The most important battles, Kato knew, were fought with whispers and ink, not bullets.
While Koba was forging an army with blood and terror in the south, she was waging a different, quieter war in the heart of Petrograd. Her new kingdom, the Imperial Merchants Bank, was a fortress of granite and silence. Her soldiers were clerks, her weapons were secrets, and her battlefield was the human mind.
She sat at the massive mahogany desk of the former bank director. Before her lay two stacks of paper. The first contained the real intelligence reports from her three turned Cheka agents—details on the Lubyanka's internal power struggles, Dzerzhinsky's movements, and Lenin's private meetings.
The second stack held copies of the false reports her agents would be feeding to their handler, Menzhinsky. These reports painted a picture of a new Deputy Commissar who was completely out of her depth. They described her as paranoid and incompetent, a woman who spent her days obsessed with reorganizing old Tsarist archives and fighting with the supply clerks over requisitions for stationery.
She compared the two sets of reports, a conductor ensuring every instrument in her orchestra was playing its part in her symphony of deception.
"Menzhinsky is intelligent," she thought, a flicker of professional respect in her cold heart. "But he is a creature of logic. We will feed his logic with a diet of perfect, plausible lies. He will build a case against a ghost, while the real work continues unseen."
Her real work now had a singular focus. A name. Parvus. The shadowy financier who was the secret artery pumping German gold into the heart of Lenin's revolution. To simply kill him would be crude, a temporary disruption. To control him, however… that would be a masterstroke. That would give her a leash around the neck of the entire Bolshevik state.
Her intelligence, painstakingly gathered from the remnants of Richter's German network, had revealed a weakness. Parvus was not just a revolutionary. He was a decadent egotist who lived a life of extreme luxury in neutral Stockholm. More importantly, he adored his daughter, a young art history student named Sonya, who lived in Berlin.
Kato felt no moral conflict, no flicker of hesitation. The girl was not a person. She was a lever. A tool to be used to apply precise, unbearable pressure to the target. It was a simple, logical calculation.
The Finn materialized in her office that evening, a ghost summoned from the city's shadows. He was no longer the cocky, independent smuggler she had first met. He was her agent now, and he was terrified of her. The fear made him efficient.
"You have a new assignment," Kato said, her voice a low murmur that barely disturbed the silence of the vast office. "You will go to Berlin. You will use the assets from Richter's network that are still active there."
She slid a thin folder across the desk. It contained a photograph of a smiling young woman with dark, intelligent eyes. "Your target is Parvus's daughter. Sonya. I want you to place a team of watchers on her. I want to know her routine, her friends, her favorite cafes, her fears. Everything."
The Finn's eyes widened. This was not smuggling. This was a new, far more dangerous level of the game.
"You will not harm her," Kato continued, her voice hardening slightly, a warning. "You will not approach her. You will simply watch. And you will find me one of her friends, someone close to her, who is vulnerable. Someone who needs money, or whose family is in political trouble. Find me a hook I can pull."
The Finn nodded, his face pale. He was no longer a simple courier. He was now an active spymaster in her burgeoning international intelligence operation, a pawn in a game whose rules he was only just beginning to comprehend. He took the folder and disappeared.
Later, Kato descended into the depths of the bank. The massive, circular steel door of the main vault stood open. Inside, what was once a sterile chamber for storing gold was now a chaotic, vibrant laboratory. Professor Ipatieff, his eyes blazing with a fire she had not seen since before his capture, was excitedly explaining a complex diagram of a graphite moderator to Pavel, who listened with his usual stony, uncomprehending silence.
The professor was thriving here, in his gilded cage. He had equipment, resources, and, most importantly, a problem worthy of his genius. He was a man reborn, alive with the fire of creation.
As she watched them, one of her turned Cheka agents, a young clerk named Dmitri, entered the main hall above and cleared his throat nervously.
"Comrade Deputy Commissar," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "A message from my handler. Comrade Menzhinsky is… dissatisfied with our reports. He finds your lack of suspicious activity to be, in itself, suspicious."
Kato turned slowly, her face impassive. "And?"
"He has requested a surprise inspection of the Commissariat's new 'archive' facility," Dmitri stammered. "He is coming to the bank. Tomorrow morning."
A slow, cold smile touched Kato's lips. Of course. The logical man had found a flaw in her perfect, plausible lies. He was coming to see the truth for himself. He was walking right into her hands.
"Excellent, Dmitri," she said, her voice calm. "Thank you for your loyalty."
She dismissed the terrified clerk and turned to Pavel. "Pavel," she said, her voice now a silken, dangerous whisper. "Comrade Menzhinsky will be visiting us tomorrow. Please inform Professor Ipatieff that we will be conducting a small demonstration of his work on… 'industrial chemical safety' for a special guest from the Cheka."
She looked at the massive, one-foot-thick steel door of the vault.
"Ensure the vault is sealed from the inside the moment our guest arrives."
She was going to trap the Cheka's master investigator in a room with a nuclear physicist and a monster. And then, she was going to turn him, too.