A word from Roger Lintott:

The way I solved Chapter 1 is as follows ...........

There were two initial clues that I worked on .... "The Ghost of Cooper past holds your Omega key" and the Eagle's eye that told us the first two keys were "1 & 20". Most questors soon picked up on the idea that "1 & 20" related to the first two letters at the start of the chapter, the word "At". That sentence contained the word "ten", which combined with the fact that we had at least two segments to find (omega, and by inference, alpha) told me that the first sequence (alpha) contained ten letters. So following up from 1 & 20, that very easily gave the sequence of ATENOCLKIH. As Ron started to publish his recent series of clues back in December, this sequence became confirmed more and more.

However, I could never agree with some comments on facebook and Tweleve, that all Ron was doing was to confirm this alpha sequence. I believed that some of these new clues also had a secondary meaning, which would give an insight into the omega key.

So, we then know what letters the omega sequence contains ... the ones between A & T (encrypted what is before U) that are not included in the alpha sequence. That is to say ... BDFGJMPQRS. But how do we find where they are in the text, and of course, how do we order them ??

The main key here of course is the "Ghost of Cooper past" which if my memory serves me, was given at the outset in the Optic Cross. The correct idea was to look at the picture at the start of the chapter. Here we have the old man "Charles Proctor III", who was once of course, in his youth, Dan Cooper. Hence the ghost was the old man in the picture, and what he is holding is his cane. That cane is a bit of a weird shape, resembling the figure "7".

Some of Ron's clues for the omega key were pointing towards the number 7, or thereby page 7. Especially that penultimate clue, the number cipher when he gave the 9th number in the sequence. He also asked what was missing? Well, not only was "booth" missing, but also the letters "at" from the word "seat" (from which he used the letters "se" for his number code). So in all, 7 letters were missing !!

Okey dokey, so page 7 contained the other picture of Dan Cooper as a confirmer. It also unusually had only one long paragraph. I actually got here a year ago, but threw it out because this paragraph does not contain a "Q". Foolish boy ..... For ages, I went off on the wrong track, thinking that "Charlie Proctor the Third" or "Chuck" was the ghost !! Especially seeing that page 22 told us that Chuck "was a character - one of the last".

Anyway, this long paragraph on page 7 contains the phrase "ten to twenty" .... a very clear indication that the second (omega) sequence was here. If you read the chapter synopsis on the website, it only says "about ten minutes" ... a small enough change to make you think.

My first thought was that, like with the alpha key, we take our letters and put them in the order that they appear in the text from the start of the paragraph. Not forgetting of course to ignore the 'poem' letters. After I'd submitted this attempt, I got to wondering if it may have been a little simplistic. After all, two years of receiving that rejection email had taken it's toll  :-)

The paragraph continues ... "ten to twenty minutes later", so my next theory was that we pick up these remaining letters in the order they appear from this point on. In reality, I wasn't totally sure whether we should start after "twenty", after "later" or (my particular favourite) after the first "H" in the text. H being the tenth of our letters, the last of the alpha ones. I therefore submitted each variation over consecutive days. As it happens, I need not have worried, my fears were unfounded. Just in time as it happened, with Mike Kerrigan also submitting a correct answer just a few hours after I did ......phew, after two years, that was close !!

Several of the later clues honed the search area down, confirming we were looking towards page7.  There is a jeep (cherokee) at the end of the first paragraph and also at the end of page9. One jeep being after the alpha key, the other after the omega key. Also at the bottom of page 9 was the first or 'starting' line across the text. The phrase "what you know" also appears on page 9, another indicator that we need to search earlier in the book for our omega key. In fact, in hindsight, all of these new clues can be seen to be straightforward indicators to the solution.   

After I'd posted these solutions, although I really liked the idea, I still had doubts (after all it's been two years of getting that rejection email). You could have knocked me down with a feather when my wife called out that there was someone on the phone for me ... he sounds like a Canadian !!!   

All the clues were there in the book and on the website, the latest clues just pointed the way. I was really close to solving this a year ago, but then went off on the wrong track ... stupid boy. Good luck everybody with those other silver eagles.