(Chapter 3)Klaue

I'd left my contact info with Ivan if he needed anything. I mean, in full seriousness, I had little doubt he'd probably take a shot at Tony again. But he'd have to come to the United States to attack Tony at Nascar like last time, so I was hopeful he might contact me on his way through and I could tip him off. How had he gotten that whip thing through security last time? I had no idea.

I watched the investigation of Obadiah's murder on the news. Tony had naively opened up Obadiah's work files to the investigators where the investigators had discovered that Obadiah had kept the incriminating files of his kidnapping of Stark on his work computer. What a goddamn moron. This had made Tony, very briefly, a suspect but JARVIS was able to produce very comprehensive footage of him in his basement as I'd hoped. His only on screen comment had been, "No, I didn't do it. I didn't know anything until after he died. It's just… It's all a shock. I'm sorry, why am I answering you?" and then a shove on his way out of the police station. I winced in familiarity at the pain on his face. Sorry Tony, I thought in sympathy. I expected that Pepper was running the company, things would get a little bit better.

My biggest worry now was that the cops would arrest the wrong guy, mostly because I knew in my heart I'd let that person take the fall for me. I was too valuable a piece to go down for some silicon valley ghoul to avoid fifteen years with good behavior. Still, I had pointed them straight at the Ten Rings, so I was optimistic.

With Obadiah dead, I had to think about my plan. My initial plan had been to lie low for a long time - Not in a technological sense, but just as a personality to be ghost-like. But Anton's comment about Tony's being in the spotlight protecting him, that struck me as important. I couldn't stay in the dark and hope to be alright.

That was why I was in a Singapore gambling den flanked by two thugs for hire, to do something in the dark before sticking myself under the spotlight for keeps. I was making decent margins at a card table on a game of poker when Kalue plopped down next to me.

"So, you're looking for a game changer," he said, thumping me on the shoulder and laughing.

I resisted the urge to sigh. Klaue had a kind of charm in the movies, but his bombasity was not something I enjoyed in real life. "It's something I have a long term interest in, yes."

"I've looked you up." I nodded my head, obviously he had looked me up. "You don't have the money for what I sell."

Yet here he was, sitting next to me. "Were you hoping that I could spot you an ante then?" I drawled, offering him a handful of gambling chips.

He grabbed the chips, put them down on the table and grinned at me, "Maybe I am. How about a wager - You split that big stack you've got right there," I contained the wince, "and whichever of us runs out of money first walks away with nothing."

"I'm not here to play games. I'm here to do business. I don't gamble real stakes."

"My research says that pot's real stakes for you."

"Your research is out of date, Mr. Klaue. I'm expecting to be a very rich man by even your standards, very soon. Not a gamble, a certainty. I'm hoping to establish whether or not your game-changer is what I'm looking for when that time comes. Nothing more, nothing less. Simple, straightforward - You give me a taste, I pay you for it, someday maybe you get a bigger buyer."

He seemed to think about it and reached into his wallet and passed a debit card to the dealer, "Beat me and we'll deal, final offer."

I rolled my eyes and shifted my focus a little so I'd be able to play smoothly. Poker, with my new abilities, was boring. I was very, very good at it. It was easy to count cards, it was easy to read faces, it was just easy. There's no fun in playing a game you're too good at, but there's also no point in risking an objective for a thrill. I played the whole dumb, boring game.

As the cards started hitting the table, I did relatively well. Nobody wins every hand in poker, obviously, sometimes your cards are just bad. But the margins between Klaue and I, to say nothing of the poor rest of the table, were not close.

"You weren't doing this well early," he said, pointing at me as he discarded his hand of cards. I noted that neither of his arms looked prosthetic, but it was possible to make a prosthetic I wouldn't recognize. Still, maybe this was before he lost his arm. I only really remembered him from Black Panther, after all.

"I wasn't playing for real stakes before. I told you I didn't want to do this," I noted blandly, sliding my cards over to the dealer face down and raking in the pot.

