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?”