Great work agents! Thanks to your ability to find clues, we successfully found the leader of Paloma and shut down their operation. Michael Purcell was rescued and is now safe with his family. Now, let’s give out some prizes! If you answered each mission briefing correctly, completed the entry form and followed us on each of our social media streams, you earned a maximum 10 entries. Winners were randomly selected from all total entries.
First Prize:
M. Nash from MN (6 total entries)
Second Prize:
J. McGrail from NC (7 total entries)
Third Prize:
D. Miller from MD (5 total entries)
Fourth Prize:
A. Pennington from CO (4 total entries)
B. Flaherty from TX (4 total entries)
M. Perez from IL (4 total entries)
A. Cortesi from MA (3 total entries)
L. Recker from IN (2 total entries)
International Prize:
L. Kastl from Austria (3 total entries)
Congratulations to the winners and thanks to ALL of you for your effort. Here is the mission debriefing.
Mission Narrative:
A secret group named Paloma is trying to bring about the end of the world in order to fulfill ancient Mayan prophecies. They embrace technology and desire to leverage it in order to bring financial ruin to world powers and bring about the destruction of the world.
Paloma’s plan is to make it seem like different world governments are sabotaging financial institutions. The global financial institutions will then begin accusing each other of sabotage and urge their respective governments to intervene. This will start a world wide nuclear war. Once Paloma has successfully hacked each financial institution, they will begin executing their plan. GCC is the last holdout.
They have kidnapped Michael Purcell and are interrogating him to get him to give up GCCs security codes. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out Michael Purcell’s last known location, identify the leader of Paloma, find out where he is hiding and rescue Michael Purcell.
Mission Briefing #1: Find Michael Purcell’s Last Known Location
Clue: “2 books forward and 1 chapter back, move 1 verse forward for the site of the attack.” A second clue was later tweeted: “Mission Impossible 1 uses a Bible verse. Use that verse to begin deciphering the clues.” The Bible verse in MI:1 is Job 3:14. 2 books forward, 1 chapter back and 1 verse forward leads to Prov. 2:15, ““whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways.”
The numbers below are pairs of GPS coordinates. The coordinates in bold point to Lombard Street, a VERY crooked path.
33.858667 151.214028
48.8583 2.2945
35.466667 97.5175
29.976111 31.131111
25.197139 55.274111
37.802 122.419 (37.802, -122.419)
51.501 0.142
43.878947 103.459825
Mission Briefing #2: Unlock the Dossiers
Clue: “Time to narrow down the suspects. If Hurley ever visits our website, this page is for him.” Hurley was a character on LOST that was constantly confronted by the numbers, 4 8 15 16 23 42. If you went to the page on our website, www.cuttingthecablepodcast.com/4815162342, 
then you were greeted with a cryptogram. The message of the cryptogram said, “A site search for Dossier will give you what you seek.” If you used the search box on our website to search for the word “dossier”, you got a page that showed you these dossiers and gave you the code: 789551.
789551 was the answer.
Mission Briefing #3: Find Paloma’s Hideout
Clue: “301, 501; the sponsor’s ad shows how it’s done.” If you clicked on the Global Cash Card banner on our website, you were taken to a page with 4 videos. You could have watched each of the 4 short videos, or if you recognized that 301, 501 are dart games, you would have gone right to the Dart Dance video and found a hostage giving clues. He said that a man with a bass clef tattoo was with him (The Musician from the Dossiers). He also said his location was “A Saint, A Square, A Wing, Not a Prayer. The answer was St. Mark’s Square which is known for a massive amount of pigeons and is not part of the Vatican.
Mission Briefing #4: Identify Paloma’s Leader & BONUS: Find Michael Purcell
Clue: We tweeted about a distress call that we received from Michael Purcell. He said he was taken up a hill, smelled fish and saw a bronze pig. A Google search for “Hill Fish Bronze Pig” results in Pike Place Market. He also stated that the man with him kept a small, round tin in his pocket. In the dossiers, Jim Franklin was said to be obsessive about his shoes. Shoe polish comes in small, round tins. Another clue was that Pike Place Market’s slogan is “Meet the Producer.” In the dossiers, Jim’s nickname is “The Producer.”