by A. G. Riddle
That left one major decision: personnel.
Someone knocked softly on the open door to her office, and she turned to find her supervisor, Elliott Shapiro, leaning against the door frame.
“Hi,” she said.
“How do you always get here so fast?”
“I sleep with one eye open.”
He smiled. “Right. What’re you working on?”
“Personnel.”
“Good. You see the pictures?”
“Yeah.”
“Looks bad.”
“Very. We really need to be there right now,” Peyton said. “If it gets to Nairobi, we’ll be in trouble.”
“I agree. I’ll make some calls, see if I can get you there any sooner.”
“Thanks.”
“Call me if you need me,” he said, stepping out of her office.
“Will do.”
Peyton looked up a number on the CDC’s intranet directory for a colleague she’d never met: Joseph Ruto. Ruto led the CDC’s country operations in Kenya. They had 172 people in Kenya, a mix of US assignees and Kenyans working for the agency. Most were concentrated at the CDC office in Nairobi, where they worked closely with the Kenyan Ministry of Health.
Peyton took some time to read Ruto’s internal status reports. She was about to call him when she had an idea—one that might well save one or both of the Americans’ lives. A few quick searches told her it was possible. It might also prevent the pathogen from spreading to Nairobi.
Elliott once again appeared in her doorway. “Caught a break. Air Force is going to give you a ride to Nairobi.”
“That’s great,” Peyton said.
“Won’t be first class accommodations. It’s a troop and cargo transport, but it’ll get you there. They’ll pick you up at Dobbins Air Reserve Base at one thirty. It’s in Marietta. Just take I-75/85, stay on 75 at the split, and get off at exit 261. You can’t miss it.”
Elliott always gave her directions, even in the age of smartphone navigation, and even to places he likely knew Peyton had visited before, such as Dobbins. She never stopped him; she just nodded and scribbled a note. She figured it was a generational thing, a product of not growing up with a cell phone glued to his hand or Google Maps a click away. It was one of Elliott’s many idiosyncrasies that Peyton had come to tolerate and then to like.
“Speaking of planes,” she said, “I want to get your take on something. One of the Americans, Lucas Turner, was asymptomatic when he arrived at Mandera. Assuming he’s been in close contact with the other man, and assuming this is a viral hemorrhagic fever, I think we should expect him to break with the disease.”
“That’s fair.”
“I want to develop a plan of care for him now. If he breaks with the infection, we can’t treat him in Mandera. Dani Beach Hospital and Kenyatta National in Nairobi are both candidates, but I don’t favor either—we risk spreading the infection to the staff there and the region.”
“You want to bring him back here.”
“I do.”
Elliott bunched his eyebrows up. “What’re you thinking?”
“I want the air ambulance to accompany us to Nairobi, then fly to Mandera and be on standby. If Turner even has a high fever, I want to bring him back to Emory.”
Emory University Hospital was next to the CDC on Clifton Road—close enough for CDC staff to walk there. Emory had a special isolation unit capable of dealing with patients infected with Ebola and other biosafety level four pathogens; it was one of only four such facilities in the US. It had been used, with great success, to treat Americans who had been infected with Ebola during the 2014 outbreak.
“I don’t know, Peyton. Bringing a patient with an unidentified, deadly, infectious disease back to the US? If word gets out, the press will scare the daylights out of everybody.”
“It could also save his life. And we could bring back blood, saliva, and tissue samples from anyone else who’s infected. We could test them here, in our BSL-4. It keeps the samples and testing out of Nairobi, and it enables the Kenyans to keep the outbreak quiet—which I know they’ll want to do. We get to potentially save a life and get a huge head start on figuring out what we’re dealing with.”
Elliott nodded and exhaled deeply. “All right, but I’ll have to get the director’s approval—he’ll have to deal with the fallout and the press if it goes wrong. But I’ll give it my full support.”
“Thanks.”
“What about the other American?” Elliott asked.
“That’s a tougher case. He was already in critical condition when he arrived in Mandera, and I don’t favor flying him back to the US—we’re talking roughly eighteen hours in the air, maybe more. He could die in transit. Beating the infection may be his only chance. I want to take some ZMapp with us.”
