Notes

Soundtrack suggestions:

- Peter - Chris Tilton, Fringe: Season 2 (Up to 01:10).
- Assembling the Team - Henry Jackman, Kong: Skull Island (Up to 00:51).

-o-

The Shadow of Cabo Blanco has struck again! Another baby abducted in Montezuma! Read the article's title.

Said article, which was taken from the English version of a Costa Rican daily newspaper, was part of a recently updated file which was being consulted by Guillaume Vuillier. The WDMC director had heard of this Shadow of Cabo Blanco, described by some inhabitants of the Nicoya Peninsula as a blood-drinking spectre, an abomination that dwelled in the trees, stole fish or meat through an open window, or worse, a newborn from the crib once in a while. Thanks to certain testimonies, the creature could have been identified as an Ornitholestes, a small carnivorous dinosaur from the Late Jurassic, mainly nocturnal and which could climb trees as easily as a feline.

Feared on Nublar only by small animals and mothers, the species being a raider of nests, the Ornitholestes had spread terror in the south-eastern end of the peninsula for more than a year. Not only did he decimated the troops of monkeys and eliminated all the cats he encountered, both small wild felines such as ocelots, margays and jaguarundis, and domestic cats, seeing them as rivals, but above all, he had developed a taste for human babies and didn't hesitate to enter dwellings in search of infants to abduct, forcing the inhabitants to lock doors and windows. But the Ornitholestes wasn't the only scourge from Isla Nublar which tormented the locals.

Indeed, the Shadow of Cabo Blanco also sometimes referred to the Ornitholestes' traveling companions and their offspring: a troop of Compsognathus, chicken-sized carnivorous dinosaurs whose gregarious habits and voracious behaviour were often compared to that of piranhas. Not only they attacked babies but also children and even disadvantaged isolated adults, small dogs and certain farm animals such as poultry, goats and pigs, while bites had even been identified on the legs of cattle and horses.

The Compsognathus were also more reckless than the Ornitholestes, as they didn't hesitate to venture in the middle of villages and towns unlike the latter, which remained on the outskirts and in the jungle. Occasionally one or more Compsognathus would be captured and killed, to be even sometimes thrown to the dogs, but these animals were like a dinosaurian equivalent of rats and reproduced easily and quickly.

Some even claimed that like the raptors and the proceratosaurs which served Masrani's Bane during the Fall of Isla Nublar, the Compsognathus were led by the Ornitholestes and obeyed its orders, but Guillaume knew that this relationship was different and was more a form of cooperation or alliance, akin to others which could be seen between some animal species which collaborated to access the same source of food or to protect themselves from predators. Moreover, according to reports from the police and the Ministry of Environment and Energy, the Compsognathus and the Ornitholestes had mostly been together in the weeks following their landing and had since separated, with attacks from each taking place sometimes almost simultaneously in places several kilometres apart. And while the Compsognathus were concentrated for the time being near Cabo Blanco, with pioneers venturing north and west, the Ornitholestes had no fixed territory and tended to stay near a village for a while, making an attack or two there and then leaving, never staying long in one area, acting almost like a bandit on the run and making its tracking difficult.

The sudden appearance of these animals on the outskirts of the Cabo Blanco Reserve had caused a great stir among the local population and people wondered how they had arrived there, until the authorities discovered during an investigation that some residents of Bahia Anasco and the surrounding villages went to Isla Nublar shortly after the island's abandonment by InGen and the diminishing of its monitoring by the authorities. From their expedition, the plunderers had brought back a yacht whose owners had perished during the fall of Cloud Island and on which the Ornitholestes and the Compsognathus, which escaped InGen's cleanup crews, had boarded. No one had noticed these stowaways which, like Odysseus and his Achaean comrades inside the Trojan Horse, had remained hidden and had shown great discretion until they reached their destination.

The dinosaurs had first struck in Bahia Anasco, where a baby was abducted and killed whereas her mother, a young woman named Pilar Morales, was found seriously injured by other villagers. Not only the Ornitholestes had injured her in the abdomen with its claws but the Compsognathus had started to eat her alive and when Pilar reached the hospital, she was between life and death. The doctors had been able to save her, but the loss of her child and her attack had been such a trauma that she had still not resumed a normal life and had separated from her husband, who had been part of the plundering expedition on Nublar.

