Berlin Hauptbahnhof was not a train station; it was a cathedral of iron and steam, a monumental testament to the industrial might and rigid order of the German Empire. The air hummed with a disciplined energy, a stark contrast to the chaotic, sprawling entropy of Russian stations. Here, trains arrived and departed with the precise, unyielding tick of a clockwork mechanism. Uniformed officials moved with sharp, angular purpose. It was the bustling, monumental heart of a nation that believed, with absolute conviction, in its own destiny.
Their party, five grim-faced "Austrian merchants," disembarked into this overwhelming display of power. At the far end of the platform, a new contact was waiting. He was a different breed from the urbane Herr Schmidt. This man was short, stocky, and had the grim, unsmiling face of a committed functionary. He was a cog in the machine, a man who followed orders without question.
Before they followed him to their connection, Koba stopped. He turned to Yagoda, but his eyes were on the new contact. He held out the sealed envelope, the one addressed to the editor of Le Temps in Paris.
"This is for our network," Koba said, his voice carrying an authority that was now absolute. Yagoda, who was once his handler, now watched him with the rapt attention of a student. "It is to be sent via the most secure channel—a diplomatic pouch, if you have one—to our people in Paris. The instructions for its handling are written inside, on a separate sheet. It is to be held, unopened. If our Parisian comrades do not receive a new, coded telegram from me, with a specific and pre-arranged authentication, within one month of my confirmed arrival in Zurich, they are to release the contents of this envelope to its addressee. Is that understood?"
The Berlin contact, who had clearly been briefed to obey this strange Georgian, nodded once, his expression serious. He took the envelope as if it were a delicate bomb. "It will be done, Comrade," he said, the use of the title a confirmation of Koba's new status.
Koba had done it. His bluff in the Warsaw yard was no longer a bluff. The dead man's switch was now a real, armed mechanism, a ghost in the machine of the international revolutionary network. His life, and his silence, were now insured.
The final leg of their journey, the overnight train from Berlin to Zurich, was a passage through a different state of being. The raw, desperate energy of their flight, the high-stakes tension of their confrontations—all of it began to recede, replaced by a profound, humming anticipation. They were on the final approach to the summit. The world outside the window was peaceful, orderly, almost dreamlike. It was a world on the brink, holding its breath before the coming storm, and they were four horsemen riding a train of iron and steam toward its epicenter.
During the long, quiet hours of the night, as the train rattled south through the German countryside, Pavel finally broke his long, brooding silence. He had been watching Koba with a new, profound, and almost fearful awe since the news about Kato. He had seen the flash of devastation in Koba's eyes, but he had then witnessed that devastation be transmuted not into despair, but into a white-hot, focused energy. He had watched him write for hours, his pen scratching across the paper with a terrible, prophetic urgency.
"That letter," Pavel said, his voice a low rumble in the quiet compartment, "your analysis of this… war. You truly believe it is coming for us all? A war of millions?" The concept was still too vast, too monstrous for him to fully grasp.
Koba looked away from the window, from the peaceful German farms and sleeping villages rushing past in the darkness. His gaze was distant, his eyes reflecting the lamplight of the compartment but seeing a different, bloodier future.
"It is not a matter of belief, Pavel," he said, his voice quiet and heavy with the absolute, weary certainty of Jake's historical knowledge. "It is a matter of physics. Of pressure. The old empires of Europe are like massive, tectonic plates of iron, grinding against each other for decades. Germany wants its place in the sun. Britain wants to rule the waves. France wants revenge for its past humiliations. Austria-Hungary is a crumbling prison of nations, and the Tsar's empire is a rotten giant. Too much pressure has built up. They need a war to release that pressure, to settle the question of who will be master."
He leaned forward, his voice dropping to an almost hypnotic whisper. "They are old, sick, and dying, all of them. And they will try to cure their sickness the only way they know how: by bleeding the youth of an entire continent dry. They will send boys from farms in Bavaria to die in the fields of France, and they will send boys from villages on the Volga to die in the forests of Poland. It is a fever that has been building for a generation, and it is about to break. It is as inevitable, and as impersonal, as the sunrise."
