Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Reading – Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, p. 42- 65

In chapter 12, a young guard is watching live feeds of images from video cameras around the complex. Suddenly, he sees an image being transmitted from camera 86 and freezes it. The camera is supposed to be overlooking a hallway, but the image before him is most definitely not a hallway.

In chapter 13, Langdon and Kohler walk into Vetra’s study.  It contains a mix of Christian artifacts as well as scientific things.  Kohler tells Langdon that Vetra was a Catholic priest and that Vetra considered himself a theo-physicist.  Kohler gets a message that Vittoria Vetra is arriving and he tells Langdon that he wants her to explain what she and her father have been working on.  The project they were working on was very secretive and groundbreaking so that might be a possible reason why he was murdered.  Kohler also tells Langdon that something was stolen from Vetra by his murderer and tells his to look at Vetra’s face.  The murderer cut out and stole Vetra’s eye.

In chapter 14, Langdon explains why he think the missing eye is proof that it’s not the Illuminati because it sends no clear message and serves no higher purpose.  Kohler tells Langdon that the missing eye does indeed serve a higher purpose.  They go outside to meet Vittoria Vetra who arrived by helicopter.  She learns that nobody but Kohler and Langdon know of her father’s murder yet and she is angry.  Kohler asks her to show them her and her father’s lab because there is evidence there.

In chapter 15, they get into an elevator and travel down it six stories because Vetra’s lab is subterranean. The elevator shows only two stops, ground level and LHC. Langdon asks what it stands for and Kohler says it’s the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator.  The LHC is the largest machine in the world. It is over eight km in diameter and twenty seven km long. 

In chapter 16, the technician monitoring the video screens is talking to someone on a walkie-talkie who is looking in the hallway where camera 86 should be.  It isn’t there, but the person can see where it was mounted.  Someone must have removed it and placed it somewhere else inside the complex because he is still getting a signal from it.  He is worried about the object that the camera is transmitting and he calls his superior.

In chapter 17, Vittoria remembers when she first met her father.  She lived in a Catholic orphanage and he was a new priest who became her best friend.  He taught her physics and religion and eventually adopted her.  They reach her lab and Kohler tells her he came down earlier looking for her father, but Vetra had replaced CERN’s standard keypad security.  She apologizes and explains that he didn’t want anyone but the two of them to have access.  She then steps up to the device and carefully aligns her right eye with a lens that looked like a telescope.  A shaft of light scanned her eyeball like a copy machine.  She explains that it’s a retina scan that is authorized for two retina patterns only, her and her father’s.  Langdon gets a horrible revelation.  Kohler gives Langdon a look and his message is clear: the missing eye serves a higher purpose.

I thought the whole eye thing was really gross.  Once Vittoria explained that their security was a retina scan, I also realized why the murderer cut out Vetra’s eye.  I wonder what was so important to steal that the murderer was willing to cut out Vetra’s eye.  I feel really bad for Vittoria because her father was her best friend and no one knows that he has been murdered yet.  She says that CERN now doesn’t feel like home without her father.  I think that would be just horrible and it’s really sad.  I also don’t really like Kohler.  He is very indifferent about Vetra’s murder and I don’t like the way he is so detached.

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