The silence in the Admiral's office was profound, broken only by the horrifyingly mundane sound of the dead man's boots scuffing against the rug as Pavel gently lowered the body to the floor. The air was thick with the coppery scent of death and the ghost of a man's last, stolen breath. For a moment, the chaos outside—the fires, the gunfire, the sirens—seemed a world away.
Jake Vance, the man inside the monster, was reeling, drowning in a fresh wave of self-loathing. Another life taken. Another soul on his ledger. This was not a distant, calculated sacrifice like Timur's men; this was intimate, brutal, and undeniable. He felt a desperate urge to be sick, to run, to undo the last thirty seconds.
But Koba asserted control. He shoved the horror down, locking it away. There was no time for guilt. Guilt was a luxury for men who were not standing over a fresh corpse in the heart of an enemy stronghold.
"The scene," Koba said, his voice a harsh, grating whisper. "Make it look like a robbery."
Pavel, his face grim but his movements steady, understood immediately. While Koba quickly scanned the stolen documents, committing the key details to memory, Pavel went to work. He upended the Admiral's desk, scattering papers everywhere. He swept a collection of expensive silver trinkets into a sack. He pulled the drawers from a filing cabinet, creating a scene of frantic, opportunistic theft. It was a crude fiction, but amidst the larger chaos of the day, it might just be enough to obscure the surgical precision of their true mission.
They slipped out of the desecrated office, closing the splintered door behind them, leaving the dead Admiral to be discovered by his aides. They moved back through the building's corridors, their steps now imbued with a new, urgent stealth. They were no longer heroes coming to the rescue; they were murderers fleeing the scene of their crime.
Their ride out of the port was a journey through a new, even more terrifying circle of hell. Anya's gambit had worked perfectly. As they emerged from the command office, a new, monstrous pillar of smoke was rising from the southern docks. The grain silo was ablaze, the fire even larger and more ferocious than the one at the fuel depot. The authorities, who had just begun to get a handle on the first two crises, were now faced with a third, an attack on the city's food supply that bordered on an act of total war.
The security cordons, which had been tightening, were now in disarray, men and resources being frantically diverted to this new, unthinkable disaster. Koba and Pavel, on their magnificent red fire-cart, rode through the chaos like two horsemen of their own private apocalypse, their path once again cleared by the very forces hunting them. They melted back into the smoldering, panic-stricken city and disappeared.
Prime Minister Stolypin stood in the center of the chaos, a pillar of cold, immovable fury. He had just come from Pier Four, where his men had confirmed what his gut had already told him: there was no munitions fire. There never had been. It was a phantom, a lie told by a soot-stained fireman with eyes that burned too brightly.
And then, the reports came, one after another, each a hammer blow to his sense of order.
First, the news from Warehouse Three. The riot was over. The last of the terrorists had been killed or captured. The assault had been contained. A victory.
Second, the news of the grain silo. A new, catastrophic fire, far from the original battle, a clear act of coordinated, widespread arson. The victory at the warehouse was instantly rendered hollow.
And then the third report, the one that made his blood run cold. An aide, his face ashen, delivered the news in a hushed, horrified whisper. "Prime Minister… it's Admiral Litvin. He's been found. In his office. He's… dead, sir. His neck has been broken. The office was ransacked, the safe forced open."
Stolypin processed the three pieces of information, and in the cold, clear crucible of his mind, they fused together into a single, horrifying, and undeniable truth.
The riot. The fires. The phantom munitions threat. The dead Admiral. It was all connected. It was a single, monstrously complex operation. The city-wide chaos, the dozens of lives lost, the millions of rubles in damage—it had all been a diversion. A bloody, theatrical, city-sized smokescreen to mask a single, surgical strike on the naval command office.
He had not been outfought. He had been out-thought. The Ghost had not tried to evade his trap; he had triggered it, embraced it, and used the ensuing chaos as his cover. He had been played. Completely and utterly. And the Ghost had won.
Stolypin's fury was not hot and explosive. It was a cold, dense, and absolute thing, a singularity of purpose. He would find this man. He would dismantle his network, piece by piece. He would hound him to the ends of the earth.
The rendezvous point was the stable, a pocket of quiet anonymity amidst the city's screams. The air was thick with the smell of horse, hay, and the nervous sweat of exhausted men. Koba and Pavel arrived to find the survivors waiting. There were not many. Timur stood with a grim-faced handful of his men, the remnants of the companies sent to start the fires and blow the bridge. The proud, boastful army of criminals had been whittled down to a haggard, battle-scarred few.
Anya was there, her face pale but her eyes blazing with a fierce, proprietary light. She had held the operation together while he had been in the field.
The mood was not one of celebration. The victory felt too much like a funeral. The cost was etched on every face, most of all on Timur's. He had lost over half his men, many of them friends and family, in a single morning. He looked at Koba, and his expression was a complex mixture of awe, respect, and a deep, simmering grief.
Koba, however, wasted no time on mourning or congratulations. The clock was still ticking. He walked to the center of the stable floor and unrolled the stolen shipping manifest in the dusty light filtering through the hayloft.
"This is our escape," he announced, his voice cutting through the grim silence, pulling them all back to the mission. He pointed to a specific entry on the page, his finger tracing the neat, bureaucratic script.
"0800 hours. Tomorrow morning. Cargo train departing from the Finland Station. Destination: Vyborg. Cargo: Four crates of 'agricultural equipment,' Naval stores reference code 77B." He looked up, his eyes sweeping over the faces of his new, battered army. "This is our shipment of rifles. They are moving it out of the city for safekeeping. Guard detail: one sergeant, two privates. A token force. They will not be expecting an attack so soon, and so far from the port."
He looked from Pavel to Timur to Anya. "We are not going to intercept that train. We are going to become its crew. We will take the guards out tonight, quietly. We will take their uniforms. Tomorrow morning, we will drive the army's own train out of the city for them."
It was the final, audacious piece of his plan. The city was still burning, but he was already moving on to the next phase.
As he finished speaking, the cold fury in Stolypin's office found its first, crucial focus. An Okhrana investigator, a meticulous man with the eyes of a hawk, was conducting a final sweep of the dead Admiral's office. He was on his hands and knees, examining the fibers of the rug near the body, looking for anything the clumsy initial search had missed.
And then he saw it. Tucked deep into the plush wool of the rug, half-hidden in the gloom beneath the desk, was a small, silver object. It was a button, intricately filigreed, clearly not from a naval uniform. It must have been torn from the attacker's coat during the brief, violent struggle. The investigator plucked it from the rug and examined it under the light. It was of a unique design, a pattern of whorls and stars he recognized instantly. It was traditional Chechen silverwork.
He carefully placed the button in an evidence pouch and brought it to the Prime Minister. "Sir," he said, his voice trembling with the thrill of discovery. "We believe this was dropped by the killer."
Stolypin took the pouch. He looked at the single, insignificant silver button. But for him, it was everything. It was the thread. The first, tangible link in the chain. The Ghost, his brilliant, infuriating phantom, was working with Timur's Chechens. He was no longer just hunting a shadow. He was hunting a man with allies, a man with a network, a man with a culture and a history he could now begin to systematically, brutally, unravel.
Stolypin closed his fist around the button, the sharp edges of the silverwork digging into his palm. The heist was over. The game had changed. The real hunt had just begun.