Page 51 of Clive Cussler Desolation Code

He assumed it was a mistake and suggested as much. The reply surprised him. “The note says this was specially ordered for you by Kurt Austin.”

Rudi looked up from the notepad. “Speak of the devil and he appears.”

He put the notes aside and went to pick up the delivery, finding a college kid in a green polo shirt with mustard on his sleeve. A logo stitched on the shirt read: Adam’s Delicatessen. A place Kurt frequented when he was in D.C.

“Kurt ordered this for me?”

The kid nodded. “He called it in.”

Considering Kurt was in India, Rudi would have been surprised if he’d placed the order in person. “I don’t suppose he tipped you?”

“Oh, yeah. Twenty dollars.”

That was a healthy tip considering the sandwich might have cost eight or nine.

“And,” the kid added, “I get a hundred-dollar bonus if you come back to the shop and take a long-distance phone call.” The kid’s eyebrows went up and down knowingly. “Some kind of prank, right?”

“Almost certainly,” Rudi groaned. “But who am I to deprive a man of his hard-earned bonus? Lead on and I shall follow.”

Chapter 29

Adam’s Deli was on the ground floor of a nondescript office complex two blocks from the NUMA building, next to what had once been a RadioShack. Its front door opened onto the street, and at lunchtime it often boasted a line that stretched out onto the sidewalk. At three o’clock in the afternoon, Rudi found only a smattering of customers and the crew doing cleanup.

He stepped inside to the jingle of an old-fashioned bell that was attached to the door. The owner, a man with a gray mustache and a few wispy hairs wrapped around his scalp in a comb-over, turned to greet him. “You’re Rudi, no?”

Rudi nodded.

The man came out from behind the counter, untying his apron and offering a strange look. “You’re taller than Kurt said you’d be.”

Rudi offered a half smile. “Napoleon and I both get a bad rap,” he said. “I’m told I have a phone call.”

“Yes, yes, right this way.” He ushered Rudi down a narrow hall half blocked by cardboard boxes filled with cups, straws, paper towels, and other vital supplies.

“Good customer, that Kurt,” the owner said. “And funny. He’s always joking.”

“Are you Adam?” Rudi asked.

“No, my father was Adam,” the man said. “My name is Gris. But Gris’s Deli doesn’t have the best ring to it.”

Gris opened a door to the back office, revealing a space even more cramped than the narrow hallway. “I give you your privacy,” he said. “But don’t talk too loud; the walls are thin.”

Rudi sat at a desk covered in receipts and invoices and half-finished cups of coffee. Amid the mess, he found an olive-green push-button phone that might have been there since the eighties. One light was blinking, which he assumed was Kurt. Lifting the scuffed receiver, he placed it to his ear and pressed the blinking button.

“This better not be a joke,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll assign you to Antarctic detail and make sure you get only warm-weather gear better suited for snorkeling in the Bahamas.”

“Great to hear you, too,” Kurt said. “Even if you are a little crankier than usual.”

“You and Joe have been off the radar for three days. And the Indian government has been pressuring us to tell them where you are and what you’re doing there. That raises my irritability level.”

“Which is why you should thank me for not updating you on our activities,” Kurt said smugly. “That way you didn’t have to lie.”

Rudi noticed the audio was very flat, almost like an AM radio broadcast through an old mono speaker. He wondered where Kurt was calling him from. More important, why he was calling the delicatessen instead of the office. “Unless you plan to keep me in the dark, how about you start by telling me why I’m talking on a phone that’s coated with olive oil and several decades of grime when the high-tech, encrypted phone in my air-conditioned office works just fine?”

“The problem is it works a littletoofine,” Kurt said.

He went on to explain why he believed the NUMA communications system and possibly even the entire server network had beenhacked. “Between the odd messages on my phone and the real-time takedown of the emergency networks on Reunion, I’m getting the sense that these guys can hack into any system they want, anytime they want, in the blink of an eye.”

“You think the two things are connected?”

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