Breakpoint - Part Three

Part Three

Len

Waking up with a surprise guest wasn't something he'd ever really get used to, although he supposed in this particular case, there was more than ample reason why she'd been able to sneak past his usual self-defense techniques while he was sleeping. She'd had a decent amount of practice at it. Hell, he'd sort of taught her how to do it.

He hadn't even opened his eyes yet, but he recognized that gentle touch along his belly, fingers grazing before slowly curling around the length of his cock, starting to stroke it tenderly, a soft giggle rippling through the air right alongside his ear.

“No matter how much you study sounds of yourself sleeping in an attempt to mimic it, John, I'm always going to be able to tell the difference,” that familiar voice said to him, even going so far as to call him by his real first name, although she still didn't know his surname. (Which, to be fair, basically no one did. A secret that multiple knew wasn't really a secret.) And he knew her real first name as well. Hell, she was part of the reason he'd even decided to do this madcap adventure, as he suspected she might have been on the island after she'd gone missing.

“I didn't know you were you for sure until I heard your voice,” Len said with a sly smile. “But I'm very glad you're you, Mira.” He opened his eyes and saw her face off to the side of him, her naked body curled up against his, a little bit older, certainly, no worse for the wear.

“No 'how you've been, Mira?' or 'what happened to you, Mira?' or 'why the fuck did you up and disappear on me without any warning, Mira?' None of that?”

Len grinned, rolling his eyes. “I'm guessing you got taken, much like I did, and brought here. In fact, I'm willing to bet that you were taken when you ran out to get coffee that last morning we were together. Because I know that you were. I saw it on cameras, but too late to be able to do anything about it. That's how I knew you were abducted.”

She nodded. “I was. I can remember that much, even if a lot of the memories are sort of jumbled together. How long ago was that?”

“Well, I don't know for certain how long it was between my abduction and my arrival here, but best guess? About six months or so.”

“Yeah, that tracks with about how long I've been here, give or take a week or two,” she sighed, not lifting her hand off his cock, still leisurely stroking it. “I'm sorry I left you that morning, but you know me and my need for caffeine in the morning.”

It was good to see her again. While he didn't know her real last name, he knew her real first name – Mira – and that was enough for two spies to forge a relationship of sorts. Mira was either working for, or had worked for, the Mossad, the Israeli Special Forces and Intelligence Agency, although her loyalty to her country hadn't always been reliable. She'd told him that she was loyal to a nation, not to a government, because governments habitually let people down when they need them the most, and nations made a point never to promise anyone anything.

From the moment they'd first met, he'd had to work hard to keep his emotions in check. They'd both been in the middle of a firefight in Iran, allies by opportunity and necessity but not planning, each of them trying to get out of the same building with entirely different (but not conflicting) objectives. Still, they'd recognized each other as a friendly, and instead of shooting each other, they'd teamed up to get not only out of the building, but out of the block and out of the city, the adrenaline rushing the entire time. It was a meet-cute unlike any other.

Mira was in her mid-thirties, with skin a light shade of olive tan, her brown hair having blistered into blonde from overexposure to the sun. She was a tiny slip of a woman, barely an inch over five foot, slender with small breasts and a pert ass, never as curvy as she would've liked to be, but she also just couldn't bring herself to eat more than her fair share. She'd bitched at Len about how small her tits were a number of times and he'd just done his best to constantly reassure her that she was attractive to him, and that she just needed to be satisfied with who she was. She was from Jerusalem, or at least she'd told him that she was, if that was to be believed. But she was definitely Israeli, and worked for the Mossad, although over the time of their relationship, she'd been considering breaking away and being independent, like she thought Len was. He'd actually been considering bringing her to meet the team on the morning she'd up and disappeared.

They'd been what could only be described as 'dating' for about five months when she'd simply vanished one morning. Len, as paranoid as he was, had immediately considered the option that he'd been played, that Mira had been a honey trap to lure him in and get him to betray the confidence of his friends. But he was him and caution wasn't just a watchword, it was a way of life. The more he reviewed all their exchanges in his head, however, the less and less likely that she'd been playing him had seemed. While she'd been interested in him, she'd also been steeped in tradecraft as much as he had, and so they'd both known better than to ask personal or intimate questions, or about jobs that either of them had been involved in. He'd definitely been on high guard the first time they'd hooked up, but as the months had passed, it had been nice to be able to talk to someone about the challenges of their particular line of work without getting into the specifics. She was the same way, treating him with a sort of open candor that had surprised him, but also impressed him with how good she was at obfuscating details, making sure he wouldn't know any operational details about anything she was talking about. They could relate in the generals without compromising anything for specifics.

