Corrupting Power
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Breakpoint - Part Nine
🕑 Added 2023-05-27 03:55:56 +0000 UTCPart Nine
Mick
There were a lot of things Mick had been prepared for when Len had come to him and pitched the gig of them finding and breaking this mystical, mythical island prison for spies and covert operatives, but to find his wife, alive and unharmed, certainly wasn’t one of them.
Len had wanted to wait until the woman woke up to enter the apartment that they’d put her in, but Mick refused to wait. The time for waiting was long, long past. He’d done everything he could’ve with his wife’s absence that he could’ve. He’d gone through all the stages of grief, lingering in denial perhaps a bit longer than he’d probably should’ve (with a dash of alcoholism on the side, because why not), specifically because her body had never been found, but that was the life of a spy – one day, you were a person and the next day you just weren’t, and no one would ever know where you’d gone or why. The one thing he hadn’t done with her absence was deny it.
And son of a bitch, he thought to himself, that’s her laying there in bed, looking just like I remember her on the day she vanished. Six years had been far kinder to her than it had to him, and as much as he wanted to shake her awake, to ask every question that had been rattling around in his head for the last six years, his first thought was that she looked tired, clearly having been wounded in much the same way that he had, dozens maybe hundreds of small cuts all over her skin beneath the bandages, and that it would be better to let her rest. But there were questions rattling around in his brain that demanded answers, that demanded resolution, and he wasn’t entirely certain he could wait much longer for them when they were asleep just a few feet away.
Or so he thought.
“Enjoying the view?” his wife’s voice said from across the room, her voice tinged with those faint remnants of her Greek accent. “I can give you a little shimmy shake if it would make you feel better or make your old man cock twitch a little.”
“Old man cock?” Mick chuckled. “Woman, who do you think you’re talking to?”
At the sound of his voice, the woman sat bolt upright and turned to look in their direction. “Babe is that you?” Her eyes caught sight of him and a wide smile blossomed on her face as she jumped out of bed and sprinted over to throw her arms around him, clinging to him tightly. “I knew you’d come and get me, whoever the bastards were that took me.” She glanced over at Len before looking back at Mick. “Is that one of the bastards or one of your bastards?”
“I’d always meant to introduce you, baby, but this is my partner, Len,” Mick said, sliding his arm around his wife’s waist. “Len, this is my wife Iris, the one I won’t shut up about.”
Len offered a hand for her to shake, and she did, quite firmly. “So you’re one of the only men my husband has ever trusted with his life. You’d figure after three years of you two being partners he would’ve introduced me to you, just so if you had to ever haul my ass out of a fire you’d know what I look like.”
Mick’s eyes narrowed a little bit, as he tilted his head, glancing quickly at Len, almost wanting to pull away from the woman he was no longer certain was his wife, but not wanting to frighten her. “Iris, what year is it?”
She scowled at him with a harsh frown. “Are you joking?”
“Humor me, babe.”
“It’s 2001.”
Mick looked at his friend before looking back to his wife. “Babe. It’s 2007.”
“The hell you say,” Iris said to him, before looking over at Len, seeing the same look on Len’s face as she saw on her husband’s. “How the hell can it be 2007?”
Len chuckled bitterly, shaking his head. “At this point, in this place, I’d believe just about anything. Welcome to the madness ride, m’lady.”
“I don’t understand, baby. How can it be 2007? It’s February 2001, give or take a few days!”
“You really don’t remember any time passing?” Mick asked her.
“It was, like, a week ago that I was sitting in our flat in London when I noticed there was some sort of smoke coming into the place and then I passed out and woke up in some sort of strange attic, in some old wooden musty house. I was kept there for a day or two, fed, given a bucket to piss and shit into, and eventually they gassed me up again and moved me.”
“Do you remember any details about the places you’ve been?”
