a hint of something else underneath. Greek, maybe? "You're Agent 32 Alpha. I've heard about you. You're a fucking legend, man."

Everyone, including the stone-faced duo of Petrov and Hornberg, chuckled at that.

"You want a fucking autograph or something?"

"Better." The kid stood…he was taller than Kruger by at least a few inches, thicker too. "I hear you're a hell of a fighter. Want to go down to Level 119 and hop in the ring? Just for fun, eh?"

Either this kid has a death wish, or he's fucking insane. "You got balls, I'll give you that." Kruger grinned. "You gotta make it fucking interesting, though. What's your name, anyway?"

"Tselios." The other flashed a smile with several gold-capped teeth. "I got the perfect stakes in mind…"

To Be Continued