Josh studied the message for a moment. He didn’t see that coming. And he had no idea what it meant. He searched the internet and came up with a few results. Apparently the British had found bones in Gibraltar in the 1940s, in a natural sea cave called Gorham’s Cave. But they weren’t human bones. They were Neanderthal bones — and they had radically changed what the world knew about Neanderthals. Our pre-historic cousins were actually much more than archaic cavemen. They built homes. And they built huge fires on stone hearths, cooked vegetables, spoke a language, created cave art, buried their dead with flowers, and made advanced stone tools and pottery. The bones at Gibraltar also changed the Neanderthal time line. Before the Gibraltar find, Neanderthals were thought to have died out around 40,000 years ago. The Neanderthals at Gibraltar had lived roughly 23,000 years ago — far earlier than previously thought. Gibraltar was likely the Neanderthals’ last stand.
What could an ancient Neanderthal fortress have to do with a global terrorist attack? Maybe the other messages would shed some light. Josh opened the second obituary and decoded it.
Antarctica, U-boat not found, advise if further search authorized
Interesting. Josh ran a few searches. 1947 had been a busy year in Antarctica. On December 12th, 1946, the US Navy sent a huge armada including 13 ships with almost 5,000 men to Antarctica. The mission, codenamed Operation Highjump, was to establish the Antarctic research base Little America IV. There had long been conspiracy theories and speculation that the US was looking for secret Nazi bases and technology in Antarctica. Did the message mean they hadn’t found it?
Josh turned the thick glossy page with the message over and examined the photo. A massive chunk of ice floated in a blue sea, and at its center, a black sub stuck out of the ice. The writing on the sub was too small to read, but it had to be the Nazi sub. Based on the likely size of the sub, the iceberg was maybe ten square miles. Big enough to be from Antarctica. Did this mean they had found the sub recently? Had the discovery set events in motion?
Josh turned to the last message, hoping it would provide a clue. Decoded, it read:
Roswell, weather balloon matches Gibraltar technology, we must meet
Together, all three messages were:
Gibraltar, British found bones near site, Please advise
Antarctica, U-boat not found, advise if further search authorized
Roswell, weather balloon matches Gibraltar technology, we must meet
What did it mean? A site in Gibraltar, a U-boat in Antarctica, and the last one — a weather balloon in Roswell that matched technology in Gibraltar?
There was a larger question: why? Why reveal these messages? They were 65 years old. How could it be connected to what’s happening now — to the battle for Clocktower and an imminent terrorist attack?
Josh paced; he had to think. If I was a mole inside a terrorist organization, trying to call for help, what would I do? Trying to call for help… the source would have left a way to contact him. Another code? No, maybe he was revealing the method — how to contact him — the obituaries. But that would be inefficient, newspaper obituaries would take at least a day to appear — even online. Online. What would be the modern equivalent? Where would you post?
Josh ran through several ideas. The obituaries had been easy: there were only a few papers to check. The message could be anywhere online. There had to be another clue.
What did the three messages have in common? A location. What was different about them? There were no people in Antarctica, no classifieds, no… what? What was different about Roswell and Gibraltar? Both had newspapers. What could you do in one and not the other? To post something… The source was pointing him to a posting system as ubiquitous today as The New York Times was in 1947.
Craigslist. It had to be. Josh checked. No Craigslist in Gibraltar, but yes — there was a Craigslist board for Roswell / Carlsbad, New Mexico. Josh opened it and began reading through the messages. There were thousands of them in dozens of categories: for sale, housing, community, jobs, resumes. There would be hundreds of new postings each day.
How could he find the source’s message — if it was even there? He could use a web aggregation technology to gather the site’s content — a Clocktower server would “crawl” the site, similar to the way Google and Bing indexed web sites, extracting content and making it searchable. Then he could run the cipher program, see if any of the postings translated. It would only take a few hours. He didn’t have a few hours.
He needed a place to start. Obituaries was the logical choice, but Craigslist didn’t have obituaries. What would be the closest category? Maybe… Personals? He scanned the headings:
strictly platonic
women seeking women
women seeking men
men seeking women
men seeking men
misc romance
casual encounters