He had now fully articulated his prophetic status to his own men. They were no longer following a gangster for money or a planner for survival. They were following a man who saw the terrible, hidden machinery of the world, a man who did not just predict the future but seemed to speak of it as a settled memory.
Their arrival in Zurich was like stepping onto another planet. After the gray, grimy vastness of Russia and the tense, monumental order of Berlin, Zurich was a city of unnerving peace and prosperity. It was clean. The air was crisp and alpine. The waters of the Limmat river were a shocking, brilliant blue. It was a city of clocks, of quiet, serious money, of a neutrality so profound it felt like its own kind of power. This was the calm, rational eye of the coming European storm, the perfect, sterile laboratory for the world's collection of exiles, spies, anarchists, and revolutionaries to cultivate their world-changing viruses.
They were taken, not to a squalid slum, but to a respectable, slightly shabby apartment on the Spiegelgasse, a narrow, cobblestoned street in a quiet working-class neighborhood. The air inside the apartment smelled of old books, stale pipe tobacco, and strong, black tea. Stacks of newspapers in German, French, and Russian were piled in every corner. Bookshelves overflowed, crammed with dense volumes of philosophy and political economy. It was the den of a thinker, a theorist, a man who waged war with words and ideas.
The Berlin contact who had escorted them from the station paused at the door. "Make yourselves comfortable," he said with a curt nod. "The Chairman is finishing an article at the public library. He will be here shortly."
He closed the door, leaving them alone in the quiet, book-filled apartment. The sudden silence was deafening. The tension, which had been a low hum for days, now ratcheted up to an unbearable, screaming pitch. Ivan and Murat, out of pure, ingrained instinct, checked the action on their pistols, the metallic snick of the slides a jarringly violent sound in the scholarly quiet. It was a habit from a world of street fights and back-alley ambushes, a world that no longer applied. Pavel, the silent guardian, took up a position by the single large window, his massive frame blocking the light, his eyes scanning the quiet street below.
Koba was the only one who seemed calm. He walked to the small, worn wooden table that dominated the center of the room. With a deliberate, almost ceremonial slowness, he placed the heavy, leather-bound logging ledger on its surface. Next to it, he placed his own handwritten thesis, the neat pages a stark contrast to the grimy officialdom of the book. His weapons were on the table. He was a king, waiting for an audience with another king.
He sat down, his back straight, his hands resting on his knees. And he waited.
Minutes stretched into an eternity. They could hear the ticking of a clock from a neighboring apartment, a sound as relentless and final as time itself. Then, footsteps. Quick, decisive, and impatient on the wooden stairs. They stopped outside the door. A key turned in the lock.
Before anyone could react, the door opened.
A man stepped inside. He was shorter than they expected, compact, with the powerful shoulders of a man who did a great deal of walking. He was balding, a high, domed forehead giving way to a fringe of reddish-brown hair, with a neatly trimmed goatee and mustache. He was dressed in a slightly rumpled but clean three-piece suit, a gold watch-chain looped across his vest. But it was his eyes that seized and held the entire room. They were slightly slanted, intelligent, and fiercely, incandescently alive. They took in every detail of the room and its occupants in a single, sweeping, analytical glance—the armed men, the silent giant at the window, the figure at the table.
His gaze finally landed on Koba. He offered a brisk, impatient nod, a gesture that was a dismissal and an acknowledgment all at once.
"Comrade Koba, I presume," he said. His voice was higher-pitched than they might have imagined, not the booming baritone of a great orator, but a sharp, precise tenor that carried an unmistakable weight of absolute intellectual authority. "I am Ulyanov. Yagoda's reports are… intriguing. You have brought me a crisis."
His eyes flicked down to the ledger on the table, then to Koba's own manuscript beside it.
"Let us discuss," he said, his lips thinning into what might have been a smile, "if it is also an opportunity."
Lenin had arrived. The game was on.