“The last one felt like a metal box, and my ears kept popping, so it was a container box, maybe, although I’m not really sure. I feel like I’ve mostly been drugged for the last week or so,” she said, looking at Mick in disbelief. “You really do look a little bit older, love. But… six years?”
Mick reached down and pulled his shirt up over his head, setting it aside before turning his back to her, showing her the back of his right shoulder. There was a well-healed gunshot scar against the back of his shoulder, just to the left of the shoulder blade. “You see that, love? I got that about a month after you disappeared, laying down cover fire for Len on an operation in Belarus, back when Scarab was just the two of us.”
She moved over to run her hand over the scar, brushing her touch on the skin, as if making contact with Mick’s flesh would somehow make the fact that she was missing so much time sink into her mind. Mick didn’t blame her. If it hadn’t been Len who had told him about the whole time-travel nonsense, he wouldn’t have believed it either. “Scarab isn’t just the two of you?”
“We’re a foursome now,” Mick said. “We brought on a couple of others, to fill in the sort of gaps we had in our skillsets. Between me and Len, we can’t do everything.”
“Len?”
“We’ve got code names now – Len, Mick, Rin and Harry.”
“Cute. What happens when you pick up a fifth?”
“We’ll reevaluate the codename system,” Len joked. “Or they can be Sutty or something.”
Iris’s face looked weary as she tipped her gaze done. “Six years gone. Bet I’ve missed some shite, haven’t I?”
“Loads more than I can tell you about in a few minutes, love, but we’ve got plenty of time to catch up.”
Iris looked up at Mick and the expression on her face had changed from one of lost frustration to one of intense anger, which put Mick more at ease. The unrestrained consternation was classic Iris. “Who the fuck did this to me, baby?”
“That’s what we’re going to try and figure out…”
Harry
It had taken them a few hours to get back to the main village, mostly because they felt like the jungle kept turning in on them over and over again, sending them down strange curves and turns, through portions of the jungle they’d either never seen before or walked through several times. Harry had tried to mark their path by stopping and carving symbols in the trees on their way into the jungle, but even though he was certain they were walking back the same way they came in, none of his markings were anywhere to be found. He was starting to get more annoyed with the layout of the bloody island than he probably had any right to be.
When they got back to the edge of the village, it started to rain again, and Harry was starting to wonder just how often he was going to have to get used to this sort of heavy pissing weather while he was here. It wasn’t like it would gently come on, a mist of water that dusted over the jungle ceiling, but it always seemed to charge in like a threat, overcast one moment, torrential downpour the next.
The three of them tried to take cover but considering how quickly the rain started to power down onto them, none of them had a chance to be anything less than drenched, their clothes plastered onto them like second skins. If he hadn’t been shivering like crazy, he might’ve taken time to appreciate the views of his two female partners, but instead, the three of them rushed into Tex’s Bar, letting the door slam shut behind them.
“You look like an armadillo that’s just avoided bein’ run over by a Jeep, partners,” Tex said to them. “Lemme get you all some drinks and you can tell me your tale of woe and chaos.”
“You won’t believe our tale even if I tell it to you, Tex,” Harry laughed, wringing his shirt out a bit, trying to get some of the endless rainwater out of it. “Can you make a g’n’t?”
“’Course I can, boy, but I can’t understand why you’d want me to,” the burly man cackled. “And for you ladies?”
“Sangria,” Calisto said.
“Whiskey, neat,” Stella countered.
“While you’re at it, Tex,” Calisto followed up, “what would you say you think of this?” She reached into her bag and pulled out the giant-sized ruby they’d found, dropping the oval-shaped stone onto the countertop.
“I’d say that’s a pretty big fucking stone you got on you there, missy. You seen any more like that?”
