CHAPTER XIII
BLINK - BLINK - blink - blink -
The flashes were guarded tonight and their code was changed, but that didn’t worry the man who watched them. He sat with his back away from a window, so his face couldn’t be seen at all, unless the distant blinks had eyes.
Because the code was new, its signals were repeated, which was a bad mistake. It gave the watcher more time to operate a peculiar machine which whirred after he pressed certain buttons. Various letters fell in line within an illuminated dial, switched to other sets, until finally they made sense, at which time this observer stopped the process.
Leaning slightly forward, the man attended a switchboard, without letting his face come into the light. He had ear-phones on his head and when a voice responded, he announced:
“Burbank speaking -”
That name defined him. Burbank was The Shadow’s contact man who reached the active agents. To vie with crime, The Shadow had posted Burbank at this strategic spot from which the contact man could view the limits of Central Park.
Now Burbank was announcing what he had learned. His statement was concise:
“Watch Outlook Cafe - check on a man named Claude Older - watch for green coupe -”
There were other details, which Burbank relayed as they arrived, together with his crack-down of the code, as gained by means of The Shadow’s mechanical decoder. It was a neat machine, this, based on the fact that codes follow patterns and ideal for quickly breaking up simple codes once they had been changed.