Pillars
Four days passed.
Sam is currently standing on a tree as he looked at the city with a telescope. He disappeared from that spot and appeared on another tree at a different place and looked at the city from a different angle.
He did that a few times and blinked from one tree to another until he covered the whole city from various angles. After that, he disappeared from the trees and arrived at a small patch where they camped.
Noah and Kumar and currently looking for a blueprint as they examined some tokens as well as some metallic puppets that Sam tinkered in the past four days. They are what they prepared for the kidnapping plan.
In the last four days, they got a lot of information from many places in the city. The three merchant groups actually helped with the security in a way that Sam never expected.
They didn't send their own people or make strategies. They just used the one resource that they have the most. Money.