Pavel stared, his face a canvas of betrayal. "You would leave her to them?"
Jake didn't even look at him. His eyes were locked on Kato. The world had shrunk to the two of them, a silent, desperate contract being signed across the room.
Kato did not flinch. She did not question.
A single, slow blink was her only reaction. In that blink, a universe of fear, of determination, of acceptance passed behind her eyes. Then it was gone, replaced by the cold, focused clarity of a predator.
The queen had been handed the board.
"Pavel," Jake said, his voice flat and hard. "Get Murat and Ivan. Bring them to the antechamber. Now."
Pavel opened his mouth to argue, saw the look on Jake's face, and thought better of it. He turned and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.
They were alone. The silence hummed with a terrible, vibrant energy.
Jake walked to a heavy steel safe hidden behind a map of Europe. He unlocked it and took out a single, small, unassuming key.
He pressed it into Kato's palm. Her fingers closed around the cold metal.
"This opens the secondary accounts," he said, his voice low. "The emergency funds. In Swiss francs. Untraceable."
He looked at her, his gaze intense, searching. "Access all of it. Pay what you must. Bribe who you must. Kill who you must."
This was not an order. It was a coronation. He was giving her his kingdom.
"Murat, Ivan, the Finns—they answer to you now," he continued, the words a heavy vow. "They are your fists. Your swords."
He took a breath, the sound rough in the still air.
"The kingdom is yours until I return." He paused. "Or until I don't."
She didn't offer empty promises. She didn't say "Be safe." She accepted the weight of the crown he had just placed on her head.
"A direct assault on the exchange is what Stern expects," she said, her voice a blade, already cutting to the heart of the problem. "He will have a kill-team waiting for Ipatieff and another for our assault force. It is a butcher's trap."
"I know," Jake said.
"So we will not spring it," she continued, her mind moving with breathtaking speed. "We will not go to the exchange at all. We will find where he is holding her before midnight."
She began to pace, no longer a grieving woman but a general planning a campaign. "Stern is a professional. Cold. Logical. But he has a blind spot."
She stopped and looked at Jake. "He thinks he is the only one in this city who can manipulate people. He sees our network as a collection of assets. He doesn't understand the emotional chaos he has created."
A dangerous, brilliant light sparked in her eyes.
"Our weapon is not a gun, Koba. It is a broken-hearted, influential Okhrana colonel who thinks he is in love with a ghost."
The air in the private officer's club smelled of stale cigar smoke, spilled brandy, and despair.
It was a place for forgotten men to drink away their failures. Colonel Orlov was its current king.
Kato found him slumped in a deep leather armchair in a dark corner, a half-empty bottle on the table beside him. His uniform was rumpled, his face puffy and unshaven. He was a ruin.
She moved silently and sat in the chair opposite him. He looked up, his eyes bleary and unfocused.
"Go away," he slurred. "Leave me to my misery."
"Dmitri," she said, her voice soft but laced with an urgent command. He blinked, trying to place her. He had seen her with Hélène. The friend. The chaperone.
"Hélène is in trouble," Kato said, leaning forward.
His posture changed instantly. The drunken haze in his eyes burned away, replaced by a flicker of sharp, desperate focus. "What trouble? Where is she?"
Kato constructed her lie with a surgeon's precision. She took the truth and twisted it into a far more effective weapon.
"She has been taken, Colonel."
Orlov tried to stand, knocking his glass to the floor where it shattered. "Taken? By who? The Okhrana? Because of me?"
"No," Kato said, her gaze holding him, pinning him in place. "Worse. By the same people who sank the Kronan."
The color drained from his face.
"They are dangerous radicals, Dmitri," she continued, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. "They found out about your connection to her. They believe she was your informant."
She let that sink in, watching his mind connect the dots. His ruin. His angel. A vast, shadowy conspiracy.
"They think she knows things about you, about your work," Kato lied, her voice filled with false panic. "They want to silence her. They will kill her."
The transformation was immediate and terrifying.
The weeping, self-pitying drunk vanished. In his place sat a Colonel of the Tsar's secret police, his mind suddenly sharp, his despair forged into a cold, murderous rage. His life was already over, but here was a chance, a single chance, to save the one pure thing he had left.
"Who are they?" he hissed, his hand instinctively going to the pistol holstered under his coat.
"We don't know," Kato said. "But they are Russian. And they are professionals. They would need a secure place to hold her. To question her."
She leaned in, her eyes locking onto his. This was the entire gamble.
"If you were a rogue operative in this city," she asked, her voice barely a whisper. "If you wanted to hold someone, somewhere official enough to be secure, but far enough off the books that no one would ask questions... where would you take them?"
Orlov stared at her, his mind racing through channels, through safe houses, through the dark geography of his own brutal profession. He grabbed a pen from his coat pocket and a cocktail napkin from the table.
He scribbled a single address, his hand shaking with adrenaline and fury. He slid the napkin across the table.
Kato picked it up. Her face remained a perfect, unreadable mask.
"It is a 'debriefing center'," Orlov said, his voice a low, venomous rasp. "A place the Third Section uses when they don't want to leave a paper trail."
He looked up at her, his eyes clear and cold as a winter sky.
"It is a place where men disappear. God help her if that is where they have taken her."