An idea I had for a while. Kind of a what if sort of scenario.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

The Life and Lies

of

Conmen and Spies

He was less than a day old the first time he met his brother, Eyal Lavin.

Their mother was a beautiful woman named Aya Chait and Eyal's father was named Noam Lavin. Noam and Aya had gotten divorced and stayed with his father. When she traveled to America, she met a charming American policeman named James Bennett. When James was arrested, Aya moved back to Tel Aviv, where she discovered she was pregnant. She named the baby Navon Chait and spoke to him in English and Hebrew and her parents' native German.

Eyal and Noam were at Navon's birth. Eyal had held his little brother with wide eyes and the declaration of one day he wanted to be a father. Aya and Noam had gotten back together not long after that and within a few months of Navon's birth, they were engaged. Within a year of being married, his baby sister, Hannah was born. Despite not being his own, Noam adopted Navon and loved him the same as he did his own children. Noam travelled quite a bit and Aya was always worried. When he was older, he found out why. Noam was a government man, working for the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations.

It was only natural that when the time came for Navon to serve, he'd follow in his step-father's footsteps by being recruited by Mossad. He was a valuable asset to them. He spoke fluent English, Yiddish, German, French, Russian, and Greek, in addition to some Italian, Spanish, Arabic, and Danish, as well as his native Hebrew. He had a wide knowledge of a variety of subjects. He could create passports and legal documents that were difficult to forge. He could recreate paintings and bonds from memory. As a result, Mossad would send him to forge Nazi loot and recover the original. He was good at it too, the best.

He was twenty-one the first time he saw Peter Burke.

Peter was FBI, barely, and Navon was on a mission in D.C. He'd always wanted to see the FBI's training facilities, or at least, that was what he told his handler. Eyal was on an off the book vacation in the States on a not-so-legal passport. Peter was there, along with some guy called Rossabi, at one of the fast food restaurants that Eyal and Navon found themselves at. They had to hightail it back to Israel after FBI caught word of a certain Mossad agent stealing paintings, that may or may not have been stolen from Jews during the Thirties. (But there's no way the FBI was acknowledging that part and there went Navon's first clean passport, which was a real shame because he had worked so hard on making a solid American identity.)

He was twenty-five when his sister died.

They found out that Hannah Lavin was dead, along with thirty or so others from a suicide bomber in Netanya that became known as the Passover massacre. After that, he took off running. He'd take any mission anywhere and it's during the thirty-six days that Eyal is part of Operation Defensive Shield that Navon gains a reputation in Mossad as being that meshugener gonif. He had started running from the truth- no, Chanah can't be dead. She can't be- and he kept running and couldn't stop. He kept trying and failing to find something to hold on to, but everything slipped through his fingers like butter.

Eyal was like him. Once his service was up, he followed his father's footsteps and join Mossad too. The two of them kept running. It drove Mrs. Lavin crazy, to the point where she eventually divorced him and got custody of their son, Aviv. Eyal's still running, still grasping at straws to try to hold on to something, anything, that will hold him in one place. He doesn't have what Navon has, but he knows Eyal is okay with that for now.

He was twenty-six the first time he went to New York City.

He was supposed to cultivate Vincent Adler as an asset so he'd lead them to a whole ship of stolen Nazi pieces. It was the first time he met the wild Auggie Anderson. He was a CIA legend. Unfortunately, his mission was the same one was Navon's and he was ashamed to say that if it wasn't for a conman named Mozzie, he'd have failed terribly.

He was twenty-six when he got on the FBI's radar.

As a conman, no less. It was at this point that Mossad felt the need to tell him that if he was caught by the FBI, they would not help him. They would not extract him, they would not work a deal with the United States. He would be completely on his own. Mossad would deny all knowledge of him. He told them it was fine.

He was twenty-six the first time he fell in love.

Her name was Kate Moreau and she made him want to forget everything. She made him want to drop the mission, drop Mozzie's con, drop everything and just be free with her. The two of them on an uncharted island in the sun. It was the first time he'd ever thought of such a thing. Kate was the reason he'd stopped running. When she left, she became the reason he started running again.

