The morning light was a blunt instrument on Rajendra's skull. His mouth tasted of sour wine and grand delusions. He lay on Anya's sofa, the rough wool blanket scratchy against his skin. The memory of last night's drunken monologue returned in cringing waves. An emperor? Franchise kingdoms? He had sounded like a madman.
He sat up, the room tilting. Anya was already at the small table, dressed in her uniform trousers and a plain sweater, drinking coffee. Two mugs sat waiting.
"Your head," she stated, not a question.
"Yes."
"Good. Pain is a good reminder of foolishness."
He took the coffee, drinking it black and scalding. It grounded him. He waited for her to dismiss him, to tell him his tourist visa had run its course and he was a security risk.
Instead, she pushed a piece of black bread and a slice of hard sausage toward him. "Eat."
They ate in silence. The only sound was the distant rumble of a truck.
Finally, she spoke. "Last night. You spoke like a child drawing pictures of dragons. But... even a child's drawing can show where the treasure is hidden."
He looked up, cautious.
"You spoke of waste. Of a military logistics network lying unused. This is not a child's drawing. This is the exact truth." Her grey eyes were sharp, analytical. "I move boxes. From Factory 112 in Minsk, which makes excellent truck axles, to Depot 45 near Vladivostok, where they rust in the rain because the local factory that needs them has no fuel for its trucks. This is my job. Moving waste from one graveyard to another."
She leaned forward. "You spoke of the republics as 'franchises.' A foolish word. But the truth inside it... the truth is that Ukraine grows the wheat. Kazakhstan has the oil. The Baltics have the ports and the technical skill. Moscow has the guns and the fear. This is the reality. But the system forces Ukraine to sell its wheat to Moscow for nothing, and Moscow sells it back to Kazakhstan at a 'planned price' that leaves everyone poor except the party men in the middle who take their cut. It is not a union. It is a parasite."
Rajendra's hangover was fading, replaced by a razor-sharp focus. She wasn't humoring him. She was workshopping the madness.
"You said the center should be a bank. A guarantor." She tapped the table with a blunt finger. "The Soviet Army is the only functioning, nationwide network left. Not the party. Not the KGB—they only know how to break things. The Army moves things. It communicates. It has discipline. If control is to shift... it would shift through the Army. Not to it, but through it."
A chill that had nothing to do with the Moscow cold went down Rajendra's spine. He was no longer talking to a helpful, bored captain. He was talking to a professional soldier who had just identified the critical infrastructure for a coup.
"But an army needs a commander," he said slowly. "An emperor, as I foolishly said."
"An army needs a cause," she corrected. "A flag to rally to. 'For the Motherland' is rusted. 'For the Party' is a joke. 'For a working toilet and meat for your children'... that is a cause men will follow."
"And who gives them that cause?" Rajendra asked. "A general?"
"Perhaps. Or perhaps..." She looked at him, a strange, speculative light in her eyes. "Or perhaps it is not a person, but a deal. A new contract. Between the army, the resource-rich republics, and... a merchant class that knows how to turn things into money."
She was outlining a junta. A military-commercial alliance. It was monstrous. It was brilliant.
"Elena," Rajendra said, the name bringing them back to earth. "She is making a deal with Dubai. For diesel. That is the old world. Selling pieces of the corpse to foreign vultures."
"Yes," Anya said dismissively. "A small-time play. She gets her dollars, her protection. She becomes a pet of a foreign shark. It is a survival move, not a power move."
"And your move?" Rajendra asked.
"My move," Anya said, standing up and pulling on her greatcoat, "is to go to my warehouse and count leaking boxes. But now, I will be counting them with new eyes. As assets. As inventory in a warehouse that has no owner." She buttoned her coat. "You should leave Moscow soon. Your woman will have told her new friends about you. Tariq al-Mansoori does not like loose ends. There will be a flight to Delhi in two days. Be on it."
"And then what?" Rajendra asked, standing.
"Then you do what a merchant does," she said, opening the door. The frozen hallway air rushed in. "You find capital. You build connections. You look at the map of a dying empire and you do not see countries. You see... supply chains waiting to be connected. And you wait."
"Wait for what?"
She gave him a last, unreadable look. "For the right moment to redraw the map. And for the right general to pick up the pen. Do svidaniya, Rajendra Shakuniya. Do not get drunk on my street again."
The door closed. He was alone in the quiet apartment, the ghost of a colossal, terrifying idea hanging in the air between the empty coffee mugs.
He packed his few things. His mind was no longer on diesel or Elena's betrayal. It was on warehouses full of truck axles. On wheat rotting in Ukrainian silos. On an army that moved things but had nothing left to move.
He took a taxi to the airport hotel, a bleak, official place where foreigners stayed. He needed to be anonymous now.
That evening, from the hotel's sterile phone booth, he made an international call to Ganesh in Mumbai.
"Bhai? Is everything alright?"
"Listen carefully," Rajendra said, keeping his voice low. "Forget the diesel deal. It's dead. New project. I need you to find two things. First, every piece of information you can get on the Soviet military logistics command—the Glavnoe upravlenie something. How it works, who runs the depots. Second, find me a list of the top ten Soviet export products by value. Not the official list. The real ones. The ones that are actually sold."
Ganesh was silent for a beat, processing the radical shift. "...Understood, bhai. And Elena-ji?"
"Elena Volkova is now a competitor. Note that. Do not engage. Just watch."
He hung up. He stood in the sterile hallway, the hum of the hotel around him. He had come to Moscow to fix a leak. Instead, he had found a crack in the foundation of an empire, and a soldier with the cold, clear eyes to see it too.
He wasn't just a merchant anymore. He was a prospector standing on a cliff of raw geopolitical ore. The scale was terrifying. The profit, if he could somehow mine it, was beyond imagination.
He looked out the window at the Moscow night, vast and dark. Somewhere out there, Anya Petrova was counting boxes in a leaking warehouse, seeing them not as Soviet inventory, but as future equity.
And somewhere, in a ministry or a barracks, there was a general who was tired of presiding over a funeral.
The game had changed. It was no longer about contracts. It was about constitutions. It was no longer about selling goods. It was about acquiring the means of production of an entire civilization.
He went back to his room and lay on the hard bed, staring at the ceiling. The hangover was gone. In its place was a cold, clear, and utterly sober hunger.
He had asked: What if we make it bigger?
Now, he had to find out if he was building a castle in the sky... or laying the foundation for the biggest deal in human history.