Pop Goes the Weasel (novel) and Dangsan Railway Bridge: Difference between pages

Dangsan Railway Bridge
	Dangsan railway bridge. The Seoul Subway Line 2 train is heading south across the Han River.
Korean name
Hangul	당산철교
Revised Romanization	Dangsan Cheolgyo
McCune–Reischauer	Tangsan Chǒlkyo

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VisualWikitext

Inline

Revision as of 04:52, 13 October 2008

The Dangsan Railway Bridge (당산철교) crosses the Han River in Seoul. It is used exclusively by Seoul Subway Line 2. Immediately on the south side of the bridge is Dangsan Station in Yeongdeungpo-gu, which is on an elevated platform. Hapjeong Station, a subterranean station in Mapo-gu, is located approximately 600 meters north of where the bridge makes landfall.

After the partial collapse of Seongsu Bridge, every bridge in Seoul was re-examined for safety and it was decided that Dangsan Bridge should be taken down and rebuilt. Amid considerable controversy, this bridge was closed for reconstruction on December 31st, 1996. The reconstruction finished on November 22nd, 1999.

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+{{Infobox Korean name
-{{Plot|date=July 2007}}
+|img=Dangsan_Railway_Bridge.jpg
+|caption=Dangsan railway bridge. The Seoul Subway Line 2 train is heading south across the Han River.
+|hangul=당산철교
+|hanja=
+|rr=Dangsan Cheolgyo
+|mr=Tangsan Chǒlkyo
+}}
+[[Image:Yeouido Surroundings Map.png|thumb|250px|right|Yeouido Map]]
+The '''Dangsan Railway Bridge''' (당산철교) crosses the [[Han River (Korea)|Han River]] in [[Seoul]]. It is used exclusively by [[Seoul Subway Line 2]]. Immediately on the south side of the bridge is [[Dangsan Station]] in [[Yeongdeungpo-gu]], which is on an elevated platform. [[Hapjeong Station]], a subterranean station in [[Mapo-gu]], is located approximately 600 meters north of where the bridge makes landfall.
-'''''Pop Goes the Weasel''''' is the fifth book in the [[Alex Cross]] series written by [[James Patterson]].
+After the partial collapse of [[Seongsu Bridge]], every bridge in Seoul was re-examined for safety and it was decided that Dangsan Bridge should be taken down and rebuilt.  Amid considerable controversy, this bridge was closed for reconstruction on [[December 31st]], [[1996]].  The reconstruction finished on [[November 22nd]], [[1999]].
-==Plot introduction==
-The book begins by introducing the villain, Geoffrey Shafer. He is well dressed and wealthy as he gets out of his big house in [[Kalorama, Washington, D.C.]] into his luxurious [[Jaguar XJ]]12. As he drives down the street, he speeds and rushes to oncoming traffic causing a commotion. He is pulled over by a [[police]] officer. When the police approach him Shafer takes out his ID. He is a [[United Kingdom|British]] [[Diplomat]] and has [[diplomatic immunity]].
-==Plot summary==
+==See also==
+*[[List of Korea-related topics]]
+*[[List of Han River bridges]]
+*[[Seongsu Bridge]]
+{{Han River bridges}}
-Geoffrey feels like he's losing control. He plays a fantasy game named the Four Horseman, in which he takes on the character of Death. The game is everything to him. He drives to the red light district with his laptop and e mails the other Horsemen. The game is about to start again. He picks up a [[prostitute]] and, after driving to a secluded area, he takes a large knife and has her get out. Outside, he introduces himself as Death and stabs her. He tells her he's the best player of all.
+{{Korea-struct-stub}}
+{{Seoul-geo-stub}}
+{{Bridge-struct-stub}}
+{{coord missing|South Korea}}
-It's been a week since the events from the last book, Cat and Mouse. It's July. Alex and Sampson are driving foster children to see their fathers, who are in prison.
+[[Category:Bridges in Seoul]]
-That night, Sampson and Cross are investigating the murder of the prostitute. She was 14 years old.
