Levine grunted. "In that case, lots of luck,"

"I know," Guitierrez said. "Rain forest is an incredibly good environment for concealment. A search party could pass within ten yards of a large animal and never see it. And even the most advanced remote sensing technology doesn't help much, because there are multiple layers to penetrate-clouds, tree canopy, lower-level flora. There's just no way around it: almost anything could be hiding in the rain forest. Anyway," he said, "the government's frustrated. And, of course, the government is not the only interested party."

Levine looked up sharply. "Oh?"

"Yes. For some reason, there's been a lot of interest in these animals."

"What sort of interest?" Levine said, as casually as he could.

"Last fall, the government issued a permit to a team of botanists from Berkeley to do an aerial survey of the jungle canopy in the central highlands. The survey had been going on for a month when a dispute arose a bill for aviation fuel, or something like that. Anyway, a bureaucrat in San Jose called Berkeley to complain. And Berkeley said they'd never heard of this survey team. Meantime, the team fled the country."

"So nobody knows who they really were?"

"No'. Then last winter, a couple of Swiss geologists showed up to collect gas samples from offshore islands, as part of a study, they said, of volcanic activity in Central America. The offshore islands are all volcanic, and most of them are still active to some degree, so it seemed like a reasonable request. But it turned out the 'geologists' really worked for an American genetics company called Biosyn, and they were looking for, uh, large animals on the islands."

"Why would a biotech company be interested?" Levine said. "it makes no sense."

"Maybe not to you and me," Guitierrez said, "but Biosyn's got a particularly unsavory reputation. Their head of research is a guy named Lewis Dodgson."