They had shared a wonderful date night – a late dinner in Rome before walking the streets until the moon was high in the sky, then some of the most intense sex he'd ever had. He'd even fallen asleep without much effort, and then in the morning, she'd just been gone. He'd suspected she'd headed off for a cup of cappuccino, one of her usual vices, and he wondered initially if she'd just gotten distracted. It wasn't typical of her, but for a spy, Mira could sometimes be drawn in by a particularly shiny object or a ridiculously cute pair of shoes. It was so wonderfully normal of her that he couldn't fault her for it.

But the afternoon came and went and she had not returned. And, more importantly, she had left several of her things behind, things she would not have left if she'd intended to be gone for long. And when night fell again, then he'd started to get worried.

It had taken him canvassing much of the next day, but eventually he found security camera footage of Mira having a bag thrown over her head and a tazer jammed into her ribs, before her unconscious body was loaded into the side of a van, which drove off into the streets of Rome. It all happened within a matter of seconds, so fast that none of the people on the streets even took notice of it, as the van was driving off before it registered in their brains that something odd might have just transpired. Shock and awe, baby; shock and awe. Whoever the abduction team was, they were good.

And, of course, Len suspected that the Mossad's first thought would be that he was responsible for her disappearance, so he'd forwarded the footage on to a contact he still had there, informing them that she had been taken but he didn't know by who. He'd also gathered up all the things she'd left in their hotel room – things he knew were important and things he knew weren't and some things that he thought could go either way – and then had them sent to the Israeli embassy.

He knew they'd have a lot of questions he couldn't answer, so he'd made sure to disappear as quickly as he could. His friend in the Mossad had understood, and had thanked him for returning all of her working gear along with the video of her abduction. The return of her things – which he was certain also included some operational information concealed and encrypted somewhere – seemed buy him a little bit of goodwill. It sounded like they didn't hold him accountable, but if they had, they wouldn't have wanted him to know that, and they would've sounded like they believed him anyway. They were going to look into it, they assured him, not that he fully believed them. That was par for the course, though.

No spy truly completely bought into anything another spy ever told them.

The trail on where she'd been taken had gone cold almost immediately, but as he started to investigate, he'd discovered that her abduction hadn't been an isolated incident. In fact, someone was starting to abduct the world's espionage agents, and without respect for country or cause. There were agents strangely missing from all of the world's major spy agencies, usually kidnapped in public and then made to disappear, and that was the element that confused everyone the most.

At first, the thought was that they were being killed and the bodies were being disposed of somewhere nobody could find them, Al Capone style. But somebody had caught footage of one of the missing spies – a Soviet FSB agent named Gosha – being loaded onto a plane and flown out of Turkey for destinations unknown, and while he was drugged and unconscious, he was very much alive. The footage had shown him hooked up to a couple of IVs, one in each arm, with a gag in his mouth and a blindfold over his eyes. But Gosha had a very distinct tattoo done in an H.R. Geiger style on his shoulder that was visible in the footage, and there was no mistaking that it was him. It had been picked up in the background of some news footage being shot for completely unrelated reasons at the airport in Turkey, and some brand new analysis software had flagged it before any human eyes had even noticed it.

With the discovery of Gosha's abduction, suddenly everyone was taking The Great Spynapping much more seriously because now they knew for a fact it wasn't just spies killing spies and business as usual across the industry.

It had become the great riddle of the spy agencies over the last year, although there were indications that it had been going on far longer than that, and simply nobody had considered them as 'missing' and instead written them off as 'killed in action.'

So Len and the rest of Scarab had made the decision that they would get abducted and they would figure out what the hell was going on, even before someone had contracted them to locate one of the missing spies specifically. It hadn't been a great plan. Hell, it hadn't even been much of a plan, but they'd done some initial prepwork and thought some things out. He'd even leveled with the team about Mira, his feelings for her and her abduction. That had been met with, understandably, a certain level of distrust and suspicion, but the team was nothing if not thorough, and they'd done as much of their homework as they could beforehand, not just about Mira, but about all the various spies that had been reported missing or killed for the last few years, a tricky task for intel gathering in the best of circumstances, something they certainly were not in now, what with Putin threatening to go rampaging all over Eastern Europe, 'reclaiming' lost Russian lands that had never really belonged to them in the first place.

All of it had finally come to a head when Len himself had been abducted, although he'd been the second member of the team to do so, with Rin having been taken slightly before he was. They'd happened so quickly after one another that they'd only just realized Rin had been taken a day or so before they got Len himself. It had led him, them, all to here.

Now, with Mira in bed next to him, he hoped he could finally start to get some answers. He hoped she would remember more about the abduction than he did, because for him, that entire area was complete and total blank. “What the hell happened, Mira?”

