The Extinction Files Box Set

by A. G. Riddle

  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 by. 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?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful. Listen, I’m in Berlin for business, and I could really use some help. I took the train in and when I woke up it was all gone—I mean everyth
ing: my luggage, laptop, wallet, passport, money, credit cards, you name it, gone. The rascals even slipped my wedding ring off!”

  “Oh, that’s terrible,” the woman said with a little more sympathy.

  “My wife wired me some money, and I’m looking for a place to rent. Can we meet? You’ll see I’ve got an honest face!” Desmond let out a goofy, nervous laugh that matched the fake exasperated accent he had affected.

  “Ah, well, okay.” The woman said it would be three hours before she could get to the flat. Desmond agreed and ended the call. Assuming it worked out, he’d be off the street soon.

  He opened a web browser and scanned the top German news sources. Bild carried no news about him, but a breaking news banner at the top of Spiegel Online read: Berlin police launch citywide manhunt for American man wanted for murder and assaulting two police officers.

  Desmond clicked the link and scanned the article. The hunt was being run by the Landeskriminalamt, also known as the LKA—the police division charged with investigating major crimes and conducting special manhunts. The LKA would be coordinating a number of units. Reading the list gave Desmond pause about staying in the city.

  The Spezialeinsatzkommando—the state police’s SWAT teams—were on standby for locations to raid. Mobiles Einsatzkommando—the special operative agents of the LKA—were being deployed to every borough to conduct a manhunt. Wasserschutzpolizei—the river police—were monitoring all the city’s waterways. Zentraler Verkehrsdienst—the traffic police—had engaged local and highway patrol units (Autobahnpolizei) to search for him. They even had Diensthundführer—K9 units—at the Concord, picking up his scent.

  They were about to turn the city upside down looking for him.

  Despite naming him, the article didn’t have any details about who he was or his background. This was both a relief and a disappointment. It would make it harder for them to find him—but it told him nothing about who he was.

  Desmond opened the phone’s map application and found what he needed. Despite the citywide manhunt launching, Wedding looked like it would be a perfect place to hide. But Desmond still had the sense that he was missing something—and that the dry cleaner was somehow part of the puzzle.

  Three blocks away, Desmond sat in the changing room of a secondhand thrift shop. Two outfits hung on the inside of the door, both Turkish-made and more casual than his button-up shirt and khakis.

  When he slipped his pants off, what he saw took his breath away. Burn scars spread from his feet to his knees. The mottled flesh looked like creamy-white tree roots growing across his body. They were old scars, remnants of a horrible event. The feeling was unnerving—not being able to remember the fire that had torched his legs. He searched the rest of his body. Above his pelvis on the right side, he found a puckered, rounded scar below his ribs. A healed gunshot wound? Scattered about his torso and arms were smaller, straight scars where knife wounds had likely healed. In the hotel room, he had been so focused on the aching black and blue bruise on his left side that he hadn’t noticed anything else. Now he longed to know where he’d come from, what sort of life he’d led—what sort of person he was. Or at least, had been.

  As he stared at the floor, something inside the crumpled-up khaki pants caught his eye: a pink tag stapled to the garment’s care instructions. He had seen similar tags before, only hours ago, attached to clear plastic bags hanging in rows… in the dry cleaner.

  He had found the claim tag.

  He detached it, then carefully searched both the shirt and pants, finding nothing else of interest. He sold the shirt and pants to the thrift shop—he needed the money, and police across the city likely had pictures of him wearing them by now. A sign on the wall claimed all items were thoroughly cleaned before being offered for sale, and he hoped it was true; if not, the police dogs might pick up the scent in the store. With some of his extra money he purchased a ball cap, sunglasses, and a backpack. In the changing room, he put all his possessions—the extra clothes and the spare magazines for the policeman’s gun—in the backpack.

  Ten minutes later, he once again stood outside the dry cleaner. The older Asian man was gone; a younger man, also Asian, now sat at the counter, hunched over a textbook, a pencil in his hand, scribbling notes.

  Desmond walked in and slid him the tag without a word.

  The teenager searched the rows of hanging clothes, checking the tag several times. After a few minutes he shook his head and returned to the counter.

  “You’re picking up late. There’s a fee.”

  “How much?”

  “Three euros per day.”

  “How late am I?”

  Desmond was already dangerously low on cash; he had just enough to pay the rent at the crummy flat for three days, and he was due to meet the landlord in less than an hour.

