He sat on the bed and took the pad from the side table. What was the key here? Deduction. A loss. Negative.

There were three diamonds inside the parentheses. So negative three—subtract three. Yes—the bottom line had to be the key, the first two lines the message. The name of the code popped into his mind: a simple substitution cipher. And more, it was a Caesar shift cipher, used famously by Julius Caesar for his secret correspondence.

Desmond took each of the letters and subtracted three—so Z became W, and D became A. He did the same with the numbers. That yielded:

WARN HER

4046390385

He placed dashes after the third and sixth numbers, producing:

404-639-0385

Warn her. And a phone number. Warn her of what? Through the opening between the bedroom and living room, he eyed Gunter Thorne’s dead body. Maybe Rapture Therapeutics or whomever had sent Gunter to the hotel room was after “her” as well. Or maybe it was all unrelated. Or maybe, Desmond had set all of this up to trap Gunter here. She could be an accomplice of his somehow. Either way, she might have answers.

Desmond picked up the phone and dialed.

On the third ring, a woman answered, sounding groggy. “Shaw.”

“Hi. It’s… Desmond. Hughes.”

She sounded more alert when she spoke again. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He had no clue where to begin. “Are you… expecting my call?”

She sighed into the receiver. He heard her rustling, sitting up perhaps.

“What is this, Desmond?”

“Do we know each other?”

Her tone was sad now. “This isn’t funny, Des.”

“Look, I just, can you tell me who you are? Where you work? Please.”

A pause.

“Peyton Shaw.”

When he said nothing, she added, “I work at the CDC now. I’m an epidemiologist.”

A knock at the suite’s door rang out—three raps, firm—from the living room.

Desmond waited, thinking. The clock on the table read 7:34 a.m. Too early for maid service.

“Hello?” Peyton said.

Three more knocks, louder this time, followed by a man’s deep voice: “Polizei.”

“Listen to me, Peyton. I think you’re in danger.”

“What? What’re you talking about?”

Three more knocks, insistent, loud enough to wake anyone in the neighboring room. “Polizei! Herr Hughes, bitte öffnen Sie die Tür.”

“I’ll call you back.”

He hung up and sprinted to the door, ignoring the pain in his legs. Through the peephole he saw two uniformed police officers, along with a man in a dark suit—likely hotel security.

The hotel employee was moving a key card toward the door lock.

Chapter 3

In Atlanta, Dr. Peyton Shaw sat up in bed with the cordless phone to her ear. “Desmond?”

The line was dead.

She hung up and waited, expecting Desmond to call back.

It was 1:34 a.m. Saturday night, and she had been home alone, asleep for over three hours. She was wide awake now, though. And unnerved.

She felt the urge to take a look around the two-bedroom condo and make sure there wasn’t someone else inside. She had lived alone since moving to Atlanta in her twenties, and with a few exceptions, she had always felt safe.