The journey to Berlin was a passage into another world. The train was a marvel of German engineering, fast, clean, and ruthlessly efficient. It hurtled westward, leaving the sprawling, chaotic expanse of Russian Poland behind, and with it, the atmosphere of desperate flight.
The mood inside their private third-class compartment was utterly transformed. The tense, uncertain truce of the Warsaw freight yard had been shattered and replaced by a new, stark reality. Koba had faced down a representative of one of the world's great powers, not with the crude tools of violence he had mastered, but with a weapon they had never seen him wield so devastatingly: his mind.
Yagoda was no longer a handler. He was a deeply impressed, almost fearful observer. He sat hunched in his corner, his gaze frequently flicking towards Koba with a new and profound respect. He had witnessed a masterclass in negotiation and extortion that would be spoken of in hushed, admiring tones in the back rooms of Geneva and Zurich. He had been sent to collect an asset and had discovered, to his shock, that he was now serving a king.
Pavel's respect, which had been shaken to its core by the decision to abandon the Kiev mission, was now being rebuilt on a new and more solid foundation. He had watched his planner, his Ioseb, stare into the eyes of a powerful, dangerous man and not just survive, but dominate. He did not understand the intricate dance of words, the threats and counter-threats, but he understood power. And he had just seen true power in action. He was still heartbroken over Kato, but his faith in the man who would, he now believed, one day conquer the world for her, was absolute. Murat and Ivan were simply in awe. They had followed a clever boss, then a monstrous survivor, and were now in the service of something else entirely, a man who moved empires and secrets as easily as they moved knives and pistols.
They were no longer fugitives on a desperate run. They were a high-stakes diplomatic mission, an embassy of four, hurtling towards a summit.
In the relative privacy of their compartment, as the train rattled through the flat, orderly plains of Prussia, Yagoda reached into his inner coat pocket. "This arrived for you in Warsaw," he said, his tone now that of a subordinate delivering a report. "Delivered to the drop point by our network just before we departed. It is from the south."
He handed Koba a small, flimsy piece of paper, a coded telegram. Koba's blood, which had been running hot with the thrill of his victory, turned to ice. The south. Kiev. Kato.
He took the paper. His fingers felt thick and clumsy. The message was short, a meaningless jumble of numbers and letters to anyone else. It was a simple book cipher, the key being a volume of Pushkin they had both used in the past. He didn't need the book. He had memorized the patterns.
KIEV ASSET—the cold, impersonal Party designation for the woman he loved—COMPROMISED STOP
CLIENT'S PRIMARY COMPETITOR—their code for the state, specifically Stolypin's office—HAS ASSUMED CUSTODY STOP
LOCAL NETWORK CONFIRMS POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION STOP
NO FURTHER INFORMATION AVAILABLE STOP
The message was brutally clear, stripped of all emotion, a sterile report of catastrophic failure. Kato has been captured by Stolypin's men.
The news was not a thought. It was a physical blow, a phantom fist that slammed into his gut, knocking the air from his lungs. For a single, horrifying second, the cold, logical fortress of Koba shattered, and the prisoner in the dungeon, Jake Vance, was slammed against the bars of his cage, screaming in silent, agonized horror.
Failed. Failed. Failed. The word was a drumbeat of self-loathing. His grand justification to Pavel, his beautiful, logical, monstrous speech about gaining power and returning as a king to save her—it was all a lie now, ashes in his mouth. While he had been playing sophisticated chess games with German spies, Stolypin, the brutal pragmatist, had simply swept his queen from the board. He had traded her safety for a ledger and a train ride west.
The narrative of the world shrank to a single, sharp point of focus: the flimsy piece of paper in his hand. He was unaware of the rocking of the train, of the concerned looks from his men. He felt his hand clench, a slow, crushing pressure, his knuckles turning white as he squeezed the telegram so tightly the paper tore. It was the only outward sign of the cataclysm raging within him.
Pavel, sitting opposite, saw it. He had been watching Koba closely, and he saw the flicker of utter, bottomless devastation in his leader's eyes, a flash of pure human agony, before the mask of cold, inhuman control slammed back down, heavier and more impenetrable than ever before.