“Whole wall of ruby, just beneath a waterfall,” Harry said as Tex slid his drink in front of him. “I’d tell you where we saw it, but I have a sneaking suspicion it won’t be back that way again any time soon. It feels like just when you think you know how something works around here, it stops working that way. But when we walked along the … left coast? Leading away from the village, we eventually came across a waterfall with a giant sheet of polished ruby behind it. We scooped up one of the loose shards of it from the area around the bottom of the waterfall. There’s sort of a sunken tidal pool beneath the waterfall that doesn’t always push out into the main ocean itself, or at least there was when we were by it today, but I guess that won’t be there tomorrow.”
“It’s hard to say when any individual feature’s going to appear or disappear, so if you tell enough people about it, some of the other residents’ll keep an eye out for it and maybe it’ll reappear or maybe it won’t,” Tex said, placing a big pitcher of sangria and an empty glass in front of Calisto. “I know there’s a couple of partners here on the island who were trying to map it out for a while before they done given up, sayin’ nothing’s ever in the same place twice, and that the whole damn island don’t make no sense.”
Harry lifted his gin and tonic up in a salute before taking a long draw off it. “I wholeheartedly concur with that sentiment in its entirety.”
“You’re sure it’s ruby?” Tex said, placing a double shot of whiskey in front of Stella before moving over to the giant stone. Harry wasn’t even bothered when the older man ran a fingernail along the smooth surface of it. “Sumbitch, that damn thing ain’t even bothered is it?”
“Ruby’s one of the strongest things in the world, Tex,” Calisto said to him, pouring herself a big glass of sangria. “I imagine that wall of it we saw’s worth billions, assuming you could figure out a way to get it loose from there and take it back someplace where the laws of reality were a bit more clung to.
The three of them were sitting at the bar in a row, with Calisto to his left and Stella to his right. Each of the ladies was drinking with their outside hand, their inside hands resting on Harry’s thighs, not aggressively or demandingly, more just like reminding him of their presence around him. The rest of the bar was empty, although Harry could still feel the presence of the cameras looking down onto them from their recessed and protected nooks. He’d asked Len about whether or not anyone had tried damaging or destroying the cameras, and he’d been told that Tex had relayed stories about how those who tried such things were often punished or, worse still, just disappeared. Harry wasn’t sure he believed the stories but didn’t feel like pushing his luck to find out how true or not they were.
“Whole island’s full of shit like that,” Tex said. “Dinosaurs. Nazis. Even supposedly a second village that appears and disappears counter to our own, although that one seems like it might be even a bit too much for me to swallow.”
“Doppelgängers are too far, but dinosaurs you buy?” Stella asked.
“Sure. Hung its skull over my door, up there near the rafters. Take a look for yourself.”
The man hadn’t been exaggerating, and up near the beams of wood supporting up the third floor of the building was a large reptilian skull that had to be at least three feet in length, far too big for it to be a gator or crocodile.
“This place fucking blows,” Calisto grumbled, rubbing the cool glass across her forehead. “I can’t trust anything I see or hear here, and at some point, it’s gonna be the death of me.”
“You and me both, sister,” Stella said, raising her glass in front of Harry, so they could clink them together. “Assuming he doesn’t die first.”
“Nobody’s dying any time soon if I have anything to say about it,” Harry said. “Not that I think I have much to say about it.” He frowned a little bit. The deadline was rapidly approaching, and Harry didn’t like the idea of condemning one of two women he still barely knew to death for reasons that would be shallow and superficial at best, if they could conceivably be called reasons at all. He felt that might’ve been generous. As the words left his mouth, he regretted saying them, because it was a promise he knew deep down that he could not keep.
A minute or so later, the pneumatic tube linked to the bar rattled as a delivery arrived in the carriage. Tex opened the chamber, pulled out the pill and closed the tube back up. After opening the pill, he took out a folded sheet of paper, looking down at it, not unfolding it. “Looks like it’s for you, Harry,” he said, holding the singular piece of paper out.
“The hell?” Harry took the paper from the man and unfolded it. There, in printed text, was an instruction.
TIME’S UP. YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE TO DECIDE.