She frowned a little bit. “I wish I could tell you. You know everybody on the island has got some screwy wiring, so I can't even tell you how much I've got floating around in my head that's right, or things that have been put in there. There's giant gaps, holes big enough to fly a 747 through. I remember you, I remember us, I remember thinking about leaving the Mossad, but I can't remember where I grew up. I can't remember what my parents look like. I can't remember who I lost my virginity to, or where I went to school, or even if I have brothers or sisters.” She drew in a sharp breath, steeling herself up a bit. “It's like an entire part of me has been taken away from me, and put behind some kind of wall. And there are some things rolling around in there that feel like they happened to someone else, not to me. I know it doesn't make but that's how it feels, like it's not my memory and that I'm seeing something that happened to someone else somewhere else. Memories where people are speaking Russian, French, Spanish... memories where I'm a man. They're only stray fragments, but it hurts to try and think about them for too long. It's like trying to catch a soap bubble – if I get too close, it'll pop and I'll have lost it.”

He let out a soft breath. “Do you remember what we were talking about the night before you disappeared?”

“How I was thinking about joining up with whatever madness you were involved in?” she said with a kind glance. “That what you and I share was more important than any country to me, and that I was willing to go rogue with you? Of course I still remember that. We spent hours going around and around about whether or not we'd ever be able to trust each other, and what it would take for us to get over the spy life and just be... ourselves. But I remember you starting to come around to the idea of me joining your little merry band of rebels after I pointed out that if you could leave your country's employ, why couldn't I leave mine as well? What's strange is that I can't remember where we were when we were having that conversation.”

“Rome,” he told her, and she suddenly winced, as if a spike of migraine headache had flashed across her frontal lobe, her hands clutched to her temples in sharp agony, although it seemed like the moment passed as quickly as it had arrived, a sudden bolt of anguish before retreating back into the darkness of her mind. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she wheezed, obviously not but trying to convince herself that she was. “It's... it's just like that was a piece of information I didn't have, and shoving it back into my brain was like screwing a lightbulb into a turned on socket. Smarted a bit, but the pain's fading now. I can remember a bit more about that day – where we were, the hotel we stayed at, the way the bellhop kept checking out my ass in that cute little skirt I had on...”

“Mira, focus. You know anything about the people who took us? Who they work for? What side they're on?”

“Jesus, John, I barely got a look at any of them,” she said, shaking her head. “I've spent most of my adult life checking for blindspots and they hit me from one I never saw coming. We should be less concerned with them and more concerned with surviving this place, because it's fucking insane.” She was slowly rubbing one of her thighs along his, threatening to slip up atop him at any moment. “I do feel a lot better knowing you're here.”

“What's so insane about this place?” Len asked. “Sure it's a little odd with everyone just volunteering to do work, but to me it feels like a sort of logical extension of a bunch of people doing what they need to to survive.”

“Survive,” she said. “Yes, that's my point, John. Why do they give a shit about any of us surviving, when we're clearly prisoners? Why not just kill us? Are they trying to learn something from us, and if so, why fuck with our memories? They may well have deleted from our skulls the very thing they wanted to get out of us!”

“I don't think they know what they've taken out of us and what they haven't, Mira, so they're still trying to figure out how this process of theirs works and what it is and isn't capable of,” he told her. “But I know that at least some of the people responsible for our abductions are here on the island. They dispatched someone last night to try and glean any information she could from me, and when she failed to get as much as they wanted, they had her killed.”

“What was her name?”

“She said her name was Sally.”

Mira drew in a sharp breath, then nodded. “I guess that makes sense. Sally's always been extremely eager to please, to ingratiate herself into any group of people, and because she was always so forward about trying to get into the cliques, nobody trusted her, and she really couldn't learn anything. Maybe you batch of newcomers yesterday were her last chance. I probably should've been paying more attention to her – where she went, who she talked to, that sort of thing – but I've been trying to keep a low profile and just not get noticed anywhere I went for fear of being recognized.” She laughed, a bitter and angry note that Len had heard before, but only when she was truly frustrated to the point of being unable to hide it. “You have no idea how much the idea of no locks on any doors will weigh on you until you've spent a few months dealing with it, knowing there really isn't any place that's completely safe. Besides, there's something fundamentally wrong about this place.”

Len paused and looked at her odd for a moment. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“You haven't noticed it yet, but the layout... it moves from time to time...” It didn't sound like Mira for a moment, the fear and uncertainty, as if she wasn't comfortable bringing it up with him, but that she had to tell someone, and if not him, then who?

“You must just be forgetting things.”

“I'm not forgetting things, John,” she said to him, her hand clinging to his shoulder, looking deep into his eyes. “I've gotten up some mornings and the building I was in was in a different part of the island. The place I was staying in had moved, okay? I know it sounds fucking mental, but I'm tellingyou that the room I was in had been on the edge of the village when I went to bed and I woke up it was practically next to the fucking bar. All my clothes, everything was exactly where I'd left it when I went to bed except for the actual fucking roomwe were in. I know how it sounds, but you need to believe me when I tell you this – the place is definitely off.”

