The Zurich apartment felt smaller than ever. Smoke hung in the air like a curtain — cheap tobacco, frustration, and defeat all burning together. News of the Gorlice–Tarnów breakthrough had come a week earlier, and it hadn't just broken the Russian front. It had broken their illusion.
The army — the supposed engine of revolution — hadn't risen. It hadn't turned its rifles on the Tsar. It had simply crumbled. Starving soldiers surrendered for bread instead of glory.
Lenin paced the floor, furious energy packed into his compact frame. "It's a catastrophe of theory!" he snapped, slamming his fist against a stack of newspapers. "The conditions were perfect! The war! The misery! The class contradictions! And what happens? They surrender. They surrender! Not a hint of class consciousness!"
Trotsky, pale and thoughtful, sat by the window. His pen lay still on a half-finished essay. "It wasn't their consciousness that failed," he murmured. "It was their will. They didn't revolt — they dissolved."
Their argument was interrupted by the door creaking open. Comrade Stern entered quietly, carrying a thin bundle of reports. His face was expressionless, but his eyes carried the exhaustion of bad news.
"Comrades," he said simply. "There's more from the front. Or rather… from behind it."
Lenin stopped pacing. Trotsky set his pen down.
"The leaflets," Stern continued. "The ones that circulated among the troops before the collapse — the ones explaining how to fake illness, how to surrender safely. They've become legend in the camps. The men talk about them constantly. They call them magic."
He hesitated, then added, "They say the man behind them isn't human. They call him the Warlock. A German demon who knows the Russian soul and can whisper poison into it from miles away."
The room fell silent. The name landed like a curse. Lenin and Trotsky didn't need to ask who he was. They already knew.
Their own protégé — Koba — had turned their lessons against them. The perfect agitator, now a weapon aimed at the Revolution itself.
Before anyone could speak, a knock came at the door. Yagoda opened it to reveal a nervous man in a rumpled suit, clutching a cap in both hands. A Menshevik courier.
"Comrades," he stammered, glancing around as if the Okhrana might burst through the walls. "I've come from Stockholm. Something is happening there."
Lenin's eyes narrowed. "Be precise."
"There's a new player," the courier said. "Arrived weeks ago. Spending German gold like water. Building a network — outside Party channels. Hiring smugglers, bribing dockworkers, buying information. They say he's preparing to disrupt Allied shipments to Russia through the Baltic." He swallowed hard. "And he's recruiting our people. Bolsheviks."
The last word hung in the smoke.
Trotsky surged to his feet, his face flushed with fury. "Then we expose him! I'll write a pamphlet — 'The German Agent in Stockholm and His Thirty Pieces of Silver.' We'll publish it in L'Humanité, in Vorwärts—"
"No!" Lenin's shout cut him off like a whip. He slammed his hand on the table, rattling the teacups.
He leaned forward, eyes burning. "That's the reaction of a journalist, not a revolutionary. A pamphlet will do nothing. We have no proof. If we publish, we look like fools — or worse, we warn him. He'll vanish, change his name, his network, his methods. You'll hand him the shadows to hide in."
Trotsky's anger faltered. The room went still.
Lenin turned slowly to Stern — the one man who didn't need speeches to understand what came next.
"The Special Commission for Party Security," Lenin said, his tone now cold, surgical. "It exists to protect us from threats. Consider this your new assignment. The threat has gone abroad."
Stern stood straighter, the set of his shoulders hardening.
"You'll go to Stockholm," Lenin continued. "Take Yagoda and whoever else you need. Bribe, threaten, infiltrate — I don't care how. I want everything. Who funds this network. Who he's recruited. Every operation. Every name. Every line of communication."
He paused, stepped closer, and gripped Stern's shoulder. "And when you confirm it's him — when you confirm the man they call the Warlock is Koba — you will neutralize him. Permanently."
The word neutralize fell with the weight of a verdict.
Stern didn't flinch. His face was a mask of quiet purpose, though behind it burned something personal — an old hatred, freshly fed.
"It will be done, Comrade Lenin," he said.
Lenin gave a single, sharp nod. "Good. The cancer must be cut out before it spreads."
The order hung in the smoke-filled air. It was death — delivered not with passion, but with precision.
Stern turned for the door. The Revolution had just sent one of its own to kill another. The Warlock's hunt had begun.