Guillaume closed the file on the Shadow of Cabo Blanco and went through the other Central American files.

There was one dedicated to Mesozoic marine animals observed off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica and that of neighbouring countries. After initially denying the presence of these animals in Costa Rican waters, InGen claimed they didn't escaped from Jurassic World but were created by another genetic engineering company and released in the ocean, or that they may even have been animals created in Site B on Isla Sorna and which had left the Five Deaths before the arrival of the Grey Guard and the UN scientists. It wasn't until quality pictures and videos of these animals emerged in the second quarter of 2018, showing that they were similar to those that lived in the lagoons of Jurassic World, that the corporation admitted that a sabotage occurred a few days after the park's fall, with agents of a rival corporation opening the gate of the underground canal which connected the lagoons to the coast.

According to the various observations, individuals of at least six species had been able to escape and in addition to maps locating these observations, the file included several photographs and videos. Those showed, among other things, the head of what experts presumed to be a Cryptoclidus briefly surfacing not far from Isla Nublar; the lifeless body of Mixosaurus (1) among the content of a fishing net; a Platecarpus (2) carcass washed up on a beach in the northern part of the Nicoya Peninsula; an Ophthalmosaurus swimming around a scientific sailing boat in the Sea of Ghosts, inside the Five Deaths exclusion zone; a small group of Elasmosaurus swimming amidst the waves very close to a boat somewhere on the high seas; a Xiphactinus grabbing between its jaws a Sailfish that sportfishermen were pulling on their boat, only a few kilometres from a seaside town; another of these giant carnivorous fish hanging from a crane while a group of fishermen posed on either side of it, proud of their catch.

Alistair Iger had commented on this minor news item, stating that these fishermen had no right to fish animals that belonged to InGen but when reminded of the latter's inaction and the denial on the issue of marine animals, the corporation suddenly became quieter. Since the Costa Rican government had not granted any special legal status to the species, nor to the other escapees from Isla Nublar, the fishermen weren't summoned to court and were able to bring their catch home and there were rumours which said that agents of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy encouraged them to fish all the individuals they encountered, in order to try to stop the beginning of a biological invasion.

The next file was about the pterosaurs and the other flying animals that had escaped from Nublar between the devastating earthquake of December 24th and the island's definitive abandonment by InGen in January. These had sought refuge in the first haven they found and the reports mentioned, among other things, a couple of Tupandactylus in Arenal, the beginning of Pterodaustro colonies on the shores of Lake Nicaragua and in the Five Deaths, where other pterosaurs as well as Ichthyornis (3) had migrated. Wallace Fitz, an ecologist who worked in the Five Deaths for the WDMC, was surveying them and he sent reports to San Francisco from time to time.

Unlike the aquatic animals, most of the land and flying animals of Jurassic World had a subcutaneous implant that allowed Vishnu, a Mascom Network satellite, to track them and send their localisation to Masrani Global and InGen, who could thus track them. The latter had sent its Asset Containment Unit, better known as ACU, to retrieve the pterosaurs that had reached the mainland but capturing flying reptiles in the wild was not easy and some of the animals had gone beyond the borders of Costa Rica. Not only in Nicaragua but also in Mexico, Cuba and the French West Indies and while certain nations had authorized InGen to intervene on their soil, others had refused and declared that their own authorities would decide the fate of the pterosaurs. And that was without mentioning the capture attempts sabotaged by civilians, who wanted the animals to be left alone.

They were indeed explained that pterosaurs could potentially become an invasive species and that it was better to capture them as quickly as possible before their population grew and became too large, but it was of no use and they were supported by several personalities and notable collectives, including Alexander Singer of the Dinosaur Protection Group, at least for a time. Coincidentally, he had not written about it on social networks since the reception at Lockwood's manor but still opposed the fishing of Xiphactinus, which he considered cruel.

In the end, only a few pterosaurs were captured and taken to InGen's facility in the Ismaloya Mountains, Site D (4).