“Okay, Mira, okay... I believe you, alright?” he said, because the haunted look in her eyes convinced him that whatever had actually happened to her, she believed that the room she'd been in had truly moved, and she was one of the smartest people he'd ever met, so as unlikely as he found the idea of teleporting rooms and relocating sections, he had to give it genuine consideration. “Do you know how?”

“No, I don't fucking know how, John,” she said, letting out a slow breath. “Don't you think I've been looking into it? It doesn't make any goddamn sense, it doesn't happen with any sense or reason, but it does happen, and a few other people here on the island have seen it too.”

“I'll keep an eye out for it Mira, but there's a lot to keep track of here on the island.”

“You don't know the half of it,” she grumbled. “But you will. Sooner or later, you will.”

After that, they had a proper reunion. She climbed atop of him and pushed him deep into the bed as she shoved her cunt down onto his cock slowly and methodically, reveling in the feeling of their bodies pressed up against one another again for the first time in a long time. They fell together like familiar halves of the same whole, his shaft fitting perfectly into her slot, like they were made for one another. In sharp contrast to how his time with Sally had been, Mira paid close attention to his breathing, measuring it with her lips ever so slightly in between kisses, setting a tempo that was like a dance, ebbing and flowing, rising and falling, rushing then relaxing, each motion completely unrehearsed and yet totally natural and authentic.

They even came together.

Together, they weren't spies – just a couple of old lovers reunited after a long absence.

It had been just like the first time.

While he felt confident she was who she said she was, and that she had gotten there how she'd said she'd gotten there, that little voice in the back of his mind reminded him once more that there were only two people he could trust with complete certainty in this world. The first was himself; the second wasn't her.

A few hours later, they'd gotten up and taken a shower together, only to have another go at each other beneath the falling water. Making up for lost time.

Somewhere along the way, Len decided he was going to have to start compartmentalizing people on the island. Rin and the rest of the Scarab would be the people he would trust with his life. He  wouldn't quite be ready to put Mira in that category yet, but she was close. She would be in the category of 'very strong allies' he felt he could count on. Then there were the neutrals, people like Tex, who seemed like they weren't likely be part of Management or even Staff. Then there would be people who might be Staff or Management. There'd been a couple of those on the plane with him on the way in. Then there were the wildcards, and fuck all if it didn't seem like there were a shitload of those he'd have to contend with.

This had been the central problem they'd spent the most time preparing for, and even after a month or so of planning, they'd still be lacking for any good ideas, although they did have a shitload of bad ones, and Len supposed that was better than nothing.

He suspected that the rest of the team still wasn't happy about it, but figured they would sort things out as best as they could until either they found the island or the island found them.

For now, he needed to start exploring, and now he at least had someone with a bit of time spent with boots on the ground, so he and Mira headed out, with Len ready for just about anything.

Harry

If there was one element of Len's plan that Harry especially hated, it was all of it.

Three months ago when they'd taken the contract to find and understand where all these missing spies were going, all of their research had hit nothing but dead ends, and in a particularly frightening way. The foursome that made up Scarab liked to think of themselves as incredibly good at their job, and their inability to turn up almost any leads had all of them a little bit put off. The abduction of Gosha had been the biggest break they'd had since they'd started, and it turned into dead ends much faster than anyone had expected.

The plane Gosha had been taken on had been shot down over the ocean, and the only other person who'd been visible in the footage captured accidentally – a former member of the Mexican High Command GAFE named Nieto – had turned up dead the day after the footage had hit the intelligence community.

No paper trail, nobody who could describe anybody, nothing caught on any cameras. Everything felt like it was done through cutouts, and the moment they thought they had a description of someone who might have had something to do with one of the abductions, that person would be a dead body before anyone could find them.

Harry was the most recent addition to Scarab, having only been with the team for a couple of years, unlike Mick, who'd been with Len since the unit was founded several years ago. As such, he still felt like there was a bit of hazing going on now and again. They'd liked to play practical jokes on him every now and then. But even with all of that, he still felt like very much a part of a family, even if he was habitually the 'f'ing new guy.'

With Rin and Len both having been abducted, it meant either he or Mick were next, and so the two of them had banded together, making it look as much as they could that they didn't want to get taken, and that they were hot on the trail of whoever had taken them.

That meant one of them stayed awake while the other one was sleeping, and that they were always looking out for each other. It meant being on guard at all times, ever alert, never once wavering in the high alert sort of–

–OW.–

Harry reached up to try and pull the dart from his neck, but he was unconscious before his fingers even touched the feathers of it.

Right before he blacked out, he decided that he wasn't going to let Mick give him any shit over this when he saw him next.

If he saw him next.