Ben Mackinnon: Bio

[intotherough]

basics :

Name: Benjamin Cailean Mackinnon
Nicknames: Ben
Birthday & Age: May 17, 1975 | 38
Occupation: Pub Owner/Hit Man

details :

Undergraduate School: University of Aberdeen, Class of 1996. Major: History
Relations: Anthony and Sine Mackinnon
Romance: Heterosexual

appearance :

PB: Noah Wyle
Notable Features: A short cropped beard, and a scar under his chin on the left side that appears to be from a knife fight. Tattoo of a fir on his back right shoulder
Detailed Description: Ben has a tall, rangy build and dark brown hair and eyes. Nearly forty now, he's beginning to show signs of his age, including lines around his mouth and eyes and a need for glasses on occasion. He dresses sensibly and pragmatically, often on the casual side in jeans, boots, and practical cotton shirts.

However, his career - especially in Hong Kong - often requires formal attire, and he tends to choose tailored suits in warm neutrals.

personality :

Ben is a charmer. Flirtatious and gregarious most of the time, he’s good at teasing information out of people - or himself out of situations. He has a love of the music of his homeland, and plays the piano well, though not classically. Despite the somewhat flirtatious nature, though, Ben is not one to speak out of turn. Secrets remain secrets, thoughts are hidden behind a firm poker face, and very few people really know him well. He doesn’t speak of his past as a smuggler or his past as a detective, though he uses both to serve the Diamonds.

At the core, Ben is really a reserved, analytical man, looking at the angles and how to exploit them. The charm is genuine, but it’s also a mask always worn, and he’s at his most real with his best friend Victor - Ciaran - and Victor's wife, Zoe.

history:

Ben was Aberdeen born and raised, the only child of Anthony Mackinnon, a doctor, and Síne Barrie Mackinnon, a museum curator at a local historical society. Ben never could quite manage to relate to Dr. Mackinnon, who was a stern, distant sort of man, and he was closest instead to his mother, who was passionate about Scottish history and Gaelic music, and she filled Ben's head with stories of Scottish heroes and royals, made sure he could speak both Scots and Scottish Gaelic, and taught him songs and how to dance. Her husband wasn't such a fan, and he instead pushed Ben to concentrate on math and science and get into medical school.

Síne was the one who won that battle, and after acceptably average performances in school, Ben went on to the University of Aberdeen, where he read Scottish history and graduated with honors. There's not much you can do with history except more history, though, so after his graduation he entered the police academy and upon finishing that was assigned to the maritime and port squad, where he stayed as he worked himself up the ranks. It was when he was here that he "met" and arrested an IRA gun-runner trying to move weapons through Scotland in what was a pretty ordinary case for him. He shouldn't even remember it

When he was at detective sergeant, in his late 20s, Ben first met and fell for Kirstin Fraser, a secondary history and geography teacher at an Aberdeen high school who he met when he was hauling her delinquent younger brother back from causing trouble at the harbor. The boys on the squad teased him about it for months, but Ben contended that bringing home rebellious teenagers was, hands down, the best way to meet girls, and he kept saying that until four years later, when after dating and even formally getting engaged, Kirstin broke it off. It wasn't a surprise by that point. They'd been arguing over his job for a year. He loved what he did, the danger and intrigue of chasing down smugglers and gun-runners and terrorists, but it terrified Kirstin, and she wanted him to trade it in for a nice, safe desk job. He wouldn't.

Ironically, it was only another two years before he did just that, quitting the force entirely and settling into a quiet-seeming life in Aberdeen. The catalyst was easy to see; Jamie, his longtime partner, died in a siege gone wrong, and Ben had had enough of law and order. He’d always been a rebel, anyway, rising on the strengths of his brains rather than how well he followed the rules, so it wasn’t so surprising that he started working with smugglers in an effort to pin down just which cops had turned on them and gotten Jamie killed. But working with criminals is a slippery slope; it wasn't that many months before Ben found what he'd been looking for and avenged his partner's death - but he didn't step out of the world again. He'd gotten in deep, and he liked the danger of it.

He was an effective smuggler, for several reasons. He had the contacts, of course, informants from his years as a detective, and he knew intimately how Interpol and the police worked to fight against the smugglers. For the most part he knew who to deal with and who to avoid.

For the most part. Ben had a good five years as a smuggler out of Aberdeen, slipping away from the authorities and rivals alike, until he ran amok of a Germany-based terrorist group. His operation was decimated, his associates scattered or dead, and Ben Mackinnon himself was on the run.

He ran with his longtime partner in crime, Ciarán Mac a'tSionnaigh, and they raced across two continents until they got to a place where Britain couldn't reach them: Hong Kong.