At 2:17 a.m., Kokoshka emerged on the other side of the wall, into a birch forest blanketed with fresh snow. He did not run. He walked. He had a contact waiting three kilometers east: a former lover, a woman who still believed his forged paintings were real. She would drive him to the border.

Kokoshka was not a large man. He was wiry, with nimble fingers and the quiet eyes of a chess grandmaster. For seven years, he had been locked in Cell 42, a concrete tomb with a single slit of a window. Every day, he did two things: he sketched on scraps of smuggled paper using a paste made of bread and coal dust, and he watched. He watched the guard rotations, the way the light shifted through the seasons, the particular squeak of the third bolt on the eastern yard door.

But as he reached the tree line, he heard footsteps. A single guard, young, scared, had taken a smoke break outside the perimeter—strictly forbidden. The guard raised his flashlight. Kokoshka stopped. For three heartbeats, neither moved.