Lester Crest was a patient man. He'd built his life on the words of Brutus, he paid close attention to the tide of man and made sure that he was always in the right place at the right time to seize it at the flood.

It had begun in high school when the wasting disease really started limiting his ability to move. He'd gone from the shy kid in the corner that no one noticed to the freak who needed a cane to get through the halls. He'd learned an important lesson in those dreaded halls. If he wanted to survive, he needed something to offer, and he needed to get in bed with the right people. Back then, that had meant being the cheerleaders' pet geek, after that it had meant playing mastermind for petty crooks, and after 2001, it meant working for some truly dangerous people.

People like the associate that he was awaiting rather impatiently. His newfound impatience came from the fact that there was a distinct possibility that he was going to die by her hand. It was times like this that made him wonder how he'd gotten himself mixed up with this insanity.

He'd first come to the attention of the Institute and the Agency shortly after 9/11. He'd picked up on a pattern of suspicious individuals attending flight schools in the United States and followed up on it. He kept digging, and through surveillance, communications intercepts, and a few educated guesses, he'd worked out exactly what the terrorists had planned two days before the incident occurred. He'd sent the information to the FIB and the IAA, and on the morning of September 10, 2001, he received their response. The email had been short and to the point, it thanked him for his concern and stated that they would look into it. It had been a blow off and Lester knew it. So instead of simply sitting on his hands and watching the towers fall, he decided that if it had to happen, he might as well profit off of it.

He'd taken every dime he had and shorted airline industry. The profit margin had been truly massive, he'd used a number of different ratlines and hid his new fortune in dozens of secure bank accounts outside of the reach of the U.S. government. He left the money to cool off for two months, never touching it, never mentioning it to anyone. Finally, when he was absolutely sure that he was completely in the clear, he accessed the money to move it around and make it easier to access.

The very next day, two men showed up at his house. One representing the Agency and the other representing the Institute. They told him that they knew about the short selling, and that if he didn't agree to work for them, he was going disappear into a deep dark pit where he would never be heard from again because of his connection to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the United States. He told them that nothing about that trade had been illegal and that he'd sent the information to the proper authorities who'd done absolutely nothing with it. The two men had looked at each other and were quiet for a few minutes.

Then they presented him with a file that laid out piece by piece why he was wanted for questioning by almost every major intelligence and law enforcement agency in the western hemisphere and that several terrorist groups had issued a fatwa calling for his murder. They made it clear that they were the only ones who could make it all go away. His options were to work for them, disappear into a deep dark pit, or death.

That was how he found himself in his current situation, sitting in a safehouse in Los Santos, waiting for a beautiful Israeli assassin who might kill him.

He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the cameras monitoring the outside of the house and the street. He didn't bother to get any of the weapons that he had in the house, she would simply take whatever weapon he tried to use and use it on him. He'd already resigned himself to the fact that if she wanted him dead, he was going to die. He'd seen her in action enough to know how good she was.

First the camera feeds went down.

A second later the power went out, drenching the room in darkness.

And then he heard her voice.

"I thought we had an agreement Lester." He couldn't see her, his eyes hadn't adjusted to the dark. He couldn't see her, but he could feel her hand around his jugular, and he could certainly feel cold metal of her silencer between his eyes.

"If you can't tell me something, you just tell me that. But you never, never, lie to me about an operation. How did you get that back door unlocked, and why did you lie about it?" Lester couldn't speak with her squeezing on his neck, so he just tried to gesture toward the figure behind her.

"Would you please release Mr. Crest?" Aliza must have recognized his voice because she immediately did as she was asked, leveling her gun at the source of the voice instead.

"What the hell are you doing here David?" Lester ignored the two assassins and focused on massaging his freshly bruised neck.

"Waiting for you, and to answer one of your questions, he lied because I told him to. I needed a way to get you over here as fast as possible. In regards to your other question, I'm sure you already know the answer to that." David looked rather calm for someone with a gun to his head, why he couldn't have just told Aliza to come over immediately was beyond Lester.

"The other guy in the house is an asset, it didn't take a genius to figure that out. I just wanted to see if Lester would lie about it. I had to know why he lied before I killed him."

"That is bullshit, Aliza, you and I both know that if you had planned to kill Lester, you wouldn't have bothered with the theatrics. I mean seriously, the cameras, the lights, are you taking your cues from low budget horror movies now?"

"It worked" Aliza gestured towards the large dark spot on the crotch of Lester's pants, "and you still haven't told me why you're here."

"I'll brief you on the situation fully once I've disposed of this." He placed a khaki vest weighted down with several bricks of semtex on Lester's bed.

"And I'm the theatrical one." Aliza arched one of her eyebrows.

"It gets the point across, I simply wanted to say, welcome back." David folded his arms.

"Thank you, and fuck you, don't yank me around when we're in the middle of operations from now on." Aliza tucked the pistol into her hand bag and turned to Lester.

"Don't ever lie to me again on an operation, I don't care if you've got a gun to you're head Lester, you know all the code words, and you know how I'm going to react if I think I've been played. If I can't trust you not to lie, I can't trust you to have my back, and I certainly can't trust you to tell me who to kill. I understand why you felt like you had to this time, but you are never to do it again, are we clear?" Aliza looked at him with an expression not of anger, but rather firm chastisement.

"Crystal."

"Good," she turned back to David, "I'll expect that briefing within a week."

David nodded, then Aliza turned to leave.

He heard her mutter to herself as she left.

"God, I need a fucking drink."

Ask and you shall receive Venom

This is a short little conclusion to the chapter that I put out earlier this week. It's mostly to give Lester some background and give you guys a little taste of another character.