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[duderaider]

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[duderaider]

And I'm gonna guess you went along with it?

[it would be a pretty short story, if Neal turned him down, after all. well, probably. there's the chance that he turned him down and ended up involved in things anyway, he supposes]

[alias_savant]

I was young and stupid so yeah, definitely.

[Neal shakes his head.]

Adler was a big hedge fund guy. The job was a long con to get at his funds and clear him out. What we didn't know was that it was all Ponzi scheme and Adler was a bigger con artist than we were.

[Probably because he was busy falling in love with Kate, but that's not important.]

[duderaider]

Somehow, that doesn't surprise me.

[for all he knows about hedge funds, they've always struck him as a little shady. you have to be a shark to get involved in that crap -- you have to have one foot in crooked, anyway. at least the warlords he deals with are honest about wanting to kill you. most of the time]

[anyway]

So, what happened?

[alias_savant]

Well, just before we were able to seal the deal on robbing him blind, he gets exposed for his scheme and flees with the money. It didn't really bother me one way or another and my partners and I started getting big and flashy, pulling jobs all over the world. Eventually the FBI caught notice, and I wound up in jail, but in the interim, a rumor started floating around that I had stolen a very specific music box.

[And he'll describe the box.]

It originally belonged to the Russians, but the stories go that the Nazis stole it in World War II. Eventually it wound up in Copenhagen, where a friend and I tried to steal it, but didn't actually manage to get ahold of it.

[duderaider]

Why the interest?

[his and his friend's. the FBIs. whoever else. Nathan feels like there has to be something special about it, beyond just having an apparently sordid provenance, but maybe that's just because, in his world, there probably would be]

[alias_savant]

My partner planned the job. I didn't know it at the time, but it had ties to her family. But the more relevant part of this story is why Adler wanted it: There was a code hidden in the music that held the equation to a fractal antenna.

[duderaider]

[okay, there's definitely a puzzle here, definitely something special about the box and the fractal antenna, he's just not sure -- wait. wait]

He wanted a way to find the U-Boat!

[that's it! that's gotta be why he'd need a fractal antenna, right?]

[alias_savant]

[Neal grins, pleased that Nate has caught on.]

He did. Things got messier from there, though. He was blackmailing FBI agents, killing my allies - trying to figure out how to get me to give him a music box that I didn't have. Little did I know, however, that the FBI had managed to obtain it.

[duderaider]

[Nathan flashes him a brief, bright smile, pleased himself, before sobering again]

And your parole officer guy didn't think to tell you that? [he means Peter. he also assumes Neal knew him, by this point, since he mentioned having been in jail already, but he could be wrong]

[alias_savant]

I think he was worried that I would do something stupid.

[A pause.]

Which, in all fairness, I absolutely would have.

[duderaider]

[he barks out a laugh, at that]

Yeah, you and me, both. [a beat] But okay, so what did happen? [he's absolutely invested in the resolution, now]