Breakpoint - Chapter 10 (Patreon)

Part Ten

Harry

It had been two days since Calisto had died and Stella had not, and during that entire time, the two of them had barely spoken at all. The information that Stella had killed his only brother was still lingering in the air between them, as was Management’s taunting last message that Harry had never had a choice to begin with, and that the whole “YOU MUST CHOOSE” had been another one of the fucking mind games the place had inflicted upon them.

The final message they’d sent him had haunted him since.

YOU NEVER HAD A CHOICE.

He couldn’t imagine that the people behind the island were so cruel that they didn’t gain anything from presenting him with a choice then retracting it, so his mind had been reeling with trying to figure out what possible benefits they’d had to presenting a false choice and letting it linger on his conscience for so long.

After a bit, the answer had come to him.

They were gleaning biofeedback from whatever weird link they had established between himself, Calisto and Stella.

It wasn’t a test; it was a fucking study.

They were examining the results from how the feedback had worked, and the illusion of choice was designed to evoke panic and fear, the period of time when Calisto and Stella had been trying to convince him to spare them to evoke hope and paranoia. They wanted to put the three of them through as many emotions as they could to test the devices they’d implanted within them.

Nobody else on the island had ever encountered anything even remotely like it, and on this tropical nexus of weird, that in itself had felt strange, but now Harry understood – they were being prototyped for later people to be brought onto the island.

In the last couple of days, the amount of connection between himself and Stella had been dwindling, like whatever they had used to link the three of them was slowly dying off, whatever power source they had connected it to had fully expended and the implant passing itself was its way out of their system. By the end of the two days, when Stella tapped him on the shoulder, he only felt the sensation of his skin being touched, not her skin touching his.

“Mmm?” Harry asked as non plussed as he possibly could appear to be.

“You didn’t feel that, did you?”

“No.”

They were sitting up in the room they were sharing. Harry had been in something of a fugue state since Calisto’s death. He’d barely eaten anything, slept far more than he should’ve, had trouble focusing, and even avoided the other members of Scarab, although he’d heard Stella filling in Len about what had happened with Calisto at one point outside of the apartment when they both thought he was sleeping. Len had wanted to storm in and shake Harry from his stupor; Stella had begged him not to. He’d relented, allowing that maybe some time for the shock to pass would be good for him.

‘What the fuck does Len know about this level of fucked up?’ Harry had thought, although he’d done his best to just drift to sleep.

“I think the link is entirely broken,” she said to him, placing her hand on his shoulder. “You want to talk about it?”

“Not especially.”

“Well, I want to talk about it, and I think you need to snap out of this funk that you’re in,” Stella said. “And we can talk about the elephant in the room. Apparently I killed your brother.”

“Apparently?” Harry said, whipping his head to look at her with a sneer, snapped out of his fugue with a startle. “You don’t know?”

“No! No, Harry! I don’t know!” she shouted in exasperation. “I’ve been in nearly a hundred firefights in my lifetime. Most of the time, I haven’t stopped and asked for names, or even to check if they’re dead or just wounded! I’ve been trying to get my own ass to safety, and a lot of times, that’s much harder than expected. In our line of work, we leave bodies in our wake! It happens! That’s just part of who we are and what we do! It wasn’t personal! I don’t know where I did it, or what the circumstances were, but it’s likely either your brother was shooting at me, or he was in the way of me trying to do my job. I don’t like to leave a lot of bodies on the floor whenever I can help it, but that’s the nature of our business, Harry!”

He let out a heavy breath. “I rarely leave hats on the ground, Stella, because what we do is covert operations. Leaving bodies in the wake contradicts the whole covert part of that. Get in, get it done, get out. That’s the job. Putting bodies in graves means somewhere along the way, somebody fucked up.” He looked down at his feet, trying to focus. “Now, I know it’s the field, that shit breaks off from time to time, but you have to understand, knowing that my brother’s dead because someone fucked up, and that you pulled the trigger, that’s hard.”

“But that’s just it, Harry!” Stella said, her voice extremely frustrated. “I don’t know that I did pull the trigger! Or even that he was shot to death! All I know is that’s what the people who run this place say happened, and I wouldn’t trust them to tell me that water is wet. We can’t believe anything anyone tells us in here!”

