They complied and told him about the Indominus' genesis, her birth, her youth and her relationship with the other residents of the quarantine paddocks, her escape and her terrible actions during the Fall... Remembering the discovery of the documents on Zara's flash drive, they also told him about the genetic composition of Masrani's Bane, along with the human DNA and its origin.
"When you look closely, you can definitely see a little family resemblance... It must be the jawline or the haughty demeanour," Santagar observed as he compared Claire to a picture of the Indominus on his phone screen. "No offense, huh?"
Claire just shrugged.
Since the office clock showed almost noon and as the couple had nothing more to say about the Indominus, Santagar ended the recording of their conversation after looking them in the eyes.
"An exchange has to go both ways," he said while pulling out a series of pictures and putting them on the desk.
He invited the couple to look at them. The fallen park director and the keeper noticed that they were showing a private jet stopped on the tarmac of a runway. Near the aircraft, several black SUVs were parked and forming a security perimeter around the aircraft, there were several black-clad soldiers. Behind the soldiers, they saw a group of about twenty people and among them, there were both men and women in civilian clothes and ACU troopers, gathered around a transport cage that was being brought to the plane. The cage was medium-sized, large enough to hold an animal the size of a jaguar, but the couple knew that its opaque walls hid the young Indoraptor. Among the persons in civilian clothes, the couple recognized a familiar Chinese-American man in his fifties.
"These photos were taken in February, last year, at the San Agustin de Chomes airfield. It's north of here. The plane headed northwest," Santagar informed them.
"To California," Owen guessed.
"February you said?" Claire interjected. "Right before Washington decided to put spokes in InGen's wheels… They anticipated that and sent the Indoraptor to the US before there were too many complications."
"Do you have any theories about its destination?" the DIS agent asked.
"We talked about it the other day," she replied, looking at her boyfriend. "We doubt they sent it to Palo Alto and if they did, the FBI agents would have discovered it during their perquisition."
Santagar nodded slowly.
"I wouldn't be surprised to learn that InGen has secret sites. I'm afraid it's up to the FBI and the other authorities in your country to deal with this case. My superiors are waiting for my report. They will then discuss about it with their American counterparts. Let's hope that they are willing to investigate. Unless you want to continue spying for us?"
"No thanks. Once but not twice," Owen replied.
"I understand," Santagar said with a laugh before glancing at the clock. "It's lunchtime. Let's give this office back to Captain Cazenova and go to the meeting room. I'll order us food. It's on me, I owe you that after the troubles I caused you."
Before getting up, the agent took yet another item from his bag.
"I think this belongs to you, Claire," he said, handing her mask.
She took it, thanked him with a slight nod, and they left the office. They went to the meeting room, where Santagar left the couple under the supervision of two police officers before going out to get the ordered meals.
An hour later, while they ate in silence, Owen asked:
"How long are we going to stay here?"
"By the time the police investigate further and we organize a trial for you… A month," Santagar informed them. "If you're lucky..."
"A month?!" Claire exclaimed with her mouth half full. "But we're supposed to help with the operation!"
"I'm sorry, but that's how it is. The vagaries of bureaucracy..."
"If we're released in a month, we'll be back just in time for the auction," Owen calculated. "What an internship, Claire! We're going to spend a quarter of it in jail! Lockwood will be very pleased."
"In other words, I can shove his help up in my ass!" The fallen park director grumbled.
"If you're important to him, maybe he can speed things up in a way I can't describe under this roof. But despite all his good will, I doubt he can reinstate you in the operation. You and InGen are at war now. If they ever offer you to come back, it will be to lure you into an ambush."
"Yeah, I think I can say goodbye to the support of the Lockwood Foundation. Fuck…"
"But if you help us properly, you'll win that of the Costa Rican state," the DIS agent assured her. "We're nothing but a very small Central American country but it's better than nothing. Don't cry defeat just yet, Claire. Maybe you will find other allies... Enjoy life in the meantime. Pura Vida as we say here."
"Enjoy life... Uh not quite. I'm going to sleep in a cell with drunks, junkies and maybe even syphilitic whores for a month. Hello worries!"
Santagar laughed and shook his head.
"Don't worry, you're not going back to your cells. You are leaving tonight for San José. You will be placed under house arrest while waiting for your trial."
There was a moment of silence before Owen spoke.
"Does the residence have a swimming pool?"
"Nope. The residence with a swimming pool was not available," Santagar answered.
"Shucks," the disappointed keeper swore.
They finished lunch and around 1:30 p.m., other police officers entered the meeting room, bringing with them a folder and a notepad. Seated across from the couple, Santagar opened his laptop and tapped on the keyboard and trackpad for a moment before starting the second meeting. To make it easier for the police to understand them, they decided to converse in Spanish.
"Let's move on now to a completely different topic," the DIS agent said. "Though it's connected to the one we talked about before lunch."
