It was two weeks before their building was ready.

During that time, Snake all but disappeared.

Lara corresponded with Nastasha from a penthouse

Otacon kept the three of them up to date, consumed by a series of paper distractions and forms that required I's dotted and T's crossed.

"Not much for social graces, is he?" Lara remarked to Otacon once, fully aware she was asking a saint if he owned a bible.

"A lot of us were already shuffling off our old lives, I guess." They were communing over a small café in downtown. Suits rustled past. "He wasn't. Alaska's almost five thousand miles away."

Lara wondered about her own life, and when she might return to England. Or to a more welcoming environ, like the Serengeti.

It turned out to be a very, very long time.

"I'm impressed."

Lara and Otacon jumped.

They were standing in the entrance hall of a small white-brick building off the waterfront, off FDR Drive. The room was high-ceiling and spacious as it was spare, with concrete support pillars in the middle of the room that ascended up to the second floor, a staircase in one corner with plain white ceramic tilings. The floor was buffed stainless steel, with more stainless steel paneling offering as trim on the edges of most of the surfaces and metal grating as shelving units mounted on the walls. Beyond an open doorway, and she spotted the vague booths of what looked like a firing range. A polished silver pole ran down from the second floor in the corner of the room, near the wetwall's circular staircase. Everything seemed to offer a dull glimmer of metallic professional utilitarianism.

"Good Lord, Snake." Lara's hand went to her throat. Snake had appeared behind both of them, voice catching the faintest echo in the space. Lara had been running a hand over a nearby desk with matte black finish and Otacon at her side when Snake had placed a hand on Lara's shoulder, causing her to slam the drawer she'd opened.

"Heaven forbid you enter a room like a normal person. Jeez." Otacon's face had emptied of his normal skin tone, ran a hand through his hair, checked his glasses.

Snake shrugged an apology. "It's perfect," he said. "What's on second?"

Otacon was regaining his colour. "Go check for yourselves. Down the hall is your weird shooting gallery. Just do me a favour and don't go all trigger happy when I'm asleep, okay?"

When Lara turned from the desk to follow Snake upstairs, she wasn't surprised to see him lighting a cigarette. "What do you mean," Snake said, smoke dangling precariously as he produced a plain metal lighter. "you're going to live here?"

Otacon was having to call up as they ascended. "Where else was I going to go? Rent in this city is ridiculous, and it's not exactly like we're being paid." And as they disappeared, she heard Otacon say, "Hey, do me a favour, take that stupid thing away from him! That's sensitive equipment up there!"

Once Lara had topped the staircase, she took observation of the myriad tools present, forgetting Otacon's request for the time being. There was a hallway on one side of the room, over the first floor's firing range. One wall of the central room was lined with firearms of a ridiculous variety, sitting on metal pegboard slots and hung like murderous trophies. Assault rifles, submachine guns, pistols, sniper rifles. She spotted two AK variants, a Colt, a Mauser, three or four Chinese Type variants. All of them looked polished well maintained. Below the wall of death were metal ammunition boxes, with spray-painted gauges and chamber numbers. In the furthest corner, she also noticed the varied bit of odd ends she had requested, and other non-lethal implements. Flares, magnetic grapples, a small glass-enclosed device that looked like a motherboard, and a pair of lockers embossed with Otacon's idea of a joke: "HIS," and "HERS." When she opened hers, she found a small array of clothes that she had shipped over from Britain and provided to the address Otacon had provided earlier in the week.

Opposite what she would consider their side of the room was Otacon's array of technology, a console with almost five monitors all wired to a central stablising computer, and a series of broken parts on a desk without space to spare, its surface area consumed by the cannibalised bits of electronic organs and computer strands. Motherboards lay about like refuse from an autopsy, half-soddered fuses and CPU squares stacked together. There was a grounding pad underneath the work area so as to remove the chance of an errant current destroying what could be months of work, she was sure. There were firewire chords like tentacles dangling over a carefully arranged hook system, with its other attachment heads available, including what looked like an air-drill with co2 cartridge for its chief motor drive. There was also an exhaustive set of drawers built into the wall, and the glass faces of them showed their innards as being composed entirely of mechanical tissue not yet used. All this was illuminated by bright white fluorescents overhead, spaced at perfect intervals. It was a necessity, as there were no windows; fresh brick and mortar overlaid their gaps. With two walls in use or covered, and one spare, the last was consumed by a massive flat screen that held only on its display a logo, a Japanese portmanteau.

