The air in the Geneva safe house, already thin with the tension of the day's historic meeting, solidified into a block of ice. Koba's final words—"This is a personal matter"—hung between the three men, a declaration of war against the cold, impersonal logic of their cause.
Lenin's face, which had been alight with the satisfaction of a successful strategist, contorted into a mask of pure, ideological fury. His fist came down on the wooden table with a crack that made Yagoda, still lingering by the door, flinch.
"Personal?" Lenin spat, the word an expectoration, an obscenity. "There are no personal matters in the Revolution! There is only the objective, material struggle! There are no individuals, only classes! There are no feelings, only historical forces!"
He jabbed a finger at Koba, his voice rising to the sharp, cutting tenor he used to flay opponents in debate. "The woman is a casualty of war. A captured soldier. Her personal fate is irrelevant next to the strategic value of that ledger. Your sentiment—your bourgeois, romantic, individualist sentiment—is a weakness. It is a cancer in the body of the Party. I command you, as Chairman, to abandon this suicidal course of action. The matter is closed."
It was a direct order. An ultimatum. For a moment, Jake's mind buckled under the sheer force of Lenin's personality. This was the man who had bent a party, and would soon bend a nation, to his indomitable will. To defy him was to commit political suicide, to be cast out, branded a traitor, and left utterly alone. The safe, logical path was to obey. To cut off the limb to save the body. To sacrifice Kato and the last vestiges of Jake Vance on the altar of the cause.
But the image from Stolypin's letter burned behind his eyes: The nightingale from Tbilisi sings for me now. It was a vision of Kato in a cell, alone, terrified, being used as a pawn. The cold, calculating mask of Koba settled back into place, but this time it was not a disguise. It was armor. He would not be broken by Lenin's ideological bludgeon. He would meet the Chairman's cold logic with a logic that was colder, sharper, and more ruthless still.
"This is not about sentiment, Comrade Chairman," Koba said, his voice a low, steady counterpoint to Lenin's fury. "It is about power. Your power. The Party's power."
He did not raise his voice. He did not plead. He began to dissect the situation with the chilling detachment of a military theorist. "You have just named me The Dagger of the Party. A weapon to be used for its most vital and secret tasks. What Stolypin is doing is not merely taking a hostage; he is testing your new weapon. He is sending a message to you, to Trotsky, and to our entire underground network. And the message is this: your leaders are weak. Your most secret assets can be compromised. Your most effective agents can be neutralized with a single, well-placed emotional threat."
He leaned forward, his eyes locking onto Lenin's. "If the Prime Minister of the Russian Empire can break your Dagger with one telegram, then the Dagger is useless to you. This is not a rescue mission. It is a counter-attack. We cannot allow this to stand. We must demonstrate, in the most brutal and public way possible, that an attack on a core asset of this Party will be met with a disproportionate and terrifying response. We must show him, and everyone else who is watching, that we do not abandon our soldiers. Because a Party that can be so easily cowed is a Party that will be broken long before the war even begins."
Lenin was momentarily silenced, taken aback by the sheer audacity of Koba's argument. He had expected an emotional plea; instead, he was being given a lesson in the brutal psychology of power politics.
Trotsky, who had been watching this clash of wills with the intense fascination of a drama critic at a premier, saw his opening. Koba's argument, while framed in the cold language Lenin respected, resonated with his own sense of revolutionary romanticism and honor. Koba, sensing the shift in the room's dynamics, turned his attention to Trotsky, seamlessly altering his argument to appeal to the orator's soul.
"Comrade Trotsky," Koba said, his tone shifting almost imperceptibly, "you are to be The Voice. You will write the words that inspire the masses to storm the heavens. What message do we send to every comrade risking their life in a secret print shop in Moscow, to every agitator on a factory floor in St. Petersburg, if we tell them that their leaders in comfortable Swiss exile will sacrifice them for a piece of paper? Katerina Svanidze is not just a woman. She is a soldier of the Revolution, a prisoner of war. To leave her in the hands of Stolypin is to tell every one of our soldiers that they are nothing but disposable ammunition. Your prairie fire cannot start if the men and women lighting the matches believe their generals will abandon them on the battlefield."
It was a masterstroke. He had framed his personal obsession in the language of cold pragmatism for Lenin and the language of heroic symbolism for Trotsky.
"He is right, Vladimir Ilyich," Trotsky declared, his voice ringing with conviction. He stood up, pacing the small room with renewed energy. "The perception of our strength is as vital as our material strength itself. The morale of our fighting forces is a tangible weapon! We cannot appear weak. We cannot appear to be mere calculators, devoid of honor. Not now. We must respond!"
Lenin was trapped. Outmaneuvered. He was now facing a united front from the two men he had just placed at the center of his new strategy. He looked from Trotsky's impassioned face to Koba's unreadable, implacable one. A storm of fury raged behind his eyes, but he was, above all, a supreme pragmatist. He had been beaten, for now, in a political game of his own making. He relented, but like a king surrendering a fortress, he dictated the harshest possible terms of surrender.
"Fine," he snarled, the word cutting through the air. He pointed a trembling finger at Koba. "You will handle this 'personal matter.' But you will do it alone. The Party will not be involved. You will receive no funds, no resources, no agents. No official sanction. If you are caught, you are disavowed. You are a rogue element, a bandit acting on his own. We will deny we ever knew you."
He stepped closer, his voice dropping to a menacing whisper. "You have thirty days, as the Prime Minister's letter dictates. Thirty days to solve this problem without compromising our organization. If you fail—if you are captured, or if the ledger falls into their hands—you will have done more damage to the cause than a dozen Okhrana divisions. And you will answer to me. Personally."
The threat was absolute. Failure meant not just death at the hands of the Tsar, but being erased from the history of the cause he was fighting for, branded an enemy of the people by the very men he sat with now.
Koba met his gaze without flinching. He accepted the impossible terms without a flicker of hesitation. "Thank you, Comrade Chairman."
He looked from Lenin's furious face to Trotsky's, now glowing with the righteous fire of the decision. He had won. He had bent the will of the two most powerful revolutionaries on earth to serve his own private war. His internal monologue, the silent scream of Jake Vance, was a chilling counterpoint to the political victory.
They think this is a debate about revolutionary strategy. A calculation of Party morale and the perception of strength. They have no idea. This isn't for a symbol. It isn't for a soldier of the Revolution. It's not for the cause.
His gaze became distant, looking through the walls of the drab Geneva room, across a continent, to a cold stone cell in St. Petersburg.
It is for her. And I will burn their entire revolution to the ground to get her back.