Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/178

 "Why was it Brubacher himself didn't run over for this talk?" Kestner casually inquired.

"Brubacher was not so intimately in touch with the new code movements as I am myself. Captain Oliver made that clear, I thought, in his talk over the telephone with you."

Kestner nodded.

"How long have you been doing code work for the Department?" he next asked. Andelman smiled at the question. He seemed to be glad of the chance of talking again.

"As far back as the war with Spain. I had an under-secretaryshrip in Barcelona at the time, and devised a system of keeping our people at Paris in touch with the movements of the enemy's battleships and torpedo-boats and that sort of thing. There were, as you may remember, some forty-four of them altogether. I adopted the two French words of  'achete'  and  'vendez'  to stand for 'arrived' and 'departed,' and then prepared a code-list of possible ports where these boats might arrive or depart. I did this by giving each the name of some particular stock listed on the French Exchange. Each boat, in turn, was represented by a certain number, so when I wired Paris to buy or sell so