Desmond asked him to discuss the city’s layout, anything remarkable about getting in and out, and the major districts and neighborhoods. The man was wound up now, talking almost without pause, and didn’t seem to mind the direction.

Berlin was a sprawling city that covered over 340 square miles—larger than New York City and nine times the size of Paris. It was also one of the German Republic’s sixteen federal states. Berlin had twelve boroughs, or districts. Each was governed by a council of five and a mayor.

Desmond counted it all as good news. Berlin was a big city—which made it a good place to hide.

The driver told him that Berlin’s new hauptbahnhof was now the largest train station in Europe and that the city also had several rivers and over seventeen hundred bridges—more than Venice. Boat tours were common, and many places in the city could be accessed by boat.

Desmond asked about tourism. The driver, who had lived in East Berlin until the wall fell in 1989, was happy to report that Berlin was currently the most popular tourist destination in Germany and one of the top three in Europe. During the previous year, nearly thirty million people had visited Berlin, which had only three and a half million permanent residents. The influx of tourists had put a strain on the city’s housing market, making it tough for Berliners to find a decent apartment to rent. Many estate agents and other enterprising individuals were now signing annual leases on apartments simply to sublet them to tourists on sites like Airbnb. In fact, the city’s senate had recently passed a law requiring renters to notify their landlord if they were subletting. Still, nearly two-thirds of the twelve thousand apartments for sublet were unregistered and operated illegally.

Desmond turned the facts over in his mind, a plan forming.

From his pocket, he took out the only clue he had about who he was: the coupon for the dry cleaner. He considered asking the driver to take him there, but he knew it was only a matter of time before the police found the elderly man and learned where he had dropped Desmond off. He needed to make his trail disappear.

“What’s Berlin’s busiest tourist attraction?”

“The Brandenburg Gate,” the driver said. “Or perhaps the Reichstag. They are next to each other, so it makes no matter.”

“Drop me there, would you?”

Fifteen minutes later, Desmond paid the driver and exited the cab.

“Be careful,” the older man said before welcoming a new fare and driving away.

From the Brandenburg Gate, Desmond strolled quickly into the Großer Tiergarten, Berlin’s oldest park and, at 520 acres, one of the largest urban parks in Germany. It had once been the private hunting reserve for Berlin’s elite, and it retained much of that untouched character. Desmond moved along its walking trails before exiting the park on Tiergartenstraße, where he hailed a rickshaw. He rode for twenty minutes, until he saw another rickshaw unloading its passenger. He stopped the driver, who seemed to never tire, paid him, and hopped into the other rickshaw. He did the change once more, then got in a cab and showed the driver the coupon from Quality Dry Cleaning for Less.