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 small 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 won — not with bullets or fear, but with words.
Yagoda sat stiff in his corner, the swagger gone. He glanced at Koba again and again, unable to disguise his awe. He had come to shepherd a dangerous man west; instead, he was serving a king.
Pavel said little. He didn't understand the game of threats and bluffs that had played out in the freight yard, but he understood power. He had 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 healing — built now on something colder and harder.
Murat and Ivan were simply stunned. They had followed a clever leader, then a ruthless survivor. Now they were following someone 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 Prussia's flat 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 froze.
The south meant Kiev.
It meant Kato.
The telegram was small, covered in meaningless numbers. But he didn't need the key — 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 didn't register as language. They were pain. They were a blow to the gut.
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, collapsed. While he'd been outsmarting German spies, Stolypin had simply taken her.
The world narrowed to the scrap of paper in his hand. The train noise faded. The air thinned. His fist closed around the telegram until it tore.
Pavel saw it — the brief flash of agony behind Koba's eyes — before the mask dropped again, heavier than steel.
Koba didn't speak. Didn't curse. Didn't breathe wrong. The machine inside him re-engaged, swallowing the man whole. He forced calm into his voice.
"Paper," he said. "And a pen."
Yagoda obeyed immediately, handing over a fountain pen and a small stack of blank sheets.
Koba sat at the fold-down table, the landscape rolling past in orderly 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 creating weapons.
The first was the one he'd promised Herr Schmidt. Written in polished French, it was a precise, devastating exposé — names, payments, accounts, dates. Everything. He left a blank space where he'd reattach the two pages he'd given the German, proof that tied the story together. It was the perfect insurance policy — a ghost waiting to strike if he ever disappeared.
Then he started a second document. This one was for a single reader: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.
It wasn't blackmail. It was prophecy.
Koba's pen moved faster. Jake's twenty-first-century memory poured through him, now sharpened 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 his gaze inward — toward Russia.
Using the very evidence from the ledger, he described the decay at the empire's core: the corruption, the incompetence, the rotting logistics. He wrote that the Tsar's army would march into a modern war armed with 19th-century supply lines. That millions would die for nothing.
He concluded that the coming war would destroy every great power and leave only one prize for whoever understood it first: revolution.
The pen stopped.
Koba leaned back, eyes fixed on the paper. The fury inside him had cooled into something diamond-hard.
He had lost her.
But he had forged something greater from the wreckage.
He wasn't carrying a simple ledger to Lenin anymore.
He was carrying the future.