The city had grown eyes. They watched from street corners and tenement windows. Factory hands, market vendors, students—everyone looked for the Georgian face.
On a grimy Vyborg corner two beat cops huddled around a steaming samovar. Fyodor, older, mustached, unfolded the evening Kopek. A grainy photo and a police sketch filled the page.
"Looks like a proper devil," Fyodor said, slurping his tea. "Koba. Tried to kill a Captain of the Guard, they say."
Dmitri, nineteen and hungry for anything that might change his luck, leaned in. "Colonel Sazonov put a bounty on him. Fifty rubles for a sighting. Not arrest. Just—see him, report him."
Fifty rubles. More than a month's pay. Dmitri's eyes drifted across the crowd—stooped clerks, a woman with potatoes, a swaggering student. Every face could be a ticket to cash. Every shadow might hold a fortune.
"You'd think he'd shave the mustache," Fyodor muttered, stroking his own. Patrols that had been lazy took on a new edge. The city tightened.
From Nevsky Prospekt to the fish markets, a million pairs of eyes were on the hunt. The state had wired the city into a nervous system. Each citizen was a receptor waiting for a familiar face.
Above the Chechen teahouse, none of that mattered. There was only the map.
A greasy sheet of butcher paper, hand-drawn lines. To Koba it read like a military chart. The panic Jake Vance had felt hours earlier was gone. He had locked it away. What stood now was a planner, cold and precise.
The paper with his photographed face lay on the table. Not a threat. Data. The manhunt was a condition to exploit, not a disaster.
Timur paced like a caged bear. The Chechen's patience had thinned to a wire. "We are trapped," he said, voice low and dangerous. "We can't move. Can't collect. Can't do business. A week—two? This is a cage."
Koba traced the Neva on the map without looking up. "A cage is a cage only if you accept its walls," he said. His voice had no heat. That made it worse. "I do not."
He turned his gaze across the room. Timur. Then Anya. Her stare never softened. She observed like a surgeon.
"You're thinking small," Koba told Timur. "You think of surviving this district. I think of turning the whole city into our escape route. I'll use their weapon against them."
He tapped the newspaper at his face. "This is a smokescreen," he said. "They hunt a political ghost. A Georgian killer who strikes officers. They'll check radicals, universities, socialist halls. They'll chase shadows."
He let the paper fall. "They are not looking for a criminal kingpin. They are not looking for a man stealing the biggest cache of arms this city has seen."
Anya raised one eyebrow. "A heist?" Her tone had steel and doubt. "Now? You can't walk ten paces without some kid running to the police for the fifty-ruble reward."
She wasn't only challenging him. She wanted to measure his mind against pressure. He welcomed the test.
"I will not be buying bread," Koba said. "I will direct the operation from here, through you. We will not cancel the arms shipment. That would be their game. We will accelerate it."
He jabbed a finger at the docks drawn in the corner: the Naval Warehouses.
"The exchange is in three days," he said. The words landed like a drumbeat. "That's our deadline and our chance. We are not intercepting a few crates. That was a plan for lesser men."
Timur's anger hit a blank wall. The idea was too big, too dangerous to fit his frame. He opened his mouth and shut it.
"Koba, your men break things," Koba said. "They make noise. Pavel's men are fast and invisible. I will use them both."
He saw the pieces move in his head: the city, the docks, the watchful crowd. He saw the rifles as leverage. "We will seize the shipment. All of it. Rykov's rifles and the rest. The guns are our payment. They are our way out."
Timur's mouth hung open. The plan's audacity shorted his sense of safety. Anya's eyes shone.
The pragmatist in her whispered suicide. The strategist hungered. Power intoxicated her. That cold, clean logic made the madness feel possible.
Koba leaned over the map and spoke in short commands. Routes, timing, who distracted and who moved. He broke the city into tasks and people into roles.
"We create noise here," he said, pointing to one quarter. "While the quiet men slip the docks. We use the bounty to funnel attention one way. We make the police look for a ghost. Everyone will point north. We move south."
Anya nodded. "We'll need false sightings. Cheap theater." She sounded pleased. A cornered thing can be cunning, and she liked cunning.
Timur slammed a fist on a chair. "And if they find us? If one of our boys slips? Fifty rubles will buy seventeen betrayals before dawn."
"Then we make sure they don't," Koba replied. "We plan for their betrayals. We cut their choices. We give them options that lead where we want."
He folded the map, slow and deliberate. "Three days." He repeated it like a vow.
Outside, the city's eyes blinked and shifted. A hundred rumors thinned into a single line on a newspaper. A boy running, a clerk signalling, a vendor whispering a face. The net closed and opened on the same breath.
Inside the teahouse the air was colder. Plans felt sharper than the winter. They had a deadline, a method, and a madness that touched the edge of genius.
Koba looked at each of them, slow and steady. "Prepare," he said. "We do not run from our faces. We use them."
Timur stared and then, finally, bowed his head. The idea was dangerous enough to be irresistible.
Anya's smile was small and slow. She liked what she saw. The room smelled of boiled tea and iron. Outside, a million eyes watched, and none of them suspected what they were about to miss.