The city was closing in on him. Every echo in the street, every shadow at a corner, every whisper in a breadline had sharpened into a blade. Christian knew the NKVD were near, hunting not just a spy but him. The man from Poland had cracked open the door to his past, and the secret police had poured in like a flood.
He no longer had the luxury of time. The mission had to begin now.
In a cellar lit only by a single lamp, Christian met with two of his Moscow contacts. They spoke in fragments, fearful of walls that could hear. "You cannot stay longer," one muttered, fingers twitching around his cigarette. "Every hour they arrest more. You were seen."
The other, a former Red Army officer gone bitter, leaned forward. "The General Secretary himself attends the concert at the Bolshoi in three nights. That is when you must strike."
"Three nights?" Christian hissed. "I don't have three hours." The man's eyes hardened. "Then you must do it sooner. Before they take you alive. Because if they take you alive, you will not stay silent."
The truth cut sharper than any knife. Christian lowered his head, swallowing against the fire in his chest. The mission wasn't just his burden; it was his only shield. To fail was to betray everything: Kristina, Katia, even Canaris's wager on him.
He moved through Moscow with new desperation. A forged worker's pass. A gray coat stolen from a tram depot. Papers smudged with dirt, names altered in ink that was still damp. He rehearsed his new role; a maintenance electrician, summoned to the Kremlin itself.
The contacts were nervous, feeding him fragments: tunnels beneath the Kremlin, guards who rotated at precise hours, the small window between Stalin's arrival and the start of his council meeting. Every detail carried the weight of finality. And yet, the whispers grew louder. Two arrests on the Arbat. A safe house burned.
The NKVD tightening was the net and Christian could feel time bleeding away.
That night, alone in his narrow room, he took Kristina's ring from its hiding place. He turned it in his hand, the faint gleam catching the candlelight. It was more than a token, it was his anchor. He pressed it to his lips, whispering her name once, silently, as though it might carry across the frozen plains back to France.
Then he slipped it back into the lining of his coat. When he rose, his decision was carved in stone. The assassination would not wait for a carefully woven plan.
It would not wait for safer ground or clearer paths. It would happen now, on Moscow's own terms, before the city swallowed him whole.
As dawn broke, a pale winter sun glinting off the onion domes, Christian walked with the rhythm of a man who belonged. He carried a satchel of tools, his forged pass in his pocket, and a silence in his eyes that matched the silence of the city.
The Kremlin's walls rose ahead of him, red and unyielding, each brick holding centuries of blood and power. Guards stood watch at the gates, rifles upright, scanning the endless line of workers and officials streaming through. Christian's breath plumed in the icy air.
One more step, and there would be no return. The mission had begun.