Harry crumpled up the paper, shaking his head, looking up at the camera, tossing the wad of paper in that direction. “Fuck you, take me instead,” he said. “There’s no point. You can’t make me choose between two people I don’t know. I’m not playing God. I refuse. Kill me.”
Another delivery chunked into the carriage, Tex taking it out, opening it quickly, holding the paper up to Harry.
CALISTO KILLED YOUR SISTER. STELLA KILLED YOUR BROTHER. THIRTY SECONDS.
Harry’s eyes widened, trying to process the information. There was no reason to assume it was true, but somehow he knew that it was true, because the truth would be so much more powerful here than a lie. He was the youngest of three children, all of whom had gone into the Special Services for England, and both his brother and his sister had died within the span of a few months, about two years ago. Six being what it was, they refused to give him any details beyond that they were killed in the line of duty, and that they would be honored posthumously. It had never set well with Harry.
“No,” he said. “I refuse to play whatever fucking mindgame it is you think you’ve going on here!” Harry shook the sheet of paper in the direction of the camera. It was impossible to have an argument when the other side was somewhere on the other side of a screen, deciding things for you without so much as a word of discussion. “You can kill me, or you can kill nobody.”
Suddenly, Harry felt a bolt of lightning shooting through his brain, as if he was being electrified for a moment, his brain crawling with ants from the gods, tearing his synapses open and then, just as quickly as the pain had appeared, it was gone again.
He turned to look at Stella, whose face was scrunched in pain as she rubbed her temple. Then his eyes whipped to the other side of him, where he saw that Calisto’s head had slumped forward. As he started to shift his body, hers fell backwards, taking the stool with it, her lifeless body slamming onto the floor, blood running out of her eye sockets, nostrils and ears.
She was dead before she hit the floor, but Harry had no idea how they’d done it, or why they’d chosen her instead of him, or instead of Stella.
Whatever nerve link he and Stella had had with the woman, it was clearly gone now.
He hadn’t even felt her die. One minute she was there, the next, suddenly not.
Harry hopped off the stool and moved to crouch down next to Calisto, bringing his hand up to close her eyes for her, so her dead eyes weren’t staring at him, but her face was expressionless, her death having hit so rapidly that it hadn’t even had a chance to register.
No pain, no fear.
Alive.
Dead.
SHUNK! Another pill slotted into the carriage, and Tex, just on force of habit, opened it up, took it out, opened up the container and immediately held out the folded sheet of paper to Harry. He wanted to take the paper and burn it without reading it, but the people on the other end of the camera had demonstrated how willing they were to just to make a point.
He wasn’t afraid; he was being respectful.
Harry took the paper from Tex’s hand and slowly opened it.
YOU NEVER HAD A CHOICE.
Harry inhaled a deep breath, folded the paper closed again and then looked to Stella, who was the most visibly shaken he’d ever seen her. He debated what to do with the paper, but then held it out to Stella, along with the one before it, that said she had killed his brother. She took them from him and began to read.
And then Harry walked out of the bar, alone.
Rin
She’d been looking for Len for hours when she finally came across him, along with Mick and a woman she didn’t recognize. Len looked confused, weary and frustrated, all things she was not used to seeing on the boss’s face. “I see you picked up our stray heavy hitter,” Rin said with amusement. “Glad to see you’re alive, Mick.”
“Heya Rin,” Mick said. “Let me introduce you to Iris.”
Iris offered her hand, and although it took a long moment before Rin shook the hand extended towards her. “No offense, but aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
“I seem to be hearing that a lot today. My husband—”
“Husband?”
“We were married before she disappeared, Rin,” Mick said to her. “I never mentioned it because, well, I never mentioned it…”
“No offense, Iris,” Rin said, “but where you been all these years?”
“You mean all these days, don’t you?” Iris flinched. “Sorry. 2007. Right. Still getting my head fully wrapped around that.”
