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So Chase is somewhat established as stubborn. Now we just need to show her finding the next case, the case that will have her trailing an MIA pilot in Panama. The pilot bombed and eventually took over a submarine carrying nazi gold to argentina at the end of the war, the pilot flew a floatplane with depth charges and was looking for targets of opportunity when he see the the Uboot and attacks, he blows a hole in the uboat and it raises the white flag and contacts him on shortwave asking him to land and the rescue the crew, he does and makes a deal with the commander to help him move the gold and hide it somewhere. They move it to the corn islands and bury it. The pilot disappears a month later along with the co-pilot and gunner. She tracks them all the way through their early training and then down to panama to guard the canal. Then she goes down to Panama on tip from the pilots daughter that her father never died in action, was never in fact missing as far as she knows, he simply moved to panama after the war,brought his wife down and so on. Nicole meets up with Sil hawkard, sailor extrodinare whom she hires as a translator and to take her out to dive the wreck of the uboat. or to scan the seafloor with radar looking for the sub. She calls up her old friend from germany and he traces the details of the uboat and tell her that there is in fact a missing uboat and that's when she goes to panama.
The man who sets the whole thing in motion, the one who gives her that piece of paper with the name on it is acting on behalf of someone who doesn't have the resurces to move the gold, but wants the americans, a senator or someone to know that they have it? ala cryptonomincon perhaps?
Pilot: Otto Lawrence.
The other mystery man is the senator's father who financed his early business with the nazi gold taken from the Uboat,
Okay so the men were based in the Carribean, the official details of what happened are languishing on Puerto Rico, the naval base at San Juan. That's where she meets Sil, they go looking for the wreck. Also note that there was 250 million in gold brought from france before the fall in 1941. It was sent to Admiral Georges Robert who then affirmed his allegiance to the Vichy regile and became custodian of the gold. So perhaps the men never see a uboat or anything else of the sort, they just hear about the gold and know that one of the transport boats it torpedoed? But it takes Chase quite a while to figure that out.
This isn't Nazi gold buried the basement of some bank or wherever vandamere bush put his gold. This was money stolen from the french government by a us navy officer who them had himself surgically altered and returned home under a false name.
They talk about why Chase does it, establish him as a nerdy guy in wool sweater vest maybe, based on the character from Rubicon. They go to lunch and then a man gives Nicole a name, she goes back and runs it through the WWII database, it isn't there. She goes to the files and finds the man's file, but there's nothing in it. She meets with the mysterious stranger again (the first time they meet he gives her a piece of chalk and tells her to mark a bench and he will be in touch with her), he gives her some more to go on and she goes to the Archives where she finds enlistment papers, enough to know that he was a soldier. Then she goes to his squadron headquarters in Annapolis and finds more record, though not much, just that he was shipped to Panama in 1941 to protect the canal and the gulf. Also search and rescue for the marines that were training on the beaches there in preparation for action in the south pacific. She goes back to her boss and tell him the story, he says she can work the case, but that she had to take on the other new case as well, so she does and they end up being connected maybe? Maybe not, maybe she just ignores that case and everyone int he office starts liking her more because the boss is getting more and more pissed at her because she's.. or even better the boss says no to her request, gives her the file she's supposed to be assigned to and then she goes back to the mystery man and he does something such that her boss comes back to her and says, okay, you can work that case, though he obviously doesn't want her to do it all so then everyone starts to like her because the boss no longer does, though he can't do anything about it. Then she works it some more, uncovers a bit more but hits another wall and goes back to the mystery man to tell him there's just nothing on the guy. He's the one who says she needs to go to Panama, give her Sil Hawkard's name and number, she flies down and meets up with Sil on his boat.
SO let's go back to the UBoot story, that sounds better to me right now, but instead of moving nazi gold, it's full of mazi french moving the french gold witha skeleton crew. So Reese rescues them, but his navigator has to stay on the boat because there's too much weight. The navigator and captain make a deal to being the sub into shallower waters and sink it so they can come back and recover it. But then the french captain dies in an auto accident and Reese disappears in the Korean war, leaving only the senator's grandfather who is the bad guy that takes some of the gold and starts his empire. So who knows about the gold and who is prodding Chase to look for it? And who is followling her, who is trying to stop her from finding it?
What things to you need a lot of money to do?
There's the Stephenson route, a an investor, I could switch Charley to be an investor looking for money.
Or maybe someone who found a journal at a yard sale? Or maybe Louis finds the journal? So that's your curious person. Then who is the bad person? Is another political figure cliche? What about this guy, not he president but his campaign manager, built on Carl Rove sort of a thing, someone willing to do anything to keep it quiet that his boss has dirty money? But mney from WWII? Who is going to have sat on that money for years, generations even, I think it needs to be rediscovered. But so then who knows about it other than Chase? We're back to why is she being followed.
Maybe the FBI? They're investigating something and stumble across it?
Fuck I don't know. Maybe more will just come as I keep writing, but I don't really want to invest too much in Charley as a politian if that's now what he ends up being....
Here's a thought based on this piece in Wired:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/ff_uvb76/all/1
What if someone picks up the name Otto Lawrence from a "a numbers station" (see below) and not wanting to get involved directly, finds out about Chase from her feed, follows her and decides he likes her so he is trying to meet up with her when the hooker barges in, takes it across the street and give it to her. Then we need the nerd behind it. Steven is in on it, Steven is part of the online collective that listens to and discusses shortwave radio signals. They call themselves Enigma 2000. They pull the name and the second name from a signal coming out of south america, but they can find little on the net so they send it to Chase, at Steven's suggestion.
So when Chase leaves town after the incident with the PI (who is also a member of the group), she comes back sans car and catches a ride from the airport with Steven. somehow this leads to her getting to his house and seeing the shortwave equipment.
Also, a real group:
http://www.brogers.dsl.pipex.com/enigma2000/
Stuff I like Less, but is going somewhere, getting there: {{{
The actual knowledge of Lawrence is being broadcast by a numbers station that no one knows about, but it turns out that the information is somehow related to drug lords in central south america who have discovered the gold but have no way to retrieve it. They find out about it because someone in the states is making a deal with them, is showing them the money to set up a drug running business and he knows about the money from a notebook he bought at a garage sale.
Sil is Simon, but anyway, Simon is down in Panama, takes Chase out to the wreck, they find the gold,
The hire Sil hawkard to do that for them, he finds the dogtags at the dive site perhaps, so then somehow the tags get from Sil to
}}}
Background on numbers stations: "... a numbers station, used to communicate encrypted messages to spies or other agents. Typically, these stations transmit numbers in groups of five, making it impossible to detect partitions between words and sentences. The numbers can be decoded using a key in the possession of the intended listener. Numbers stations are thought to have existed since World War I, as documented by the Conet Project, a compilation of recordings that was first released in 1997. (Director Cameron Crowe, a fan of the Conet Project, used samples from it in his 2001 film Vanilla Sky.) Drug runners are believed to have used numbers stations on occasion; so too are the North Koreans, the Americans, the Cubans, and the British. Indeed, shortwave hobbyists suspect MI6 was behind the most famous numbers station on the planet, the much-revered Lincolnshire Poacher. via: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/ff_uvb76/all/1
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