ZMapp was the only available treatment for Ebola; it had been successful in treating several physicians who contracted the disease in 2014, but had yet to undergo human clinical trials. Its effects were largely unknown.
Elliott nodded. “You want me to get the legal guardians’ consent to treat?”
“Please. The patients may be in no shape to give informed consent.”
“I’ll work on contacting the guardians.” Elliott glanced at the papers strewn about her desk. “You selected your team yet?”
“Just about,” Peyton said. “You ready for the conference?”
“No amount of coffee could make me ready for that.”
Chapter 6
As he walked across the marble-floored lobby, Desmond realized why the police officers were looking at him: because he was looking at them. The natural human reaction was to look back at someone staring at you, and the instinct seemed more honed in those drawn to law enforcement. Such individuals had almost a sixth sense about predators and threats.
Despite her stoic demeanor in the elevator, the white-haired woman was quite frail. She shuffled slowly across the lobby, breathing heavily.
Desmond averted his eyes from the police, stepped aside, and power-walked past her. She was moving away from the revolving glass door, toward a swinging door with a silver bar straight across it. The bellhop was scanning the board of keys, oblivious to his oncoming guest.
Desmond swung the door open and stood in the cool November air, holding it for the lady, facing away, not eyeing her as she slowly approached.
“Vielen dank,” she whispered as she passed.
He opened the door to a cab for her, then slid into the next one in line.
The police were still inside, but the radio chatter on the security channel was feverish now; they would send someone to look for Gerhardt soon. When they did, they would find the four bodies, only three of which were alive.
In German, the driver asked for a destination, which told Desmond that the hotel was not the haunt of foreign tourists or business travelers, but rather of native Germans. It was yet another clue, another piece that might reveal who he was and why he was in Berlin.
Desmond almost answered, Bahnhof—train station—but stopped himself. When the fallen police officers and dead man were found, a citywide search would ensue. Security would be intensified at the train stations and airports, and possibly along the highways and rivers as well.
He needed to think. He needed to know more about what was happening. The answers might still be in Berlin.
In German, he told the man to just drive.
The car didn’t move. In the rearview mirror, the middle-aged man scrutinized his passenger. In English, he said, “I need a destination.”
“Please, just drive. I’ve had a fight with my girlfriend, and I need to get out for a while. I want to see the city.”
Desmond exhaled when the driver punched the meter and pulled away from the hotel.
Now the question became where to go. His first priority was clear: to get off the streets of Berlin. The police clearly didn’t have his description when they were sent to the hotel—the officers in the lobby didn’t recognize him. Apparently it was
just as the security guard had said: an anonymous tip about a disturbance in his hotel room. But who had called it in? Had they wanted to check on Gunter Thorne—the dead man? Or had his death been loud enough to alarm a nearby guest who called the police instead of hotel security?
As he rode through the streets of Berlin, a memory came to Desmond, of walking in a warehouse, his footsteps echoing on the concrete floor. Metal rafters hung high above, and the aisle was lined with cubicles enclosed in milky-white sheet plastic. He could hear the faint, rhythmic beeping of EKGs and could just make out hospital beds inside the isolated cubes. Plastic bags filled with clear liquid hung beside the patients, who appeared to be of all races, genders, and ages. Why were they here, in this makeshift hospital?
Workers in containment suits shuffled in and out of the patient cubicles. Up ahead a cart was stacked with black body bags. Two workers carried another bag out of a cubicle and tossed it on the heap.
Desmond was wearing one of the suits too. It was warm inside. He hated the sensation of being enclosed; he couldn’t wait to rip it off.
The memory shifted, and he was standing in an office with plate glass windows that looked down on the rows of plastic-wrapped cubicles. The room was crowded with people, their backs turned to him, all facing a large screen with a world map. Red dots marked major cities. Arced lines spread across the screen, connecting the dots, representing flights between the cities. A man with scars on his face and long blond hair stood before them, speaking slowly.
“Soon, the world will change. Stay the course. The coming days will be the most difficult of your life. But when this is finished, the world will know the truth: we saved the entire human race from extinction.”