Rin sighed, shaking her head, looking over at Len. “Time shenanigans again? Like the Nazis and the Vatican gold?”
“Vatican gold?” Iris asked.
“It’s a thing,” Rin replied.
“It’s a whole thing,” Len grumbled. “Time travel. Nazis. Vatican gold. Dinosaurs. Oversized praying mantises. Metal doors that don’t open except when they do.”
“If I hadn’t seen the scar on Mick’s shoulder, old and regenerated, that I know wasn’t there a week ago, I wouldn’t have believed six years have passed, but I know my husband.” She swallowed a deep breath. “He wouldn’t lie to me. Not me. I’ve lost time. A lot of it.”
“And somehow not aged a day, my love,” Mick chuckled. “It’s downright unfair it is.”
“Anything interesting happen while I was away?” Iris joked, and immediately after the words left her mouth, she came to regret it. “Wait, what happened? What did I miss?”
Rin looked at Mick and Mick looked at Len, and Len shrugged a little bit. “On September 11th, 2001, a terrorist organization called al-Qaeda attacked the United States. They hijacked four passenger planes. They flew two of them into the Twin Towers in New York City and brought down both buildings. A third ran into the Pentagon. The last was crashed by the passengers in an attempt to stop the terrorists from running it into its target, assumed to be either the White House or the Capitol building. There were almost three thousand people killed on that day, the deadliest terror attack in human history. The person responsible for the attack, Osama bin Laden, remains at large to this day.”
“Shit.” Iris clenched her hand into a fist. “I imagine you’ve been quite busy since I’ve been gone, then.”
“You have no idea, my love,” Mick said. “Nobody trusts anybody, and everybody’s causing problems for everybody else.”
“And my husband’s part of the most dangerous and untraceable pair of mercs in the business.” She glanced over at Rin and sighed. “Quartet, sorry.”
“We’ve been very busy, dealing with all sorts of problems,” Len said quietly. “Starting wars. Ending wars. Overthrowing governments. Finding troublemakers and dealing with them.”
“So, what brought you all to this neighborhood?” Iris joked.
“We were looking for his girlfriend, actually,” Mick said, pointing at Len.
“She’s also a spy. She went missing several months ago. In fact, we determined a lotof spies were going missing, so we set out to see if we couldn’t join the ranks of the abducted,” Len said. “Sure enough, one by one, we all started to go missing and all started to appear here. The time frame’s a little wonky, and we don’t all remember all the bits and bobs, but we’re doing what we can to figure out what’s going on and who’s in charge.”
“And what have you got so far?”
“Not a whole fucking lot,” Rin grumbled.
“Other than the fact that this island is a fucking mess, and we’re not even sure how many of the basic rules of reality work here,” Len added. “The people who control this island are very good at keeping their secrets.”
“I just got here, same as you, baby,” Mick said to Iris.
“And your fourth team member?” she asked.
“Harry,” Len said. “He’s been dealing with his own level of impossible to manage bullshit.”
“No missing wife, girlfriend, sister, long-lost cousin? Nothing like that?”
“No, but his seems to be biologically linked to a couple of women, sharing all the same nerve sensations,” Len said. “I wouldn’t wish his problems on anyone else.”
“Shared the same nerve sensations?” Iris asked. “What, like two people listening in on the same phone call?”
“Yeah, except it’s pain and pleasure all rolled into one,” Len sighed. “But you look like you had something else in mind, Rin. What’s up?”
“I wanted to get ahead of this, boss, because the last thing I want is this information hitting you the wrong way.” She looked down at her feet before looking up at him. “You’re gonna be mad. I mean, really really mad. But I want you to understand… I didn’t…” She inhaled a deep breath and then let it out again. “I didn’t know who he is until after I’d fucked him, okay? He was just another person I could use to get information, but after… after I’d fucked him, it all came flooding back to me. I wanted to kill him right then and there, but… well, I know you’d be pissed if I just offed him and didn’t give you a chance to light into him yourself.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the photograph, holding it out to him.
