The days in the Zurich apartment stretched thin and taut, every hour a new ache. Lenin prowled the rooms like an animal; the man who once wrote manifestos now moved like a general studying a battlefield. Trotsky sat at the map, face unreadable, drifting in and out of silence. The "Koba problem" had stopped being an abstract debate. It had become a wound that would not stop bleeding.
Yagoda came in without knocking, pale and shaking, a thick stack of decoded telegraphs clutched in his hand. He laid them on the table.
"From Stern," he said. "The full report from Tilsit."
Lenin's order was a knife: "Read it."
Yagoda read. He read Stern's account of the staged exchange on the bridge, of German agents positioned like actors, of the sniper hidden in the ironwork, of the Okhrana colonel struck down mid-ceremony. He read of Koba's cold, efficient moves in the firefight. He read the line that made Lenin and Trotsky lean forward as one:
"…subject Koba then identified my position. He discharged his weapon in my direction, forcing me to take cover. He facilitated the escape of the German agents with the asset Malinovsky, and retreated under their protection…"
Yagoda looked up. The final sentence hit like a tombstone.
"CONCLUDED: HE IS NOT THEIR PRISONER. HE IS THEIR PARTNER. HIS TREASON IS COMPLETE AND WILLING."
Silence filled the room. The clock's tick sounded like artillery.
Lenin walked slowly to the map and did not look at Berlin. He looked at the Russian expanse and spoke with a voice that had been stripped of heat.
"He is gone." He spoke plainly. "He is now an asset of the German state. A weapon that will one day be pointed at us."
What had been an irritating internal quarrel was now the lens through which they saw every risk. If a man like Koba could sell himself to an imperial power, how many others might follow when war and hunger came?
"We move immediately," Lenin said. "Draft protocols for a Special Commission. First mandate: root out spies and traitors from our own ranks. We will make our knife inside."
Trotsky rose, notebook in hand, not to craft a legend but to cut one down.
"We must denounce him," Trotsky said. "Publicly. Absolutely. We cannot allow a myth to grow. I will draft a statement to every cell. We will brand him: provocateur, agent of German imperialism. We poison the well before the enemy uses his name as a lever."
Their resolve snapped into place: purge, inoculate, control. Koba's betrayal had given them the rationale for a harder, cleaner party.
Yagoda cleared his throat. He had one more scrap of news that seemed small and yet enormous when placed next to the rest.
"From the Balkans," he said. "From Sarajevo."
Lenin and Trotsky barely lifted their heads.
"Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife have been assassinated," Yagoda read, voice thin. "The assassin believed to be a Serbian nationalist."
The two men stared at one another. Trotsky's old prediction — that a single assassination could light the fuse of a continental war — rang in the hum of the room.
Lenin's hand went to Koba's thesis on the table, to the cold calculus within it. The document that once read like prophecy now sounded like a warning overdue.
Koba, who had understood war's machinery perhaps better than anyone, was now outside the circle. The man who could predict the slaughter had defected to the other side. The war they had been planning for had begun.
The question in that quiet Zurich flat was stark and immediate: what would their monster do now that the world he foresaw was finally here?