+[[ko:당산철교]]
-Geoffrey is eating dinner with his wife and kids. He does not love them. He was once a [[Colonel]] in the British army. He tells his family he had to go to [[London]] for the weekend. He is actually staying put in [[Washington DC]] to play his game. He leaves that night and goes toward the airport, but turns toward an apartment complex where he has a room he rents and a garage where he has a taxi cab that he's been using for months. He goes inside the apartment and transforms himself into a black man. He gets in the cab and heads to town.
-The game of the Four Horsemen depend on the roll of a dice. The idea is to have an elaborate fantasy. All four are competing with each other. Shafer is driving through town looking for a “fare”. He spots a young couple but decides they’re not right, and eventually picking up a beautiful woman.
-Alex is at the St. Anthony's soup kitchen when Christine arrives. They take a little time to cuddle. Soon Sampson arrives to inform Cross there's been another murder, but they know the victim is Nina Childs, who worked at St. Anthony's. Sampson and Cross take off. Her body is just like the prostitute's, naked and beaten. Nina's body had been dumped in a bad and impoverished neighborhood. Cross and Sampson went to tell Nina's family the news. It's revealed Nina and Sampson used to date and Sampson had loved her.
-The only consistency with the murders is that all the bodies found had no ID; the bodies were dumped in or by buildings where they could not be found quickly and there were never any witnesses.
-Cross and Sampson get together with the detectives that helped during the child killings in Jack & Jill to work on the murders. They’re going to do their own investigation. Alex makes some educated guesses about the murderer--he's suicidal, doesn’t like his job or family, former military man, world traveler, and is very careful. Cross thinks he’ll explode. Sampson says “Pop goes the weasel” and the name the Weasel sticks.
-A few days later, Chief Pittman tells Cross he doesn’t want him working on other cases than those assigned to him. He told Cross to get involved in the case of a German, who was robbed and gunned down.
-As soon as Cross leaves Pittman's office, another detective named Patsy Hampton slips in through the side door. Pittman had her there to listen in to the conversation. Pittman wants Hampton to help him take Cross down.
-At the British Embassy, Shafer cruelly and unjustly fires an employee for his own pleasure. We also learn he is with [[MI6]].
-That night, Alex and Christine have a romantic date. He proposes and she accepts.
-Ten days have passed since Shafer killed the prostitute, and he is on the prowl again. On the airport Shafer picks up a business man. He rolls the dice and has to kill him immediately. He drives and shoots the man with his gun. Shafer drives to a neighborhood, strips the man and dumps the body.
-At 2:30 Alex is called by Sampson. The murdered man has been found. Alex rushes over to the scene. Alex wonders why this body was dumped in a place where it was easily found.
-Detective Hampton is also at the scene and she watches Cross. She is impressed by him. It's revealed that Hampton once broke into a suspect's car without a [[Warrant (law)|warrant]], which is why she is working for Pittman.
-George Bayer is Famine in the game of the Four Horsemen. He is on his way from Asia to [[Washington DC]] to confront Shafer. Bayer and Shafer were both from [[MI6]]. Bayer thinks Shafer is controlling. Bayer is concerned Shafer is no longer playing a game, but is acting out his fantasies. Bayer thinks it's the drug use causing all this.
-Bayer goes to the apartment complex Shafer rents out. He sees the taxi Shafer uses. Bayer goes to Shafer's room, then back to the taxi and takes it for a spin. He picks up 2 women.
-Shafer had hacked into Bayer's computer and knew Bayer was in town. Shafer followed Bayer the whole time. Shafer wondered why Bayer was in town. It was against the rules unless agreed beforehand. Shafer waits for Bayer to leave and then goes and kills the 2 girls.
-Cross finds out that the man that was picked up at the airport was sodomized after death.
-Cross and Sampson find the two women with their lips stapled to each other.
-At work, Alex gets a lead about the murdered girls from a young man on a burglary charge. He claims to have seen the killer.