He was twenty-nine when the FBI arrested him.

This particular event occurred two weeks after he set up a rather largely funded bank account and made himself a safe house in New York. Mozzie and Kate didn't know about it and it was on one of his few clean identities. Andrew Robert Ross, thirty, a linguist and translator who learned the languages by studying them in their own country. He even who a few articles about himself under various names and filed tax returns. The condominium he had bought was paid off in full. The electric, gas, and water all came out of the bank account on automatic withdrawal. He stashed any evidence that he was a foreign citizen there.

Eyal was at his trial, sitting discreetly in the back, just another concerned, but bored citizen, as was Auggie on the exact opposite side. Still, he was touched that his brother would show up for this and he thanked HaShem that he wasn't caught for espionage. That would be career suicide. It might also be regular suicide too, especially if certain assets that he had cultivated learned who he really was. That wouldn't be good for him. So he prayed, silently in his head, hoping that they wouldn't ever discover it before he could disappear in the wind. (It was, after all, a family trait.)

He was thirty-two when he started working with the FBI.

But it was better than prison, so who could blame him. By then, Neal Caffrey had no easy connection to Navon Chait. The idea was almost laughable, that a gentleman art thief could be a Mossad field officer.

He kept up his languages in private. He held secret conversations, burner phone to burner phone with Eyal. He spoke German with a friend of his in Germany. He ordered food in French at restaurants and pretended to be a Russian tourist at others. He'd like to go to worship in a temple, but he didn't really feel like explaining to anybody when Neal Caffrey became Jewish… or his name suddenly became Navon.

After all, the only difference between spies and conmen are stories they can tell.

He was thirty-three when Kate died.

She was exploded in a plane that was obviously meant for him. His first guess was that his old life had caught back up with him. It'd been another year before he had answers, and Vincent Adler was only attacking Neal Caffrey, not Navon Chait. He didn't even know who that was. Kate had died not knowing who Neal really was or why he stole what he did. She, like Mozzie, assumed that the stuff was for fun or for vanity, but everything he stole went straight to his handler who took everything right back to Mossad. He had turned her without her even knowing. He'd been ready to propose to her, but he had lied through his teeth. It made him feel guilty and awful and he couldn't even tell Peter, not without him getting very angry and accusing him for espionage. (Which after getting accused for that time in Russia, back when he was still very green, was not a road he would ever be ready to go down again.)

He was thirty-five when Auggie Anderson stumbled into one of Peter's investigations, near literally.

He hadn't seen Auggie since before he had gone to prison, but they played chess over the computer, rooted through message boards and false IDs. (They were nothing if not cautious.) He had heard about the man's accident and how he had lost his sight. He hadn't expected it to have actually changed the cocky CIA operative.

"Sir, you can't be here. This area is closed. It's part of an ongoing investigation," a woman was saying to someone who he wasn't paying all that much attention to.

"Yes, I know. And I'm telling you, I dropped my cane in the confusion. I need my cane. Annie!" Navon looked up because he knew that voice, but he only knew the pretty blonde woman from the way his brother talked about her. (And if Eyal didn't sound more in love or concerned for the blonde than he had for Kate, he'd give every penny he had away.) He'd never expected that she had changed the former field operative as much as his accident had.

He ran over to them, "Hey, Maggie?" He put a hand on the agent's shoulder, "It's okay. Why don't you go get his cane? They won't come in any farther. I'll watch them."

"Do my ears deceive me?" Navon smirked at the man.

"It's good to see you too, Auggie."

"Handsome as ever, I see." The men chuckled and shook hands.

"I take it you two know each other," Annie said from where she had become Auggie's human cane.

"We do." Auggie began to introduce the two, but he beat the other man to the punch, "A-"

"Annie Walker. My brother's description does you no justice." She looked between Navon and Auggie, as if trying to figure if they were really related. He leaned in, "My brother who you've met in Zurich. And D.C. And Israel."

It took a minute, but then it clicked for the two CIA agents. "You're related to Eyal?"

He chuckled, "Navon Chait. Better known as Neal Caffrey."

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