The apartment door opened, and Pavel, Murat, and Ivan filed back in, their faces etched with a tense, uncertain curiosity. They had been walking the clean, quiet streets of Zurich for what felt like an eternity, outsiders in a world of clocks and chocolate, while their fate was being decided in a small, book-cluttered room. They returned to find the room transformed. The electric, almost suffocating presence of Lenin was gone, but the echo of his authority remained. The air was thick with the aftermath of a storm.
Koba sat at the table, exactly where they had left him. The ledger and his manuscript were still laid out before him, two artifacts from a battle they had not witnessed. His face was a pale, unreadable mask, but there was a new and terrible stillness about him, the stillness of a live bomb that has just been armed.
Pavel's heart hammered in his chest. He could not bear the silence. He took a step forward, his voice a low, rough plea. "What did he say, Ioseb? About Kato?" The use of the familiar name was an unconscious slip, a desperate appeal to the man, not the planner.
Koba looked up, his eyes seeming to focus from a great distance. He did not recount the cold, strategic cruelty of Lenin's response. He understood that his men, especially Pavel, needed a victory, not a clinical assessment of a compromised asset.
"The Party will handle it," he said, his voice flat and emotionless, a carefully edited summary. "It is now a high-priority operation. They are launching an intelligence mission, using their best agents in the south, to locate her and assess the situation for an extraction." He framed it as a decisive, powerful action, not the cold, conditional promise it truly was.
Murat and Ivan exchanged a look of profound relief. To them, the answer was simple and satisfying. The powerful, almost mythical Party was now solving their problem. Their planner had delivered. But Pavel, who knew Koba's face better than any of them, saw through the carefully constructed report. He saw the truth in the dead, empty space behind Koba's eyes. He saw the caged, howling pain of a man who had just been told his wife's life was a matter of strategic convenience. He understood that Kato had not been saved. She had been nationalized, her fate now in the hands of faceless committees and distant strategists. Pavel gave a slow, solemn nod, a gesture of shared, unspoken grief.
Koba stood, pushing the chair back. The time for personal matters was over. "Our own mission has changed," he announced, his voice regaining its sharp, commanding edge. He laid out their new reality, the sheer, staggering scale of it. "We are no longer fugitives. We are the founding members of a new intelligence directorate for the Party, focused on the coming war. Our base of operations will be Vienna. Our first objective is to gather intelligence on a high-value target: a rival revolutionary named Trotsky."
The names and places were abstract, but the meaning was clear. They had leveled up, transcending the world of simple crime and entering the great game, the world of nations and spies. He gave them their new roles, forging a new purpose for them out of the ashes of their old one. "Murat, your talents for moving unseen, for watching without being watched, will be invaluable. You will be in charge of our counter-surveillance and security. Ivan, you will be our enforcer, the silent threat that ensures our security is respected. Pavel," he looked at the big man, "you will be my second-in-command, my chief lieutenant. You will be the fist. I will be the brain."
He was giving them a new identity, a new hierarchy, a place in this terrifying new world he was building. He was binding them to him not just with loyalty, but with purpose.
That night, sleep was a distant country Koba could not reach. The others were asleep, their exhaustion finally claiming them. But he sat alone in the darkness of the small study, the pale Zurich moonlight striping the floor. The Koba persona, the cold, calculating machine that had gotten him through the meeting with Lenin, was dormant. And in the sudden, terrible quiet of his own mind, Jake Vance was left to confront the full, monstrous scope of his new reality.
He had done it. He had met the man who would one day rule a sixth of the world. He had looked into the eyes of history. He had predicted the Great War, not as a theorist, but as a witness. He was no longer a hapless victim of his strange fate; he was a key player, a catalyst in the events that would forge the entire bloody course of the 20th century.
And the price had been his soul.
Kato was gone. A prisoner of his nemesis, her fate now a bargaining chip in Lenin's grand, inhuman game. The one pure thing that had driven him, the memory of her that had kept some small part of Jake alive, was now just another asset on a strategic map. He had become a monster, a prophet of death, a cold-blooded strategist who had just calmly debated the deaths of millions. He was more alone, more utterly and completely isolated, than he had ever been in his life. He had saved the world from the historical Stalin, perhaps, but he had lost himself so completely in the process that he was no longer sure what was left. He was a ghost animating a famous corpse, haunted by a future he was now helping to create.
The next day, as they prepared for the train journey to Vienna, Koba requested a final, private meeting with Yagoda. The ambitious young agent, now Koba's official liaison with Lenin's office, was almost fawning in his deference.
"The Chairman was… impressed, Comrade Koba," Yagoda said, a note of genuine, unfeigned awe in his voice. "Deeply impressed. After you left, he told me you have a mind like a calculating machine, but one forged from Damascus steel."
Koba looked at Yagoda, his eyes as cold and empty as a winter sky. He had no interest in Lenin's compliments. He had one final piece of business. One last price for his service.
"The operation in Kiev," Koba said, his voice a low, chilling whisper. "I want a message sent to the team leader there. A directive from this office."
Yagoda leaned in, eager to be of service. "Of course, Comrade. What are your instructions?"
"The capture of Ekaterina Svanidze," Koba stated, his voice utterly devoid of emotion, "was a catastrophic failure of our intelligence network. Specifically," he continued, his gaze unwavering, "it was a failure of the agent on the ground who was responsible for her, who led her into the initial bomb plot trap, and whose incompetence placed her in a position to be captured." He did not need to say the name. They both knew he meant Yasha.
"Such failures," Koba continued, his voice dropping even lower, becoming a whisper of pure, distilled ice, "cannot be tolerated. They breed weakness and unreliability throughout the entire organism. To ensure the future discipline and operational security of our network, there must be… consequences."
He let the word hang in the air for a moment. "You will instruct the Kiev team to find Yasha. And you will instruct them to eliminate him. Quietly. Efficiently. He is to be made an example of."
Yagoda stared at him, his mouth slightly agape. A flicker of shock, then of understanding, and finally of profound fear passed through his eyes. This was not a strategic request. This was not about improving the network. This was a cold-blooded, personal act of vengeance. This was Koba, the man whose wife had been captured, using the full, deadly apparatus of the Party to settle a personal score, to execute the man he deemed responsible.
Koba had fully, irrevocably, embraced the monstrous calculus of power. His grief and guilt over Kato had not broken him; they had simply become another weapon in his arsenal, another tool to be wielded. He was no longer just predicting history, or reacting to it. He was now actively, brutally, making it, one body at a time.