He glanced at the two screens beside it: a video feed of the door outside and the city map with 24 red dots representing Clocktower Jakarta’s field operatives. He didn’t know which display made him more nervous. They might as well be giant countdown screens, ticking away the seconds to his death and some terrible, unknown catastrophe… While the other screen still simply said “Searching…”
Should the search have taken this long? What if he was wasting time?
Something else made him nervous. He glanced at the field box David had left on the table. He stood, grabbed the box, but as he lifted it, the bottom fell open. The gun and cyanide capsules tumbled onto the table, the clanging noise shattering the silence. The sound seemed to echo for hours that felt like a dream. Finally, Josh reached for the gun and two pills. His hands were shaking.
On the wall, a beep snapped him out of the moment. The larger screen read: 5 results.
5 Results!
Josh sat down at the table and worked the wireless keyboard and mouse. Three results from The New York Times, one from The Daily Mail in London, and one from The Boston Globe.
Maybe he was right. From the moment he had seen the names and dates, his first thought was: they’re obituaries. Obituaries and classifieds were classic spy-craft: operatives after World War II routinely used them to send messages across spy networks spread across the globe. It was old school, but if the message had been passed in 1947, it could have been a viable method. If it was true, this terrorist network was over 65 years old. He pushed the implications of that to the back of his mind.
He looked at the coded message David had given him:
________________________
Toba Protocol is real.
4+12+47 = 4/5; Jones
7+22+47 = 3/8; Anderson
10+4+47 = 5/4; Ames
________________________
Then he turned to the results. It was more likely the terrorists had used one paper — one paper that was available in cities around the world. The New York Times was the mostly likely candidate. Even in 1947, you could walk up to a newsstand in Paris, London, Shanghai, Barcelona, or Boston and get the day’s copy of The New York Times, paid obituaries included.
If the obituaries were coded messages, they would have been flagged in some way. Josh saw it immediately: each of the obituaries had the words clock and tower. He leaned back in his chair. Was it possible that Clocktower was that old? The CIA was only formally established in 1947 by the National Security Act of 1947, although it’s precursor organization, The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was created in during World War II, in June of 1942.
Why would the terrorists mention Clocktower? Maybe they were fighting Clocktower back then — in 1947 — 66 years ago?
He needed to focus on the obituaries. There must be a way to decode them. The ideal encryption system would feature a variable cipher; i.e. there would be no one key that could decrypt a message. Each message would include its own key — something simple.
He opened the first obituary.
____________________
Adam Jones, Pioneering Clockmaker, Dies at 77 Working on his Tower Masterpiece.
The New York Times - Obituaries, 4/12/1947 Issue
Adam Jones, leading Gibraltar clockmaker, died Saturday in British Honduras. He was found by his valet. His bones will be interred near his late wife’s — a site they selected together. Please send a card or advise family if visiting.
____________________
The message was here somewhere. What was the key? Josh opened the other obituaries and scanned them, hoping for some sort of clue. Each obituary contained a location, and each one was early in the text. Josh ran through several possibilities, re-arranged several words, then sat back and thought. The obituaries were written awkwardly, like certain words were out of order. Or forced, like they had to use those words. The order, the intervals. He saw it. The names were the cipher, the length of the names. It was the second part of the code.
____________________
4+12+47 = 4/5; Jones
____________________
The 4/12/1947 obituary was for Adam Jones. 4/5. The first name was 4 letters. The last name was 5. If he took the fourth word of the obituary, then the fifth, it yielded a sentence.
He opened the obituary:
____________________
Adam Jones, Pioneering Clockmaker, Dies at 77 Working on his Tower Masterpiece.
The New York Times - Obituaries, 4/12/1947 Issue
Adam Jones, leading Gibraltar clockmaker, died Saturday in British Honduras. He was found by his valet. His bones will be interred near his late wife’s — a site they selected together. Please send a card or advise family if visiting.
____________________
Together, the message read:
Gibraltar, British found bones near site. Please advise.
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?