When the suit complained, blustering like he was talking to some secretary straight from the temp agency, Heinrich repeated the vocabulary words louder. If the suit wanted silence, he should have coughed up for first class.

Once in Warsaw, he checked into a three-star hotel in the Old Town tourist quarter. The central part of the city had a medieval wall that surrounded a cluster of historic buildings, or at least the imitation of historic buildings. The whole place had been wrecked by the Nazis during the Warsaw Uprising, the brave but doomed attempt by the Polish Jews to resist final annihilation.

He had to admit the reconstruction would have fooled him if he didn’t know the city’s history. The narrow cobblestone streets wound their way between fine old stone buildings that looked like something out of Georgian England, and little squares had cozy cafés next to burbling fountains or statues of historic figures. One even had a mermaid, an odd choice for this landlocked city. There was a glorious red palace with Russian-style onion-shaped towers, and fine old churches with spires that soared above the historic quarter. It all looked like it had been preserved from the 18th century. In fact, it had all been rebuilt in the last fifty years from rubble.

Heinrich felt tempted to splash out on a five-star place and let the old bag pay for it, but he’d learned the hard way that anonymity was the better option. People noticed the guests in five-star hotels. No one cared about the middle class tourists and unimportant businessmen at the cheaper places.

All in all, the hotel wasn’t bad, a converted historic home with a small room, a tiny bathroom, WIFI, and satellite TV. The old woman who ran it spoke horrible English, but that only gave him a chance to practice his Polish.

“Ah, you know our language!” the woman said, her eyes lighting up. “Are you Polish-American?”

“Yes,” Heinrich lied, then decided to feel her out, “I’m from Wałbrzych.”

Suddenly the landlady put on a poker face. “Oh… and when did your ancestors moved to America?”

“Oh, way back in 1902. They always talked about the old country. My grandfather Pavel always talked about his parents, who came from Wałbrzych. He taught me my Polish although I should have learned more. It’s my first time getting back to Poland.”

The lady’s smile crept back. Apparently he had said enough to convince her he was Polish, not German, but a certain doubt remained thanks to his name. He took some tourist brochures from the display by the counter, thanked her, and went up to his room.

An email from Biniam was waiting for him when he fired up his laptop. All it said was “Skype”.

He didn’t mean Skype when he said Skype. He meant AnonChat, a more secure encrypted video calling service that had a slow connection because the signal got scattered through various servers like communications on the Dark Web. The connection made Heinrich feel like he was back in the days of dial-up, but Biniam didn’t turn on his camera anyway. He conceded to a microphone, but Heinrich got the impression that was on a secondary computer he only used when it was necessary. Plus he used one of those speech modifiers that made him sound like a serial killer in a cheap movie.

If it had been anyone else, Heinrich would have given him shit for being part of the tin foil hat brigade, but considering what the guy had lived through, and what waited for him if his government ever got its hands on him, Biniam was probably not being cautious enough.

“The entire world had accepted cameras and microphones into their homes, even into their beds. Everyone is stupid!” That’s what he always said.

Biniam was super paranoid and for him that made perfect sense. Eritrea vied with North Korea for the Most Oppressive Regime Award. There was no free press, no free speech, the jails were overflowing, and when you were eighteen, they sent you to the army and kept you there as long as they liked. Sometimes that could last ten years. Of course they didn’t pay you.