"Soso? What is it? Who is that?"
Kamo's voice was a rough whisper in the cold, dusty air of the tenement room, but it sounded to Jake like a distant shout across a vast, echoing canyon. He couldn't answer. He couldn't breathe. His mind was caught in a sickening temporal whiplash, the past and a terrifying future colliding right before his eyes in the flickering gaslight of a Tbilisi street.
Genrikh Yagoda.
The name was a thunderclap in the silent prison of his mind. Not a revolutionary hero or a forgotten victim. A monster of a different caliber. The future head of the NKVD. The man who would systematize the Gulags, who would stand beside Stalin during the blood-soaked frenzy of the Great Purge, a loyal butcher until the day the revolution, in its insatiable hunger, turned and devoured him too. And he was here. Now. A young man taking his first treacherous steps on a path that would lead to unimaginable slaughter.
"Soso!" Kamo hissed again, shaking his arm. The physical contact was a jolt, pulling Jake back from the precipice of his own sanity. "Did you hear me? Do you know him?"
Jake's heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. He had to say something. He couldn't just stand there, paralyzed by a history no one else had lived. He needed a lie, a plausible story to explain the look of sheer horror on his face, a story to contain this world-shattering revelation.
He forced a breath into his lungs. "I… I think so," he stammered, stalling for time, his mind scrambling through the files of his historical knowledge. He pretended to squint, to search his memory. "From my time in Batumi, I think. A few years ago. He was on the fringes of the party there. Ambitious. Too ambitious, some said."
It was weak, but it was something. It gave a reason for his intense reaction—the sudden recognition of a half-forgotten rival, a man he already had reason to distrust.
Kamo accepted it without question. For him, the world was simple. There were comrades, there were enemies, and now they had a name and a face for a new enemy. His mind immediately leaped to the next logical, violent step. "Good. We have him. We know who he is. We follow him home. We snatch him, just like we snatched Fikus. We take him to the ice house and we make him talk. We find out how many more of them there are."
Jake's mind recoiled in panic. Grab Yagoda? It was the worst possible thing they could do. He saw the dominoes falling with horrifying clarity.
"No," Jake said, his voice sharp.
"No?" Kamo turned to him, his face a mask of disbelief. "Soso, he is a traitor! We just watched him with our own eyes! We can't let him walk away!"
"Think, Kamo! Think past the end of your fist for one minute!" Jake snapped, his own fear making his voice harsher than he intended. He had to make Kamo understand the complex, delicate architecture of the trap they were already running.
"Think about Fikus," he said, lowering his voice, forcing himself to be calm, to be the strategist. "What is the story we have built? That the Okhrana is running a sophisticated plot to frame Comrade Orlov. That Fikus was a pawn in that plot. The entire story hinges on the idea of one conspiracy, aimed at one man."
He saw a flicker of understanding in Kamo's eyes and pressed his advantage. "Now, what happens if we snatch this new man? This… Yagoda. We torture him. And he starts talking about his network. His handler. His missions. And none of it matches Fikus's story. None of it has anything to do with Orlov. What does that do? It makes our entire narrative fall apart. It makes Fikus look like a simple liar. It makes us look like fools, or worse, like agents ourselves, running around snatching people based on flimsy evidence. It muddies the water. It gives Orlov the very ammunition he needs to discredit us completely. We can't touch him. Not yet."
Kamo stood in frustrated silence, the simple, brutal logic of his world colliding with the complex, deceitful logic of Jake's. He hated it, but he couldn't deny the truth in Soso's words. To act now would be to destroy their own carefully constructed political weapon against Orlov.
"So we do nothing?" Kamo finally grumbled, spitting on the floor in disgust. "We just let another traitor walk the streets freely?"
"I didn't say we do nothing," Jake said, his voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial whisper. A new, more insidious plan was forming, born of the paranoid necessities of this new reality. "We don't snatch him. We watch him. We learn everything about him. Fikus is a pawn, a tool to be used and discarded. But this man… he is different. He is careful. He is professional. He is a cancer. And you don't remove a cancer with one quick, clumsy cut. You must map the entire tumor first. You find every root, every infected vein. You learn the scope of the disease before you even think of taking up the scalpel."
He was speaking as much to himself as to Kamo, verbalizing the terrifying new strategy. Orlov was a political problem to be managed. Yagoda was a security threat to be understood and, eventually, excised. Two separate wars, demanding two separate strategies.
Kamo was silent for a long time, chewing on the inside of his cheek as he digested the cold, patient cruelty of the plan. It went against every fiber of his being, against his desire for immediate, violent action. But he couldn't deny the strategic wisdom. Soso had been right about everything else. He had outmaneuvered Orlov, he had predicted the need for a crossfire, he had seen the value in Fikus's "confession." He had earned Kamo's trust.
"Alright, Soso," he finally conceded, the words tasting like defeat. "We do it your way. We watch. We wait."
A tense agreement settled between them. As they prepared to leave the cold, dusty tenement, to slip back into the shadows of the city, Kamo paused.
"This man from Batumi," he said. "What is his name? We cannot keep calling him 'that man'."
Jake's mind went blank for a second. He had to give him a name, a name that was plausible but wouldn't accidentally be the man's real name and lead them back to some unforeseen truth. He needed a label, a placeholder for the monster. And in the dark, twisted recesses of his historically-saturated mind, a different name surfaced, a name from another, even darker chapter of the future. A name reeking of terror, torture, and betrayal. A private, chilling irony that only he would ever understand.
"His name is Beria," Jake said, the name feeling like poison on his tongue. "Giorgi Beria."
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