The train rattled through the dark heart of the German countryside, its rhythmic clatter a somber drumbeat counting down the thirty days Koba had been given. Inside a second-class compartment, the air was stale with the scent of coal smoke and dread. The grand ideological certainty of the Geneva safe house had evaporated, leaving behind the grim, practical reality of an impossible mission.
Pavel, Murat, and Ivan sat in silence, watching their leader. Koba had relayed Lenin's ultimatum and the harsh terms of his exile. They were no longer the Party's Dagger; they were a rogue cell, disavowed and utterly alone, about to declare war on the most powerful man in the Russian Empire.
Pavel, his broad face etched with worry, finally broke the silence. His loyalty was absolute, but his mind, grounded in the simple physics of violence, could not grasp the strategic geometry of their situation.
"Koba," he said, his voice a low rumble. "I will follow you into hell. You know this. But Lenin is right. This is a trap. The Peter and Paul Fortress… it is not a prison, it is a citadel. Even if we could get inside, how can four men fight the Tsar's entire garrison? It is suicide."
Koba looked up from the map of Berlin that was spread across the small, vibrating table. His eyes were calm, but they held a chilling, almost alien intelligence, the look of a man seeing a game board that was invisible to everyone else.
"You are thinking like a soldier, Pavel," Koba said, his voice quiet but carrying an authority that filled the small space. "You are thinking about assaulting a fortress. That is the trap Stolypin has set for us. It is the trap Lenin believes we are walking into." He tapped the center of the map. "We are not going to St. Petersburg. We are not going to assault anything. We are going to do exactly what the Prime Minister expects. We will walk into his trap in Berlin. And we will use it to spring one of our own."
His men leaned forward, their confusion mingling with a dawning sense of awe. Koba began to lay out the plan. It was not a simple scheme of rescue; it was a monstrously complex, multi-layered gambit, each part designed to create a cascade of chaos and pressure that would force Stolypin's hand.
"First, the bait," Koba began, his finger tracing the route to the grand boulevard of Unter den Linden, where the Russian Embassy stood. "Stolypin wants the ledger. He expects me to negotiate. We will give him what he wants to see. Murat, you will use our contacts in the Berlin underground to leak a single piece of information: that Koba is in the city and is preparing to trade the Krupp ledger for the life of a comrade. We will make them believe I am desperate, emotional, and predictable. The entire Okhrana presence in Germany will focus on that embassy, waiting for me to make my move. They will be watching the front door."
Ivan grunted. "While they watch the front door, we go in the back?"
"No," Koba said, a thin, cold smile touching his lips. "While they watch the front door of the embassy, we will be miles away, hunting a different target altogether. Our mission is not to rescue Kato. As Pavel said, that is impossible. Our mission is to take a hostage of equal or greater value. We are not conducting a rescue. We are conducting a prisoner exchange."
The sheer audacity of the statement hung in the air. Pavel stared at him, his mind struggling to comprehend the scale of the plan. "A hostage? Who in this city could possibly be as valuable to the Prime Minister as that ledger?"
Koba let the question settle before he delivered the answer. He looked at each of his men, his gaze steady and hard. "Do you remember the man who gave us the mission for the dynamite? The man in the Duma who set this entire chain of events in motion?"
Pavel's brow furrowed in concentration. "The politician… Malinovsky."
"Roman Malinovsky," Koba affirmed, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "One of the six Bolshevik deputies in the Imperial Duma. A fiery speaker. A beloved leader of the Metalworkers' Union. And, according to Lenin himself, one of the most important men in our Party."
He paused, letting them absorb the weight of that. Then he delivered the secret that he alone carried, a piece of knowledge from the future that was about to become a devastating weapon in the present.
"He is also," Koba said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion, "the Okhrana's most valuable and highest-placed agent of all time. He is Stolypin's crown jewel."
Murat gasped. Ivan swore under his breath. It was an impossible revelation, a betrayal on a scale they could barely conceive.
"He is in Berlin for an international socialist conference," Koba continued, his tone all business. "Stolypin believes his prize agent is safe, reporting on the internal squabbles of our Party. He has no idea that we know what he is. Kidnapping Malinovsky, alive, would be a catastrophic, career-ending blow to the Prime Minister. The scandal would be immense. He would pay any price to get him back, to silence him before he can be unmasked. And the price we will demand is one female Georgian prisoner, delivered to a neutral border."
The men were silent, stunned by the terrifying elegance of the plan. This was not a gangster's smash-and-grab. This was not a revolutionary's desperate assault. This was the cold, inhuman calculus of a king, calmly sacrificing his own side's castles and bishops to save his queen. To save Kato, Koba was willing to kidnap and expose a man who, to the entire world, was a Bolshevik hero. He was preparing to shatter the Party's political wing, betraying its secrets to achieve a personal goal.
Pavel looked at the man he had followed out of the Caucasus, the man he had seen transform from a hard-bitten survivor into this… this grand strategist of impossible coldness. He saw now that the Gospel of the Wolf was not just a philosophy for survival; it was a blueprint for a new kind of power, a power that saw men and movements not as collections of people, but as assets on a balance sheet.
Jake's internal monologue was a silent scream of self-awareness. He could feel the last vestiges of his 21st-century morality crumbling, turning to dust. The old Jake would have called this pure evil. Trading one man's life for another's, deliberately wrecking the very cause you claim to fight for. It's monstrous. But the thought was distant, academic. Koba's mind had already finished the calculation. Koba simply called it leverage. The skill [Ruthlessness] has evolved into [Grand Strategy]. The price was no longer just my soul; it was everyone else's, too.
The train's whistle shrieked as it began to slow, the lights of Berlin's sprawling suburbs appearing in the darkness. The city was a tense, militaristic hub, the air electric with the pre-war jitters of an empire girding itself for conflict. It was the perfect stage for their desperate play.
Koba folded the map. "We have our plan. Now, we execute." He gave his first orders, each one precise and final. "Pavel, Ivan. You will begin surveillance on Malinovsky the moment we arrive. Learn his routines, his guards, his weaknesses. We will need a window of opportunity, and it will be small."
He then turned to Murat, who had been listening with a look of horrified fascination. His task was different. It was the most dangerous, and most shocking, part of the plan.
"Murat," Koba said. "You will not make contact with any of our Bolshevik comrades in Berlin. They cannot be trusted, and they cannot know what we are about to do."
"Then who do I contact?" Murat asked.
Koba reached into his coat and produced a small, sealed note. "You will deliver a message to an old acquaintance of ours. The man we met in Warsaw. The one from German Intelligence."
Murat's eyes went wide. "Herr Schmidt? You want to involve the Germans?"
"Stolypin has made this a personal battle," Koba said, his eyes like chips of ice. "So I will make it an international incident." He handed the note to Murat. "Deliver this. Be discreet. This moves our timeline forward. We no longer have thirty days. We have until the Germans decide what to do."
Murat broke the seal and read the simple, explosive message written inside. It was Koba's ultimate gambit, an escalation that would set empires on a collision course.
It read: "Prime Minister Stolypin is blackmailing a Bolshevik over a state secret involving Krupp armaments. This has become a German national security issue. I require a meeting. We have a common enemy."