The director of the WDMC arrived at the last file, the one dedicated to Operation Fallen Kingdom and which only needed to be updated as soon as would receive news. It was supposed to resume soon with the departure of the animals from Burgo Nuevo during the summer. Guillaume looked at the lower right corner of his computer screen, where the date of May 6th was indicated. He went to his inbox, opened the message Claire Dearing had sent him, where she was telling him about the offer Lockwood had made to her. Consulting it again, he noticed that her internship was supposed to start the next day and that the couple and the small DPG group led by Alexander Singer would depart for Costa Rica in the second half of June.

Guillaume turned his head, looking through his office's window. Outside, daylight was fading as the day drew to a close, bathing the San Francisco Bay Area in a golden halo. As he contemplated Japantown and its Peace Pagoda, the director of the WDMC hoped with all his heart that things would go well between now and the animals' auction in early August and that Claire Dearing would carry out her missions and earn considerable support. She was going to need it.

Turning back to the computer, his eyes stopped on a frame with a photo, in which he appeared alongside several colleagues from Interpol's anti-poaching division and was smiling. They were in the middle of the jungle, somewhere in Asia, and the group was made up of both local agents and foreigners such as Guillaume, whose face then sported no goatee or moustache and his scalp no scar. Memories of the operations around the world he was involved in as a field agent, before he was injured in Bangladesh in 2010 and became an executive, returned, including those of the operation Interpol had carried out in Costa Rica in the first half of the 2000s, Operation Wyvern.

Working until then at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, Guillaume remembered the excitement he felt when he was told that he was being sent there as a field agent, but also the strange and mixed feeling he had felt when he first saw live non-avian dinosaurs with his own eyes. During one of their missions, he and his partners had found a warehouse in which cages were stored. They contained small species such as Compsognathus or Microceratus as well as babies of larger species, both herbivorous and carnivorous. It had been a sad sight and knowing that, if they hadn't intervened, these animals would have been shipped to various destinations outside of Costa Rica had troubled him greatly. Where some of the dinosaurs could have been returned to the Five Deaths, those that couldn't had been given to InGen for lack of anything better, and InGen kept them at Site D before sending them to Jurassic World.

Guillaume saw live extinct animals again only ten years later during various trips, in New York, Orlando, Singapore, Saint-Aignan… in zoos to which InGen had sold specimens. But it had only been a handful of individuals or species each time and although he wanted to, he had never been to the Costa Rican islands inhabited by dinosaurs. Jurassic World was gone but the Five Deaths and their fauna were still there. Every year, the United Nations' Committee on the Containment and Control of De-extincted Lifeforms organized a visit to Caer Draig and Guillaume's predecessors had always been part of the trip. The date of this year's trip hadn't been announced yet, but his desire to see whole herds roaming the lush valleys, predators prowling under the jungle foliage and pterosaurs flying over the coastal cliffs might be granted by December.

He smiled and laughed softly when he realized that Costa Rica was once more among his main preoccupations after all those years, like if he came full circle.

Returning to the home page of his mailbox, he noted that several employees of the center had sent him messages in which they asked if they could take their leave on the morning of May 24th. He also saw that he had received an email from a sender named AttoliniEnthusiast about some Bethany. Doubtful as he didn't knew this sender, Guillaume opened it and read the email:

Subject: Bethany

Hello Mr Vuillier,

I know you were at the reception in Lockwood Manor in Orick on March 23rd. Before you become friends with Benjamin Lockwood, I'll suggest you to investigate a project called Bethany.

Best regards,

Though he initially wanted to put this email in the trash, Guillaume hesitated. This AttoliniEnthusiast knew that he was at Lockwood's reception, but the director of the WDMC had only mentioned it to Peggy and other of his subordinates. They were either one of the center's employees, either one of the reception's guests and the latter were relatively numerous. Guillaume had noted that this mysterious sender almost seemed to warn him against Benjamin Lockwood, who had nevertheless struck him as quite a nice and respectable person when he had spoken with him that evening. He was a more decent person than InGen's current management anyway.

