all of my reasoning entirely, but
I can’t shake the thought that Max and I were good together. I don’t want to
hurt him any more than I already have. Maybe being willing to get married, to
be tied down to me, is sacrifice enough. Maybe I’m asking too much.
Renee is out doing something somewhere with someone (likely
dinner with Will) so I’m left alone with my thoughts for far too long. Eventually,
I get tired of arguing with myself about Max and my mind starts to wander. When
it gets to Jeremy I can’t help but remember the story he was talking about
earlier, the one with the conspiracy and the gold vault and the maps. Ten
minutes later I’ve used every journalistic resource at my disposal to pull up a
satellite map of Europe with infrared and radar overlays. I cross-reference
this with a list of historical holdings of the Rothschild family and one very
complex query later I’ve narrowed my search radius down to what’s still a
disgustingly large portion of land. Even if I’m a bit more stringent with my
criteria and I only look at areas that that were owned by them or their
affiliates for more than a year, I’m still looking at like a quarter of the
continent. Manual searching is going to be impossible.
It’s going to be a battle of wits, then. Where would I hide
a vault? Jeremy never gave a specific date that I recall, but it’s a reasonable
assumption that this would have been constructed pre-satellite imaging. This
means it won’t be disguised very well. I try playing with the contrast and
cross-referencing regular area maps to look for anything that seems out of
place but this gets me nowhere – not like you’d need a very big vault to hold
all of the world’s gold, anyway; the stuff is valuable largely because it’s
rare. It would be easy to just build something over or around it to disguise
the location. Depending on what that thing is, there could be tactical
advantages as well – a military base over the vault could guard it
unintentionally. Or a bank. Or anything else with security --protecting a
museum isn’t that different from protecting a bank, and there’d be no suspicion
about wanting to keep the exact floor plan of a museum secret. My journalistic
training screams at me as I proceed to skim down all of the locations mentioned
in The DaVinci Code with no basis to back it up, but I can’t imagine the
Rothschilds being that melodramatic and I don’t find anything to suggest
otherwise. It would be something small, I’d imagine, and with their government
connections a military base would be more likely than anything else. Maybe. I
don’t eliminate the other possibilities as I weight options for a script to
sort locations by likeliness. Checking things manually will take forever. This
way at least I’ll be looking at more suspicious areas first.
I leave it running in the background. I’m pretty proud of
myself: this is some CSI level bullshit right here. If it works, anyway. All
I’m really doing is searching the web for each location on the map and then
assigning it a numerical value based on which other words appear on the pages
mentioned in the search – ‘military’ gets 50 points, bank gets 30, etc,
Rothschild gets 100, etc – which is terribly unscientific and inconclusive. Whatever.
In the morning I’ll have a sorted list, and if it proves to be completely
useless I’m only out a few minutes. Time to move on to the Max problem.
I’ve got a legal pad and a felt tipped pen out making a pros
and cons list when Renee comes home, glowing from whatever she and Will just
finished doing. She recognizes it immediately: I’ve used this trick for years to
try to reduce my problems to something I can think about clearly. To her mild
disapproval, of course. I thought it was the cheesiness that turned her off until
our conversation about my relationships earlier this week; now I’m starting to
think that she dislikes dealing with emotional problems logically (or at all,
which
I can’t shake the thought that Max and I were good together. I don’t want to
hurt him any more than I already have. Maybe being willing to get married, to
be tied down to me, is sacrifice enough. Maybe I’m asking too much.
Renee is out doing something somewhere with someone (likely
dinner with Will) so I’m left alone with my thoughts for far too long. Eventually,
I get tired of arguing with myself about Max and my mind starts to wander. When
it gets to Jeremy I can’t help but remember the story he was talking about
earlier, the one with the conspiracy and the gold vault and the maps. Ten
minutes later I’ve used every journalistic resource at my disposal to pull up a
satellite map of Europe with infrared and radar overlays. I cross-reference
this with a list of historical holdings of the Rothschild family and one very
complex query later I’ve narrowed my search radius down to what’s still a
disgustingly large portion of land. Even if I’m a bit more stringent with my
criteria and I only look at areas that that were owned by them or their
affiliates for more than a year, I’m still looking at like a quarter of the
continent. Manual searching is going to be impossible.
It’s going to be a battle of wits, then. Where would I hide
a vault? Jeremy never gave a specific date that I recall, but it’s a reasonable
assumption that this would have been constructed pre-satellite imaging. This
means it won’t be disguised very well. I try playing with the contrast and
cross-referencing regular area maps to look for anything that seems out of
place but this gets me nowhere – not like you’d need a very big vault to hold
all of the world’s gold, anyway; the stuff is valuable largely because it’s
rare. It would be easy to just build something over or around it to disguise
the location. Depending on what that thing is, there could be tactical
advantages as well – a military base over the vault could guard it
unintentionally. Or a bank. Or anything else with security --protecting a
museum isn’t that different from protecting a bank, and there’d be no suspicion
about wanting to keep the exact floor plan of a museum secret. My journalistic
training screams at me as I proceed to skim down all of the locations mentioned
in The DaVinci Code with no basis to back it up, but I can’t imagine the
Rothschilds being that melodramatic and I don’t find anything to suggest
otherwise. It would be something small, I’d imagine, and with their government
connections a military base would be more likely than anything else. Maybe. I
don’t eliminate the other possibilities as I weight options for a script to
sort locations by likeliness. Checking things manually will take forever. This
way at least I’ll be looking at more suspicious areas first.
I leave it running in the background. I’m pretty proud of
myself: this is some CSI level bullshit right here. If it works, anyway. All
I’m really doing is searching the web for each location on the map and then
assigning it a numerical value based on which other words appear on the pages
mentioned in the search – ‘military’ gets 50 points, bank gets 30, etc,
Rothschild gets 100, etc – which is terribly unscientific and inconclusive. Whatever.
In the morning I’ll have a sorted list, and if it proves to be completely
useless I’m only out a few minutes. Time to move on to the Max problem.
I’ve got a legal pad and a felt tipped pen out making a pros
and cons list when Renee comes home, glowing from whatever she and Will just
finished doing. She recognizes it immediately: I’ve used this trick for years to
try to reduce my problems to something I can think about clearly. To her mild
disapproval, of course. I thought it was the cheesiness that turned her off until
our conversation about my relationships earlier this week; now I’m starting to
think that she dislikes dealing with emotional problems logically (or at all,
which
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