“Maybe I don’t believe you then!” Harry countered. “Maybe I can’t! Maybe you know exactly who my brother was, and you killed him with your bare hands because someone in some office told you to, and you never stopped to think that he was a person with a family!”

“I always think about them!” she finally shouted, throwing her hands up in the air. “I think about all the people who might’ve gotten caught up in my wake, about all those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think about the people who might have died because of what I had to do, and all the people I’ve left without a father, a brother, a son, a daughter, a sister or a mother, but I have to do what I have to do, so I try to remember that they would’ve done the same to me given half a chance, and that the business we’re in, the stakes are too fucking high for us to be dicking around!”

The two of them sat in quiet silence for a very long moment before Harry leaned back and laid down on the center of the bed, looking up at the slowly spinning ceiling fan above them. “We’re quite the pair, aren’t we?” He reached up and wiped his eyes dry. “You’re entirely correct. You are. We don’t know, neither of us, that you had anything at all to do with my brother’s death. We just know that someone’s claiming that you did. And I don’t know any way that we’d ever really be able to answer that question, so… the only way out is through. Let’s start with a few key details that you and I can share about one another, and maybe we’ll learn a little something, yeah? I truly was with Five, but I do know exactly what it was that resulted in me leaving their employ. I’m just not fond of talking about it.”

“What was that then?” she said, laying down next to him on the bed. While he was looking up at the spinning fan, she was looking over at him.

“Our betters, those in management, they wanted us to make something go away by pinning it on someone who had nothing to do with the problem, and I didn’t want to play ball.”

“Why not?”

“Because they weren’t the actual perpetrators, were they?” Harry grumbled. “They were just a couple of foreigners that had snuck into the country illegally and were easy enough to use as patsies. Scapegoats meant Five could seem to have had arrested someone for a bus bomb that killed four people. But we knew it wasn’t them, because we had footage of them getting on and off the bus, and they were never even close to the part of the bus the bomb went off on. Still, Downing Street wanted someone to pin it on, so our betters decided these people would have to do. And that I could not stomach. That’s why I left Five.”

“Where did you go after that?” she asked.

He waggled a finger. “Not the way the game is played, Stella. Now you.”

She sighed, smoothing her hand over his chest.  “I told you I left Wildneedle because their quartermaster wouldn’t quit hitting on me, but that I didn’t remember who I’d gone to work with afterwards. I guess that was somewhat of a lie. It wasn’t then, but it would be if I stuck to it. I didn’t remember who I was working for when I was abducted when we were talking about it the first time, but I do remember now.” She inhaled a deep breath and then slowly let it out again. “I was working for NovaLantern Associates.”

Harry tensed up a little bit. “That’s not a name you forget lightly.”

“No,” she agreed, sliding one of her legs over his. “No, it very much is not. But somehow I did, and that’s what has been rolling around in my head for the last couple of days. I don’t remember how I started working for them, but I know I wasn’t particularly happy over there. They were… needlessly cold, even for mercenaries.”

“That’s exactly what their reputation paints them as,” Harry said. “They’re all about getting the job done and not giving a damn for what’s left in their wake. I’ve heard talk that they poisoned an entire village just to kill one man who was in hiding there. That true?”

“You mean the Berenger Plan?” she said, moving her leg back and forth atop his. “Yeah, it was true. They wanted to ensure a terrorist hiding out in a village would get killed, so they poisoned the well they were all using to make sure they got him. Ended up killing close to a hundred people, and yes, I’m sure some of the people there were harboring the guy willingly, but a lot of them were just innocent collateral. I’m not fond of that approach, but the money is great, and I couldn’t stay with NIS, so I had to find some place to apply my skills somewhere. The job market isn’t exactly booming for ex-spies, so when you get an offer that can keep you fed, clothed and housed, and not locked up somewhere. Spy life is complicated.”

“What now?”

She sighed a little bit. “Look, I know you don’t know me from anyone. You’ve got allies in here. You’ve got friends and teammates, and I don’t have shit like that, so I’d like to hitch my horse to your wagon, if that’s okay.” She laughed a little bit. “I can throw in an offer for regular sex if that’ll be enough to tip the scales in my favor. Although, if I’m honest, I’m throwing that offer in for my own interests as well. While I was trying to convince you to choose me to live, I rather got to like the intimacy we had. You’re actually quite a good fuck. Never thought a posh English geezer would be my type but—”

“I’m not a geezer, and I’m certainly not posh…” Harry laughed. “I got into the armed forces to dodge my sketchy childhood and my criminal record.”

