Mike stared down at him, then stared off to the west. Huge storm clouds covered the sky and were obviously headed their way.
He felt like saying No shit, Sherlock. But that would probably be beneath the dignity of a major general and it would certainly hurt Andersen's feelings.
You always had to make allowances for tech people. Their skills were so useful that you just had to accept the fact that if someone like Jimmy Andersen got struck by lightning, the first thing he'd do if he survived was get on the radio to find out if there were thunderstorms in the area. In those halcyon days before the Ring of Fire, of course, he would have gone online to find out.
Schwerin, capital of Mecklenburg Province
United States of Europe
Jozef Wojtowicz had set up a safe house for himself in Schwerin before he'd gone to Wismar. He thought he could lie in hiding here until whatever manhunt was launched for him exhausted its energies.
He assumed that the military police who interrogated Morton would deduce soon enough that the agent who'd suborned him was either Polish or working for Poland. Who else would have taken the risk? Any person familiar with the Baltic grain trade would know that the pretext he'd used was preposterous. If there were no USE interrogators with that knowledge in Wismar, all they had to do was walk over to Wieczorek's tavern and ask the Polish grain dealers who habituated the place.
Where would they look for this Polish agent, then?
Magdeburg, of course—but they really wouldn't expect him to hide there. The capital city's CoC was too pervasive, too well organized. A stranger, especially a foreigner, ran a greater risk of being noticed there than anywhere else.
The fact that such a stranger was a foreigner wouldn't be held against him in Magdeburg the way it might in some cities in the USE. Although the CoCs called for the unification of the German people into one nation, their ideology was not particularly nationalistic. There were CoCs in a number of European countries and they all shared the same basic political program. The Italian CoCs also called for national unification.
The problem with hiding in Magdeburg wasn't that people would be hostile, it was simply that he'd be noticed more quickly, and by an organization that was sophisticated and well organized on a city-wide basis.
Hamburg was another obvious possibility, as were Luebeck and Hannover. Big cities where a foreigner could hide easily.
Jozef had considered them, in fact. The problem was that they were in western provinces and he wanted to be as close to the border as he could manage. If he did have to make a desperate attempt to escape back into Polish territory, he'd find that much easier to do from Mecklenburg than places farther west.
Escaping into Poland from Pomerania would be even easier, of course. But to do that, he'd have to be in Pomerania, which he detested. The only city in the miserable province that would be tolerable would be Stettin, and Stettin was crawling with Swedes. Suspicious Swedes, with a nasty turn of mind when it came to Poles and anything Polish, as you'd expect from a pack of bandits in their ill-gotten lair. (The city's proper name was Szczecin. Always had been, always would be, and damn anyone who said otherwise.)
Ideally, he'd have gone to Grantville. Jozef loved Grantville. And with his uncle as his paymaster, he could even afford the outrageous rents.
Alas, it was not to be. He'd spent too much time in Grantville, early in his career as a spy, before he'd learned how to stay invisible. There was too much risk of being spotted.
Where then?
He'd settled on Schwerin because it was the capital of Mecklenburg province. Since the Dreeson Incident just a short time ago, the place had become a hotbed of radicalism, especially its capital. Young firebrands holding forth on every corner.
More importantly for Jozef, such centers of youthful radicalism produced certain cultural developments, almost like a law of nature. For every firebrand spouting ideology on a corner, there would be a poet spouting verses in a tavern.
Jozef wrote poetry, as it happened. Not very good poetry, but that would be all to the good. A mediocre poet would blend in perfectly where a man with literary talent might be noticed.
So it was. His first night in a nearby tavern was uneventful. He made a few acquaintances.
The second night, the same.
The third night, he was urged to recite some of his own poetry. Which he did, to reasonable applause. To fit the crowd's taste, he'd slightly adjusted a poem he'd once written on the subject of sunrise to make it politically appropriate. (Not hard to do. A sun rising, a people rising; the rhymes just had to be tweaked a bit.)
The fourth night, the same, with the added benefit of finding female company. It turned out that for this crowd of people, anything foreign carried a certain romance and panache.
The fifth night, the same again, with the female company more affectionate still.