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Doc

Very ingenious. It’s like a diagram written using the presumed cipher as a canvas.

It gives me 2 (rather wacky) ideas:

1) Perhaps drawing a clockface makes good sense here. Z’s words were: “The Map coupled with this code will tell you where the bomb is set. You have until Fall to dig it up.” He does add the element of time.

This might suggest a time bomb, set to go off in the “Fall”. (Which does not seem to have occurred.)

I have often been taken by the potential of the Zodiac reticle to be transformed from a diagram with spatial meanings to a diagram with temporal meanings. I could imagine it being subject to other transformations as well: modulous arithmetic comes to mind, but I am sure I have thought of others, in my dreamier states.

Could it be that we are not only looking for a location, but a time? Presumably a month in Fall. And perhaps even a time in hours? He doesn’t mention a specific hour, but if it were supposed to have been a time bomb, you would think it would eventually come down to hours.

Since I am speculating wildly (it’s 4:30 am and I should be asleep–speculating wildly is the next best thing), I might suggest the following climax to his plan: the bomb turned out to be a dud, but he left it exactly wherever it was because he didn’t dare fiddle with it himself, in case it got triggered. He went quiet out of embarassment.

Anyway, all that to say maybe you might be onto something with your clock like diagram.

2) My second idea had to do with the V’s:

The only other overt clue that Z provided was “PS. The Mt. Diablo Code concerns Radians +#inches along the radians”.

What the above text is not showing is a gratuitous, silent character that looks like a little arrow (^) that points upward at the pound/hash/number sign (#).

Looking at an image of the original letter, I noticed awhile back that that little arrow is completely superfluous, yet potentially meaningful.

When I say it is superfluous, I mean that, at a glance, it looks like it belongs there, but it doesn’t. When we hand-write a sentence or two, but forget to include a phrase, we might typically “insert the missing words by writing over top–above, I mean–the ecpxisting string of words, then add a little arrow underneath to clearly mark the insertion point where the added words are supposed to fit in.

At a glance, it looks as though that is what Z did: it’s as if he used the little arrow to mark the insertion point of the pound sign (#), which was squeezed in as if it had been added as an afterthought. It looks rather natural there.

But, if you think about it, it’s not. The pound sign is not written above the original string of text, it is squeezed in to a very definite spot. It does not need an arrow to mark its insertion point.

Of course, could have been simply put there absent-mindedly, but I suspect Z was quite deliberate about every pen stroke, and I see the potential for meaning.

I have been working on a theory that suggests that the arrow represented the arrow on the circle-cross drawn over M t Diablo, and it still may, but in light of your diagram–and your mention of the letter “V”–that the arrow, when transformed through the X axis, so to speak, begins to look like the letter “V”.

As to the significance, the arrow in the instructions points to a hash sign (#), meaning a number–as in number of inches. Perhaps in the spirit of transformations, that number is determined by a position on a clockface. Perhaps the position of the reversed Vs.

A follow up step, I might suppose, would (presumably) render a tie-in to the requisite number of inches, as mentioned in the instructions, which when multiplied by the map scale (6.4 inches per mile) would render a radius, perhaps, or maybe a distance along a circumference) to help pinpoint a location.

At any rate, it is very late. My imagination is running wild, but your diagram looks like it has potential to me. It certainly changes how I might think about the cipher. Whether it is correct or not, I don’t know, but it certainly is ingenious.

I better go back to bed.

Best regards,

G