Stella grinned, moving to straddle him, lightly banging her fists against his chest. “You can’t just lob a hand grenade into a conversation like that and then try and walk it back or pretend like you didn’t say it. What’s on your criminal record?”

“Vehicular theft, criminal damage with a vehicle, assault… I’d love to say it was just sort of a teenage prank, but I was described as remorseless for my crimes, and when asked to explain myself, I declined, so they sort of threw the book at me,” Harry grumbled.

“Why wouldn’t you explain yourself?”

“Because the fuzz and the magistrate were on the same page and wanted to make an example out of me. They had a stake in the matter and would’ve considered my grievances to be ‘petty’ and ‘not measuring up to the amount of retribution’ that I took. Not that he should’ve been in a position to make that call. The man in the robe should’ve recused himself, let someone without chips in the game review it all, but instead, he decided he wanted to see me punished more than he wanted to do the right thing,” Harry said. “He could’ve done the right thing, could’ve recused himself from the case, and then the entire trajectory of my life would’ve been reshaped in one singular moment, but instead, the die was cast, and I was considered a career criminal from then on out. I figured, if I’m going to have these skills, and if I’m going to need to apply them, I figured the Armed Forces would be the place to start.”

“And was it?”

“Was it, bollocks,” Harry scoffed. “Yeah, I could use me skills for Queen and Country and all that, but all the lads I was serving with never let me forget that I was, in their eyes, their pet villain, the one who’d always take the fall for the mistakes, whether I’d done them or not. I was the guy they liked to carve up to pin stuff on, so I had to make extra certain nothing stuck to me. One criminal act my entire young life, but it was the SAS that taught me to think and act like a proper criminal. Because before I got there, my one ‘crime’ I’d done I made no attempts to hide or conceal, but once I got into the SAS, I had to learn how to cover up everything. Once there were other people looking at me to do things, I had to figure out how to become a proper troublemaker. After a couple of years of all that, I knew I didn’t want to hang around letting the army get their talons too deep into me, so I shifted and went to work for MI-5. I figured what are the odds of spies being as much of tossers as soldiers.”

“Just about the same, isn’t it?” Stella joked.

“Mmmm, except they’re wearing much more expensive clothing and nobody’s sharing a rack,” Harry said. “A bit less colorful language, maybe, but at the end of the day, it’s still people causing trouble for everybody else and claiming they’re doing it for the greater good. But the people are still fundamentally lazy, and they’ll still look for shortcuts to get out of doing their bloody job. Wrong people, wrong place, wrong time. That was why I left 5. Nobody could be bothered to fucking get it right the first time.”

“I told you I’m with NovaLantern, but you didn’t mention who you’re with now.”

Harry inhaled a breath, kept it inside for as long as it took him to make a decision on how far to trust this woman, then let it out. “We’re a very elite, very specialized, very small agency. We’re called The Scarab Group. We take on very select deployments, things that require not only our selection of skillsets but our particular flourish of disciplines. We’re also selective in that we won’t take deployments or missions that we don’t feel comfortable with. Oh, we’ll still do assassinations, regime changes and the like, but we need to be convinced the cause is just and noble, otherwise we’ll just pass.”

“What, like the A-Team?” she giggled. “’I do so love it when a plan is coming together’ and all that? Are you especially difficult to locate?”

“We do alright,” he said, smiling up at her. “Partners then?”

“For now,” she said, leaning down to kiss him, her hands spreading out along his chest. “But we agree to let the other know if interests have changed before anything serious.”

“Naturally,” he said, as he felt her starting to grind her hips down against his.

He didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her, but for now, he needed allies.

Len

The longer they were on the island, the less answers they seemed to get. Each member of Scarab had tried to make a map of what they knew of the island, and yet none of them could be considered at all reliable with one exception – the borders of Neontown and all the contents within never seemed to change. They were as reliable as taxes.