Koba did not curse. He did not cry out. He did not wallow in the acidic bile of his grief and guilt. The Koba persona reasserted control with a speed and brutality that was terrifying. It took the raw, screaming energy of Jake's despair and began to channel it, to forge it from a crippling emotion into a cold, hard weapon.
He carefully, deliberately, smoothed out the torn telegram. Then he looked at Yagoda. "Paper," he said, his voice a low, chillingly calm rasp. "And a pen. Now."
Yagoda, startled by the sudden, dead-eyed intensity, quickly produced a fountain pen and a small sheaf of clean paper from his satchel.
Koba took them and turned to the small, vibrating fold-down table by the window. As the orderly, peaceful German countryside flew by, a world of green fields and tidy villages, he began to write. He worked with a feverish, silent, all-consuming intensity. He was no longer a passenger on a train. He was a forge, and the fire within him was the white-hot rage of his own failure.
He was not just copying the ledger, as he had planned. He was creating two separate, powerful documents, each with a different purpose, each a different caliber of ammunition for the war he was now fighting.
The first document was the physical manifestation of the bluff he had sold to Herr Schmidt. He wrote in crisp, formal French, the international language of diplomacy and journalism. It was a meticulously detailed, explosive exposé of the entire Krupp-Admiralty affair. He left nothing out: the names of the corrupt Russian officials, the dates of the secret shipments, the account numbers at the Swiss bank, the technical specifications of the Zeiss rangefinders. It was a document so damning, so precise, that no government could dismiss it. He even left a blank space where he would later affix the two pages he had given the German as a sample, a proof of authenticity. He folded it, placed it in an envelope, and addressed it to Monsieur le Rédacteur en Chef, Le Temps, Paris. This was his dead man's switch. His insurance policy. His ghost that would haunt his enemies if they ever managed to kill him.
Then he took a fresh sheet of paper and began to write the second document. This was something else entirely. It was not an exposé for a newspaper. It was a thesis. It was a prophecy. And it was intended for an audience of one: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.
He began by laying out a strategic analysis of the coming European war. Jake's 21st-century historical knowledge, the curse that had tormented him, now became his ultimate sword. He wrote with the chilling, detached accuracy of a historian writing about a past he had already lived through.
He predicted, with absolute certainty, the German Empire's primary war plan: a massive, sweeping scythe-stroke through neutral Belgium, designed to bypass the French fortifications and knock France out of the war in six weeks—the Schlieffen Plan.
He then predicted the plan's ultimate failure, arguing that the logistics would break down and the French and British would rally, leading not to a quick victory but to a bloody, grinding stalemate on the Western Front. He described the inevitable rise of trench warfare, a new and terrible kind of war of attrition that the industrial powers, for all their might, were not prepared to sustain.
Then he turned his analytical gaze on his own country. He used the details from the ledger—the reliance on German parts, the endemic corruption of the port officials, the clumsy methods of payment—as evidence for his central, damning thesis: the Russian military was a hollow giant, a colossus with feet of clay. He predicted its catastrophic collapse, not from a lack of bravery in its soldiers, but from the rot within its leadership and the brittleness of its industrial and logistical supply lines. He argued that the Tsar's armies would be sent into a modern, mechanized war with 19th-century infrastructure, and the result would be a slaughter on an unprecedented scale.
He concluded that the war would not be a quick victory for anyone but a multi-year bloodletting that would bleed every great empire dry, creating the perfect, fertile ground for a global proletarian revolution. But, he argued, that opportunity would only be seized by the party that understood the true nature of the coming conflict before it began.
He put down the pen. The work was done. He had transformed himself. He had taken his grief, his guilt, his rage over Kato, and forged it into a sword of pure, terrifying intellect. He was no longer just a man bringing Lenin a piece of blackmail about a corrupt naval contract. He was a geopolitical prophet. He was bringing Lenin a blueprint for the future of the world. The ledger was no longer the main course; it was merely the evidence, the first footnote in his grand, terrible thesis. This was his new leverage. This was how he would become a king.