The silence in the Admiral's office was absolute.
Only the soft drag of the dead man's boots broke it as Pavel lowered the body to the rug. The air was thick with the metallic tang of blood and the ghost of a last breath. Outside, the world burned—but here, time had stopped.
Jake Vance wanted to vomit.
Another life, another death. Not a tactical abstraction—this one was close. Personal. The horror of it pressed against his ribs, raw and suffocating.
But Koba would not allow it.
He forced the feeling down, locking it away like a dangerous tool. Guilt could come later—if there was a later.
"The scene," Koba rasped. "Make it look like a robbery."
Pavel didn't need explanation. He overturned the Admiral's desk, scattering papers. Silver trinkets clattered into a sack. Filing drawers hit the floor with hollow bangs. It was messy, crude—exactly what it needed to be. Amid the chaos outside, no one would look twice at a looted office.
Koba checked the stolen papers, eyes scanning, memorizing. Then they slipped out, leaving the shattered door ajar and the Admiral cooling behind it.
They were no longer rescuers. They were fugitives.
The fire-cart's escape was a ride through a city gone mad.
Anya's new inferno—the grain silo—rose to the south, a black tower of smoke blotting the sky. The flames at the fuel depot were still raging, and the army was still locked in a meaningless victory at Warehouse Three.
The plan had worked too well. The city's defenses were collapsing under the weight of chaos. Soldiers shouted, police ran in circles, orders contradicted orders. In that confusion, Koba and Pavel—two firemen on their scarlet engine—cut through the pandemonium like ghosts, escorted by the very system they'd destroyed.
They vanished into the smoke.
Prime Minister Stolypin stood at the center of the storm.
He had gone to Pier Four himself, where his men confirmed his worst suspicion: there was no munitions fire. There never had been.
The realization hit like a blade of ice.
Then came the reports, one after another.
Warehouse Three—secured. The riot ended.
The grain silo—burning. A new crisis.
And finally, the killing blow: Admiral Litvin. Dead in his office. Neck broken. Safe forced open.
Stolypin pieced it together with brutal clarity.
The riot. The fires. The phantom explosion. The murder.
It was all one operation. One mind.
The Ghost had not avoided his trap—he had detonated it.
Every move, every order, every death had been part of the plan.
For a long moment, Stolypin stood motionless, the world reduced to the cold pulse of thought. When he finally spoke, his voice was low, steady, and deadly calm.
"I want him found," he said. "Every contact, every accomplice, every whisper. I don't care how long it takes."
The rendezvous point was a stable on the city's outskirts—a small, dark pocket of calm in the roaring chaos. The air reeked of hay and horse sweat.
Koba and Pavel arrived to find what was left of their force. A dozen men at most. The rest were gone—burned, shot, scattered. Timur stood among the survivors, his eyes hollow with loss. Anya was there too, pale but burning with cold fire.
It wasn't victory. It was survival.
Koba unrolled the shipping manifest on the dirt floor.
"This is our escape," he said. His voice cut through the silence like a knife.
He pointed to the entry. "0800 tomorrow. Cargo train, Finland Station. Destination: Vyborg. Manifest lists four crates—'agricultural equipment,' Navy reference 77B." He looked up, eyes sharp. "That's the rifles. They're moving them out. Guard detail: one sergeant, two privates. Nothing more."
He let the information sink in, then continued. "We're not attacking that train. We're taking it. Tonight, we remove the guards quietly. Tomorrow, we ride out wearing their uniforms. Their train becomes ours."
It was madness—and brilliance. The next phase had begun before the fires had even died.
In the Admiral's ruined office, an Okhrana investigator was crawling across the floor, methodically inspecting the scene. He was a careful man, and the dead left traces that the careless missed.
He found it beneath the desk: a small silver button, half-buried in the rug. Filigreed. Intricate. Not naval issue. He turned it in the light, recognizing the pattern instantly—Chechen silverwork.
He slipped it into a pouch and brought it straight to the Prime Minister.
"Sir," he said, voice shaking. "We found this by the body."
Stolypin took the pouch. The button gleamed against his palm. The design was unique—enough to identify an entire people, an entire network.
So the Ghost wasn't working alone.
He had allies. A tribe. A map to follow.
Stolypin closed his fist, the edges of the silver biting into his skin.
The heist was over.
The war had begun.