The man who answered the door had to be seven feet tall and little more than skin and bones. He had long, stringy hair and a patchy beard to match. His black leather trench coat and camouflage bucket hat had seen better days. His movements were almost insectile, as though he possessed an abundance of joints found nowhere else in nature. He stepped aside and admitted them without a word.
Mason and Layne followed Ramses into a dark garage that reeked of motor oil and sawdust. A monitor displaying security footage from the street out front and the alley behind was mounted on the wall. It cast a dim glare onto the stained concrete and a lone rattrap in the corner.
The skeletal giant made strange, hollow breathing sounds as he led them through the doorway at the back of the garage and into a room stripped to the bare framework, through which they could see a toilet with a pull cord and a roll of toilet paper balanced on the lid. The carpet was worn to the mesh in a traffic pattern that led absolutely nowhere. The man abruptly stopped, turned to face them, and held out his hand, palm up.
“Your badges and guns,” Ramses said.
The giant nodded as though in slow motion.
“You’re kidding, right?” Layne said.
The giant sluggishly shook his head and revealed a jack-o’-lantern smile riddled with missing teeth. The gaps made it easy to see that he didn’t have a tongue.
Mason handed over his badge and drew his Glock. He ejected the round from the chamber and the clip, flipped the pistol over, and passed it to the giant.
Layne glared at Mason as she reluctantly did the same.
The giant handed back their badges, but their weapons vanished into the deep hip pockets of his trench coat. He walked right up to the wall, knelt in a series of awkward motions, and pried up the edge of the carpet. His inhumanly long fingers moved like worms as he delicately rolled the carpet away from the wall until he revealed a square of cracked concrete that was a slightly different color than the rest of the foundation. There was a small hole at one end. He grabbed a crowbar from the sill of the boarded window, fitted the end into the hole, and levered the hatch open. A thin layer of concrete had been bonded to the wooden door to prevent it from producing a thumping sound if someone stepped on it, betraying the presence of the tunnel hidden underneath.
The intermingling scents of damp earth and mildew emanated from the dark hole. Mason could barely make out a series of rickety wooden stairs, which creaked and groaned as the giant descended. A faint light blossomed several seconds later.
“Do I want to know where he’s going?” Mason asked.
“You mean where we’re going,” Ramses said.
“Down there.”
“When has following a strange man into a dark cellar ever gotten anyone in trouble?”
“Let’s just get this over with,” Layne said, and climbed down the stairs.
“Does it bother you that she has a bigger pair than you do?” Ramses asked.
Mason ignored him and followed her. He had to duck his head under the packed earth and exposed cribbing to enter the tunnel connecting the shop to the three-story building next door. Layne didn’t even need to lower her head to pass beneath the lone lightbulb or the conduits that powered it from the far end, where the giant ascended another staircase, the space above emitting a scent Mason would have recognized anywhere: gun oil.
The room that awaited them on the main floor was like none Mason had ever seen before. Everything was clean and clinical. Sterile. The outer walls were reinforced and sealed with sheet metal. Racks filled the place from floor to ceiling. Halogen tubes lined the ceiling, providing enough illumination to display the contents of the recessed shelves, which were packed with what appeared to be every weapon ever manufactured.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Layne said.
Mason could only nod. While he’d been troubled by Ramses’ personal arsenal on a professional level, he knew fellow agents with larger caches of weapons. Now that he was here, though … now that he’d seen … this … he worried that his old friend was in even deeper than he suspected.
There were assault rifles in all shapes and sizes and from every manufacturer under the sun. Full auto. Semiauto. Bolt action. Sniper. Handguns of all kinds. M2 .50-caliber machine guns. Shoulder rockets. Flamethrowers. Grenades. Incendiary and explosive devices. One-stop shopping for everyone, from your garden-variety psychos to wannabe dictators in the market for a quick coup.
“Pretty unbelievable, right?” Ramses said. “I told you to bring your checkbook.”
Mason caught him by the elbow.
“What the hell have you gotten us into?”
“Relax, Mace. It’s all military surplus. Nothing to get your sack in a twist over.”
“Military surplus?”
“Maybe not ours, per se, but definitely someone’s.”
An elegant maple staircase with a plush crimson runner branched from the left side of the room. The giant grabbed the polished banister and ascended into a hallway that terminated in an anteroom decorated with framed black-and-white photographs of African trophy hunters from the twenties and upholstered furniture with clawed feet. It smelled of wood smoke, expensive cologne, and the barely detectable scents of formaldehyde and age.
“Tell me again how this guy is supposed to be able to help us,” Layne said.
“He knows something about chemical weapons and the military.”
“Good. As long as one of us is clear.”
The giant approached the inset door in the opposite wall, from beneath which a flickering glow played across the hardwood floor. He gently rapped with his knuckles, turned once more to face them, and gestured for them to take a seat.
“What’s this guy’s name?” Mason asked.
“Ryan O’Leary,” Ramses said. “But everyone calls him ‘Rhino.’”
“I’m not calling a grown man Rhino,” Layne said.
“Just a moment.” The voice from the other side of the door was soft but firm, the kind that people tended to heed the first time. The inner locks disengaged with a series of heavy thuds and the door swung inward. Classical music flooded out on a wash of firelight, silhouetting the man standing before them against the roaring blaze in the hearth some distance behind him. “Thank you, Mr. Church.”
The giant nodded and presented the visitors with an awkward bow and a flourish of his arm.