-Cross and the men go visit a man named Booker, who tells them he saw the cab that dropped the girls off and describes the cab.
-Shafer is heading to his apartment hideout when he sees all the police officers doing searches. He's curious so he approaches carefully on foot. He overhears the names of Sampson and Cross. Shafer returns to the embassy and looks them up on his computer. Shafer's intrigued, especially by Cross.
-Cross meets with a [[Pulitzer Prize]] winning [[Washington Post]] reporter, Zachary Taylor, and tells Taylor about Pittman and all the 114 unsolved murders in the southeast parts of DC.
-Christine and Alex go on a date and Alex spends the night at her house.
-The next morning, the story Cross told the reporter is on the front page of the Post. When Cross arrives at the police station Pittman meets with him and the other detectives working with Alex. He suspends the three, but not Cross. Pittman tells Cross that he’ll be reporting to him directly.
-Shafer emails the other horsemen to tell them he wants to involve Cross and Sampson in his game.
-Christine goes on an extended vacation with all of the Crosses (Alex, Nana, Damon and Janelle) to [[Bermuda]]. The trip is fun and relaxing but on the third night Christine disappears.
-Cross contacts the police and informs [[Interpol]] as well. Later that night, there is a phone call in his room and a muffled person tells Cross he has an email. Cross takes out his [[laptop]] and reads an email that says: She's safe for now. We have her.
-Sampson goes to Bermuda to help Cross find Christine. The local police find a witness to the kidnapping. Christine was riding a [[Moped]] when she was hit by a van. The man takes her and the moped inside the van. The man was black.
-Late night in bed, Patsy Hampton receives a call from an FBI contact about a [[chat room]] he visits and a game called the Four Horsemen. Hampton logs in for a few minutes and wonders if there is a connection.
-When the Cross family gets back to DC, the other members of the family are there waiting, including Naomi, his niece that was kidnapped in ''[[Kiss the Girls]]''. They’re all there to support Alex.
-Shafer goes to a ranch house in [[Maryland]] to kill a mother and daughter. When he gets there, he rolls the dice and gets a 5, which means he has to leave. He decides to ignore the rules, and runs into the house and shoots them both.
-Cross is back at work. He is still working the murders with Sampson, against Pittman's orders. They’re approached by a young man that tells them that night there was someone following the cab and drove a nice car. He tells Cross the man was white and the man driving the cab was also white.
-Hampton and her FBI friend trace the IP address of one of the boys from the chatroom. When they visit, they discover he's a teenager. They ask how he knows about the Horsemen. He tells them that a person went to the chatroom and told them about it. He managed to traced the IP address also and tells them it's Geoffrey Shafer, and that he works for the British Embassy.
-A few days have passed, and Alex has no leads on the kidnapping. Alex is giving [[boxing]] lessons to his kids. A call comes for Alex, it's the kidnapper, who tells Alex to go to a pay phone a few blocks away. Alex runs to the pay phone and commandeers it from a young woman. He waits almost 45 minutes before the kidnapper calls again with a warning to back off before something happens to his family.
-Sampson and Cross are working the cab angle. They meet with a woman who was the landlady of an apartment complex where a man owned a purple cab. The man's identification cards was false. On examining the cab, they go inside the apartment. Taped to a mirror in the bathroom are pictures  of Christine and the entire Cross family in Bermuda.
-Patsy Hampton is watching Shafer when he leaves the embassy. Shafer notices her following and heads straight home. At home he is bored and wants to kill his family. He rolls his dice but they came negative and his family is spared.
-When Shafer leaves that night, he heads to his mistress’ house and later returns home. Hampton follows. After a half hour watching Shafer at his house, she leaves. She decides to call Alex Cross. They set up to meet that night at a diner. They go over some information. Cross asks her to let him help. Hampton says she’ll think about it,
-Three nights later, Patsy invites Alex on a stakeout at Shafer's house but nothing happened. Shafer ended up going to a sports bar and watched a [[baseball]] game.
