Once the passcodes were in hand, making fake ATM cards was a trivial task.
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Chapter 18
Wednesday, January 6
Amsterdam, Holland
Scott Mason had a theory. It didn't matter than no one else believed it, or that they thought him daffy. It worked for him.
He believed that jet lag was caused by the human body traveling across mystical magnetic force fields called Ley lines. The physics of his theory made common sense to anyone but a scien- tist. It went like this: the body is electric and therefore magnetic fields can influence it. Wherever we live we are sub- ject to the local influence of magnetic, electrical and Ley lines. If we move too quickly, as by plane, through Ley lines, the balance of our system is disturbed. The more Ley lines you traverse, the more upsetting it is to the system. Thus, jet lag.
But, Scott had a solution. Or more accurately, his mother had one which she had convinced him of years earlier. Scott carried with him a small box, the size of a pack of cigarettes, that had a switch and a blinking light. It was called an Earth Resonance Generator, or ERG. The literature said the ERG established a negative gravity field through a magnetic Mobius loop. Inside the box was a battery, a loop of wire, a light emitting diode and the back side of the switch. In short, nothing of electronic consequence or obvious function. There was no way in hell that this collection of passive components could do anything other than wear out batteries. All for $79.95 plus $4 shipping.
Scott first heard his mother proselytize about the magic of the ERG when he was ten or twelve. His father, the role model for Archie Bunker ignored her completely and said her rantings in- creased with certain lunar phases. Since his father wouldn't listen to her any longer, she endlessly lectured Scott about the virtues of the ERG whenever she returned from a trip. His father refused to travel, and had never even been on a plane.
His mother so persisted in her belief that she even tried experi- ments. On one of her trips to Rome, she somehow talked the stewardesses into handing out the 400 questionnaires she'd brought with her onto the plane. It asked the passengers how they felt after the flight, and if they do anything special to avoid jet lag. She claims more than 200 were returned and that they overwhelmingly indicated that no one felt jet lag on that trip.
She attributed this immense success to the ERG effects which purportedly spread over one acre. In other words, the ERG takes care of an entire 747 or L-1011 or DC-10.