“We lost him.”
Conner sighed and leaned back from the long desk. He stared at the screen on the wall. It showed a map, with red spreading out from major cities across the world.
“Listen to me very carefully,” he said. “Desmond Hughes is smarter than you are. He’s smarter than I am. He’s smarter than anyone I’ve ever met. Our only chance of catching him is to do something he’s not willing to do—something he would never consider. Now tell me how you’re going to find him. Quickly.”
“Stand by.” The agent in the van muted his headset, presumably to converse with his colleague.
He unmuted the line and said, “Okay, we could review cam footage from our field units of the cafe off Reichsstra?e and the teahouse, look for any individuals in disguise—”
“Hughes would have thought of that. Remember, he’s smarter than you are. Think outside the box. What’s the one thing you have?”
The team leader muted his mic again. A minute later, he reactivated it and said, “Sorry, we’ve got nothing here.”
“You know the identity of someone meeting with Hughes as we speak.”
“We use our contacts to trace Meyer’s mobile—”
“Hughes would have thought of that too: Meyer won’t have his phone with him. Think about what you know.”
“Uhmm…”
“You know that Meyer is scared. He will have another phone, probably a disposable, and he will have given someone he loves and trusts the number—just in case. You find that person, you get to Garin Meyer. You get to him fast enough, you get Desmond Hughes—and we all live through this. I suggest you hurry, for all of our sakes.”
In the teahouse bathroom, Garin Meyer had expected to see Desmond Hughes waiting in the stall, but it was empty.
Garin entered, latched the door, and waited.
Someone in the next stall slipped a package wrapped in brown paper under the divider. A note on top read:
Put these on. Pass your clothes under. Wait twenty minutes. Then exit the teahouse and get in the taxi with license plate B FK 281.
In the package, Garin found a change of clothes, including shoes. He changed quickly in the cramped stall and shoved his own clothes under the partition.
A moment later, he heard the door to the next stall open. Voices whispered, though he couldn’t make out the words, and the door to the bathroom swung open.
Twenty minutes later, he rose, exited the teahouse, and got in the taxi. The driver pulled away without asking for a destination.
At Cafe Einstein in Unter Den Linden, a few blocks from Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, Desmond Hughes sat at an outside table, flipping through a print copy of Die Welt. He still wore the dark sunglasses and the ball cap pulled down to his eyebrows, blending in with the throngs of tourists bustling past. His calm demeanor hid the anticipation swelling inside him.
As he flipped the pages, a picture caught his eye: a photo of sick Africans stretched out on mats in a large room. Personnel in Tyvek containment suits leaned over them. The headline read:
Ebola Again?
He scanned the article. It featured several quotes from a Jonas Becker, a German physician working for the World Health Organization, who had recently been dispatched to Kenya to respond to what looked like an Ebola outbreak. But the name that jumped out at Desmond wasn’t Becker’s—it was Dr. Peyton Shaw. Becker was joining forces with Shaw, whom he had worked with during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It quoted him as saying, “Peyton Shaw is the best disease detective in the world. I’m honored to be working with her and the Kenyan Ministry of Health to stop this outbreak. I’m confident we’ll be successful—just as we were in West Africa a few years ago.”
Peyton Shaw—she’s the key to all of this, Desmond thought.
But how? The message in his hotel room had said, Warn Her. Was the outbreak what he was supposed to warn her about? The memory he’d recalled yesterday morning replayed in his mind: the scene where he had walked through a warehouse filled with plastic-wrapped isolation rooms. It was all connected; he was sure of it. The pieces all fit together in some way.
At that moment, a man wearing a knit cap and large sunglasses stopped before Desmond, towering over him.
“That was very clever, Desmond.”
Chapter 16
Berlin’s Unter Den Linden boulevard was crammed with passersby. They weaved around the tables outside Cafe Einstein as they rushed to the Brandenburg Gate and the attractions in Pariser Platz, taking little note of Desmond and the man standing before him.
The visitor sat, though he kept his hands out of sight, one under the table, the other in his jacket pocket.
“Did you kill him?” he asked.
Desmond slowly lowered the paper copy of Die Welt to the table and leaned back. “What did I tell you on the phone?”
“I asked you a question.”
“I have a gun pointed at you under this table,” Desmond said. “If you’re not the man I spoke with on the phone, I will shoot you, then I will figure out who sent you, and I will find them and get my answers from them.”
The man grew very still. “You said to wear a navy peacoat, jeans, sunglasses, and a hat. To hold up a sign that said ‘Looking Glass Tours’ in Pariser Platz.”
“Where are the clothes?”
The man swallowed, still visibly nervous. “I slipped them under a bathroom stall in the teahouse.”
“What’s your name?”
Confusion crossed the man’s face.
“Humor me,” Desmond said.
“Garin Meyer.”
The night before, and all that morning, Desmond had considered very carefully what he would say to this man. And he had decided to lay it all on the line. He needed answers, and he sensed that time was running out.