CHAPTER 233

One day after the Jurassic Park survivors' escape from Isla Nublar…

"You don't bring people half way around the world to visit a zoo. You bring the zoo to them. Mr. Hammond knew this. Before he ever dreamt of an island he began construction on an amphitheater, very near to where you're sitting right now, at the INGEN waterfront complex in San Diego, but he abandoned it in favor of something far grander and ultimately impossible. And so, the facility sits unused, unfinished, when it could be completed and ready to receive visitors in less than a month."

Peter Ludlow had been refining the presentation in his head, going over it time and again. Now, in light of everything that had transpired it seemed a fool's errand. His optimism had been stifled. In its place stood a wealth of anxiousness.

Peter tilted his head and drank his flask empty. He hadn't meant to. It had been more than half full yet, and now he was sucking at the last drops. Peter lowered the flask and screwed the cap. It took him a few tries. His hands were shaking. His fingers fumbled. Tucking the flask away in his coat pocket he looked around him. The amphitheater was deserted. Its high coliseum walls towered around him like a volcanic crater. The wind blew, disturbing tarps that were tied down over various pieces of surrounding equipment. Their loose ends drifted and crinkled like ghosts in a haunted zoo.

Peter nervously snapped his watch up to his eyes and dropped his arm with a huff.

It was hard for him to imagine a brachiosaurus or a triceratops ambling around what currently looked more like a construction zone. Somehow his earlier enthusiasm over what he was doing had blinded him to this. When he had visited before he saw potential. He saw dollar signs, lines and lines of parents with eager children coming in droves, people willing to spend all kinds of money to see the marvels within. Now he saw a ghostly construction site. He saw failure.

The sound of a motor vehicle approaching made him turn. A shiny black limousine was cruising up the main drive.

Peter looked at his watch again. He felt for his flask and remembered that it was empty. His hands fidgeted with his clean pressed suit like he was trying to work out some uncomfortable wrinkle, but there was none. He was just anxious as hell.

The limo crunched to a halt on the dirt road just a little way from where Peter was waiting. The engine remained humming. Peter could make out the driver beyond the windshield wearing dark aviators. Though he could not see his eyes at all behind the obscuring lenses Peter got the sense he was being stared at. The driver did not move or gesture. Peter began to squirm in his suit. He started to approach the limo when the back passenger door swung open.

Peter stopped. A man in a much pricier black suit stepped out of the vehicle with a single glide, his body still partially obscured by the door. He was perhaps in his forties with a hair line that had sharp receding corners. His face was sharp and clean shaven. He had an aura of hazard about him that exuded from his posture.

The man scrutinized Peter through the settling dust that drifted off the car tires, and then he stepped out from behind the door. Every motion he made was like a sharp knife in the hands of a master chef as it sliced through a crisp vegetable.

There was a thin metal briefcase in the man's right hand. Like everything else about him it was razor sharp, crisp, and clean, and it cut through the air like a katana as he strode towards Mr. Ludlow.

In a matter of brisk steps he was standing in front of him with the same scrutinizing expression. He didn't say anything. Peter waited. He was using every shred of strength he had not to appear like an absolute wreck, but he felt like the man's stare was rapidly etching away any fragment of his front like x-ray vision. Peter swallowed. The man was a bit taller than him. There was no rational reason for this to carve at his ego, but it did. Peter swallowed again and cleared his throat, gathering what composure he could to flex his corporate savviness before the individual in front of him unleashed his own emotional bulldozer.

Peter collected his words and pursed his lips, but the only thing that he was able to force past the tight oral sphincter of his face was, "Lewis."