-The next night, Cross returns home from Damon's choir practice. He gets a call from the kidnapper. The kidnapper tells Cross to go to the [[National Zoo]] and go to the monkey house; there will be a payphone there. Cross calls Hampton, who tells him Shafer is at home at his son's birthday party.  Cross rushes there. He waits 15 minutes and the phone rings. The kidnapper tells Cross that Christine is at the apartment Patsy and Alex had gone to.
-Cross races to the apartment complex and finds police officers there. He goes in to find the dead Patsy Hampton. Cross finds Shafer's car. He has the police officers look around. He realizes he's at Shafer's mistress’ apartment complex. Cross burst into the apartment and has the officers arrest Shafer. Shafer yells that he had diplomatic immunity.
-The next morning, the news is all over the papers. Shafer is with his lawyer and is suing the department for false arrest and defamation of character for $50 million dollars.
-The next day, Cross is with the DC law department to discuss the case. Shafer's attorney calls. He tells everyone Shafer will waive diplomatic immunity provided that there is no civil trial afterward.
-In London, Conqueror was taking a young prostitute with him. He is an overweight balding old man in a wheelchair, so the hooker did not feel endangered. The three Horsemen are trying to compete with Shafer.
-Five months later, Christine is still missing; Shafer is on a short leash. The trial js about to start. Shafer's attorney claims any evidence found by the police falls under illegal search and is therefore not valid in trail.
-Cross receives an [[e mail]] from Sandy Greenberg, the Interpol agent that helped in the Mr. Smith case. They have a lead on Conqueror, another former [[MI6]] agent.
-Cross e mails Conqueror, a man by the name of Oliver Highsmith, from [[England]], a retired MI6 agent. Cross asks for help on Shafer. Cross receives a reply that Conqueror's relationship with Shafer is merely as an acquaintance and that the game is really just a game.
-Cross is made to look like a vindictive vigilante in the trial and Chief Pittman didn’t help him with his own testimony.
-A few days later Shafer plans a “suicide”. This becomes a news sensation. Cross knows Shafer will get off.
-During a break from the trial, due to Shafer's suicide attempt, Sandy Greenberg contacts Cross and tells him that Andrew Jones from [[Security Service]] wants to meet with Alex in regards to Shafer. They meet at a bar. Jones reveals that all four Horsemen are killers and former MI6. Jones is willing to help because Alex has information now that could cause a scandal through [[Security Service]].
-Jones reveals that the game started in 1991 where three of the four Horsemen were stationed in [[Bangkok]]. The fourth, Highsmith, was Bayer's mentor. There was a murder of two girls in Bangkok that was never solved. Jones thinks Bayer committed them, but has no proof. Jones offer to help Alex and Alex offers to help Jones and the two agree to meet again.
-As the trial resumes, the defense tries to make Shafer look like a victim, and Cross the bully. Shafer's wife made him look like a loving, caring husband, and his mistress, who is a psychiatrist, tries to make Shafer out to be like a troubled, insecure man. The defense claims Cross put Hampton's blood on Shafer when hes checked on Hampton and then went upstairs.
-Cross and Shafer confront each other outside the courtroom, in the parking lot but no fight ensues.
-Despite the prosecution's best efforts, Shafer was declared [[Not Guilty]]. At the end Shafer yells at Cross “You killed her." referring to Christine.
-Despite being let go, Shafer was held on a short leash. Jones goes to his office to tell Shafer he'll be returning to London in a month, and that he knows Shafer is a killer and that they will catch him eventually.
-Cross, Sampson and Jones meet to discuss Shafer. Shafer was [[Bipolar disorder|bi-polar]] as a kid and it's gotten worse with all the drugs he's been taking.
-Shafer is alone at home. His wife left him and took the children. They returned to London. Though Shafer won the trial but his life is unraveling. We learn that it was with MI6 that he became an assassin and learned he liked to kill others. He was stationed in Bangkok with the other 3 men that would become the horsemen. Shafer goes out for a drive and is pulled over for speeding. The cop gives him a ticket and tells him they’re watching him. In the distance he recognizes Cross black [[Porsche]].