Once a person stepped foot outside of Neontown, though, nothing was fixed, nothing was set. There were a few major features, such as the impenetrable door on the side of a mountain, that were generally around 50-60% of the time, but anything else? It felt like there were at least two dozen islands wrapped around them, and no reliable way to navigate them, or to know which one a person was going to walk into until they set foot outside of the safe borders of Neontown.

So instead of a map, they’d been building a catalog instead, trying to identify what features were next to which others. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something, and something was definitely better than nothing when there wasn’t a whole lot else to keep busy with.

The headcount for the island was up to eighty, with a few minor fluctuations here and there. But as with all delivery days, there was a chance for new prisoners (or jail keepers) to arrive with the shipment of supplies. Len had decided to go out with Tex and Paulina (Tex’s girlfriend, who had surprisingly been with him consistently since their arrival, despite Tex’s insistence that he went through partners like phases of the moon) out on the speedboat.

“Is that the plane?” Len said, pointing off in the distance. “You ever think about trying to send them a message, flag them down or even get on board?”

Tex scoffed. “How the hell do you think we could get on board? They don’t even really slow down,” he said. “Plus, they’re never low enough, even if you could jury rig some kind of harpoon with a rope attached to it. Not that I think we got enough rope on the island to make it work. Nah, put it out of your head. Pretty quick, they’re just gonna start chucking things out of the back of that thing, and most of the time, we’re just picking up the pieces.”

True to Tex’s word, while the plane descended a little bit, it certainly didn’t decelerate, and eventually boxes began vomiting from the backside of the plane, little parachutes attached to each crate as they tumbled down from the sky and fell into the water, pontoons inflating on impact to keep the boxes from sinking.

Tex’s boat had a tow barge behind it, so they couldn’t move too fast, but all said and done, there were about a dozen crates or so, and as they rained upon the ocean, he kept moving the boat from one to another as Paulia used a pole with a loop on it to drag them back over to the barge, pulling them up and locking them in place on the barge before moving on to the next one.

In that moment, Len wished they still had someone on the outside, because he’d been thinking that all the supplies being dropped off regularly could be a thing they might have been able to try and track, although he had to wonder how many layers of obfuscation they were running things through to get supplies to the island without anyone realizing it.

Overall, he thought they must’ve been running their operation out of several locations, with no one consistent point, otherwise they would’ve been easier to track. From a purely operational point of view, the entire structure of everything, he had to admit, was rather brilliant. They’d not been able to find any point to find the island other than getting themselves caught for it, so Scarab had done the most ridiculous thing they could possibly think of…

…they’d put up a bounty for their own capture.

Anonymously, of course, but the money was through a renown fixer, and the cash was in escrow, so as each of them was captured, a chunk of the cash was taken. And if they wanted to get their money back, they’d have to figure out who was running the island, why and how.

Len’s head was focusing on running the permutations when he realized there was one final thing being thrown out of the back of the airplane – another raft with two people strapped into it. He couldn’t see any details about them from a distance, but he realized this was exactly how he’d come in, and now he could get a chance to see if there were any details that he’d missed that he might pick up from the other side. But the plane was unmarked, there weren’t any telltale signs that could’ve given any insight as to where it was coming from or heading to.

And while he’d hoped not to let anyone see him looking, he felt Tex tapping him on the shoulder. “There’s not much to pick up there, amigo, but if you want to look at that plane until it’s out of sight, I don’t rightly blame you. Hasn’t done me a lick of good, but you ain’t me, and I wouldn’t trust me none neither, was I you.”

“Oh, I trust you plenty, Tex,” Len said. “But it never hurts to verify, to check on things for myself, and see if maybe there’s something you overlooked.”

“I’ve got good eyes, cowboy, but you want a second opinion, that’s all yours to have. Take a look and see if you see anything I don’t.”

“I didn’t, but I just wanted to look,” Len sighed. “Was what you did with me the standard protocol for newcomers?”

“Pretty much,” Tex said as he steered the boat over towards where the life raft had parachuted onto the water. Getting over to it quickly was important, although it was clear that the two people on the raft knew enough to be pulling in the parachute onto the raft itself, so it wouldn’t drag the boat down or get caught in the currents and pull it away. “We play each one as they lie, but for the most part, it’s just get’em back to the island, get’em squared away in some room, get’em their stuff and let’em do their thing.”

