At the same time, somewhere in the western part of the canton of Burgo Nuevo, a car was following a dirt road, driving towards an isolated house, that of a farm located not far from the railroad. Inside the car were Martí Padilla, his driver as well as a young man and a young woman in their twenties, two twins dressed in black and carrying a pistol in their belt, just like Padilla and their driver. The four wore a medallion depicting a monkey's head, indicating their allegiance to the Black Monkeys gang. They walked through a gate left open and shortly after, the car stopped in the grass, opposite another car already parked near which five armed men sporting the Gavilanes tattoo were waiting. Martí Padilla recognized one of them, their leader, a man named Bosco Iglesia. The two groups of gangsters stared at each other in silence for a moment before turning their heads towards the entrance of the house. The door had just opened, letting out Jeremy Rankin, Dorian Faraday, Adrian Bentley and William McSweeney, who was carrying a suitcase. While Iglesia wondered where the blond man, the Indian woman and the scientist were, Rankin stepped forward and spoke in Spanish to the two gang leaders:
"Okay gentlemen. We have to talk about your men's performance and the results of this day. This way, please."
Following the English mercenary, the gangsters turned right, to skirt the angle described by the house. Rankin led them to a spot at the edge of a tall grassy meadow and he and his men moved to position themselves a few meters in front of them, next to a stump on which McSweeney put the suitcase down and opened it, revealing the wads of notes it contained. Turning, Iglesia saw Eric Aubrey following them, cigarette in hand. The leader of the Gavilanes paid no attention to the scientist's whereabouts, who must have remained inside the house, but the presumed absence of Rankin's sniper worried him and he scanned the surroundings. He and a few others also smelled a particular odour but before they could point it out, Rankin started the meeting. As the latter began ranting, Adrian pulled a flask from his trouser pocket and took a sip of the liquid it contained. The gangsters realized that the ex-InGen Security employee greatly wished to be somewhere else and in better company.
"The plan was simple though!" Rankin exclaimed. "Modified switch, the train rushes towards the viaduct. The train jumps off the viaduct… Boom, no more dinosaurs! No more dinosaurs, no sale. No sale, no money for InGen…. No money, economic collapse. Economic collapse, InGen kaput… InGen kaput."
"No more dinosaurs, I'm not sure. There are still some in the facility," Padilla pointed out.
"It's a way of speaking! We're not here to split hairs!" Rankin retorted. "Anyway, what I mean is that things would have worked out if you had left guards by the lever! Why you haven't?!"
"You didn't tell us that this train would be so heavily defended!" Iglesia blamed him while Padilla felt completely unconcerned about the switch issue. "We got pelted! I lost fifteen motorcycles, three pursuit vehicles and more than half of the men involved in this operation! It has done us more harm than good: You've got us stuck in a quagmire, sir!"
"Yes. And both our organizations have lost men," Padilla added.
"I've lost more than you, Padilla," Iglesia pointed out before turning back to Rankin. "If we decided to ally with you against InGen, it's because it sent to slaughter the men we lent her."
"You don't have to remind me why I contacted you," Rankin told him. "When we made our deal, you do remember that I promised you half the sum in case of success?" he asked the two gang leaders.
"Yes."
"But since this day was a failure, I will keep that half."
He closed the suitcase.
"I'm done with you, you're going to leave without further ado," he added.
The gangsters stirred and the faces of their leaders flushed.
"How dare you, after what happened?! It's scandalous! We won't let you!" Iglesia exclaimed.
The Englishman then took his phone out of his pocket, dialled a number and showed its screen to the gangsters.
"You see my phone. If I press the green button, the police's phone will ring and eventually someone will pick up. If you haven't cleared by then, I'll tell them it was the Gavilanes and the Black Monkeys who attacked InGen's convoy."
Iglesia shook his head in disbelief and sneered. He had always wondered how a man with a physique as... unremarkable as Rankin's could be leading a team of mercenaries and believing he was intimidating in any way. The Englishman looked more like a civil servant or a senior school administrator than a soldier and if Iglesia had never met him and passed by him one day in the street, he would have even assumed that he was the kind of man to be constantly belittled by his boss. Admittedly, it was rumoured that Rankin was a former Secret Service agent, but that was just hearsay. Some of his companions didn't inspire charisma, such as the four-eyed who seemed to be more at home behind a grocery's counter, or the American drunkard. On the other hand, Faraday and Aubrey fitted the part for him. Those could be really dangerous.
"Listen to us Englishman, you give us the money and you stop fooling around," he threatened.
"Otherwise what? You're going to shoot me?" Rankin asked them defiantly.
Iglesia and his men drew their weapons and held Rankin and his team up. Padilla and his escort, also feeling insulted by Rankin, copied them.
"Exactly. We're going to shoot you and your little buddies," the leader of the Gavilanes declared. "Think about that, you're outnumbered and if one of you ever manages to escape, we'll send guys after them and they'll never leave the country."