As quickly as it had come, the memory ended, and Desmond was back in the taxi in Berlin, the city flying by in a blur.
Desmond desperately needed to figure out his next move. He needed information, especially about the local area. He drew a twenty-euro note from his pocket and slipped it past the clear plastic security barrier.
“I wonder if you’d be willing to tell me a bit about Berlin. It’s my first time here.”
The driver seemed hesitant at first, but finally began to speak. Driving through the crowded streets, the elderly man spoke with great pride, describing a city that had played a pivotal role in European history for almost a thousand years.
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.
“Do you know where this address is?”
The driver nodded. “It’s in Wedding, in Mitte.”
“Where’s that?”
“In the center of the city.”
“Perfect. Let’s go there.”
Twenty minutes later, Desmond stood outside the dry cleaner, which was a narrow store with a plate glass façade. The buildings along the street were run-down, but the area was bustling; the sidewalks swarmed with younger people and immigrants from around the world. A cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the air above them, and farther up, satellite dishes lined the roofs. Through open second-story windows, Desmond could hear radio and TV shows in foreign languages—Arabic and Turkish, he thought.
Behind the counter in the dry cleaner, he found a short, bald Asian man with round glasses sewing a shirt. The shopkeeper set down his needle and thread, got off his stool, and nodded once at Desmond.
“I need to pick up.”
“Tag?”
“I don’t have a tag.”
The man slid over to a keyboard and monitor on the counter. “Name?”
“Desmond Hughes.” He spelled it.
As he typed, the shopkeeper said, “ID?”
Desmond stood silently, contemplating what to do.
The shopkeeper eyed him. “No ID, no pickup.”
Desmond held up the police ID he’d taken from the officer in his hotel room. “This is a police investigation. We’re looking for Desmond Hughes.”
The Asian man raised his hands slightly. “Okay, okay.”
The shopkeeper repeated the name, spelling out each letter deliberately as he finished typing the name. He shook his head.
“There’s nothing. No Desmond Hughes.”
Desmond wondered if he had misread the clue. Maybe he was supposed to meet someone here—not pick up his dry cleaning. “How many people work here?”
That seemed to scare the man. “No one. Only me.”
“Look, this has nothing to do with your business or employees. Is there someone else in the back I can talk to?”
“No. No one.”
Desmond glanced behind him, out the large front window, just in time to see a police patrol car roll by. He turned, waiting for it to pass.
He wouldn’t get anything else from the dry cleaner. Maybe it was just a random coupon and had nothing to do with who he was or what was going on. Finally, he said, “Okay, thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
On the street, he moved with the throngs of people, trying to stay out of the line of sight of cars passing b
y. Two blocks from the dry cleaner, he spotted a mobile phone store, where he bought a disposable smartphone. They were common in Europe; tourists and temporary workers often used them to avoid roaming charges for calls and data. The phone and a prepaid GSM SIM card severely depleted his cash supply. Money would become a real problem soon. He made a note to only use the mobile data in an emergency until he solved his cash problem.
He bought a döner kebab from a street vendor, wolfed it down, and slipped into a crowded coffee shop with free WiFi. He locked himself in the single toilet bathroom, ensuring no security cameras could see his actions or record his conversations. His first instinct was to search the internet for himself, to dig into the mystery of who he was—and to look up Peyton Shaw. But he had to cover the bases of survival first. He needed to get off the street as soon as possible.
The cab driver was right. There were tons of flats and rooms for rent on a nightly basis in Berlin, but many of the listing sites, like Airbnb, required him to register and pay with a credit card in order to rent. That wouldn’t work. He found a site that required landlords to pay-to-list, and began bookmarking suitable accommodations. Luckily there were quite a few studio flats available in Wedding. Most were run-down, but they were cheap.
He dialed the number listed for a promising flat nearby. Without thinking about it, he spoke excitedly, with a New England accent far different from his neutral, Midwestern accent.
“Oh, hi, do you have the flat for rent on Amsterdamer Straße?”
“Yes, that is correct.” The woman’s voice held little emotion.
“Is it available for the next three days?”