BEg2 chapter 14

[Joseph Tracy]

My suspicion grows that Traipse has been set up to handle some very dark material, let’s say detailed building plans of the WTC, the flight plans of certain airlines, you get my drift, or maybe just money transactions at the hidden state level, and Ice or his high level confederates want only one disposable person who might potentially provide access to that information. Perhaps they even know about Lester’s embezzling action at hwgaahwgh <http://hwgaahwgh.com/> so Traipse is bitterly paranoid because he knows he’s in a deadly trap. His death is not about money but what he knows at a minimum about where hwgaahwgh money was being diverted to, or what he may know about Ice’s encrypted dark web stuff . Was Boingeaux in on the embezzlement?

Felix describes Ice - “Him( Ice) with his high-level connections. Instead here he is insecure,  anxious, angry, like some loan shark or pimp who’s just learned he can’t depend for help on the cops he’s paying off, or even on the higher levels he has to report to—no SEC to hear his sad complaint, no Fraud Unit, he’s alone.”
With something else then in the next sentence, just about to drop, which is when Felix shows up, just short of suspicious, as if he and Lester might have their own nondisclosure arrangements. 

Maxine on Lester- He carries a furtive fantasizing gaze she’s seen too many times before, an awareness of living not only on borrowed money but on borrowed time also.
   
Lester trusts Felix to have his back  but Maxine does not.

 Maxine talinng to Felix-No. No, Lester, that’s not exactly it, is it. This is evasion she’s hearing, and not the tax kind either, more in the area of life-and-death. “There’s something you want to tell me,” gently, “but it’s worth your life if you do. Right?” He looks like a little kid who’s about to start crying.
 “What else would it be? The money isn’t bad enough?” 
“In your case I think not.” 
“I’m sorry. We can’t go any further. It’s nothing personal.” “I’ll see what I can do about the money.”

Felix referring to Gabriel Ice-  “Ever meet him?” She understands that this may’ve been the whole point. “We’ve talked on the phone. I got a sense that his time is precious to him.” “Come on, I’ll introduce you, we’ve been doing a little business together.” 
Of course you have, bitch.
Felix and Ice seem buddy buddy but She never talks with Ice only listens to his domed server farms in the arctic schpiel.

Airport chance meeting with Felix B- Haven’t seen you since the Geeks’ Cotillion, recall you being into some deep discussion then with Gabriel Ice. Were you able to drum up any business?” “Maybe a little consulting work.” No shame. Felix is now an account payable of the guy who may have whacked his former partner. Maybe has been all along.

Boingeaux—  A real company called Boingo provides TV to US military( interesting contract), and is wifi provider for airports and and a network of hotspots/servers. 







> On Jan 15, 2022, at 4:19 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> HTML acronymized into He’s Taking More Lithium, so, inferentially, he’s
> crazy.
> 
> Traipse and Felix Boingeaux were hired as a team* to create Web pages
> holding encrypted data and not findable by search engines - this could be
> the deep web Hashslingrz financial info that Eric Outfield had found for
> Maxine? Or something similar?
> Or something even more shady?plans of 
> 
> It’s the encrypted data that he doesn’t know how to read.
> 
> * Ice  didn’t want his in-house people knowing about it. These would
> include the script kiddies he’d entrapped - so they might be able to read
> more encryption than Traipse & Boingeaux & hence more risky.
> 
> And/or he wanted to draw Traipse and Boingeaux into his web of intrigue by
> employing them?
> 
> 
> Allen Ruch wrote:
> 
> [Personal Note: Lester says: “Old-school HTML pages, in this case
> ‘He’s taking more Lithium,’ everything encrypted, nothin any of us
> knew how to read.” I confess, this has me puzzled. Why the Lithium
> comment? What didn’t Lester know how to read? Was that the Arabic
> LEET?]
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l