The choice was no choice at all.
Professor Ipatieff, his brilliant, scientific mind finally shattered by a piece of brutal, simple logic he could not refute, broke. He was a man of numbers, of cause and effect. He had seen the cause—a quiet command—and the effect—a severed finger delivered on a clean bandage. He understood the equation perfectly.
He was now Kato's prisoner. Not in a cold Cheka cell, but in a gilded cage.
She had Bogdan arrange the transfer. The official reason: the Professor's "fragile mental state" required a place of quiet convalescence, where Sister Anna could personally minister to his spiritual and physical health. The reality was a comfortable, isolated dacha outside Petrograd, "requisitioned" for the use of the German Red Cross. It was surrounded by a high wall and a thick forest, a perfect, private prison.
But Kato didn't use physical torture anymore. She had learned a better way. She used something far more effective on a man like Ipatieff.
She gave him good food, brought to him by a silent, grim-faced Pavel. She gave him a comfortable bed with clean sheets. She gave him a quiet room with a view of the snow-covered pines.
She denied him his work.
No books. No papers. No pencils. No blackboard. Nothing. She let him starve, not for food, but for knowledge. For the release that only his numbers could provide.
Pavel was his silent warden, a constant, terrifying reminder of the price of defiance. He never spoke to the Professor. He never threatened him. He just existed, a hulking shape of latent violence in the corner of the room, his presence a far more effective cage than any iron bars.
After three days of this silent, intellectual torment, Ipatieff was a wreck. He paced his room like a caged animal, his hands twisting, his lips moving as he traced invisible equations in the air. He was a genius deprived of his reason for being.
On the fourth day, he broke again.
"Please," he begged Kato when she came to his room, his voice a dry, desperate croak. He fell to his knees. "Please, just a piece of charcoal. A wall. A floor. Anything. I need to see the numbers. They are screaming in my head."
Kato looked down at the broken man, her face a mask of gentle, saintly pity. She granted his request.
She had Pavel bring in a large, dusty blackboard and a single piece of white chalk.
The moment the chalk touched the professor's trembling fingers, the broken man vanished. The scientist returned.
He scrambled to the blackboard, his eyes blazing with a feverish, brilliant light. And he began to write.
It was a torrent of genius unleashed. A flood of complex equations, chemical symbols, and theoretical physics that filled the blackboard in a matter of minutes. He was not writing for them. He was writing for himself, letting out the pressure that had been building in his mind, the only way he knew how.
Kato and her two German agents—former physicists from Richter's network, now her loyal servants—watched in stunned silence. They photographed every equation, every symbol.
It was more than they had ever imagined.
It wasn't just a bomb. It was a blueprint for an entirely new kind of fire. He was showing them, step by step, how to build a "breeder reactor." A machine that could take harmless uranium and, through a controlled chain reaction, create a new, fissile element. A man-made element that could be used to create a bomb of unthinkable power.
He was giving her the keys to the atomic age.
While this slow, careful extraction of knowledge continued in the secret dacha, Kato's other work proceeded without pause.
Her reputation as "Sister Anna," the Angel of Smolny, grew by the day. Wounded Red Guards, men who had faced death, spoke her name with a kind of religious reverence.
One day, while changing the dressing on a young soldier's wound, he told her a story. He spoke, his voice filled with awe, of the new People's Commissar. Comrade Koba. The great war hero. The man who had personally sat with a dying Georgian soldier, holding his hand, speaking to him in their shared mother tongue.
The name hit Kato like a physical blow.
Koba.
He was here. And he had a title now. A position of real power in the new government.
Her mind, a cold, fast engine of analysis, began to connect the dots. Bogdan had told her about this new Commissar, this upstart Georgian, a man of action who had appeared from nowhere. And the Finn, the smuggler who was now one of her most valuable assets, had reported a strange request just days earlier. Someone high up was looking for a way to get rare Western medicine to Commissar Yakovlev, the man guarding the Romanovs.
And now this same Koba was making a grand, public show of compassion. He was creating a narrative. A legend.
But why?
She understood instantly. It wasn't about the dying soldier. It was about her. He was trying to get her attention. He wanted something she had, or something he thought she had. Access. Medicine. A solution to a problem he couldn't solve with a gun.
It was a trap. A lure. A baited hook, cast into the chaotic waters of the revolution.
And she decided to walk right into it. On her own terms.
She returned to Bogdan's apartment that evening and wrote the note. Her handwriting was a perfect, elegant imitation of a gentle, educated nurse. She invited the Commissar to meet, to discuss the medical needs of the dying soldier. A meeting of two compassionate souls, united in their desire to help.
She was setting the stage for their first meeting since that desperate, bruising, almost violent kiss in the Stockholm safe house.
But she added one, final, secret instruction.
She gave a second, smaller note to Pavel, who was waiting for her in the shadows outside. This one was for her agents.
"The Commissar of Nationalities will be meeting with me tomorrow at the hospital," it read. "His office at the Smolny will be empty."
"I want to know everything about him. Search his desk. Read his papers. Find his contacts. His secrets."
"I want to know who Koba really is."
The hunt had begun again.