The air in the Zurich apartment was thick with the smell of boiling cabbage and stale paper.
Vladimir Lenin slammed a newspaper down on the table. The sound cracked through the small room like a gunshot.
"Insubordination!" he roared, his voice a raw, furious thing. "Utter, treasonous insubordination!"
The young Bolshevik courier who had just arrived from Stockholm flinched. He stood by the door, pale and nervous, twisting a worn cap in his hands.
"There… there was no official report from Comrade Stern," the boy stammered.
"I am aware there was no report!" Lenin spun on him, his eyes burning with a zealot's fire. "I want to know why. I want to know what the underground is saying about my agent's failure!"
The boy swallowed hard. "They... they do not speak of failure, Comrade."
He looked at the floor, unable to meet Lenin's terrifying gaze. "They speak of the Warlock. They say he is the real power in Stockholm now."
Leon Trotsky, who had been leaning against a bookshelf, pushed himself off the wall. He was infuriatingly calm, an island of cool intellect in Lenin's sea of rage.
"The Warlock," Trotsky mused, stroking his goatee. "A dramatic title. Koba always did have a flair for the theatrical."
"This is not theatre!" Lenin paced the tiny room, three steps one way, three steps back, a caged tiger wearing a path in the cheap floorboards. "Stern was given a direct order! Neutralize the traitor!"
He threw his hands up in the air. "Instead, he plays spy games! He allows this… this Warlock to run free, to build a power base with German gold!"
Trotsky let out a soft, considering hum. "A traitor with German gold is a problem, Vladimir, I agree."
He paused, a faint, knowing smile playing on his lips. "But a revolutionary with German gold… that is an opportunity. Perhaps Stern saw something we cannot from this distance."
"He saw his own ego!" Lenin spat, pointing a trembling finger at Trotsky. "There is no room for ego in the revolution! Only discipline! And Stern has failed!"
The argument was cut short by another knock on the door. It was sharper, more urgent.
Another courier, this one breathless, his face flushed from running in the cold. He didn't hold a cap. He held a single, flimsy sheet of telegram paper.
The news was not from Stockholm.
"It's from Petrograd," the courier gasped. "It's happening."
Lenin snatched the telegram from the man's hand. His eyes scanned the stark, black text.
BREAD RIOTS. WOMEN MARCHING. THOUSANDS IN THE STREETS.
PUTILOV FACTORY WORKERS ON STRIKE.
The words were hammer blows. Each one a piece of a world he had only ever dreamed of.
Lenin froze.
The fury, the frustration with Stern, the entire petty proxy war in Stockholm—it all evaporated. It turned to smoke, to ash, to utter irrelevance.
His face, which had been contorted with rage, went slack with a terrible, blazing intensity. He saw it. He saw the timeline, the potential, the spark that could finally ignite the world.
This was not another protest. This was the beginning.
It's finally happening, the thought screamed in his mind. And I am here, smelling cabbage while the world is set on fire.
He had spent his entire life waiting for this moment. And he was missing it.
He looked up at Trotsky. The calm intellectual, the detached theorist, was gone. Trotsky's eyes were wide, alight with the same fanatical fire.
Their personal squabbles, their ideological debates, were children's games now. The real battle, the one they had bled and starved and plotted for, had begun without them.
They had missed the opening shot of the war for the world. He would not miss the rest of it.
Lenin crushed the telegram in his fist, the paper crinkling into a tight, hard ball. He was no longer an exile, a writer, a theorist sitting in a library.
He was a weapon, about to be aimed at the heart of an empire.
He turned to Trotsky, his voice no longer a roar, but a low, urgent, and world-shattering command.
"Get me the Germans," Lenin commanded. "Tell them their investment is about to pay out."
He took a step towards the door, as if he could will himself across a continent.
"We are going home."