23 July 2006

Saturday, November 28: An Angel Gets Her Wings

Angel visits Dag in the hospital to see what the results are of his funds distribution. When Dag tells her all the funds have been distributed, she asks to see the list. She checks it and is unhappy that a particular charity that was a favorite of Simon’s was not on the list. Dag reveals that he knows that the specific charity that she is referring to was a front and that money contributed to it would, in fact, go to Simon for future expenses. Angel breaks down and says that it was hers. Simon promised her he’d take care of her.

Dag tells her that he transferred title of the house in Croatia to her, and that she would find one million dollars in a Swiss Bank account for her, the amount that Simon had indicated he was keeping "to live on." In order to get access to anything, however, she will have to expatriate as she would have to deal with the IRS if she brought anything into this country. Dag assures her that she is on a watch list with the FBI and they would have her if she ever moved back to the US or brought money into the country. But before he gives her the account numbers, Dag wants to know more about Angel. He drags out of her that she has a boyfriend (waiting in the hall) and that Simon was no more than a bank account to her.

She insists that she allied herself with Simon because of his high goals. Dag wants to know if her boyfriend killed Simon. Angel just replies that Simon was old. He was going to die soon anyway. Before Angel leaves, Dag spots the tattoo that matches the one Simon had. He manages surreptitiously to memorize the Hexadecimal number. When Angel leaves, Dag's FBI agent friend steps into the room and congratulates Dag on distributing the funds, but is disappointed that two critical pieces are still missing from the puzzle. First, they don’t yet have Simon’s murderer. Second, they don’t know what the source of the funds was. All Simon’s business seems to have been legitimate except that he embezzled money from the source. But the source isn’t stepping forward to file charges, so there is no crime. He’s pretty disgusted that Dag failed to get a confession or locate the source.

End of Chapter Twenty-Eight

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

> He manages surreptitiously to memorize the Hexadecimal number.

This is easier if the number spells something or is close to spelling something. That's one of the nice things about hex, it's not too hard to make words. Hacker lore has several "cultural" examples of hex-words in instances where a programmer needs to embed an arbitrary constant into some code. "DEADBEEF" is a notorious one, and may thematically resonate with the fact that Simon and Dag are/will-be "dead beef" themselves soon.

You might also (or instead) work the hex number/word thing in elsewhere in your story. Between zeroes looking like "O"s and ones looking like "I"s, it wouldn't be hard to have a tattoo that was convincingly english text but which then turns out to be a hex number.