The newspapers of the day carried a story of a fire that broke out at a munitions plant south of here and swiftly raged out of control. They did report it by name, and described a few casualties, and said the plant would take significant reconstruction before it would be back in production. They did not state the true extent of damage, the type of personnel missing nor the number of deaths. No mention was made, of course, describing the experimentations that were being conducted there covertly. We again waited, this time for a week. We were mulling over whether or not to contact Mycroft for information and further instruction, but we decided we couldn’t chance breaking our cover. We knew there must be government agents swarming Germany to uncover anything unusual or unexplained foreign person’s who might have had a hand in the munitions facility catastrophe. Waiting can be so stressful if you let it. I have been known to let my boredom bother me to the extent that I had resorted to drugs to seek release. That was in my younger days, having matured, I came to know that fleeting momentary distractions at the cost of my health was definitely not worth it. And now that I was, as they label it, in my middle-aged years, my body did not recover so easily from abuse. I stuck to tobacco in moderate amounts and alcohol with or after dinner in measured doses. Inaction in itself is not stressful, but forced inaction due to having to wait on others’ response, can cause all sorts of worry. Of course, in our situation, the overwhelming consideration was that we were hiding from a deadly opponent who had already killed to keep his activities from the public eyes. And we had of course attempted lethal sabotage. So the game we were engaged in had ultimate penalties. The clandestine nature of our making limited our ability to interact with the outside world. We kept to ourselves and kept in touch with the outside mainly with newspapers. But we could not highlight our national and international interests by buying anything except local papers. The munitions facilities catastrophe did not make a second byline. It seemed to vanish from the concerns of any one not directly involved with clean up. We saw one advertisement from a local construction company that was recruiting a new work staff to go to the town that meant the amount of replacement of the facilities was larger than had been let on. The Kaiser’s government apparently was going to keep the incident low key and make recovery as quiet as could be. Without direct contact with Jack, we could only guess what was happening and thus I refused to make any definite conclusion about what we had to do next. But that did not stop Watson and I from making alternate plans for once we knew the true situation. As we saw it, the Professor would certainly want a first hand appraisal of his loss. Whether he suspected foul play or experimental disaster, he would send Jack to investigate and thus pull him off of keeping the second prototype secure. That could be one reason we had not been contacted yet. In this scenario we would have to keep low and wait for Jack’s next instructions. A second possibility was that some how Jack’s cover had been broken in that case we were on our own. If he had revealed the existence of our team, we would have been terminated, since he was the one who directed us to stay at our current location. There would be no real reason not to take us out immediately. So although his cover could have been breached, our team had not been revealed. This would be a catastrophe for our ability to do anything else to stop the Professor, as we had no other inside man. The Kaiser’s forces would be working against anything we could attempt. We would have to flee back to England to confer and regroup. A third possibility was that case that the Professor having lost the first prototype, and assumed it was not an experimental accident, was keeping Jack occupied securing the current device and he could not slip off to meet with us. This again would require us to simply wait for his call, for he would then need us to help him and we would have to be available at a moments notice. It turned out none of the above was correct. On the eighth unbearably tense day of wait, a man knocked on our door in the middle of the night. In crisp German, “Heir Holmes,” he whispered against the door, “you must let me in, I have word from Watson’s nephew.” We of course had not registered at the inn under that name, and the knowledge that Watson had a nephew would alert us this man was from Jack. We hurriedly opened the door gabbed his shoulder and pulled him in and closed the door behind him. He shook our hands and introduced himself as Hans Snyder. “It is not well,” he began, “my team is to help you track the Professor. Jack has been given the task of guarding the devise as it is transported to Vladivostok!”