  The teen worked the computer, searching the tag number. “Fourteen days late. Forty-two euros plus the cleaning. Fifty-five total with tax.”

  If he paid, Desmond wouldn’t have enough for rent for all three nights. He considered pulling the police ID again, but that would only invite problems. So he forked the cash over and waited while the teen thrashed around in the back for what felt like an hour. Desmond hoped it would be worth it—that whatever he, or someone, had stashed here contained something to get him out of the fix he was in.

  The boy emerged with a plastic hanging bag covering an expensive-looking navy suit. Desmond could barely resist the urge to tear it open and examine it right there. His appointment with the landlord, however, was fast approaching, so with the suit hanging over his shoulder, he made his way to the meeting spot.

  He found a young woman in her mid-twenties, a cigarette in her hand, standing in front of a run-down three-story building. Four Middle Eastern teenagers sat on the steps outside the front door, arguing in a language Desmond didn’t recognize.

  “Are you Ingrid?” he asked in the same New England accent he had used before.

  “Ja.” She put the cigarette out and accepted Desmond’s hand when he extended it eagerly.

  “I’m Peter Wilkinson. We spoke earlier. Thank you so much for meeting me on such short notice.”

  She led him inside, up a winding, narrow staircase, and into the flat, which was tiny but clean.

  “It’s perfect,” Desmond said. “Now listen, this suit is literally all they left me with. Guess they didn’t know it was mine!” He smiled sheepishly. “I need it for my meeting tomorrow, and,” he sighed, “I’m running low on cash.”

  The woman shook her head. “If you can’t pay, you simply cannot stay here.”

  “I’ve got enough for one night.” He handed her the folded-up euros. “I’ll get you the rest.”

  Ingrid hesitated.

  “Look, if I can’t pay tomorrow, I’ll leave. Promise. My wife is going to wire me some more money. I promise. Okay?”

  Ingrid glanced away from him. “All right. I’ll come back tomorrow with my boyfriend. Please pay or be gone.”

  “No problem. Thank you again.”

  The moment the door closed, Desmond ripped into the plastic dry cleaning bag and searched the suit. The patch inside the jacket listed the maker as Richard Anderson, 13 Savile Row. He wondered if it was another clue. He ran his fingers over the embroidery—and felt a lump.

  His heart beat faster. There was something sewn inside the suit.

  Chapter 7

  At CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Peyton was working on the central mystery in the outbreak in Mandera: the patients. She believed she had just made a breakthrough.

  The two young Americans had started a nonprofit organization called CityForge. Its mission was to help villages grow by giving them funding for infrastructure and mentoring from city leaders in the developed world. CityForge’s funding came from individuals, who donated via the CityForge website. The investments were treated as municipal bonds, which meant the donors would benefit financially if the villages thrived. Villages used the money to bring electricity, education, better roads,
health care, internet, public sanitation, police enforcement, and other vital services to their citizens.

  As part of the CityForge model, local leaders were trained to film the village’s gradual transformation. The videos gave the mentors in the developed world a way to follow the progress of the villages. In almost real time, city council leaders, mayors, police chiefs, and others could see the villages change, and could offer guidance. Individual donors could also follow the villages’ progress, like a reality show, seeing how the money they provided was improving the lives of the current residents and laying the groundwork for generations to come.

  The CityForge founders had come up with the idea while they were undergraduates at UNC-Chapel Hill, and after graduating this past May, they had set out to make their concept a reality. They had spent the summer promoting their startup and raising money from friends, family, and passionate supporters. They used the funds for their trip to Kenya, where they planned to document every stop along the way—and identify their first “CityForge villages.” And, for reasons that remained unclear to Peyton, the two boys had made a pact not to shave or cut their hair during the trip.

  She clicked the Supporters page and read the names. Icarus Capital was among the corporate sponsors. She had seen the name before—hours ago, in her apartment. It was Desmond Hughes’s investment firm. Was he involved in some way? She thought it was an odd coincidence, but she couldn’t think of a way to act on the connection.

  Even thinking about Desmond rattled her. She fought to stay focused.

  Another tab on the CityForge site featured a map with every stop the two young men had made. Most included one or more videos of the two Americans touring the village and doing interviews with residents. Mostly, they highlighted how infrastructure could change the villagers’ lives. For a few of the villages, the videos continued after the two Americans had left. The more recent films had been uploaded by village leaders hoping to attract financial supporters.