He signalled to one of the police officers and the latter placed a small plastic bag on the table which contained a single minuscule item. Leaning over, the couple saw that the object was some kind of purple pill.
"Do you know what this is?" he asked them.
"No idea. Looks like one of those candies from Harry Potter," Owen replied.
"It's not magic, but almost."
"Some medicine? A drug?" Claire guessed.
"Bingo! A drug," Santagar confirmed. "Unicorn Candy. It has been on the headlines for some time now."
From the folder, another police officer took out a collection of press articles about that new drug.
"I think I heard about it on the radio last week," the keeper recalled before glancing at the article his girlfriend was reading.
It recounted the ordeal that some Silvio, aged five, had gone through. After inadvertently swallowing a Unicorn Candy brought home by a relative, the young boy had violent hallucinations, in which he saw, among other things, monkeys and snakes dancing on his bed. Alerted by his cries, his parents had taken him directly to the hospital and very fortunately, little Silvio was able to be treated in time and his life was no longer in danger.
"And why are you telling us about it? We are neither chemists nor members of any narcotics brigade. How could we help you with this?" the fallen park director inquired.
They were handed a forensic science report and the couple began to flip through it.
"Our laboratory has discovered that the Unicorn Candy is the evolution of another drug that you probably know: Magical Liopleurodon, named in reference to a series of animated short films, Charlie the Unicorn, created by some guy named Jason Steele," Santagar explained before turning his laptop to show them its screen.
The couple looked at it and saw that a Youtube video was displayed. It was titled Charlie the Unicorn The Magical Liopleurodon Way and the agent started playing it.
They watched the beginning of the video, where the series protagonist, a lethargic and pessimistic grey unicorn named Charlie, was disturbed in his sleep by two other unicorns, one pink and one blue, who asked him to go with them to some Candy Mountain.
"Coincidentally, there's a candy mountain in that same short," Santagar commented. "To think that we took months to find a link between the Lioplo and the Unicorn Candy, while it was just there, before our eyes."
After much insistence from his two unruly congeners, Charlie agreed and followed them through a forest, where they encountered a stranded Liopleurodon which, according to the two facetious unicorns, showed them the way to Candy Mountain. But all Charlie, and the viewers, heard were unintelligible gurgling and clicks from the marine reptile. However, the grey unicorn continued and he and his two companions arrived at Candy Mountain. The pink unicorn and the blue one encouraged Charlie to enter a cave in the mountain but once he was inside, the path was blocked behind him and he was beaten in the dark. When he woke up, Charlie was irritated to find that one of his kidneys had been stolen.
"So you knew about the Lioplo on Nublar?" Claire asked.
"Come on, Mrs. Dearing. You must know that we had a few agents on the island and that we were watching you closely like we do with heads of state."
She let out a small laugh.
"It's like you treated Jurassic World like a foreign nation which might harm you…."
"We laugh, we laugh… but while colourful, this description is a bit accurate," the agent admitted.
Claire sighed.
"Don't think I didn't try to put an end to the Lioplo traffic. I tried but to no avail. According to some people, J-SEC executives were involved in it. My orders were probably lost along the way…"
"You said the J-SEC was involved? Very interesting. This makes an additional connection between these drugs and InGen Security."
"Additional?" Owen repeated.
Another file was opened to them, and among the documents inside it, the couple recognized the same rattlesnake emblem as the one seen on the two assassins.
"We suspect the Cascabels, one of the major gangs in the San Jose area, to be behind the Unicorn Candy's traffic. This gang is unofficially run by this man, Sebastián Bonel," Santagar explained, pointing to a photo of a well-groomed middle-aged fat man. "He owns several businesses, including a nightclub, the Athene, the real epicentre of Unicorn Candy's consumption…"
They were now looking at a map which located incidents related to the drug use. There was a glaring concentration of dots in and around the Hospital district in San José, the same one where the Athene was located, right in the heart of the Cascabels territory, delineated on another map.
"The police have been watching Bonel for several years now, waiting for him to make a fatal misstep. It turns out that someone you know and like a lot, Mr. Edward Torres, has been seen several times in the company of Mr. Bonel, including very recently, four days ago."
"The same night when we told you about what we found in the house."
Santagar nodded.
"It's not difficult to guess the subject of their talk. And by going through this file, you'll find out that the two assassins you met were looking to permanently integrate the gang and that your liquidation was going to allow them to do that. But as we know, it was the liquidators liquidated… The streets have been relieved from two scums. Going back to the relationship between Torres and Bonel, they also had conversations before and after the events of Christmas 2017. According to reports from our informant, the Cascabels loaned men to InGen Security just before the collapse of Jurassic World but those never returned, as they were slaughtered alongside others during the Grey Guards' insurgency. InGen also hired men from two other gangs: The Gavilanes and the Black Monkeys. According to your account of the events from two days ago, I think you also encountered them."
