Alongside that was a blurred, curling snapshot of a bespectacled Chinese man in a white lab coat, standing in the jungle beside a wooden sign that said “Site B.” His coat was unbuttoned, and he was wearing a tee shirt with lettering on it.
Alongside the photo was a large blowup of the tee shirt, as seen in the original photograph. It was hard to read the lettering, which was partly covered on both sides by the lab coat, but the shirt seemed to say:
nGen Site B
esearch Facili
In neat handwriting, Levine had noted: “InGen Site B Research Facility???? WHERE???”
Just below that was a page cut from the InGen Annual Report. A circled paragraph read:
In addition to its headquarters in Palo Alto, where InGen maintains an ultra-modern 200,000 square foot research laboratory, the company runs three field laboratories around the world. A geological lab in South Africa, where amber and other biological specimens are acquired; a research farm in the mountains of Costa Rica, where exotic varieties of plants are grown; and a facility on the island of Isla Nublar, 120 miles west of Costa Rica.
Next to that Levine had written: “No B! Liars!”
Arby said, “He’s really obsessed with Site B.”
“I’ll say,” Thorne said. “And he thinks it’s on an island somewhere.”
Peering closely at the board, Thorne looked at the satellite images. He noticed that although they were printed in false colors, at various degrees of magnification, they all seemed to show the same general geographical area: a rocky coastline, and some islands offshore. The coastline had a beach, and encroaching jungle; it might be Costa Rica, but it was impossible to say for sure. In truth, it could be any of a dozen places in the world.
“He said he was on an island,” Kelly said.
“Yes.” Thorne shrugged. “But that doesn’t help us much.” He stared at the board. “There must be twenty islands here, maybe more.”
Thorne looked at a memo, near the bottom.
SITE B @#$#TO ALL DEPARTMENTS OF[]****
MINDER OF%$#@#!PRESS AVOIDAN*****
Mr. Hammond wishes to remind all****after^*&^marketing
*%**Long-term marketing plan*&^&^%
Marketing of proposed resort facilities requires that full com-
plexity of JP technology not be revealed announced made
known. Mr, Hammond wishes to remind all departments that
Production facility will not be topic subject of any press release
or discussion at any time.
Production/manufacturing facility cannot be#@#$#
reference to production island loc
Isla S. inhouse reference only
strict press****^’%$**guidelines
“This is weird,” he said. What do you make of this?”
Arby came over, and looked at it thoughtfully.
“All these missing letters and garbage,” Thorne said. “Does it make any sense to you?”
“Yes,” Arby said. He snapped his fingers, and went directly to Levine’s desk. There, he pulled the plastic cover off the computer, and said, “I thought so.”
The computer on Levine’s desk was not the modern machine that Thorne would have expected. This computer was several years old, large and bulky, its cover scratched in many places. It had a black stripe on the box that said “Design Associates, Inc.” And lower down, right by the power switch, a shiny little metal tag that said “Property International Genetics Technology, Inc., Palo Alto, CA.”
“What’s this?” Thorne said. “Levine has an InGen computer?”
“Yes,” Arby said. “He sent us to buy it last week. They were selling off computer equipment.”
“And he sent you?” Thorne said.
“Yeah. Me and Kelly. He didn’t want to go himself. He’s afraid of being followed.”
“But this thing’s a CAD-CAM machine, and it must be five years old,” Thorne said. CAD-CAM computers were used by architects, graphic artists, and mechanical engineers. “Why would Levine want it?”
“He never told us,” Arby said, flipping on the power switch. “But I know now.”
“Yes?”
“That memo,” Arby said, nodding to the wall. “You know why it looks that way? It’s a recovered computer file. Levine’s been recovering InGen files from this machine.”
As Arby explained it, all the computers that InGen sold that day had had their hard drives reformatted to destroy any sensitive data on the disks. But the CAD-CAM machines were an exception. These machines all had special software installed by the manufacturer. The software was keyed to individual machines, using individual code references. That made these computers awkward to reformat, because the software would have to be reinstalled individually, taking hours.