The Warsaw freight yard held its breath.
Coal smoke drifted under a pale Polish moon. Everything was still, suspended between fear and violence.
Yagoda stood frozen. The Party's confident courier suddenly looked small, his slick mask stripped away. He had led his prize straight into a lion's den—and realized it too late.
Behind Koba, Pavel loomed like a statue of granite, silent but ready. Murat and Ivan shifted, hands slipping into their coats. One wrong word, and this corner of the yard would become a killing ground.
Herr Schmidt's demand still hung in the cold air.
Surrender the ledger.
Koba's mind split in two.
Jake: Give it up. It's just a book. That man represents an empire. He could have soldiers in the shadows. We hand it over, we live. That's what matters.
Koba: Wrong. The ledger is not paper—it's power. Without it, we're beggars in Zurich. The Germans want to declaw us. So we won't play their game. We'll make our own.
Koba met the German's gaze, calm, almost curious. When he spoke, his tone was quiet, conversational, like a scholar at a lecture.
"The shipment on August fourteenth last year," he said. "You know the one?"
A flicker crossed Herr Schmidt's face. The question had thrown him off. "I'm not at liberty to discuss—"
"Six crates," Koba cut in. "From Krupp Works in Essen. Labeled precision tools. Signed by a Herr Müller. Sent through Libau, not Kronstadt. Payment order seventy-seven B. Three hundred thousand gold marks."
The German froze.
Koba went on, relentless. "The money didn't touch Krupp's accounts. It went through Copenhagen, into a numbered account at the Swiss Bank Corporation in Basel. Account two-two-seven. Hidden from both Krupp and the Admiralty."
For the first time, Herr Schmidt looked uncertain.
"And those crates," Koba said softly, "held six Zeiss rangefinders. The most advanced fire-control systems on earth. For the Gangut-class battleships."
Silence. Only the faint hiss of steam.
Koba had made his point: the ledger wasn't just ink in a book. It lived in his head now.
"You want the book so this never sees daylight," Koba said. "Understandable. But if you think killing me ends it, you're mistaken."
He spun his lie with perfect calm. "Copies of the worst pages—and an explanation—are with a comrade in a neutral country. A watchmaker. He waits for my telegram on the first of every month. If he doesn't get it, he sends the packet to Le Temps in Paris."
The words hung like frost. "So if I die, you lose control. And the world learns exactly what Krupp sold your Admiralty."
Schmidt said nothing. The tension shifted. For the first time, he wasn't the predator.
Koba pressed on. "But I'm reasonable. I have no quarrel with Germany. My war is with the Tsar. So let's give each other something."
He opened his satchel. His men stiffened, then relaxed as he drew not the whole book but two pages. He sliced them out cleanly with a knife and held them out.
"These detail Russian bribes at Libau," he said. "No mention of Krupp. No mention of Germany. They'll make Stolypin's men squirm, but they won't touch you. Bring them to Berlin. Tell your superiors you contained the leak. You'll have proof. And a victory."
Herr Schmidt stared. He understood. This was a token win masking total defeat.
After a long moment, he reached out and took the pages.
The air loosened. Fingers slipped away from gun grips. Yagoda exhaled.
Koba had won.
The train to Berlin was a world apart.
Fast. Clean. Precise. A machine built for purpose, cutting west through the last traces of Russian chaos. The rattling freight wagons and freezing yards were gone. The air smelled of polish and order. Even the rhythm of the wheels felt confident.
Inside their cramped compartment, everything had changed.
The uneasy truce of Warsaw was over. In its place was something sharper. Koba had faced down an agent of the German Empire and prevailed—not with bullets, but with words.
Yagoda sat stiff in his corner, swagger gone. He kept stealing glances at Koba, unable to hide his awe. He'd been sent to shepherd a dangerous man west.
Somewhere along the line, he had started serving a king.
Pavel said little. He didn't understand the dance of threats and bluff that had played out in the freight yard, but he understood power. He'd seen it when Koba stood eye to eye with a man who could have destroyed them and made him flinch instead. His faith, cracked since Kiev, was knitting back together—this time around something colder, harder.
Murat and Ivan were simply stunned. They had followed a clever leader, then a ruthless survivor. Now they were following something else entirely—a man who could move nations the way they once moved knives.
They were no longer fugitives.
They were an embassy of four, riding toward a summit.
As the train thundered across the flat Prussian plains, Yagoda reached into his coat and pulled out a folded slip of paper.
"This came for you in Warsaw," he said quietly. "Delivered just before we left. From the south."
Koba took it.
His pulse stopped.
The south meant Kiev.
It meant Kato.
The telegram was small, covered in meaningless numbers. But he didn't need the cipher. He remembered every pattern.
KIEV ASSET COMPROMISED STOP
CLIENT'S PRIMARY COMPETITOR HAS ASSUMED CUSTODY STOP
LOCAL NETWORK CONFIRMS IDENTIFICATION STOP
NO FURTHER INFORMATION STOP
Kato had been captured.
The words stopped being language. They were a blow.
For one terrible second, the mask cracked. Jake Vance's voice—the human voice buried deep inside—screamed in despair.
Failed.
Failed.
Failed.
Everything he'd told Pavel, every brilliant justification about delay and leverage, collapsed. While he was outsmarting German spies, Stolypin had simply taken her.
The world narrowed to the scrap of paper in his hand. The train's roar faded. His fist closed until the telegram tore.
Pavel saw it—the quick flash of agony behind Koba's eyes—before the mask slammed back into place, heavier than steel.
Koba didn't curse. Didn't lash out. The machine inside him re-engaged, swallowing the man whole. When he spoke, his voice was level.
"Paper," he said. "And a pen."
Yagoda obeyed instantly, handing over a fountain pen and a small stack of sheets. Koba lowered the table, the landscape sliding by outside in neat fields of green and gold. His shadow leaned over the page like a black flame.
He began to write. Fast. Focused.
He wasn't just copying the ledger anymore.
He was forging weapons.
The first was the one he'd promised Herr Schmidt. In polished French, he built a precise, devastating exposé: names, payments, accounts, dates, routes. Everything. He left a blank space where he would reattach the two pages he'd given the German—proof to tie the story together. It was the perfect dead man's switch, a ghost waiting in some editor's drawer if he ever disappeared.
Then he started a second document.
This one had a single reader: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.
It wasn't blackmail.
It was prophecy.
Koba's pen raced. Jake's twenty-first-century memory poured through him, honed now into strategy.
He outlined the coming war. Germany's plan: a great sweep through Belgium to crush France in six weeks. The Schlieffen Plan. He predicted its failure—the inevitable collapse into trench warfare, the years of blood and mud that would grind empires into dust.
Then he turned on Russia.
Using the very evidence from the ledger, he described the empire's rot: corruption, incompetence, rotting logistics. He wrote that the Tsar's army would march into a modern war with 19th-century supply lines. That millions would die for nothing.
He concluded that the coming war would destroy every great power and leave a single prize for whoever understood it first:
Revolution.
The pen stopped.
Koba leaned back, eyes on the papers. The raw pain inside him had cooled into something diamond-hard.
He had lost her.
But he had forged something from the wreckage.
He was no longer merely carrying a ledger to Lenin.
He was carrying the future.