Sister Anna had arrived in Hell, and she looked like an angel.
The city of Petrograd was a warzone, the streets echoing with the distant crackle of rifle fire and the roar of angry crowds. But here, in a hastily converted ballroom near the Smolny Institute, there was a strange, focused calm.
It was a makeshift field hospital, and Sister Anna was its heart. She moved through the chaos of wounded Red Guards with a serene, gliding purpose. Her white German Red Cross uniform was a beacon of purity in the filth and blood.
She was an angel of mercy in the eye of the storm.
While her hands, gentle and sure, were cleaning a wound or changing a bloody bandage, her mind was at war.
She had made contact. Major Richter, her new puppet cowering in Helsinki, had proven his use. He had activated his network. The two "porters" who had carried her medical supplies across the border were not simple-minded Finns. They were two of Richter's best intelligence agents, their loyalty now transferred to her. Dressed as smugglers, they moved through the chaotic city like ghosts, gathering information, completely invisible to the Bolsheviks who thought they controlled these streets.
Kato was not here to find Jake. Not yet. That would be a fool's errand, chasing a ghost in a hurricane. She was here to build a fortress. A fortress of information, of secrets, of leverage. A fortress from which she could control him, and this entire revolution, when the time was right.
She needed a source. A high-level asset inside the brand-new government.
Her agents, ruthlessly efficient, identified the perfect target in less than a day. Not a soldier. Not a politician. A high-ranking Bolshevik administrator, the personal secretary to Grigory Zinoviev, one of the most powerful men in the Party. The secretary was a true believer, a man of iron conviction. But he had a weakness. A secret shame.
His wife was dying. A strange, wasting sickness that the revolutionary doctors, with their peasant remedies and political slogans, couldn't cure.
Kato had a secret weapon.
Among the vast medical supplies she had seized from Richter's network was a small, heavy, lead-lined box. Inside, nestled in velvet, were twenty vials of a new German miracle drug: Salvarsan. An arsenic compound that was the world's first effective treatment for syphilis. In war-torn Russia, it was more valuable than gold.
And Kato knew, from Richter's meticulously kept files on Party officials, that the secretary's wife was dying from the horrific ravages of the late stages of the disease. A deep, dark family secret.
Kato, the spymaster, began to weave her web.
She didn't approach the secretary, a stern man named Bogdan. That would be too direct, too clumsy.
Instead, she arranged to treat a wounded Red Guard who, her agents discovered, served in the same unit as Bogdan's personal bodyguard. While tending to the man's wounds with a skill that left the other orderlies in awe, she spoke softly of the tragedies of war. She lamented the diseases that ran rampant in the city, diseases that were so easily cured with modern medicines back in Germany.
She let the rumor spread. The whisper of the miracle-working German nurse, the angel of Smolny, who possessed rare and powerful Western medicines. It was a seed of hope, planted in a field of desperation.
It took less than twelve hours.
Bogdan, the iron-willed Bolshevik, approached her triage station. His proud, stern face was a mask of anguish, his eyes hollowed out by sleepless nights and shame.
"Sister Anna," he began, his voice a low, desperate plea. "They say… they say you have medicines from your homeland. My wife… she is dying. Please."
Kato feigned a deep, sorrowful reluctance. She was a picture of conflict. "This medicine is for the German embassy," she said, her voice filled with gentle regret. "I am sworn to protect it with my life."
She looked at his tortured face. "But… your wife's suffering… the Party has been so kind to me. It is my duty to help."
She agreed. But the medicine was dangerous, she explained. She would have to administer it herself, in his home, to monitor the effects.
And in return… a small favor. Nothing political, of course. She was just a simple nurse. But her papers were not in order. Perhaps he could help her with travel permits? And information on which roads were safe, which supply routes were open? Small, seemingly innocent requests for logistical information. Requests that would give her a complete, real-time picture of the Bolsheviks' operational capabilities.
Bogdan, his eyes filling with tears of gratitude, agreed to everything. He would have promised her the moon.
That night, Kato stood in Bogdan's apartment. It was a place of surprising, bourgeois luxury for a man of the people. The wife was in her bed, sleeping peacefully for the first time in weeks, the first dose of the miracle drug already working its magic.
Bogdan had already given Kato her first piece of real intelligence. A detailed schedule of Bolshevik arms shipments expected from the Tula armory.
As she was about to leave, Kato's eyes fell upon a locked leather briefcase on his study desk.
While Bogdan was in the other room, fetching her a glass of water, her skilled fingers made quick, silent work of the cheap Russian lock. It sprung open with a soft click.
Inside, she didn't find military plans. She found a ledger.
Her eyes scanned the neat columns of figures. It was a list of secret, off-the-books payments. Transfers from a German bank account, funneled through Stockholm. The same account Jake had used. The account that funded the revolution.
But the name on the account was not "Koba." It was not "The Bolshevik Party."
The account, the ultimate source of all this fire and blood, was registered to a single, legal name.
V.I. Ulyanov.
Lenin.
Kato closed the briefcase, the lock clicking softly back into place just as Bogdan returned. She held a polite smile on her face, but her heart was pounding with a cold, triumphant rhythm.
She had just found the first, and deepest, secret of this new world. Proof that Lenin himself was not just an ideological ally of the Germans, but a directly paid agent.
And now, she owned that secret.