The ghost train cut through the wilderness like a splinter of steel and stolen purpose.
It was a thin vein of light and motion threading through the sleeping north, its wheels whispering across the frozen rails. No one spoke. The men sat wrapped in the heavy silence that follows revelation—each haunted by the same word still echoing in their minds.
Moscow.
The destination had changed, and so had the scale. The fear that had gripped them earlier had not vanished—it had simply evolved, turned into a feverish, electric awe. They were no longer thieves fleeing justice. They were conspirators riding toward history.
Koba was not resting. He sat cross-legged on the wooden flatcar, the foreman's ledger open on his lap, a lantern swaying at his side. The wind clawed at the pages, but he ignored it. His focus was surgical. He wasn't reading the headlines of empire anymore; he was diving into the small print—the ledgers, payment orders, and procurement trails that formed the skeleton of the Tsar's new fleet.
Pavel watched him from across the car, his massive shape hunched against the cold. "What are you looking for now, planner?" he asked finally, his voice a deep rumble against the steady rhythm of the wheels. "More trouble?"
Koba didn't look up. "Patterns," he said simply. "Every machine has one. And every pattern hides a flaw."
He scanned column after column of neat, bureaucratic handwriting. The book was a portrait of industrial hunger—a web of numbers feeding the Kronstadt shipyards. Then his finger stopped.
"Here."
He tapped the page, eyes narrowing. "These payments. Admiralty authorizations. All routed through the State Bank in St. Petersburg—standard. Most suppliers are Russian, as expected. Arkhangelsk Timber Concern. Vologda Forestry Union. Onega Logging Collective." His finger froze. "But this one…"
Pavel leaned closer. The name was foreign, heavy, metallic. Krupp AG, Essen, Deutschland.
Pavel frowned. "What is that?"
For Koba, it was as if lightning had struck the page.
Jake:Krupp? The Kaiser's factory? The same Krupp that builds the cannons that'll flatten Verdun? What are they doing in a Russian naval contract?
Koba's voice was tight with the thrill of realization. "Krupp isn't timber. They're steel. Guns. Artillery. The heart of German militarism. They build the engines of war for the Kaiser."
He looked up, eyes gleaming in the lantern light. "And yet they are here—in our books."
Jake:But why? Russia doesn't buy its guns abroad. Putilov builds them. Obukhov builds them. Unless…
The thought clicked into place.
"They're not selling weapons," Koba said aloud, piecing it together in real time. "They're selling what Russia cannot make. Precision machinery. Nickel-steel gears for the gun turrets. Rangefinders, maybe even the optical instruments—the glass eyes of the fleet."
He closed the ledger for a moment, staring into the dark, the wind hissing past. When he spoke again, his voice carried an awe that was half horror, half revelation.
"Do you understand? The Tsar's ministers stand before the Duma denouncing German militarism—while secretly buying the brains of the German navy. They preach nationalism and independence, and they build their ships with the Kaiser's hands."
He opened the book again, his gloved finger tracing the columns. "This isn't a theft anymore. This is a state secret. Proof that the Russian government—the same government hunting us—is betraying its own propaganda. If this were published, if the Duma or the nationalist press got hold of it…"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.
The men stared at the ledger as if it were an explosive.
Koba closed it with a soft thud. The sound carried like the tolling of a distant bell. He looked down at the cover—at the dull, scuffed leather—and saw not paper, but power.
Jake:This is it. This is how it ends. Leak it to the French. Or the British. Stolypin collapses. The manhunt ends. We walk free.
Koba:No. A collapse breeds chaos. A vacuum. Someone worse could rise. The value of a weapon lies not in firing it, but in knowing when not to.
He lifted the ledger, weighing it like a relic. "The man who can destroy the government," he murmured, "is stronger than the man who does."
The train began to slow. The grade beneath them was leveling. Their stolen momentum was fading. Ahead, through the predawn mist, faint lights flickered—a railway depot, small and solitary.
Koba rose. "We'll need steam," he said, glancing at the gauge. "We'll stoke the boiler, build pressure, and—"
"Wait," Ivan interrupted. His eyes, sharper than any of theirs, were fixed ahead. "There."
Koba followed his gaze. A solitary figure stood beside the tracks, haloed in the weak glow of a lantern. A stationman, perhaps—or something else. The man didn't move. He was simply there, as though waiting for a train that shouldn't exist.
Koba lifted the binoculars. The glass caught the faint lamplight. The figure raised his lantern in a gesture that was both greeting and acknowledgment. The glow lit his face.
Sharp features. Intelligent eyes. A thin, knowing smile.
Recognition hit like ice water.
It was a face from another life—a ghost from the oil fields of Baku, from the smoke and blood of the counterfeit ring.
Yagoda.
The "second serpent." The ambitious apprentice who had once bowed to him in fear and whispered of empires.
And now, in the middle of nowhere, he was standing by the rails as if he had been waiting all along, smiling as the stolen train approached—welcoming his old master home.