"Are you talking about the bikers and the parkour guys who attacked the train?" Owen guessed. "So InGen was doing business with them? It definitely has the knack for turning former allies into enemies."
"And since the Slayers were destroyed, the gangs aren't as scared of InGen as they used to be," Santagar added.
"But why did the relations between Torres and the Cascabels remained good while those with the other two gangs seem to have deteriorated so badly that InGen's enemies were able to hire them?" Claire raised.
"That's what interests me the most," Santagar said.
"The Lioplo. You said that the Unicorn Candy is an evolution of the Lioplo and I understand that the Cascabels have a monopoly on it…," Owen summarized.
Santagar nodded.
"Several of the keepers at the Farm were talking about a stock of Lioplo which was stored in the Depths and abandoned during the Fall," the keeper said. "What if that stock hadn't been destroyed or consumed but found by InGen Security's troops and then sent to the mainland, where Torres gifted it to the Cascabels to retain their loyalty? In exchange for a percentage of the traffic profits, he also had to give them the recipe."
"But in doing so, he offered no compensation to the Gavilanes and the Black Monkeys, who must have not appreciated this insult," Claire added.
"Especially since those two gangs are rivals of the Cascabels," Santagar told them. "We can consider ourselves lucky that a war didn't break out between the gangs. At least not yet… May InGen be damned. What do you know about the Lioplo production? Do you know the ingredients? Have you ever tasted it?"
They shook their heads, then Owen said:
"Rumor said that a toxin in Compsognathus saliva was the key ingredient."
"Compsognathus…," one of the police officers repeated, writing down the name.
"A small, bipedal chicken-sized dinosaur. Green with slender jaws and a long tail," the keeper described. "While there is only one, it's alright… It's when they are several that problems might occur. We nickname them Compys."
"Ah, the Compys!" One of the policemen exclaimed. "The same ones that are giving us a hard time in the Nicoya Peninsula?"
The couple nodded.
"Are they easy to breed?" Santagar asked them.
"Oh yes. They're like rabbits."
"Do you think that private individuals could be able to breed them clandestinely?" the DIS agent asked.
"If they get some basic advice from someone who knows these animals, yes," Owen said.
"An employee or ex-employee of InGen, for example? Last I heard, InGen hasn't opened any specialized pet stores where it would sell dinosaurs and other de-extinct animals. The eventual given compys were therefore provided under the table."
"But this Bonel is lucky enough to be friends with an InGen executive…"
Claire widened her eyes then put her hand on her partner's arm.
"The missing compys! You know, the ones Zia was talking about…," she told him in English in a low voice.
"Zia?" Santagar repeated.
"Zia Rodriguez, the Dinosaur Protection Group's veterinarian, a colleague and friend of Franklin's," Claire replied, speaking again in Spanish. "She conducted a small personal investigation during our stay."
"Is she still in Costa Rica?" The agent asked while taking notes.
"She was supposed to leave with the train, but the events with Blue… my raptor, prevented her from doing so," Owen informed him. "She's still at Site D. I guess she'll leave with one of the cargo planes, if you don't hold them back..."
"And what did Miss Rodriguez find out?"
"That an employee declared that the Compys were dead before handing them over to InGen Security employees."
"When did it happened?"
"At the beginning of last year."
"Ah, would you believe…," the DIS agent commented. "Obviously, a lot of things happened during that period. This employee, who are they?"
"The Compys were discovered by one of the keepers, Pedro Olla," Owen told him hesitantly. "But he is not guilty. He was tricked in that business and..."
"Don't beat around the bush," Santagar cut him off. "If you know the identity of whoever smuggled the Compys out of Site D, you must tell me. Our agreement stands only if you tell the whole truth."
After letting out a sigh of unease, Claire replied:
"We suspect Brice Le Goff, the veterinarian."
"A Frenchman I presume with that name?"
Claire nodded.
"Does he plan to keep working for InGen?"
"No, he will leave it by September or October, once the animals will be send to their new homes. He applied for a job at Puy du Fou, a historic theme park in Vendée, in western France. If you ever look for him in the future, I'm afraid you'll have to go there."
Santagar stroked his moustache.
"Too bad I don't know anyone at the DGSE… I have friends in the United Kingdom but not in France."
"Hence the accent," Claire said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"When you speak English, you have a British accent. It surprised us when we met," the fallen park director explained. "Then I thought that if you were a Secret Service agent of this country, you must have been trained abroad. While some of your classmates probably went to the US, you went to the UK and got your accent there. I guess that's where you bought that pipe and started smoking with it like a Tolkien character?"
"Spot on," the agent confirmed, impressed by her deduction skills.
They ended the meeting a little later and as they were taken to the vehicle that would take them to San José, Santagar said to the couple:
"I think that we'll have a good collaboration. Relax, I promise you'll be back in the US just in time for the auction in Orick."