The center of the Queen Louise Bridge was a thin strip of no-man's-land between two worlds. Wind ran down the Memel like a blade, tasting of river ice and coal smoke. It tore at wool coats and made every movement feel harder. Below, the river lay locked in gray ice, scarred by the wind. Two small groups of men stood fifty paces apart — dark figures in white — each waiting, each still.
Koba stood beside the hooded, trembling Roman Malinovsky. He felt the man's fear as if it were a thing pressed against his ribs. Across from them, a hard-faced Okhrana colonel stood with Kato.
She looked impossibly real and impossibly broken. Thinner, paler, her face hollowed by whatever she'd been through. Yet when their eyes met across the bridge something shut out the rest: Germans to the left, Okhrana to the right, the Party and the treason — all of it faded. For a moment there were only the two of them.
The colonel shoved Malinovsky forward. Koba nudged Kato the other way. They walked toward each other with prisoners between them, steps measured like a ritual. The only sound was boots on gritty, snow-dusted planks.
Up close Kato held herself like a queen in a cheap dress. But her hands trembled. Dark rings shadowed her eyes. She was not the triumphant survivor he'd imagined. She had been dragged through hell.
They met at the bridge's brass plaque. Wind whipped her hair into his face. "Soso," she whispered — the name from youth, not the one he'd made for himself.
"Kato," he breathed, and for the first time in years his voice cracked. He brushed his thumb across her cheek. Her skin was as cold as the air.
"It's a trap," she blurted, eyes flicking to the Russian side. Words tumbled out: "He broke me, Soso. He made me… I was supposed to lure you, to tell you a story…" She tried to confess and to warn him at once.
Relief swamped him so fast he barely heard the warning in her voice. "It's all right," he said. "I know. I have it under control. It's over."
That's when his eye snagged on a tiny, wrong glint in the iron lattice overhead. A sniper. The geometry of it landed in his head like a fist. The shot line aimed diagonally — at the center. Not at Kato. At Malinovsky.
Stolypin's plan unfolded cold and simple before him. This wasn't a prisoner exchange. It was a cleanup. A public execution masked as trade. The Prime Minister would not let the agent walk into German hands and talk. Malinovsky was expendable.
There was no time to think.
"Get down!" Koba yelled.
He pushed Kato sideways with one hand and shoved Malinovsky forward with the other. The hooded man became a human shield, driven into the path of the approaching colonel.
A rifle cracked. The sound broke the air.
Malinovsky screamed. The colonel, reaching for his prisoner, staggered back with a red bloom on his chest and collapsed.
Everything erupted.
Germans drew pistols and barked orders in German. Okhrana returned fire in panicked volleys. Pavel, already expecting trouble, spat suppressing shots from his Nagant. The bridge turned into a fifty-yard killing strip.
Koba grabbed Kato's hand like iron. "This way!" he shouted, hauling her toward the German side, toward cover and danger both.
From a customs shed on the German side a man in a worker's cap pushed through the chaos, pistol in hand, voice cutting clear. "Koba! Stop! In the name of the Central Committee, you will come with me!"
Comrade Stern — the Party's hand, the man from Zurich — stepped into the firefight.
Koba froze. Front: Germans. Back: Okhrana. Now his own Party blocked his retreat. He looked at Kato's terrified face, at Pavel holding the line, at Stern advancing with the cold certainty of someone who did not hesitate.
There was nowhere to run. No allies. No safe side.
He chose.
With his good hand he lifted his pistol. Time slowed to the drum of his pulse. Shouts and gunfire dimmed to a distant thunder.
He didn't aim at the falling colonel, the frantic Okhrana, or the suspicious Germans. He leveled the barrel at the chest of Comrade Stern.