"Yeah…" Rankin said sceptically.
Iglesia removed his pistol's safety.
"I'm counting to three…" he began.
"You must have noticed the absence of Miss Grewal, my sharpshooter, by my side," Rankin pointed out to them.
"Yes, and?"
"Where do you think she is?"
The thugs scanned the area again, looking for the sniper, then, realizing that Rankin might have led them to that exact spot of the property for some reason, looked at the house and specifically the window on the last level, that of the attic. That window overlooked them and was open. There, they thought they saw a shadow.
She's up there.
"Don't you smell something weird too?" The English mercenary added.
The gangsters began to sniff loudly.
"Shit, it smells like gasoline!" One of them exclaimed.
Suddenly, they turned to Aubrey, who was still silently smoking his cigarette while looking at them up and down contemptuously. The gangsters then realized with horror that the British had led them straight into a trap.
"You may be more numerous, but I've got the high ground," Rankin said, looking at the gangsters. "All I have to do is a single little move and not only your retreat will be cut by the flames, but we could shoot you. It would be a trap from which you would not come out alive and your men would be told that one of you accidentally dropped his still hot cigarette butt on a gasoline leak. So no, you must stop fooling around. Come on, you have a chance to get out of here alive and not worry about the cops."
Defeated and dismayed by Rankin's treachery, Iglesia and Padilla grew enraged.
"You are no better than InGen, you wretched little runt!" the leader of the Black Monkeys exclaimed.
"I'm nothing but a mercenary..." Rankin shrugged. "I'm just following orders and taking the money I'm owed. And my employer never claimed to be better than InGen. They are enemies and at war, that's all there is to know. It's capitalism, gentlemen..."
"We're leaving!" Padilla said to his escort.
"Do. I'm not holding you back," Rankin told them. "The next time you want a job, just go ask Luc Besson. He likes guys like you."
"Luc Besson, who is he?" one of Padilla's bodyguards asked.
"He's a film director, you muppet! He made some really good films two or three decades ago but since the beginning of the millennium, he produces almost nothing but garbage where guys like you are behaving like mongs in front of the camera."
"Ah, he called you mongs. Take that!" One of the Gavilanes taunted them while several of his comrades were equally amused.
The Black Monkeys gave them an angry look. Their leader instead turned to the British and Adrian.
"Mr. Rankin, if you set foot in Costa Rica again, you're a dead man. And we won't spare your men either. Consider yourself lucky that our influence does not extend beyond the borders of this country."
He then turned to his escort.
"We're leaving. Let's go back to San José."
Rankin and his men watched the Black Monkeys delegation return to their vehicle. They then turned to the Gavilanes, who were also preparing to leave.
It was then that Iglesia asked one of his men to pass him a flattened rectangular item.
"Too bad for you that you decided to cut short our collaboration," the gang leader said. "One of the teams I deployed near the viaduct found this tablet near a wrecked car, some Cascabels' stunt. Their path ended there."
He then turned on the tablet and showed its screen to Rankin's team. They saw the InGen logo on it.
"Wait, it's an ACU tablet," Adrian recognized. "They use it to track animals."
"And?" Rankin asked him.
"The carnotaur…" Faraday realized. "With this tablet, we could follow it, right?"
"In theory yes," Adrian replied.
"Interesting," Rankin said, guessing the beginning of a plan his subordinate had to be imagining.
He looked at Iglesia insistently.
"Give us the tablet!" He ordered him.
The leader of the Gavilanes shook his head.
"I knew you were going to be interested in it. We can give it to you, but not without compensation. We intended to hunt this animal to avenge our fallen brothers and make money by selling its body parts on the black market."
"Alright!"
Rankin reopened the suitcase, grabbed a wad or two, and handed them to Iglesia, giving him a fraction of the amount he would have paid him had they succeeded in destroying the train.
"If you don't want to be ambushed before you leave the country, I would suggest you give more."
Rankin growled and grabbed a few more bundles.
"For the widows and children of those who have fallen," he said. "We're not afraid of you."
"Think whatever you want," Iglesia said while counting the money. "I'm ready to excuse you if you give me another small bundle."
After sighing audibly, the Englishman conceded to give him some additional money.
"Here's your money," he grumbled when he handed him the last bundle. "Be gone, now!"
"That'll do," the leader of the Gavilanes said after counting the notes in the last bundle. "Goodbye, Mr. Rankin."
Iglesia and his escort then left the meeting ground.
"This is the last time I'll do business with gangs in this country," Rankin muttered while watching them climb into their vehicle.
He then looked at Adrian and handed him the tablet.
"Adrian, bring this tablet to Dr. Scherrer and work on it together."
As the ex-InGen Security employee nodded, a dark idea sprouted in Rankin's mind.
"If we manage to locate this carnotaur, we could kill two birds with one stone…" he added.