The dawn broke not with light, but with a slow, grudging dilution of the darkness. A hazy, gray twilight filtered through the grimy windows of the stable, illuminating a scene of grim, methodical sacrilege. The city outside was a wounded beast, licking its wounds. The fires in the port district had been contained, leaving behind vast, blackened scars that smoldered under a pall of smoke. An eerie, exhausted silence had fallen, punctuated only by the distant, mournful clang of a single, stray fire bell.
Inside the stable, the air was cold and still, thick with the smell of horse, hay, and the metallic, cloying scent of cooling blood. Koba, Pavel, and two of Timur's best surviving men—a wiry, silent killer named Murat and a hulking brute called Ivan—were at work. They moved with a quiet, unsettling efficiency, stripping the uniforms from the bodies of the three Russian soldiers they had ambushed during the night.
The attack had been silent and brutal, a necessary piece of the plan's bloody machinery. Now came the intimate, grotesque aftermath. Jake Vance, the man from a century that had sanitized death, was screaming in the silent, soundproofed room of his own mind. This was not the detached, strategic sacrifice of men in a battle. This was a violation. His hands, covered in a thin pair of leather gloves, felt the rough wool of the uniforms, the stiff leather of the belts. He had to touch the still-warm bodies, to manipulate their dead limbs. It was a cold, personal, and deeply profane act.
But the Koba persona was in absolute control. He worked with the detached pragmatism of a man field-dressing a deer. His focus was on the details. He carefully unpinned the sergeant's chevrons from one uniform, noting the precise placement. He examined the regimental patches on the shoulders, burning the colors and insignia into his memory. He checked the contents of their pockets, finding a half-eaten apple, a letter from a sweetheart in Tver, a cheap tin icon of Saint George. He noted these details not with empathy, but as data points, small pieces of a stolen identity that he might need to reconstruct. This was not a desecration. It was a necessary, if distasteful, acquisition of assets.
As the four men worked, transforming themselves from criminals into soldiers, Anya was conducting her own final, critical operation. She was not a quartermaster of uniforms, but of identities. She moved around them, her presence a sharp, focused point of energy in the grim tableau. She had spent the last few hours drilling them, hammering the basics of military protocol into their defiant, underworld minds.
"No," she snapped at Ivan, who was struggling with the leather gaiters. "The straps are buckled on the outside, always. A real soldier would spot that in a second. Do it again."
She turned to Koba, who was now fully dressed in the dead sergeant's uniform. The fit was surprisingly good. The uniform gave him a new, harsher authority. "Your salute, General," she commanded. "Show me."
He snapped a salute. It was stiff, awkward.
"No," she said, her voice sharp with criticism. "You look like a student playing at soldiers. It's a snap of the wrist, from the temple. Sharp. Confident. Bored. A sergeant is not trying to impress anyone. He has seen it all. He is weary of the world and everyone in it. You must be that man."
Her intellectual bond with Koba had transformed. She was no longer just his admirer or his priestess; she had become his fierce, unforgiving protector, a guardian of the flawless execution of his plan. Her own survival was now inextricably linked to the perfection of his performance.
"You will refer to each other only by rank," she continued, her gaze sweeping over all four of them. "You are Sergeant Orlov," she said to Koba, giving him the name from the dead man's papers. "You three are privates. You do not speak unless spoken to. You do not smoke on the platform. You do not slouch. You are soldiers of the Semyonovsky Regiment, the Tsar's elite. You are disciplined. Your sloppiness will betray you before your faces ever could."
Before they prepared to leave, as Pavel and the others did a final check of their weapons, Koba and Anya shared a final, quiet moment. The unspoken tension between them was a palpable force, a dense field of shared secrets and shared monstrosities.
"You should come with us," Koba said. It was not a plea. It was a statement of cold, strategic fact, delivered with the same flat tone he would use to order a change in logistics. "Your mind. Your attention to detail. It would be an asset."
It was the closest he had ever come to a personal appeal, an acknowledgment that her value to him was more than just her utility as a subordinate.
Anya considered it for a moment, her gray eyes searching his face. A flicker of something—regret? longing?—crossed her features before her own cold, unassailable logic took control.
She shook her head. "No. The plan requires four soldiers. A woman, a civilian, would draw immediate, unwanted attention. It is a fatal flaw in the cover story." She looked around the stable, at the city beyond. "My role is here. Timur is a strong arm, but he is not a mind. Without one of us here, his new power will crumble in a month. I will use the chaos of your escape, the power vacuum you have created, to solidify his control. I will rebuild our network, make it stronger, smarter. When you need a safe harbor in this Empire, or a friendly port to return to, I will have one waiting for you."
Their farewell was not emotional. There were no embraces, no promises. It was a strategic deployment of their forces, the pragmatic decision of two monarchs dividing their kingdom to ensure the survival of their dynasty.
In his office, surrounded by the organized calm that was his only defense against the chaos he governed, Prime Minister Stolypin held the small, silver Chechen button in the palm of his hand. It felt cold and heavy, a single, solid fact in a world of smoke and shadows.
He was no longer chasing the ghost. The city-wide manhunt, the wanted posters, the patrols—he now saw them as a clumsy, inefficient tool. The ghost had proven he could move through the city at will. Stolypin knew, with a certainty that settled in his bones, that his quarry had likely already fled. The hunt for the man himself was over, for now. The hunt for his network had just begun.
He summoned Colonel Sazonov, whose face was gray with fatigue and the humiliation of the previous day's events.
"Forget the ghost, Colonel," Stolypin said, his voice quiet but laced with a cold, renewed purpose. He dropped the silver button onto the desk between them. "He has allies. This is our thread. Find me every known associate of Timur Akhmadov. Every enforcer, every merchant who pays him protection, every corrupt policeman on his payroll. I want his teahouses raided. I want his safe houses dismantled. I want every man in his organization arrested and questioned. We will not find the ghost by looking for him. We will find him by squeezing the city until it gives us a name."
Sazonov's eyes lit up with a grim, predatory light. This was a task he understood. This was the work the Okhrana was made for. The hunt had a new direction. He was no longer chasing a phantom; he was dismantling a machine. And the audience knew, with a chilling certainty, that he was now on the right trail, even if he was still a few, critical steps behind.
The four soldiers walked through the hazy, smoke-filled dawn of St. Petersburg. Their uniforms were immaculate, their posture ramrod straight, their faces set in masks of grim, military discipline. Koba, as Sergeant Orlov, walked with a slight, weary swagger. Pavel and the two Chechens walked a respectful half-step behind him, their rifles held at the proper angle. To any casual observer, they were a guard detail from an elite regiment, on their way to another dreary, routine assignment.
They approached the Finland Station. Even from a distance, they could see it was not the bustling, chaotic hub of the previous days. It was a fortress. The entrance was flanked by a double contingent of military police, their white belts stark against their dark green uniforms. Okhrana agents in plain clothes stood conspicuously, their eyes scanning every face, every piece of luggage.
Koba's heart, the treacherous human heart of Jake Vance, began to hammer against his ribs. This was the point of no return. They were four murderers dressed in stolen clothes, armed with false identities, walking directly into the most secure, heavily patrolled railway station in the entire Russian Empire.
The train that was their only hope of salvation was scheduled to depart in one hour. And between them and that train lay a thousand suspicious eyes, each one a potential trigger for their own execution.