He stood in a bathroom, at a long vanity with two sinks. In the mirror, he saw a bank of three urinals, all empty. He seemed to be alone. He couldn’t place the location, but he felt like this wasn’t long ago—probably shortly before he woke up in Berlin.

He stared into his own eyes in the mirror and spoke solemnly. “I hope you know what’s going on by now. This location is a backup. I wasn’t able to figure out where the Citium was manufacturing the cure, but I know they shipped it all around the world. There must be a storage site close by, maybe in Adelaide. Search for it. I’m also enclosing the rest of the memory that took place here. It may help you. But it could also hurt. It’s leverage, but it goes both ways.”

The bathroom disappeared, and Desmond was back in Australia, on that day in 1983 when the bushfires killed his family. Except, this memory was from that morning, before the fire killed his mother. He didn’t understand what he was seeing. His arms felt weak.

Then he felt Avery at his side.

He closed his eyes, thought he would throw up.

When he opened them again, he saw figures, clad in woodland camouflage, racing in from the tree line. A dozen of them. He reached back for his rifle, but it was gone. It lay on the ground twenty yards away. Who had thrown it over there?

He pushed up, but a boot hit his chest.

“Stay down, Des.” Avery towered over him. Her rifle was pointed in his face.

“Avery—”

“I don’t want to hurt you.” She studied him. “You remember, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Chapter 100

Chapter 100

Peyton watched Charlotte rummage through the old filing cabinets in the storage room.

“It’s here somewhere… along with some other things of his I’ve kept.”

Peyton’s father cut his eyes at her, silently saying, Where’s this going?

Charlotte pulled an old VHS tape from the bottom drawer.

In a room with a small, cathode ray tube TV, she popped the tape in a VCR and pressed play.

“This was taken the day Andrew died.” Charlotte studied the picture, which was coming into focus. “He’s in Uganda, on his way to Kapchorwa, his last stop.”

Peyton saw her brother riding in the back of an SUV, which bounced on a dirt road with a trail of dust rising behind it. It was so incredibly good to see his face again. His hair was dark, like Peyton’s, but his features were less Asian than hers; he looked more British, like her father and her mother’s father.

“Kapchorwa’s a small town in East Uganda,” Charlotte said, “roughly twenty-four miles from the border with Kenya. Only a few thousand people lived in the town then, but many more from the surrounding villages visited each month for the open-air market and hospital.