The world narrowed to twenty feet of smoke-filled, fire-lit hell.
The roar of the inferno, the distant, rhythmic crackle of gunfire, the screams—it all faded into a dull, rushing hum, the sound of blood pounding in Koba's ears. For one, eternal, frozen moment, there was only the man in the immaculate greatcoat, his face a pale, stern mask in the flickering orange light. Pyotr Stolypin. The Prime Minister. The grandmaster. The hunter.
Jake Vance screamed. Inside the carefully constructed fortress of the Koba persona, a raw, primal, and entirely modern terror erupted. He sees you. He knows. It's over. All for nothing. You're going to die here, in this ridiculous costume, in this insane, barbaric century. The panic was a physical thing, a white-hot nova that threatened to vaporize his composure, to send him scrambling back in terror or collapsing into a pleading, pathetic heap.
But the Koba persona, the armor forged in desperation and tempered in Anya's cold philosophy, held. It did not just hold; it slammed down on the panic with the force of a drop hammer, crushing it, converting its terrified energy into a fuel of pure, audacious resolve.
He has a blurry photograph, the cold, internal logic stated. He has a sketch. He is looking for a ghost. He is not expecting to see a fireman. The soot on his face, the heavy, obscuring helmet, the chaotic, dancing firelight—these were not weaknesses; they were his shield. He could not run. He could not fight. He had to dictate the reality of the moment before Stolypin's brilliant, analytical mind had a chance to impose its own. He had to seize the narrative.
He made the decision in the space of a single, frantic heartbeat. He would not wait to be questioned. He would not try to shrink away. He would do the most insane, counter-intuitive, and therefore unexpected thing possible: he would attack.
He stepped forward, breaking the frozen tableau. He moved with a stiff, righteous purpose, his face a mask of furious, professional indignation. He snapped a salute, not the crisp, military gesture of a soldier, but the slightly more perfunctory version of a senior civil servant, a man who saw the Prime Minister not as a demigod, but as the final link in a chain of command he was trying to activate.
"Prime Minister!" he barked, his voice a rough, powerful roar, coarsened by smoke and adrenaline, the perfect timbre of a man used to shouting over the din of collapsing buildings. "Chief Officer Lagunov, Third Fire Brigade!"
He had given himself a name, a rank, a reality. He had thrown the first fact onto the table, forcing Stolypin to engage with his fiction.
He jabbed an accusatory, soot-stained finger at the unyielding Okhrana officer. "Your man here is obstructing a state emergency! We are the only steam pumper crew on this side of the canal, and the fire has just jumped to the timber yards at Pier Four! It's right next to the naval munitions warehouse!"
It was a lie of breathtaking genius, layered and weaponized. He had invented a new, catastrophic threat—the munitions warehouse—that was far more immediate and terrifying than a smoldering fuel depot. It was a threat that demanded the Prime Minister's full, undivided attention, a strategic problem that would, he prayed, override the tactical puzzle of a single, unfamiliar face. He had framed the loyal Okhrana officer not as a guard doing his duty, but as a foolish, incompetent bureaucrat on the verge of causing a city-leveling disaster. He was not just lying; he was creating a new, more urgent reality and daring Stolypin to question it.
Stolypin was visibly thrown. His mind, which had been in the process of coolly observing a minor breach of his cordon, was now forced to grapple with a new, terrifying variable. A munitions fire. The words alone were a nightmare. The port district would not just burn; it would be blown off the face of the earth. His hunt for a single revolutionary ghost was suddenly dwarfed by the potential for a catastrophe that would cripple the Empire's Baltic fleet and kill thousands.
His sharp, analytical eyes bored into Koba's. He was trying to see past the grime, past the helmet, trying to reconcile the blurry photograph in his mind's eye with the solid, furiously determined man standing before him. He saw the authentic, soot-stained uniform. He saw the raw, desperate urgency in the man's eyes. Most of all, he saw the unwavering, absolute certainty of a professional on his own field of battle. This was not the furtive, nervous energy of a liar. It was the righteous, focused rage of a man trying to save the city from bureaucratic incompetence.
For a split second, Stolypin hesitated. The hunter's instinct warred with the statesman's duty. The face was… familiar. There was something in the intensity of the eyes, the set of the jaw beneath the soot. But the risk… if the fireman was telling the truth, and he wasted precious minutes interrogating him, the blood of thousands would be on his hands. He made the only choice a responsible leader could make. He chose to save the city.
"Let him through!" Stolypin's voice was a whip crack of command, directed at his stunned Okhrana officer. "You heard him! Get this engine to Pier Four immediately!" He then turned to his own aide, his mind already moving to this new, greater threat. "Get every available man! Form a new cordon, a hard perimeter, around the munitions warehouse! I want every street cleared! Now! Move!"
The wall of soldiers, which had been an impassable barrier, dissolved. The Okhrana officer, his face a mask of humiliated fury, barked the order, and the barricade was lifted.
Pavel, who had been a statue of coiled tension on the driver's seat, did not need to be told twice. He snapped the reins, and the two massive horses surged forward, pulling the heavy engine through the newly opened gap. They were through.
As the fire-cart lurched past, Koba, his heart a wild, frantic drum against his ribs, risked a final, fleeting glance back at the Prime Minister. For a single, terrifying second, their eyes locked across the churning chaos. And in Stolypin's gaze, Koba saw something that chilled him to the bone. It was not recognition. It was something far more dangerous. It was a flicker of profound, intellectual suspicion. It was the look of a grandmaster who knows, with an absolute gut certainty, that he has just been bluffed, that a piece has been moved on the board in a way that defies the rules, but he cannot yet prove how or why.
The bluff had worked. The gate was open. But Koba knew, with a certainty that settled deep in his soul, that he had not just escaped a trap. He had left a psychic fingerprint on the mind of the most dangerous man in Russia. He had won the battle, but he had just guaranteed the war would be to the death.