In the Mini Vanona caper, we discovered yesterday that despite our valiant efforts to recover a clue by hiking part way up Mission Peak, we’d hit a dead end. The cipher text we recovered, once decoded, told us to go back to the BART station and search the phone booth location more carefully.
Kusanagi did that last night and recovered a small magnet with geocache waypoint GCKGJB written on it. I expect he did this pretty much by feel behind the metal mounting frame of the phone, which had been removed. GCKGJB is an archived cache near the Arlen Ness Motorcycle shop and was hidden under an old concrete bridge. Kusanagi searched last night but came up empty.
This morning I stopped by, and after searching for a while located a mini-briefcase under some very old 2x12s. The briefcase contained a single sheet of paper with 3 photographs, one of them an aerial view, evidently indicating the location of a foot-bridge.
On the drive home I kept thinking about how familiar the aerial photo seemed, and finally realized it looked like an area just west of Stoneridge shopping mall. I verified that was indeed the case as soon as I got home. As I was making plans to go there, Dan called, so I met him at the airport parking area and we went to Pleasanton together.
We searched around and on the bridge for some time (it’s an interesting bridge because the green structural stuff is fiberglass, not steel). We finally got an old sheet from the truck so Dan could shimmy under the bridge, where he quickly spotted a small container in a sealed plastic bag.
It was a small phone number book that we initially thought was blank. Then we noticed the back side of the pages contained dots along one edge. After some careful alignment, coordinates appeared.
These coordinates specified a spot right on the corner of Valley and Santa Rita in Pleasanton. If there is a busier intersection in Ptown, I don’t know of it. My GPSr kept pushing me out into the street corner, so we searched all the poles and signs, but found nothing. Finally, Dan climbed up, stuck his head in a cobwebby space, and recovered a black plastic-wrapped tube.
Back at the truck, we unwrapped the tube and unrolled the banner. It seems we have successfully recovered the banner from being held hostage by MV.
We’re still puzzled by the 373 prefix phone number we heard on the taped message. Maybe we should have called it.
And on the way home we stopped to find the Sycamore Pole cache.
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