The silence that followed Jake's speech felt different—charged, electric. It wasn't the hush of a room waiting for orders. It was the hush of a room that had just been handed a dangerous, gleaming tool and realized it knew how to use it.
The men looked at him differently now. Not just Soso. Not just Kamo's bruiser. A strategist. A thinker. A man with a mind sharp enough to cut. The younger revolutionaries leaned forward, lit with awe; the older ones narrowed their eyes, as if reassessing a threat they had misjudged. Even the medic—usually expressionless—had tightened his jaw.
Orlov recovered first. The politician always regained the scene.
His hands came together in a slow, deliberate clap, each strike landing with the weight of mockery.
"An excellent sentiment, Comrade Soso," he said, tone smooth as glass. "Rhetoric is easy. Revolution is hard."
He lounged back in his seat as if bored, but Jake saw the knives sharpened behind the older man's eyes.
"You speak of hunting informants," Orlov continued. "Very well. Tell us—how do you propose we find them? Do they wear armbands labeled 'I betray you'? Or shall we simply start pointing fingers at anyone who looks… odd?"
It was the perfect practical sting—mocking, plausible, dangerous. A plan without targets was just a poem.
Jake had expected the jab.
He let the silence stretch, then spoke with the calm of a man who had already solved the equation.
"We don't need to guess," Jake said. "We already have a name."
The shift in the room was immediate—every man leaning forward, a ripple of anticipation, even fear. Orlov's mask slipped for half a heartbeat.
"A tavern near Erevan Square," Jake added. "A man called Fikus."
Kamo let out a low growl of agreement, the kind that made doubt sound like denial. His endorsement did half the work.
"We believe he betrayed the bakery," Jake continued. "He's the reason Mikho was taken."
The accusation electrified the room. Mikho's absence was an open wound; Jake had just handed them a culprit they could strike.
"My team's first action will be to neutralize him. Quietly. No bombast, no fires that bring half the city watching. We take him alive. We make him talk. We find out who handles him. Who else he's paid. Who else sells us."
Concrete. Tactical. Enough to drain the fever Orlov had stoked.
Then Jake pivoted—folding Orlov's own thunder into his plan as if it were always meant to be.
"And Comrade Orlov's call for spectacle isn't wasted," Jake added. "While my team seizes Fikus, Orlov's men can stage diversions—small fires in the river warehouses. Bright enough to pull patrols away, controlled enough not to attract cavalry."
A thin line of tension cut across Orlov's face. Jake had placed him in a perfect vise.
If Orlov refused, he seemed cowardly—opposed to catching a traitor who had supposedly given their comrade to the Okhrana. If he accepted, he ceded initiative to Jake in front of every man present.
Orlov pushed a smile up with visible effort. "Of course," he said, voice tight. "My men will support this operation."
The meeting broke in a rush. Men gathered around Jake. They asked questions. They volunteered. Jake had become the new center of gravity.
Kamo pulled him aside, breath hot with excitement. "By the devil, Soso," he hissed. "You didn't just fight him. You took his blade and turned it on him."
Jake nodded, but his eyes were fixed on the far end of the room—where Orlov whispered with two lieutenants, venom sharp in his glance.
Victory curdled instantly into clarity.
This wasn't the end.
This was escalation.
Jake had humiliated a man who commanded loyalty, influence, and—worst of all—a web of plausible deniability. A man who never forgave or forgot.
The game had just become personal.
The stakes had just become lethal.
The new safe house was worse than the cellar—an abandoned ice-house on the industrial fringe, a brick cavern that smelled of rot, salt, and standing water. Cold lived here, settled deep, the kind that seeped into joints and made breath pale and thin. Under a single lantern's weak glow, Jake spread the plan before the five men he had chosen for his new counter-intelligence unit: Kamo, Pyotr, Levan, Davit, and Artyom.
They watched him like anointed zealots. In one night, he had become not just someone to follow—but someone to believe.
He knelt and drew a rough map on a crate with charcoal: the tavern behind Erevan Square, the alleys, the tannery roof.