Lara drank it all in, thought of all the work Otacon must have employed to make it a reality, how every corner and space was used for something.

She quickly snatched the cigarette from Snake's mouth and stamped it on the ground.

"—The hell—"

"None of that. Awful bloody smell, anyway," Lara said. Snake looked deflated, and she walked to the wall of firearms. "And you had the audacity to harass me about my toys? Good god, you own too many guns."

"How did you know I own these?" Snake was eying the ruins of his cigarette on the floor.

Lara picked up one of the pistols, and said, "Because Otacon doesn't own any, and most of these are custom. This 1911 is a thin-frame for lighter handling, the top of the slide is serrated to limit glare during aiming, and the handle's got a tapered cut for easier reloading. I wouldn't expect anybody who didn't know their way around a pistol to modify their weapon like that."

When Snake looked impressed, she tried her best not to beam.

Otacon was had just mounted the staircase's apex. "He had me ship his weapons out here from a storage place up in Anchorage. I don't think we'll get a lot of use out of them."

"I hope not," Snake said.

"Agreed," Lara said. "Guns are fun, being shot at isn't. If I may be so bold, this place isn't just altered, it's almost built from the ground up. How did you get this done so fast, Hal?"

He shrugged and took a seat at his console. Snake was crouched on an ammo box, and Lara took a lean-to on one of the lockers. "Actually, I had already drummed up plans for an engineer out here almost a month ago. I had to modify the blueprints for the floorplan, and since this is a converted firehouse, we figured it'd do more than suit our plans. Originally we had a much larger place in mind out of a warehouse, and we do have a dock a mile or so up the road, but…" Otacon trailed off. "You weren't talking about any of this, were you."

Lara smiled crookedly, arms crossed over her chest. "Afraid not. Sorry Hal."

Otacon nodded. "Well, Snake fronted most of the money."

They both looked at him. Snake was dancing a cigarette between his fingers. "What?"

"Well," Lara said. "For starters, I don't know how you managed what is probably thousands and thousands of custom remodeling, real estate in New York, or all of Hal's equipment."

Snake only raised an eyebrow. The two men exchanged looks.

"Come on, boys. Don't you think it's a bit late to hold out on me?"

Snake sighed. "I, uh, had some money squirreled away. From my days as a merc."

"You were a mercenary? Is this… blood money we're talking about?"

Snake shook his head. "Not quite. After I left the CIA in the mid nineties, I got a few job offers. If I thought it was worth it, I took the job. I'm no hitman, though. A lot of it was escorting work for suits going to military sites, or helping train grunts for rent-a-war assholes." Snake jerked his head in Lara's direction. "Your country hires more guns for hire than any other, you know. Britain's paid a lot of money to get Mantis LLC to help their troops in Iraq."

Lara shook her head. "Nuh uh, no getting off the topic that easy. You mean Philanthropy's coming out of your pocket? What other type of jobs were you lending your talents toward?"

Snake shrugged. "It had to. Besides, I just stockpiled the money after I had cost of living taken care of. I wasn't really interested in doing more than keeping my mind off Africa, and Zanzibar. After Moses, it seemed like as good a use as any." Snake hesitated, knowing there was another question at play here. "I never murdered anybody for money, if that's what this is about. We've got the same work ethic."

"Shoot second, but make sure you're a better shot than the other gent," Lara said.

Snake nodded. He seemed thankful the topic appeared closed, so Lara returned to the other subject at hand. "Mantis LLC?"

Otacon shrugged. "I've heard of them, but man. I didn't know that they were helping stock the war." He turned to Lara. "Praying Mantis is a private military contractor that provides armed personnel on a for-hire basis. I know some people who'd put the number of personel on the ground at almost a hundred and fifty thousand."

"Good lord." She turned to Snake. "And you used to work for these people?"

Snake shook his head. "No, not Mantis. They're a new upstart, but they just got a DOD contract that'll make them one of the ten leading suppliers as of 2008. I did work for a company out of Montreal that folded when they got sold to Blackwater LLC a few years back. There's a reason I don't do that sort of work anymore, not for almost six years."

"Right." She paused, thought on it. "I'm sorry, Snake. Your past is your past. So, then." She looked at the monitor on the main wall. "I believe Bolivia was on the agenda when you called, Hal?"

"It was. Here's how much we know." Otacon threw a small breaker beneath his desk, and the other two turned to the central display.