Len took the photo from her hand and looked at it, her legs wrapped around the waist of one of the few men Len had ever truly hated in this world – Arturo Krieger. Len was no stranger to having to use himself as a honey trap, but they’d never asked Rin to do it, even though she had anyway a couple of times, when the op provided no other speedy solution. And yet, there was a photo of her, thrusting up passionately at Krieger, somewhere in the middle of the jungle.
“You didn’t tell me Krieger’s here,” Len snarled.
“Yeah, well, I figured if you went off and killed him too soon, we’d all be up shit’s creek without the proverbial paddle,” she said, her voice quiet and apologetic. “I’m pretty certain he doesn’t recognize me, or even remember his run ins with Scarab.”
Len looked up at her in anger. “Yeah, I’d believe that with my dagger between his shoulderblades and not a moment sooner. But you’re right – killing a resident would probably draw a lot of attention to ourselves, and I don’t know that we’re ready for that yet.”
“Should we even be having this conversation inside their buildings?” Mick asked.
“We’re not entirely certain what areas have cameras and what don’t, and we also don’t know how many of them have microphones, if any,” Len said.
“Besides,” Rin said. “Even if there’s a microphone with every camera on this island, there’s no way they have the manpower to watch and pay attention to them all. And we’re just one group of spies on this island, and there’s loads and loads of other spies like us on this island.”
“I’m amazed you haven’t all killed each other already,” Iris joked.
“It’s a lot harder with no guns,” Rin said, moving to sit down in one of the chairs in the room.
“What do you mean ‘no guns?’”
“There aren’t any firearms anywhere on the island,” Len said. “In fact, while we’ve found a handful of old weapons on the island, none of them have had any bullets in them.”
“So what now, top?” Mick asked Len.
“Now, you and Iris take a day or two to get healed up while Rin and I will circle around with Harry and maybe see if we can start coming up with a plan to try and determine how and why this island is the way that it is.”
“I’ve been trying to do that for weeks since I got here, boss,” Rin said, “and I’m telling you, I don’t know that there’s any easy way to map anything out other than the village.”
“Well, we’ll do it in installments then, and maybe things’ll pay off in the end. You’ve been on your own before we got here, but the whole team is here now, and we need to start using that to our advantage. We also need to catalog everyone on the island, so we don’t get any more surprises like this,” he said, holding the photo back to Rin. “Where’d it come from?”
“Random delivery in the tubes.”
“Any message with it?”
“On the back.”
Len turned the photo over and written in black sharpie was written WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? in heavy block lettering. He rolled his eyes, giving the photo back to Rin. “Amateur hour psy-op shit,” he sighed. “They aren’t even good at this…”
“You’re not mad at me, are you, top?” Rin asked.
“I’m mad, but not at you, Rin,” Len confessed.
Cast
Scarab
Len – The head of the Scarab unit, American, Caucasian, ex-CIA.
Rin – The Scarab unit’s trained sniper/demolitions expert, Asian, ex-US Army Ranger.
Harry – The Scarab unit’s trained vehicular expert, British, ex-MI6.
Mick – The Scarb unit’s extraction/infiltration expert, black, British, ex-MI6.
Scarab adjacent
Mira – Len’s former partner, ex-Mossad. Her disappearance triggered Scarab’s interest in The Island.
Iris – Mick’s wife, went missing (presumed dead) in early 2001, only to appear on The Island in 2007 with no knowledge of her missing time.
Calisto (deceased) – Woman paired with Harry, formerly of Spanish intelligence services.
Stella – Woman paired with Harry, former of South Korean intelligence services.
Prominent islanders
Tex – Runs the bar, has been on The Island longer than almost anyone else, very likely not Texan.
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Ronan
"Never had a choice"....... so Calisto was always going to die? or "kill me instead" was never an option?
