busy with tourists even though it wasn’t high season. The waterfront restaurants were packed and the lights were just coming on. It was a picture-postcard image that on any other night Jack would have called beautiful, but tonight they were still too involved in formulating their plans for ingress into the warehouse and tomorrow’s follow-up actions.
They passed by a garishly ornate theme-cruise “pirate ship” that had just docked and was unloading its last tourists. The familiar sea shanty “What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor?” was blasting on the ship’s loudspeakers in Polish and the pirate crew was securing the boat for the evening. Liliana explained that it ran daily tours past the Westerplatte—the place where World War II started when German forces opened fire on Polish defenders.
Construction cranes dotted the sky on the other side of the river behind the ship on one of the two islands formed by the splitting of the Motława River. Brand-new buildings designed to mimic seventeenth-century architecture were going up, shoulder to shoulder.
Jack picked the hotel off a TripAdvisor recommendation, an authentic, renovated seventeenth-century, four-story royal granary. Photos showed a double-sized bed for her and an extra-long couch that could accommodate his six-foot-one, two-hundred-pound frame.
She agreed with Jack that there was no telling if her organization was compromised, given the fact that an ex-ABW agent was now working for the other side. She also reluctantly agreed to his idea to rent the room for the night with cash and his Gavin-generated passport under an alias. He would bring her in later that evening as a “guest” with a nod and wink to the desk clerk—along with a twenty-zloty tip—so she didn’t have to show her credentials or reveal her identity.
He paid his bill and dropped their bags off in the fourth-story suite after pocketing a couple of Gavin’s devices and headed back down to meet Liliana. The good news, Liliana reported, was that Goralski’s car was still on the move and tracking toward Łodź rather than Warsaw. She said that tourists traveling to either Prague or Vienna would take the same route, but it was too early to tell which one.
With any luck, Goralski was out of the picture for the rest of the evening. That was good. There was too much else to worry about without the ex-ABW agent charging through the back door when they least expected it.
* * *
—
Liliana was an officer of the law and a patriot. When she and Jack finally got back to the hotel room, she started to get cold feet.
Jack rightly pointed out that she couldn’t break into the warehouse and gather any information that wouldn’t automatically be compromised for lack of a warrant. Worse, she’d lose her job, which to her was more than a source of employment—it was her life’s calling. How better to serve the nation she loved so dearly?
But Jack’s offer to break in instead was equally problematic. He was a foreigner threatening to trespass on private Polish property, though Jack reminded her that Gage was an American like he was, and Hu Peng a Chinese national, and they were the property owners, technically.
“Look, I promise not to steal anything. Only plant these.” Jack showed her two small cellular video cameras with both optical and night-vision capabilities. With their own SIM cards and transmitters, they could broadcast live video and audio signals to Jack’s cell phone or store them on The Campus’s cloud, which Gavin managed. The Campus’s cloud was, of course, just a data-storage facility, i.e., racks and racks of bare metal servers built and designed by the world’s premier company for that sort of thing:
CloudServe.
Still in the hotel room, Jack set up the two camera units to record when the motion-detection sensors were activated. At any point he could manually fire the cameras, turn them off, or program them to record on a set schedule of his choosing. The lithium-ion batteries and supplemental solar cells would provide a minimum of one hundred hours of continuous recording. More than enough time to identify any possible criminal activities that might occur inside the warehouse.
“I put these in, and then I’m out of there. Twenty, thirty minutes, tops,” Jack promised.
“You’re putting me in a very awkward position.”
“That’s what friends do.” Jack smiled, packing up the cameras. “Trust me. In and out.”
Given the possible connections to the international drug syndicate she and Jerzy had been investigating, as well as Jerzy’s likely attempted murder, and given the relatively minor criminal infraction that Jack was