The pamphlet was a declaration of a new kind of war, and Jake met it with a new kind of response. Kamo's instinct was to answer propaganda with a hammer, to crush the dissent with public, overwhelming force. But Jake knew that would be a fatal error. It would be like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. It would prove the pamphlet's every accusation. His response had to be as subtle and insidious as the attack itself.
"We will not hang anyone from a lamppost," Jake said, his voice a low, dangerous calm in the cellar headquarters. "Public terror is a tool of the Tsar. It shows desperation. We will be silent. We will be surgical."
He immediately put his fledgling intelligence apparatus to work. The pamphlet was a weapon, but it was a physical object. It had to be written, printed, and distributed. It had a supply chain, and he intended to dismantle it, link by link.
He called in Luka and Anna. He showed them the pamphlet. "This is our new priority," he commanded. "Anna, you and your network of observers will focus on who is passing these. Not the workers reading them. The ones slipping them into the newspapers, the ones leaving them on the benches. I need descriptions, locations, times. Luka, you will take those descriptions and cross-reference them with the list of known associates of Yagoda's old faction that we got from Danilov."
It was no longer a game of revolutionary fervor. It was a professional counter-intelligence operation, a methodical, painstaking process of collecting data, analyzing it, and identifying key nodes in the enemy's network.
While his agents worked in the shadows, the political pressure began to mount in the light. Yagoda's poison was effective. The whispers that had started in the taverns and tea houses were now echoing in the party's leadership circles. Stepan Shaumian requested another urgent, private meeting, his face etched with a new and profound worry.
They met in the same dusty bookstore, the smell of old paper a stark contrast to the fresh, dangerous ideas circulating in the city.
"Soso, your actions were necessary," Shaumian began, forgoing any pleasantries. "I have defended them. But this pamphlet… it is causing instability. It is giving a voice to the doubters, the fearful. Members of the Central Committee, good comrades, are asking questions. They are worried about the precedent you have set. They argue, not without reason, that the party cannot operate on the secret judgment of one man, no matter how capable."
Jake listened, his expression unreadable, his hands steepled before him.
"They want proof, Soso," Shaumian continued, his voice heavy. "Hard proof. They are demanding to see the witness, Danilov. They want to hear the confession of Orlov's betrayal from his own lips. They want to question him themselves."
This was the attack Jake had feared. Danilov was his greatest asset and his most dangerous liability. The man was a psychological wreck, held together by fear and Jake's constant, methodical pressure. Under the skeptical, hostile questioning of a dozen committee members, he could easily break. He could contradict the carefully crafted narrative. He could reveal the full extent of Jake's manipulations, the fact that Jake had known about Yagoda for weeks, the fact that he was running his own secret operations. He could destroy everything.
Shaumian saw the hesitation in Jake's eyes. "I have held them off as long as I can," he said, his voice dropping. "But I cannot hold them off forever. They have called a closed session of the committee to review the matter. You must present Danilov. Tomorrow night. It is the only way to calm their nerves, to put this matter to rest, and to consolidate your own authority."
It was a political ultimatum. Jake had less than thirty-six hours to solve an impossible problem.
He left the bookstore, his mind a cold, churning vortex. He walked through the city, the drizzling rain doing nothing to cool the frantic heat of his thoughts. He needed to send a message. A clear, terrifying message that would silence the dissent before the committee meeting even began. He needed to cut the head off Yagoda's propaganda machine.
By late afternoon, his new apparatus had delivered. Anna's network had identified a key distribution point: a small, back-alley print shop run by a man named Viktor Malenky, a known malcontent who had been a vocal supporter of Orlov's faction. Luka's cross-referencing confirmed it: Danilov had named Malenky as a man who occasionally did illicit printing jobs for the Okhrana for extra cash. He was the lynchpin.
A public abduction was out of the question. Another secret execution would eventually leak, proving the pamphlet's point. The solution had to be deniable. It had to be invisible. It had to look like the random, brutal chaos of the city itself.
He found Kamo in a small, smoky tavern, cleaning his revolver. Jake sat down opposite him, the table between them.
"I need a message sent, Kamo," Jake said, his voice low, barely audible above the tavern's din.
Kamo stopped his work, his eyes narrowing. "What kind of message?"
"A loud one that makes no sound," Jake replied. He explained the situation. The printer, Malenky. The threat he represented. "He needs to disappear. But it cannot come from us. There can be no witnesses, no political statements. It needs to look like an accident. A street robbery gone wrong. Tragic, but common in these dark times."
Kamo stared at him for a long moment, the full, chilling meaning of the order settling in. This wasn't a revolutionary execution. This was a common murder, a piece of street violence orchestrated for a political purpose. It was a new level of cold-blooded pragmatism.
Finally, Kamo nodded slowly. "Robberies happen," he said, his voice a low rumble. "Especially to men who carry their week's earnings home with them after dark."
He stood up, tucked the revolver into his belt, and left the tavern without another word.
Later that night, the printer Viktor Malenky was found in a filth-strewn alley not far from his shop. His pockets had been turned out. His head had been bludgeoned with a loose cobblestone. It was a common, brutal street crime, one of a dozen that would happen in Tbilisi that month. The police would investigate for a day and then forget about it.
But the right people wouldn't forget. Every revolutionary who had secretly received a pamphlet from Malenky, every malcontent who had whispered his agreement in the back of the print shop, would hear the news. And they would know, with a certainty that would chill them to the bone, that it was no robbery. They would know it was a silent, terrifying warning. The invisible hand of Soso's committee, reaching out from the darkness to crush dissent before it could even take root.
The pamphlet distribution would stop. The whispers would die in their throats.
Jake had successfully countered the immediate political threat. He had won another battle in the war of shadows. But as he sat alone in his headquarters, the greater problem remained, now looming larger and more immediate than ever.
The committee still expected to interrogate Danilov tomorrow night. And Danilov was a ticking time bomb who could still destroy him.
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