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The Eastern Front(109)

By:Eric Flint


Koniecpolski was unusual among hetman for the importance he attached to building an extensive espionage network. An army without such was half-blind, in his opinion. Once again, he'd been proven right.


Wismar, Germany, on the Baltic coast

"All good things come to an end," murmured Jozef Wojtowicz. He turned away from the window and quickly gave the room a final inspection to see if he was leaving anything incriminating behind. It was time to go.

As he'd always done before meeting the American radio operator in the tavern, he'd arrived in the area two hours early and gone to the hotel room he'd rented for the purpose of observing the tavern before he entered. The room was on the third floor and its windows opened onto the same street where the tavern was located, a short distance away.

He had no fear of arousing suspicion. Wismar now had a lot of transient traffic, which had inevitably produced the sort of hotel whose managers asked no questions—didn't even think of the questions, in fact—so long as the room was paid for. Since the Danish fleet had been repelled here two years earlier, Wismar had become a much larger town than it had been before. The air force base was no longer very active, but the navy had built a base of its own here. Wismar's harbor was deep enough to handle fairly large ships. The navy's main base on the Baltic remained at Luebeck, but they found Wismar convenient for many purposes. They'd improved the harbor, too, which had naturally drawn commercial enterprises to the port city as well.

Jozef's German was almost without accent in the most common dialect spoken along the Baltic, but it hardly mattered since the lingua franca in Wismar was the recently arisen Amideutsch. That bastard language, basically German with stripped down English conjugations and a lot of borrowed English terms, was so new that it had no standard pronunciation and probably wouldn't for many years. No one "spoke it like a native," so Jozef didn't stand out at all.

For that matter, even if he'd spoken Polish he probably would have gone unnoticed. Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century was still a place where nationalism was just beginning to develop. War was traditionally viewed as a matter between dynasties, not peoples. Trade went on between countries officially at war with hardly a pause or a stumble. Not more than two blocks from the tavern where Jozef got his weather reports from Sergeant Trevor Morton was a tavern that catered mostly to Polish fishermen. Two blocks from there, toward the west, was another tavern where Polish was also the only language normally spoken. That tavern was what the Americans called "high end," its clientele being mostly Polish grain dealers.

Jozef had never been worried that he'd be spotted as a "hostile alien." Still, he'd learned early on in his career as Koniecpolski's chief espionage agent in the USE that caution was always a virtue for a spy. So, the day after he'd made his arrangement with the American sergeant, he'd rented this room so that he could reconnoiter the tavern before entering it. He rented the room on a monthly basis rather than a weekly or a daily one, but that was so common for this hotel that the managers thought nothing of it—so long as he paid the rent on time. But one of the advantages of being a spy for the grand hetman of Poland and Lithuania was that Stanislaw Koniecpolski was immensely wealthy and not given to stinginess.

Jozef glanced out the window a last time. Two more uniformed policemen were just entering the tavern. As with the four who'd preceded them a few minutes earlier, these were USE Navy military police, not the city's constabulary. They were probably on loan to the air force, whose base here was too small to maintain its own police force.

Too bad for Morton, of course. But the man was so stupid that the only thing that really surprised Wojtowicz was that he hadn't been caught sooner. Luckily for Poland, the American sergeant was a sullen sort of man. He had as few friends as he did brains, so he hadn't let anything slip sooner simply because he talked to few people about anything and didn't talk to them for very long.

There was nothing in the room to worry about. There'd never been much anyway, because Jozef never slept here. For that purpose, he had a room in a private boarding house on the outskirts of the city. What little he had in the way of personal possessions was kept there.

He was tempted to retrieve those few belongings but that would be foolish. It was unlikely that any suspicion had been aroused at the boarding house. The owner was an elderly woman so hard of hearing she was almost deaf, and so nearsighted she carried a magnifying glass with her at all times. Whether as a result of those ailments or her innate nature, she was also one of the most incurious people Jozef had ever met. Which made her a perfect landlady for his purposes, of course.