"This is not a street brawl," Jake said. "This is a surgical extraction."
He pointed.
"Levan, you hold the mouth of the main alley. Do not engage. Just block exits."
He marked the roofline.
"Davit, rooftop overwatch. If you see a patrol turning toward the district, whistle once and drop behind the chimney."
He tapped the rear door of the tavern.
"Kamo and I take the target."
He marked a spot a block away.
"Pyotr—cart here. The moment we get him out, you move. One minute. Silent in, silent out."
They nodded. Kamo repeated every order like a prayer, harsh and precise. "You heard Soso. No mistakes."
It unfolded almost cleanly.
Orlov's diversions sparked to life on the far side of the city—fires licking from warehouse roofs, drawing patrols like moths. Davit signaled clear from his perch. Jake and Kamo slipped through crates and shadow, the cold pressing close.
The tavern's back door creaked open. A portly man waddled out with a bucket of slop. He dumped it, turned—
And the night folded around him.
Kamo's hand clamped over his mouth; Jake's arm locked around his chest. A sack dropped over his head. Pyotr's cart swallowed them whole. Thirty seconds. Clean. Efficient.
Back at the ice-house, they threw Fikus to the dirt floor and pulled the sack off. His face glistened with sweat, his eyes bulged like an animal's.
Kamo cracked his knuckles, eager. "Now," he growled, reaching for a chain.
"Wait," Jake said.
Kamo stopped mid-step, surprised. Jake's authority was new, but it held.
"We need his mind, not his screams," Jake said. "Pain makes men lie. We need truth."
Kamo hesitated, then nodded and stepped back. He trusted Soso's brain now. The others drifted toward the far wall. Only Jake and Fikus remained in the lamp's circle.
Jake sat on a crate.
He didn't accuse. He didn't threaten.
He spoke facts.
Names, meeting places, payment sums—taken from the dead officer's notebook collected during the ambush.
"Your handler is Sergeant Volkov," Jake began quietly. "Tuesdays, behind the fish market. Fifty rubles a month. Ten-ruble bonus for the railway-reading group."
Fikus' terror stuttered into confusion. "How… how do you know that?"
"We know everything," Jake said. "So speak plainly. Confirm what we already know. Save yourself the trouble."
The tavern owner cracked like wet bark. He babbled names—small informants, petty watchers, errand boys. But when Jake pressed about the bakery raid, Fikus recoiled.
"Not me!" he cried. "I swear on my mother's grave—it wasn't me! I didn't know about the bakery!"
Jake studied him. His fear was real. His improvisation sloppy. Men lied, but their lies followed patterns. And desperate men named bigger fish to survive.
Fikus offered one name.
One that hit the air like a gunshot.
"Orlov!" he blurted. "Volkov told me—told me the bakery job was Orlov's! He said… said Orlov handles the high-value work. I—I stayed out of it!"
The door slammed open.
Kamo stormed in, face carved from rage, revolver raised. "Liar!" he roared. "You blame a comrade to save your miserable skin?"
Fikus shrank back, sobbing.
Kamo pressed the barrel to his forehead.
Every instinct in the room slid toward finality.
Jake stepped between them.
"Wait."
"Move aside, Soso! He's a dog—"
Jake didn't move.
Instead, his voice dropped into something colder than the air around them.
"Don't kill him."
Kamo's eyes widened. "Why not?"
Jake didn't blink.
"Because he's worth more alive," he said. "He just gave us the rope to hang a bigger man."
Silence froze the room.
Jake held it.
"Whether Fikus lies or tells the truth doesn't matter," he said quietly. "What matters is that the accusation points where we already should have been looking."
He let that sink in.
Orlov.
The man who smiled too easily.
Whose plans were too grand.
Whose hands stayed too clean.
"We keep Fikus alive," Jake finished. "And we use him."
The revolutionaries stared at him—some in awe, some in fear.
Jake felt the future twist beneath his feet.
He had walked into this world thinking he could change history by killing one man.
Now he understood the truth.
He was becoming something else entirely.
Something history would either praise… or come to fear.