When the conference broke, Peyton spoke privately to the EIS officers she’d selected for deployment.

“You heard the security situation. If any of you feel uncomfortable, I need to know now. I’m not going to put anything in your file. I’ll select an alternate and never say a word about it.”

At one p.m., Peyton made her way downstairs and walked nervously through the lobby, unsure how many of the officers she’d find waiting for her.

Outside, it took her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the sun.

When the scene came into focus, she saw every one of the EIS officers she had selected standing in front of the vans, their duffel bags beside them. She nodded at them, and they loaded up and drove to Dobbins Air Reserve Base.

Less than an hour later, they were on their way to Nairobi.

From a chain link fence that ringed Dobbins ARB, the man who had been following Peyton watched the Air Force transport lift off. When it was out of sight, he typed a message to his superiors:

Subject is en route to target zone.

Chapter 9

In the small flat in Berlin’s Wedding neighborhood, Desmond carefully cut the stitches that held the patch inside the suit jacket. The Savile Row label fell away, revealing the contents of the secret pocket: two prepaid Visa credit cards.

The cards were timely—Desmond was almost out of cash—but he had hoped for more. In particular, he had hoped for some clue about who he was, why he was in Berlin, and most of all, what had happened to him before he’d woken up that morning in the Concord hotel with no memories.

Something about the cards struck him as odd: each had a small vertical scratch after the tenth number. To the common eye, it might look random, but the fact that both cards had the mark raised his suspicion. Beside the mark on the first card were four smaller scratches. The second card had two small scratches to the right of the vertical line, just above the card numbers.

Was it another code? If so, it likely followed the pattern on the dry cleaning coupon—a simple substitution cipher. Add four to each of the first ten digits on the first card and two to the first ten digits on the second card. Ten numbers formed an American phone number.

Desmond drew out the prepaid smartphone and dialed, doing the math for each digit in his head. He listened anxiously as the first droning beep sounded. Another. A third. Then voicemail picked up. To his surprise, he heard his own voice.

“If you’ve reached this number, you know what to do. If you don’t, you’d better figure it out fast.”

When the beep sounded, Desmond paused, his mind racing. Was the voicemail box a sort of digital dead drop for messages to someone else? Or was he supposed to try to access the voicemail? He decided to do both.