-Inside the Porsche, Andrew Jones sits with Alex. They are committed to stopping Shafer before he kills again.
-A few days later, Shafer goes to a mall. He tries on clothes and mingles through the crowd. He goes to another side of the mall. He goes to another parking lot and gets into a different car. He goes to a computer store and types an e mail to the Horsemen. The game is about to end and he wants to meet with all of them.
-Cross and Jones, using the resources of [[Security Service]] know that all three are going to [[Jamaica]] since that's where one of them owned a large beach house. Everyone heads down to Jamaica and get rooms in the same hotel as the Horsemen. Shafer has yet to arrive. Soon, all the Horsemen but Shafer are there.
-Shafer arrives that night by sailboat. It's been a little over a week and he's kicked off the drug habit. George Bayer is on the shore waiting to kill Shafer.
-When Shafer gets to the beach, he thinks Bayer is there to kill him. Bayer tells Shafer they are all going to play the game one more time at the hotel. They will let the dice decide. Shafer rushes Bayer and strangles him to death. Shafer grabs Bayer's dice and mumbles that he no longer uses the dice and throws them out to sea. He blames the Horsemen for making him into a killer.
-Cross and Sampson learn that the [[Security Service]] have lost the Horsemen. Cross and Sampson rush to help look for them.
-Shafer is heading toward the hotel to kill the other two Horsemen. He discovers two agents posing as a couple and shoots them. He heads into Conqueror's room, once inside after a brief argument; Shafer shoots Conqueror in the head.
-Jones, Cross, and Sampson go to Highsmith's suite. They know Bayer is probably dead so Shafer is going to the final player. They go toward Whitehead's beach house. Shafer is already there and they get into a shoot out. Shafer shoots him in the back. He decides to let him live but paralyzes him when he shoots him again at the base of the spine.
-Cross and Sampson arrive. Shafer shoots at them in a distance. He's making his way to sea. Cross figures he has a boat nearby. Cross takes off after him. In the ocean, the two struggle, and Shafer fakes bad cramps and starts to sink. A few seconds later, he grabs Cross from beneath. Cross lands a powerful kick to Shafer's head, who sinks again. Cross tries to rescue him but is unable to.
-Two nights later, Cross and Sampson meet with Jones and try to make sense of the whole ordeal.
-At  the airport, Cross and Sampson are heading home when Jones shows up and tells them Christine may have been in [[Jamaica]] all along.
-A thief had been caught and traded information to the police. An American black woman was being held by a gang. We learn it's been a year since Christine was kidnapped. They get to the area where she's being held and they’re allowed in. Christine was there and she had a baby. She begins to cry. She tells Cross she named the baby Alex. They kiss and she tells Cross that he was always with her.
-Epilogue: Shafer had actually survived Jamaica and was in London. He was following Lucy, his ex-wife. He approaches her and quickly slashes her throat. The new game begins.
-==Trivia==
-* Shafer called the taxi she used to pick up his victims the Nightmare Machine.
-* Shafer became known as the weasel in casual conversation between Cross and his fellow detectives.
-* Shafer played the horsemen every Thursday night and loved it. The game had been played for 7 years. He played when sick and would cancel functions if it interfered with the game.
-* Shafer was Colonel in the British Army and a spy for [[MI6]].
-==The Four Horsemen==
-* Geoffrey Shafer (The Weasel) – Death. The main bad guy in the book.
-* Oliver Highsmith – Conqueror. The game was originally his idea. He was in charge of the other 3 when they were stationed in [[Bangkok]]
-* George Bayer – Famine
-* James Whitehead – War. War Recruited Shafer into MI6. Whitehead reported to Highsmith.
-All four of them killed people in their area, but Shafer was more out of control. During their time in Bangkok they all murdered prostitutes.
-{{Alex Cross}}
-[[Category:2005 novels]]
-[[Category:Alex Cross (novel series)]]