The captured Russian field command post smelled of stale tobacco, fear, and ozone from the smashed telegraph equipment. It was their designated rendezvous point, a small island of grim order in the vast, chaotic sea of the German advance. By the time Koba's small party arrived, leading their dazed but unharmed prize, Pavel had already established a perimeter and consolidated their gains.
Pavel's reunion with Koba was a quiet, tense affair. He stood as Koba entered the makeshift command center, his face showing none of the relief a soldier should feel upon seeing his commander return safely from a firefight. His eyes were searching, questioning, trying to reconcile the man who had ordered him to save the wounded with the man who had just returned with four fewer German allies than he'd left with.
"The assets are secure," Pavel reported, his voice flat. He gestured towards a side room where the captured Russian doctor and two bandaged officers were being held under guard. "The surgeon is… grateful. He believes you are some kind of medical visionary. The officers have been cooperative."
"Excellent," Koba said, his tone brisk and businesslike. He clapped a hand on Pavel's shoulder, a gesture that was meant to be comradely but felt possessive. "You see, Pavel? Mercy has its uses. It is a currency, like any other. And today, it has purchased us a great deal."
He walked past Pavel to where the Russian doctor was tending to a captured staff captain. The captain, a man whose leg Koba himself had saved with a tourniquet, was pale and sweating, but his eyes were lucid. The doctor looked up at Koba with an expression of pure reverence.
"Your methods, comrade commander," the doctor said, his voice trembling with emotion. "The system of triage… the use of the tourniquet… it is revolutionary. We could have saved thousands. You saved dozens of men today who would have died. God will bless you."
Koba offered a thin, dismissive smile. He had no interest in God's blessing. He was interested in the captain. "Did he tell you what I asked?" Koba directed the question to one of his men who had been interrogating the officer.
"Yes, commander," the man replied, handing Koba a few pages of hastily scribbled notes. "In exchange for a double dose of morphine, he was very talkative."
Koba took the notes and scanned them, his eyes lighting with a cold, predatory fire. He had found it. The next lever. The next weak point in the great machine of the Tsarist army.
He turned and strode into the main office, a room where Kato had been meticulously organizing the stacks of captured Russian documents, creating a library of enemy intelligence from the chaos. She sat at a large oak desk, a single lantern casting a pool of golden light on her work, her face a mask of concentration. She didn't look up as he entered.
He was energized, almost vibrating with the thrill of his victories. The adrenaline from the firefight, the acquisition of Ipatieff, and the confirmation of this new intelligence had ignited a fire in him. He was no longer just surviving. He was building.
"The offensive was a complete success," he announced, the words dropping into the quiet room. "Ipatieff is secured. He is already talking to our new friend, the good doctor, about setting up a laboratory. And our pragmatism at the church has paid its first dividend."
He slapped the interrogation notes down on the desk in front of her. The sharp sound made her flinch, and she finally looked up, her eyes cold and guarded.
"The staff captain we saved," Koba said, leaning over the desk, his voice a low, excited thrum. "He has given us a gift. He has confirmed a rumor we've been hearing for months. The entire supply chain for the Russian Northern Front, everything from bullets to bread, is being choked by a single bottleneck. One man."
He tapped the top page of the notes. "Colonel Dmitri Orlov. Chief Procurement Officer for the Warsaw District. Meticulous. Incorruptible by money. A logistical genius. And the primary reason our offensive in the north has stalled."
Kato read the name, her expression unchanging. "And you expect to have him assassinated?"
Koba laughed, a short, sharp, humorless sound. "Assassination is clumsy. It is the tool of an anarchist. You kill Orlov, and they simply replace him with another meticulous officer. No. We are not going to remove the bottleneck. We are going to control it."
He leaned closer, his voice dropping. "The captain's report confirms Orlov's one, glorious weakness. A weakness known to everyone in the officer corps, but one they are too civilized to exploit. He has an insatiable appetite for two things: vintage French burgundy and expensive, foreign women. He makes frequent 'procurement and diplomacy' trips to neutral Stockholm to indulge both."
He straightened up, his eyes locking onto hers. The excitement was gone, replaced by a cold, deliberate intensity. "Your work in the archives has been invaluable, Kato. You have proven you have a mind for systems, for details. Now, I have a new task for you. One that requires a more… delicate touch."
He could see the wall of her defiance rise in her eyes, the subtle tightening of her jaw. He was not deterred. He saw it as just another obstacle to be overcome.
"I need you to go through the Party's intelligence archives. Every file we have on our sympathizers, our agents, our exiles in Scandinavia. I need you to find me every woman on that list who is currently in or can get to Stockholm. I need their complete files. Their histories, their photographs, their family situations, their psychological profiles. I need to know their weaknesses, what they love, what they fear."
He paused, letting the monstrous scale of the request sink in. "I need you to find me the candidates. The ones who are beautiful enough to catch the eye of a connoisseur like Orlov. Clever enough to play the part. And most importantly, desperate enough—for money, for a cause, for a lost relative's freedom—to do exactly as they are told."
The demand hung in the air between them, ugly and explicit. He was not asking her to be an archivist anymore. He was ordering her to become a procuress, a spymaster in the vilest sense. He was deliberately, methodically trying to pull her down into his own moral abyss, to make her not just a witness to his sins, but an active, willing accomplice. He knew her passive, silent resistance was her last fortress. He was laying siege to it.
He took the file containing Colonel Orlov's profile—complete with a grainy photograph of a handsome, silver-haired man—and placed it squarely on top of the interrogation notes.
"Find me a weapon, Kato," he said, his voice soft, but with the unyielding hardness of forged steel. "Forget rifles and bombs. Those are for soldiers. We are building a kingdom. And kingdoms are built with more subtle tools. Find me a woman who can get close enough to a man like that to break not his body, but his loyalty."
He turned and walked to the door, leaving her alone in the quiet, lantern-lit room. He did not need to see her face to know the war he had just declared in her soul.
Kato sat frozen, staring at the file. The photograph of Colonel Orlov seemed to mock her, his confident, aristocratic gaze a symbol of the world Koba now moved in. This was the true nature of his power. Not just violence and prophecy, but a cold, transactional view of human beings, seeing them as assets, tools, or weapons to be aimed and fired. And now, he was asking her to load the gun.
Slowly, as if in a trance, she reached out a trembling hand. She did not push the file away. She pulled it closer. With a deep, shuddering breath, she opened it. Her expression, caught in the flickering lamplight, was a complex, unreadable mask of revulsion, calculation, and the first, terrifying spark of a new, more dangerous form of survival.