Len nodded and the boat whipped closer, which let him get a good look at the two people on the raft, and to his surprise, he recognized one of the two. There was a man and a woman, the woman with deep black skin, hair cropped incredibly tightly, and a gaze that looked like it was going to rip all of them in two, even though Len was pretty sure he’d never seen her before in his life. She was dressed in a black jumpsuit, similar to the one he’d worn when he arrived. But her face was a complete unknown to him.

The man, however, was someone who’d worked for the CIA, although Len had never gotten a name from him beyond ‘Lynch.’ He was a rather unassuming man, late thirties, dirty brown hair, completely forgettable face, fit without showing off, but there was something about the man’s sunken green eyes that had left an impression on Len. That and the fact that the last time he’d seen Lynch, Lynch was deciding to leave Len behind, surrounded by hostiles, while Lynch took off safely and flew away from the problem.

Lynch had left Len to die.

The man looked annoyed to see Len, as if him not following through with dying had been a personal affront to him. “Jesus, John, why can’t you fucking expire like everyone else whose time has passed?” Lynch said, shaking his head.

“I dunno, Lynch, but I expected company cockroaches like you to be harder for these people to get than this, and yet, here you are, just like the rest of us,” Len said as they helped the two of them up and onto the speedboat. “If I’d have known it was you, I’d have just left you out here to drown, if it was up to me.”

“Is it up to you, though?”

“It’s not up to anybody here, as far as we know,” Tex said. “I’m Tex, and I always come out and get everyone they drop off.”

“And what happens if you don’t come out and get people when they’re dropped off?” Lynch asked, anger clear in his voice.

“I haven’t chosen to find out,” Tex chuckled. “Considering how easily they’re willing to kill people off at the drop of a hat, figured my best bet is to be useful and stay out of folks way.”

That answer didn’t seem to satisfy Lynch, so he moved on to his next question almost immediately. “Where do I get a gun?”

“You don’t. No firearms anywhere on the island. That’s the first thing you’re going to have to get used to.”

“What’s the second?”

“No locks on any doors,” Len said, a smug grin on his face, knowing exactly how much that was going to annoy Lynch, who’d always been a super paranoid twitchy little fuck. “That means you’d better get used to sleeping with one eye open.”

“Why’s that, John? You got it in for me?”

Len laughed, rolling his eyes. “You don’t need my help in getting yourself killed, Lynch. I’m sure over half the people on this island have got beef with the CIA in one form or another. And you personally have never been much in the way of looking after your people, unless there was something in it for you. For a spy who’s supposed to be cultivating assets, you certainly threw them away like you only ever had one use for them.”

“Use an assets too much, too long, and they’re gonna burn you, John. They’re gonna figure out how to feed you bad intel and then you’re up shit creek without a fucking paddle, so I never give them that long. Get as much as you can then cut’em loose and let the bad guys clean up your mess for you. Speaking of which, how the hell did you get out of that shit sandwich I left you in the middle of?”

“I’ve always been smarter and more resourceful than you, Lynch, so I don’t know why you’re surprised that I was able to see a way out of your little deathtrap.”

Lynch grinned and, in that moment, Len realized he’d accidentally given something up. “It wasn’t anything I planned, John; I just took advantage of a situation that’d gone tits up to gain a leg up and remove a burr from my shoe, that burr being you. But you’ve got your own crew now, so you can stand on the moral high ground and pretend you’re better than all of us all you want.”

The speedboat started to zip back towards the island, dragging the cargo with it as the new woman leaned over to tap Len on the shoulder. “You’re Len, right?” Len nodded in response.

“I’m supposed to give you a letter from management,” she said, her voice thick with an African accent from a region he couldn’t place. “But don’t take me as management, okay?”

“Sure.”

She opened a pocket on her jumpsuit and reached in to pull out an envelope within a sealed plastic bag. “When they ask, tell them I did what I was told.”

Len opened the bag and took the envelope out from within it before opening it to read it. It was typed, as if by an old typewriter, and he had to read the words several times, trying to understand.

MIRA CAN LEAVE THE ISLAND IF SHE AGREES TO FORGET YOU FOREVER.

He wanted her to be safe, but safe without him? That wasn’t what he wanted. But he was going to need to tell her one way or the other.