Suggesting that I investigate that Bethany project is nice and all, thought Guillaume, but he gives me no information about it, not even the beginning of a lead. Does he want me to investigate on hot air?

There was a knock on his door.

"Come in," he said.

The door opened. It was Peggy.

"Yes, Peggy?"

"I wanted to ask you if I could be absent on most of the morning of the 24th to attend a conference at the University of Berkeley. Actually, I won't be the only one to go there. The others should send you their requests by the end of the day."

"I've already had a few. I haven't opened their emails yet. What's the conference's subject?"

"Life on the edge of chaos. It starts at ten o'clock and the lecturer will be Ian Malcolm."

Hearing that the famous mathematician and survivor of the 1993 and 1997 incidents was going to give a lecture on the other side of the bay, Guillaume's attention grew.

"Ian Malcolm? I think it's going to be a very interesting conference. Since you're telling me about it, I even wonder if I'm also going to be absent on Friday morning to attend it."

"If you wish, you can come with us," Peggy suggested. "Claudia has an eight-seater minivan and there's one seat left."

"With pleasure."

"Thus, you can make sure that we're attending the conference and not having beers in some pub."

"That could be another reason. Is that all?"

"Yes."

But as she turned, he stopped her:

"Before you go… When I say Bethany, what do you think of?" He asked her.

"Bethany…," the assistant repeated. "Bethany from Accounts? Does she interest you? Know that she'll be with us next Friday."

Guillaume smiled and shook his head.

"No. I must admit that Bethany is a pretty woman but it's not about her, although you raised the fact that Bethany is a first name."

"Why did you ask me that question?"

"A friend is writing a novel, some sort of thriller, and he asked a riddle about a story element named Bethany."

"In Bethany, there is Beth, which is also a diminutive of Elizabeth," she suggested, "but that's no use to you since there are countless Elizabeths."

"Indeed. I'm afraid I might be in a dead end with this enigma. That will be all, Peggy."

She got out of his office and, thoughtful, he settled back in his chair.

He then had the idea of writing Bethany in the search bar of an online encyclopaedia and noticed that in addition to being a first name, Bethany was also the name of several localities, mostly from the Anglo-Saxon world. Among those located outside the latter, one of them caught his attention because it was mentioned at the top of the search results: Bethany, the English name of a village mentioned in the Bible, located near Jerusalem and known today as Al-Eizariya, the place of Lazarus.

Lazarus, the saint famous for his resurrection and whose name was given to taxa (5) that disappears for one or more periods from the fossil record, only to appear again later. The coelacanth was the most famous example of a Lazarus taxon, as this order of fish was thought to have been extinct for sixty-six million years before living specimens were discovered off the coast of South Africa in 1938.

From a certain point of view, species de-extincted through genetic engineering, "resurrected" by Science, could be considered as Lazarus taxa and if one of InGen's dinosaurs end up fossilized following an exceptional conjunction of circumstances and that alien palaeontologists visit the Earth millions of years in the future, it would be a safe bet that those, circumspect, would indeed consider non-avian dinosaurs as a Lazarus taxon, since they would have disappeared at the end of the Mesozoic era just to reappear suddenly during the Holocene period.

And Guillaume was the director of an organization whose objective was to study and monitor De-extinction. The fact that he was encouraged to investigate a project named after the resurrecting saint was no accident. But why did this AttoliniEnthusiast want him to do that and what was this Bethany project all about?

-o-

Notes

(1) Mixosaurus: Small ichthyosaur from the Triassic period.

(2) Platecarpus: Small mosasaur.

(3) Ichthyornis: A seabird-like flying theropod from the late Cretaceous.

(4) Whereas Isla Sorna is known to be InGen's Site B, the Farm near Burgo Nuevo is indeed called Site D. But what are Site A and C? Since San Diego's Jurassic Park was supposed to be InGen's leading site before being abandoned when Isla Nublar came into the picture, it had been called Site A, even if it had been acquired after Isla Sorna. As Isla Nublar and the Burgo Nuevo site were acquired years later, they had been called Site C and Site D respectively in accordance with that same logic.

(5) Taxon (plural: taxa): A group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit.