From the deep, cold shadow of the mausoleum, Jake watched the scene unfold with a sense of dizzying, nauseating disbelief. The world he thought he was beginning to understand, the complex but ordered reality he was navigating, simply shattered. The two separate battlefronts he had been fighting—the public political war against Orlov and the secret intelligence war against "Beria"—were not separate at all. They were two arms of the same monster.
Orlov and Yagoda stood together in the graveyard's gloom, not as enemies, not as strangers, but as colleagues. Their posture was relaxed, familiar. Orlov clapped Yagoda on the back, a gesture of easy camaraderie. They spoke for a few moments, their words snatched away by the wind, but their body language was unmistakable. They were partners in treason.
The humiliation was a physical blow, as profound and staggering as the terror. Jake's entire strategy, the intricate web of lies he had woven around Fikus's "confession," the narrative of an Okhrana plot to frame Orlov—all of it had been a farce. He hadn't been the master manipulator pulling the strings. He had been the puppet.
He finally understood. Fikus's confession hadn't been a lucky break. The story of an Okhrana plot to frame Orlov hadn't been Jake's brilliant invention. It had been their invention. The entire scenario had likely been fed to the informant Fikus through his handler, a piece of deliberate disinformation designed to be "discovered." They had wanted the party to believe Orlov was being targeted, to rally around him, to protect him, thus making him untouchable. Jake hadn't seized control of the narrative; he had unknowingly played his assigned part in it with perfect, idiotic precision.
He felt a hot flush of shame, a rage so intense it made him dizzy. He had been played. Utterly and completely.
Beside him, Kamo was trembling, not with fear, but with a righteous, volcanic fury. The world, for him, had just snapped back into its brutal simplicity. "Traitors," he hissed, his hand gripping the cold steel of the revolver in his coat pocket. "Both of them. We take them. Now. We shoot them down like the dogs they are."
"No," Jake whispered, his voice hoarse, grabbing Kamo's arm with a strength that surprised them both.
"No?" Kamo turned on him, his eyes blazing in the dark. "Soso, what is wrong with you? We have them! Dead to rights! Together! This is the proof we need!"
"It's not proof! It's our word against theirs!" Jake shot back, his mind racing, trying to climb out of the black hole of his own humiliation. "We are two men hiding in a graveyard. They are a respected party leader and a rising comrade. Who do you think the committee will believe? It will be chaos! They will say we are the agents, that we lured them here! We can't win that fight. Not yet."
He knew, with a sickening certainty, that a direct confrontation was still a losing battle. He needed more. He needed undeniable, irrefutable proof. He needed to re-seize control of the narrative, to flip the chessboard so violently that all the pieces would be his to command.
And in that moment of profound rage and shattered pride, a new plan began to form. It was not a plan born of careful, strategic thought. It was an idea forged in the fires of pure, cold fury. It was a plan of such breathtaking audacity and monstrous cruelty that it marked his final, irreversible step into the heart of the darkness he had been fighting. He would stop playing their game. He would design his own.
"We're not going to take them," Jake said, his voice dropping to a chillingly calm whisper. He was no longer looking at Orlov and Yagoda. He was looking at the board, at the pieces, seeing the new, terrible path forward. "We are going to use them to destroy each other."
Kamo stared at him, confused. "What are you talking about?"
"They created a story using Fikus," Jake explained, his voice flat and devoid of all emotion. "They used him as a pawn to protect Orlov. That was their mistake. They left a living piece on the board." He turned to Kamo, his eyes gleaming with a terrifying light. "We are going to leak the location of our prisoner."
"What? To who?"
"Not to our comrades," Jake said. "We will leak it to the low-level Okhrana network. The one that Yagoda controls through the drop-box. We will send an anonymous tip. A message saying that the Bolsheviks are holding a captured informant in the old ice house, and that he is starting to talk."
Kamo's eyes widened as he began to grasp the horrific logic of the plan.
"Think it through, Kamo," Jake pressed, his voice like ice. "Orlov and Yagoda cannot, under any circumstances, allow Fikus to remain in our custody. He is the living loose end, the one person who can tie them directly to this plot. If they think he is about to break completely, they will have no choice. They will be forced to act. They will have to silence him permanently."
He paused, letting the full weight of the monstrous idea settle on Kamo's shoulders.
"They will send a team to the ice house," Jake continued, spelling it out. "Not to rescue Fikus. To execute him. And when they do…" He looked at Kamo, his expression as cold and unforgiving as the granite tombstone behind them. "…you and a trusted team of our men will be waiting in the shadows. Not to save Fikus. Not to fight them."
"Then what?" Kamo whispered, horrified and awestruck.
"You will witness it," Jake said. "You will be the unimpeachable witnesses to a team of Okhrana agents, sent by their traitorous masters, murdering their own informant. The same informant who, according to their story, was supposed to be protected. You will have your proof. Not our word against theirs. Not a scribbled note in a book. You will have the proof of a dead body and a smoking gun."
The plan was monstrous. It was diabolical. It involved the deliberate, cold-blooded sacrifice of their own prisoner, a man whose life Jake himself had spared just days before. They would be leading him to the slaughter, using his death as the bloody centerpiece of a political theater designed to destroy his killers.
It was no longer about outmaneuvering an enemy. This was about total annihilation. This was a plan born from the mind of a man who believed that the ends, no matter how horrifying, justified the means. It was a Stalinist gambit.
"This is how we get our proof, Kamo," Jake said, his voice flat, devoid of any human warmth, any trace of the man he used to be. "Proof written in blood. The only kind they, and the party, will ever understand."
He held Kamo's gaze in the darkness, a silent, terrible question passing between them. He had just laid out the map to a new level of hell.
"Are you with me?"
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