WebNovels

Chapter 201 - A Whisper in Zurich

The Zurich apartment felt more like a cage than ever before. The air was stale, thick with the smoke of Lenin's cheap cigars and the heavier pall of intellectual frustration. The news of the Gorlice-Tarnów breakthrough had arrived a week prior, and it had landed not as a single event, but as a series of ideological blows that had left them reeling.

The Russian army, the great, lumbering beast they had hoped would turn on its masters, had not staged a grand mutiny. It had not transformed the imperialist war into a civil war. It had simply… broken. It had shattered like cheap pottery, its soldiers surrendering in droves, more interested in a German prison camp's promise of bread than in any revolutionary slogan.

Lenin paced the cramped room, his small, powerful body a coiled spring of impotent rage. "It is a catastrophe of theory!" he seethed, slamming a fist on the table littered with newspapers. "The objective conditions were perfect! A disastrous war, a corrupt officer class, a proletariat in uniform! And what happens? They collapse! They surrender! They show no class consciousness at all!"

Trotsky, for his part, was in a quieter, more brooding crisis. His pen, usually so swift and certain, felt heavy and useless. How could he write the heroic narrative of the revolutionary soldier when that soldier had just thrown down his rifle and run?

"It is not their consciousness that failed, Vladimir Ilyich," Trotsky argued, his voice weary. "It is their will. They were not defeated. They were… dissolved. Something broke their spirit before the German infantry even reached them."

Their debate was interrupted by the arrival of Comrade Stern. He entered without knocking, his face grim, carrying a small bundle of reports from their contacts in the socialist underground. He had become the specter at their intellectual feast, the man who brought them the ugly, inconvenient truths from the real world.

He waited for a pause in the argument before he spoke. "Comrades. There is more news from the front. Or rather, from behind it."

Lenin and Trotsky fell silent, turning to their intelligence chief.

"The propaganda," Stern began, his voice low and serious. "The leaflets that preceded the collapse. They are becoming something of a legend in the underground. Our contacts in the prisoner camps say the men talk about them constantly. The simple messages, the instructions on how to fake illness, how to surrender safely… they see it as a kind of magic."

He took a deep breath. "They have given a name to the agent they believe is responsible. The one who seemed to know their every weakness. They are calling him 'the Warlock.' They say he is a German demon who knows the Russian soul and can whisper poison into it from a hundred miles away."

Lenin and Trotsky exchanged a dark, knowing look. They knew the Warlock's real name. The knowledge was a bitter acid in their mouths. The very methods of practical, on-the-ground agitation they had taught Koba were now being used against their own revolutionary hopes with supernatural effectiveness. He was not just a traitor; he was an artist of betrayal.

Before they could digest this grim news, there was a hesitant knock at the door. Yagoda opened it to reveal a small, nervous-looking man in a rumpled suit, his eyes darting around the room as if he expected the Okhrana to burst in at any moment. He was a Menshevik contact, a trade union organizer who had just arrived by train from Sweden.

"Comrades," the man stammered, wringing a worn flat cap in his hands. "Forgive the intrusion. I… I have come from Stockholm. I thought you should know… something is happening there."

Lenin's eyes narrowed. "Be specific, comrade."

"There is a new player," the man said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "He arrived a few weeks ago. He is spending money like water—German gold, they are saying. He is setting up a new network, completely outside the official Party structures. He is recruiting exiles, buying the loyalty of smugglers, paying for information on shipping manifests… He is building an organization."

The Menshevik looked from Lenin to Trotsky, his face pale with worry. "The word is, he is preparing to disrupt the flow of British and French war materials to Russia through the Baltic. He is not just an agitator. He is an instrument of the German war machine. And he is recruiting our people, comrades. Bolsheviks. Men loyal to you."

The pieces clicked into place with the cold, final sound of a prison door slamming shut. It was him. Koba was not just a German asset to be deployed on a mission. He was building his own fiefdom, his own kingdom of spies and saboteurs, right on their doorstep.

Their reactions were as different as their personalities.

Trotsky, the man of words and grand gestures, was the first to speak, his voice booming with righteous fury. "This is intolerable! We must expose him! I will write a pamphlet immediately—'The German Agent in Stockholm and His Thirty Pieces of Silver'! We will circulate it to every socialist newspaper in Europe, from L'Humanité to Vorwärts! We will destroy his name! We will poison the well so that no honest revolutionary will dare go near him! We will fight his gold with our ink!"

"No!" Lenin's voice was a whip-crack that cut through Trotsky's rhetorical storm. He slammed his hand flat on the table, the sound making the teacups jump. Everyone froze.

Lenin rose slowly from his chair, his eyes gleaming with a cold, analytical fire. He pointed a finger at Trotsky. "That is the reaction of a writer, Lev Davidovich, not a revolutionary. A pamphlet? A pamphlet is useless! We have no concrete proof to offer, only the word of a nervous Menshevik. We would be fighting shadows with ink. If, by some chance, we are wrong, we will look like paranoid fools, tearing the movement apart with unsubstantiated accusations. And if we are right," his voice dropped to a low, dangerous growl, "we simply warn him that we are watching. We alert the viper that the mongoose is near. He will change his name, his methods, his location, and disappear deeper into the shadows than he already is. Your grand exposé will accomplish nothing but to make our real work impossible."

He turned away from Trotsky, his gaze falling on the one man in the room who understood that this was not a problem to be debated, but one to be solved. He looked at Stern.

"The Special Commission for Party Security," Lenin said, his voice hard as flint, "was formed to protect us from internal threats. It seems the threat is no longer internal. As of this moment, it is a foreign intelligence service. And its first mission is Stockholm."

Stern stood a little straighter. A flicker of something dark and personal, a memory of a bullet shrieking past his head on a frozen bridge, crossed his face. This was not just an order. It was a chance for vengeance.

"My orders, Comrade Lenin?" Stern asked, his voice steady.

Lenin walked over to him, his small frame radiating an intensity that was more menacing than any physical bulk. He put a hand on Stern's shoulder.

"I do not want rumors. I do not want legends about a 'Warlock.' I want facts," he commanded. "You will go to Stockholm. You will take Yagoda and anyone else you need. Use any means necessary. Bribe, threaten, infiltrate. I want to know everything about this new network. I want its leader's name. I want to know who is funding him, who he has recruited, what his objectives are. I want his entire operation mapped out on my desk."

He paused, his grip tightening on Stern's shoulder, his eyes boring into him.

"And if… when… you confirm that the man behind it all is our former comrade Koba…" Lenin's voice dropped to a near-whisper, cold and final as a graveside prayer. "…I want him neutralized. The cancer must be cut out before it infects the entire body of the revolution. Do you understand me, Comrade Stern? Neutralized. Permanently."

The order was absolute, a death sentence issued in the quiet of a Swiss apartment.

Stern's face was a mask of grim, resolute determination. "It will be done, Comrade," he replied. The hunt was on. The Party had just officially dispatched its own dagger to find, and to kill, the one that had gone rogue.

More Chapters