"You're damn stinking hustler is what you are," he growled. I just shrugged and called during the round of betting. If he was going to be angry with me, he was going to be angry with me. You couldn't make people not angry with you by arguing. The rest of the table, a couple of businessmen in hand tailored suits and a couple of soldiers of fortune in black silk t-shirts and camopants, looked at us uncomfortably.

He grumbled and turned back to his hand, raising. I folded, not because I was intimidated. It just wasn't a good hand. We made it another dozen hands in before he decided to give picking at me another go. I don't know why he had to be like this. It just made everyone uncomfortable.

"I ought to walk! You sandbagged me is what you did," he shouted. Other people looked at us, the bouncers at the door stiffened.

I just smiled back serenly, "If you want to go," I said with a smile, "Go. You're disturbing the other players, Mr. Klaue."

He grunted and turned back, "Raise." he said angrily and I kept a neutral face until we turned our cards over and I got the pot.

"You must be cheating," he said after another few hard hands. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. He couldn't possibly be this petulant. He'd driven off the rest of the table twice now, only to slowly recycle them with new people who hadn't seen his displays. Klaue was probably a self-made billionaire. This establishment must have genuinely liked him to put up with it. He was an "asset" to a dozen countries, at least, and he also just generally seemed to try to be fun in a jock-y sort of way. He had to be good at getting people to like him, so it was really a question of whether he was testing me or just thought I wasn't someone who he needed to treat with respect. Well, the simple truth was that I couldn't respond force for force, so if it was the latter, there wasn't much I could do.

"He deals the cards," I said, nodding toward the poor dealer, who looked positively petrified to be involved. "I just play them."

Klaue, seemingly sensing that he might have offended the establishment, raised his hands in surrender, "Wasn't implying anything against this marvelous establishment."

His pot was really dwindling when the waitress walked up, a young-ish woman who looked like she'd steeled herself for this moment. "Sir, would you like a drink?"

"No I don't want a fucking drink!" he yelled, pounding the table, "Don't you think I'm losing enough?" The woman, to her credit, simply nodded politely and turned away.

We played a couple more hands and the thought of her walking off bothered me. I tried to ignore it. It wasn't really sensible to care. He might come around to thinking I was soft, even if he didn't decide I was easy to intimidate. But when a really bad hand popped up, I groaned and folded, grabbing a high value chip off the table. "Stake me if my hand comes up and then fold," I said to my two thugs.

"You running off?" Klaue asked, gesturing to my pile, "Can I help myself?"

"Rather you didn't," I said shortly, walking over to where the waitress was standing, the tension still visible in her shoulders. "I'm sorry for my friend, he's a big character and likes to make a scene," I began, but she seemed to be struggling to understand what I was saying. I closed my eyes and toggled focus onto spoken Mandarin, "My friend is a loudmouth," I said, "I am sorry that he yelled at you. Thank you for offering him a drink." I held up the chip, "Can you accept these as tips, or do I need to cash it?"

Her eyes widened and she smiled with relief as tension left her body, "We can take the chips," she said holding out her hand like she was afraid to grab it. I put it in her hand and smiled at her warmly.

"Paying back your confederate?" Klaue asked as I returned to the table to discover I had missed four hands and embellished his pot again.

"No, I've never met her. But I prefer that everyone I do business with has a positive impression of me, Mr. Klaue. I hope you will too."

He laughed and turned back to the table.

Eventually, mercifully, he ran out of chips to stake and show to boat. "You ought to do that professionally," he said, his tone straight back to jovial. "You really are very good."

"I like to make winning bets," I said modestly. "You said the terms were that if I won, you'd sell to me."

"I hope you'll turn out to be a winning bet, one hundred thousand for a gram."

"That's quite a markup from your usual prices," I pointed out.

"There's a bulk discount."

I shrugged and pushed all my winnings and my initial stake for the night over to him, "I'm taking a bet on you, Mr. Klaue. I trust you'll send me the address of the appropriate safety deposit box."

I walked away and beckoned my guards after me, praying silently that he wouldn't shoot me in the back on the way out. He didn't. The next day, I got a paper letter at our dropsite telling me where to pick up the vibranium and it was there. That was good.

There was no way he'd have given it to me if he knew what I intended to do with it.