Ryan O’Leary was barely taller than Layne, but his shoulders spanned the width of the doorway and tested the fabric of his silk evening jacket. His neck was like that of a bull, thick and corded, and seemingly a swallow away from popping off the top button of his shirt and sending his bow tie spinning at them. He wore his white mane bushy, a mustache that spanned his lip and swept up his sun-leathered cheeks to his ears, and a pair of magnifying lenses resembling goggles, which he’d flipped up against his forehead so he could see them.
“Rhino,” Ramses said, and proffered his hand.
“Put that thing away before you hurt someone with it,” O’Leary said. He engulfed Ramses in a one-armed hug around the waist. “I haven’t seen you in the flesh since Torkham. Did Donovan here ever tell you about what happened there?”
Mason could only shake his head.
“They don’t want to hear about that,” Ramses said, but O’Leary plowed on regardless.
“There we were, streaking through the Spīn Ghar Mountains above Khyber Pass in a Black Hawk, skimming mere feet above the ground, attempting a daring rescue of a special ops unit that had been ambushed across the Afghani border in Pakistan, where the army couldn’t go without causing an international incident. Or at least where it wasn’t supposed to go.”
“You’re a mercenary?” Layne asked.
“I’ve been many things in my time,” O’Leary said, winking. “So we swoop down toward their last known location and follow this dry creek bed into a slot canyon positively littered with bodies. We’re talking twenty-some hostiles, all of them wearing their baggy tan shalwar kameez and shemagh scarves, their beards flapping in the rotor wash. And this guy here. Somehow he’d escaped the cave where his team was slaughtered, only to end up surrounded. I don’t know how he did it, but he must have been like an animal, killing every single one of those men with any weapon he could find until all he had left were rocks, his bare hands, and his teeth. We found him covered with blood, both arms broken, bleeding from at least a dozen—”
“Now’s not the time,” Ramses said in a tone that brooked no argument. Mason looked at his old friend, whose eyes had taken on a faraway cast. He knew something horrible had happened in the army, but he’d never imagined it could have been something so awful. No wonder Ramses had never told him what happened. “This is Special Agent James Mason and his partner, Special Agent Jessica Layne.”
Mason and Layne flashed their badges for the sake of formality.
“Put those things away,” O’Leary said. “I’m not the least bit intimidated by the implied threat of such totems. I told Donovan I’d help you and, if it’s within my power, I fully intend to do just that. I would hope that should the need arise, you’d be willing to do the same for me.”
He smiled and thrust out his hand, his liver-spotted skin betraying the advancing age he worked so hard to conceal.
Mason caught the expression of disapproval on his partner’s face, but they didn’t have any other options and they were running out of time. He sealed the deal with a firm shake.
O’Leary stepped aside and gestured for them to enter a cavernous chamber that appeared to occupy the entirety of the second floor. The inner doorways had been widened to open up what at one time must have been numerous separate apartments but now functioned like so many museum exhibits. The walls were adorned with dead animals, be it their entire bodies, select portions, or just their heads, all painstakingly stuffed, posed, and displayed in rooms devoted to their sites of origin. One featured North American animals ranging from elk and deer to mountain goats and bighorn sheep, their marble eyes appearing to track the procession walking below them. A Kodiak bear stood on its hind legs in the center of the room, its paws raised, claws unfurled, head touching the ceiling. It loomed over a mountain lion with its jaws open and its haunches flexed as though preparing to lunge.
“Ursus arctos middendorffi and Puma concolor,” O’Leary said. “The former mauled a woman on the oil sands of Alberta and took nearly four full days to track. The latter killed and partially devoured a man in his home, but didn’t put up nearly the fight I had hoped it would.”
“Seriously?” Layne said.
O’Leary smiled patiently at her, as though she were a child, and guided them through the South American room, which showcased jaguars and caimans, tapirs and vultures, and even an enormous snake nearly as thick as the trunk of the dead tree upon which it was posed.
“Eunectes murinus. The green anaconda. This one removed a sleeping child from his bed and led me on a three-day hunt through the Amazon basin. You can still see the stitching where I removed the remains from its digestive tract.”
Mason caught a glimpse of the Asian display through the doorway to his right, where a Bengal tiger appeared ready to pounce from its hind legs and a cobra struck from the wall behind it, on their way into the African room. Gorillas and apes, crocodiles and pythons, and even the heads of a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus stared down from their mounts, all of them seemingly focused upon the lion frozen mid-roar in the center of the room.
“Both the Panthera leo before you and its Indian cousin Panthera tigris tigris in the exhibit we just passed developed a taste for human flesh and killed fifteen men between them,” O’Leary said. “I wish I could have better captured the sheer ferocity they displayed in their final moments.”
He ran his fingertips along the lion’s flank on the way into his inner sanctum, a workroom housing tables covered with taxidermy tools. The head of a baboon was clamped in an enormous vise on the central table, its teeth bared and its hollow sockets staring accusingly at them. Flames nearly overflowed from the hearth behind it and cast a strange wavering glare over the entire room.
“I didn’t see the smoke from the street,” Mason said.
“It’s vented on the back side of the building, above the industrial laundry.”
O’Leary assumed his position before the primate’s skull, tilted it to better see into its left eye socket, and lowered his magnifying lenses. He clipped a cigar and clenched it between his teeth. A flick of his Zippo and he puffed until the cherry glowed bright red. He commenced working as though they weren’t even there.
“Aren’t these things flammable?” Layne asked. She waved vaguely toward the trophies in various stages of completion on the surrounding tables, the racks of preservative chemicals, and the bags of stuffing material.
“I’ve got news for you, Special Agent.” O’Leary smiled and revealed bright white teeth seemingly too large for his mouth. His black eyes, magnified by the lenses, glowed like charcoal on the brink of igniting. “Everything burns.”