The Zurich apartment had changed.
Once it had been a meeting place for theory and revolution. Now it felt like a bunker—tight, airless, obsessed with one goal: finding Koba.
The hunt for their rogue Dagger had consumed everything. Messages from Berlin arrived in fragments, each one riskier than the last. Comrade Stern's reports told a story of a man who had crossed into another world—Koba working with German Intelligence, protected by the deadly precision of Abteilung IIIb.
Lenin was unraveling.
He couldn't stand inaction. The loss of control gnawed at him like a disease. He paced the tiny room, boots grinding the threadbare rug, his hands locked behind his back.
"He has made a pact with the Kaiser's own butchers!" he shouted, voice low but seething. "With the very imperialists we swore to destroy! This is treason—not just against the Party, but against the entire international proletariat! He's become an agent of empire itself!"
Trotsky sat nearby, watching him with an uneasy mix of sympathy and fascination. To him, Lenin's rage was more than fury—it was pain, the agony of a strategist who had lost his most capable piece.
"Vladimir Ilyich," Trotsky said carefully, "his betrayal isn't the disease. It's only a symptom. The real sickness is the world that made such desperation possible."
He swept a hand over the table, where a pile of newspapers from all over Europe lay scattered. Headlines screamed in a dozen languages about the same thing—tension. "Look at this. Austria is threatening Serbia again. Russia is shouting about pan-Slavic brotherhood. The Serbs—especially the Black Hand—are talking openly of assassination. This is where the real storm is gathering."
For the first time, Lenin paused. Trotsky pressed on.
"If we want to understand Koba's betrayal," he said, "we have to understand the world he's walking through."
So they began their first true war game.
They cleared the table, spread out the map—not of Berlin this time, but of the Balkans. The powder keg of Europe.
Lenin leaned over the map, tapping the thin red lines that marked trade and transport. "It's always the same," he muttered. "Railways. Oil. Markets. German capital wants its path to the Ottoman Empire—the Berlin-to-Baghdad line. Russian capital wants the Dardanelles, warm-water access to the world. And the Serbs, the Bosnians, the Bulgarians… their nationalism is just the excuse. The Great Powers will use their dreams as fuel for war."
Trotsky nodded. "Economics may drive the machine," he said, "but nationalism lights the fuse. These empires—Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans, the Romanovs—they're dying. Rotted from within. The dream of a Greater Serbia, of a South Slav state, that's the axe that will finish them. All it will take is one spark. One gunshot at some pompous Archduke, and the world will burn."
Their argument turned into something more than analysis—it became prophecy.
On the table lay Koba's old thesis, the one he'd written in Zurich. Pages filled with notes, underlines, marginal scrawls. What they had once dismissed as theory now felt like scripture.
Lenin lifted a page, his finger tracing a line. "'The brittleness of the alliance system,'" he read aloud. "'A minor crisis in the Balkans will trigger a cascade of obligations that no general staff can stop.'"
He looked up slowly.
"Trotsky," he whispered, "what if his deal with the Germans wasn't just about Malinovsky? What if he gave them more than a man?"
Trotsky frowned. "More? What else could he offer?"
"His mind," Lenin said. "This analysis. His predictions. We saw it first—his understanding of how this world will shatter. What if he's given it to them? What if he's advising them?"
The words froze the air.
Koba wasn't just a traitor anymore. He might be shaping the next war.
The silence broke when Yagoda burst in. His face was pale, his hand shaking as he held up a decoded telegram.
"It's from Stern," he said. His voice trembled. "Listen."
He read: "HE IS ON THE MOVE. EASTBOUND TRAIN FROM BERLIN. DESTINATION: TILSIT, PRUSSIAN–RUSSIAN BORDER. HE IS NOT ALONE. ESCORTED BY AGENTS OF ABTEILUNG IIIb. HE IS NO LONGER THEIR ASSET. HE IS THEIR GUEST."
The room went dead quiet.
Their guest.
Koba hadn't just made a deal. He'd been welcomed.
The rogue Dagger—their most dangerous creation—was no longer just working with the enemy. He was becoming part of it.
And now, as his train headed east, toward the volatile border of empires, Lenin and Trotsky realized the truth.
They weren't chasing a deserter anymore.
They were watching the birth of a strategist who might set the entire world on fire.