Nothing happened.

"Uh, Hal?"

"Oh, shoot. Give me a sec." He began typing on the computer. "Oh, there we go. Here."

The screen lit up a satellite image of the area's topography, a rich ocean of green clouds with colours tracing verdant outlines around patches of beige and creamy agricultural squares. The region was secluded from La Paz, Bolivia's nearest megalopolis, and the nearest highway was hardly within walking distance. "Not quite the limousine ride we were all expecting, I'm sure. What's our goal, then?"

"Well," Otacon said, pressing his glasses up again. "You two have seen those photos. If I had to hazard a guess, The Boys of Che have got hold of REX's data, or something like it. The idea is for you guys to get in and out with proof, and with that thing out of commission. I'm going to put you in touch with a Brasilian escort who's been staying in a small village a ways east of Rurrenabaque."

"Rurre? Hal, there's nothing there. And this," she waved her hand over the area of the map he'd pointed out. "is hardly the region you're talking about."

"That's your ultimate destination, yeah. Or generally speaking."

Snake was lighting another cigarette. "'Generally speaking'?"

Otacon sighed. "Yeah, I know. There's not much I can do if I'm going to try and keep you guys out of La Paz, which could be a problem. Rurrenebaque isn't exactly a major city, but in tourist season, they see enough travelers, so you two won't stand out nearly as much. And heading east from the west is easier, as far as avoiding the authorities are concerned."

"Why is that an issue?" Lara said.

Snake took a deep drag of his cigarette, and ignored Otacon's frowning. "Because if they see a couple of Westerners come in with jeeps and guns, we'll get told to go home."

"Best case scenario is they tell you guys to go home, yeah. In fact-" Otacon sat at his terminal and began typing. Another pair of images overlaid themselves on the central screen. "Hey. Take a look at this." The image presented was the grainy photo they'd seen before. "This is what you guys saw before, but last night, I got something a little bigger. I haven't watched it yet because until a few minutes ago, I hadn't been able to get the power working in here." Otacon pressed a key, and the second image began to play. It was a video, and a timer on the lower right notified its length at less than two minutes.

As it started, there was hardly much present. Just a green blur of a poorly-shot camera video, someone's bare feet, and a voice.

"That's Movima," Lara said.

"A variant of Spanish?" Otacon said from his desk.

She shook her head. "No. Hardly anybody speaks it. That narrows down who—"

Snake waved his arm and barked. "Quiet!"

The video's frame moved to peer upwards. A low sound like rain ran in the background, but was otherwise almost silent. It must have been early morning, because although the video's quality was low from a light-enhancing lens's application, it was an odd middle ground of illumination. An indigenous person's head stepped in from of the camera, facing away from them. His bare shoulders moved away from their perspective of whomever was holding the camera. The native moved aside branches, dignified in his caution, and looked back to the "director." He pointed beyond the brush.

There was a great hulking pair of legs beyond the tree, its branches, the native. They were rectangular, two great columns of metal attached to a thinner sort of joint, reverse-knee, like a bird, or a canine. The structure, still half-completed but with progress the previous photo hadn't hinted at, was still supported by a webworm of girders and struts. The two of them were attached to a torso of a sort, with a waist like a series of octagonal plates.

"That's an armor skirting," Otacon said. "I thought about implementing one on REX before we figured out its armaments didn't match its defenses, so—"

The speaker in the video was American tinged in his accent, swearing once, then twice, at the sight presented. "If you get this video, please make sure it's copyrighted to me, so none of those travelogue bastards poach it. I'll stream this to you." The camera recording beeped. "I've worked too hard to let some—"

The head of the native snapped backward, and in the greenish gray of the lowlight lens, the blood erupting from his head caught the light like white liquid blowing out from his spinal column. Gunfire reports seemed to come in as an afterthought, cracks as flat as they were loud.

Lara covered her mouth, thought she said "Oh my god," but couldn't be sure.

Otacon turned away.

Snake only winced, gritted his teeth.

Lara forced herself to look back at the video.

The American directing the video took a shaky step backwards, almost dropped the camera, recovered. The native's body had fallen towards him, crumpling as a puppet would after being freed from its wires. The director began a litany of prayers, and turned to run.

A man with an AK stared at the man, whose profane terror ended upbruptly. The beret-clad soldier took aim.

The video ended.

They were silent for a long time, the recording having left only a black screen.

It was Lara who spoke first.

"Tell me how and what to do to stop it."