The waiting was a unique form of torture. For two days after Danilov delivered the first message, a profound and unnerving silence descended upon their operations. Jake's entire strategy, his political survival, the lives of Danilov's sister and nephew—it all hung in a terrible, suspended balance, dependent on the reaction of an unseen, unknown enemy.
Danilov was a wreck. He was kept in the cellar, pacing his small room like a caged animal, starting at every sound, his nerves shredded. He would alternate between fits of sobbing despair and a desperate, fawning obedience, asking Jake over and over again if he had done well, if his family was still safe. Jake treated him with a cold, professional detachment, offering no comfort, only the constant, implicit threat of his leash.
Kamo was a coiled spring of violent impatience. "They are playing with us," he would grumble, cleaning his revolver for the tenth time. "They know it's a trick. They're planning a raid. We should move the arsenal. We should move him."
"No," Jake would reply, his voice always calm, a steady rock in the turbulent waters of their anxiety. "We will not show fear. We will not deviate from our routine. They are watching the city, not just us. Any sign of panic will be read as weakness. We will wait."
But even Jake, the architect of this grand deception, felt the strain. He barely slept. He spent his time poring over the intelligence he had gathered, memorizing the names of Okhrana functionaries, mapping out their networks, trying to build a complete picture of the enemy he was trying to deceive. He was preparing for a battle, but he didn't know what form it would take. His plan, which had seemed so brilliant in its conception, now felt terrifyingly fragile, a house of cards built on the sanity of a broken man.
On the third day, the serpent replied.
Luka, his face impassive as always, delivered the report. "The secondary drop-point. The loose brick in the market wall. A message was left."
The tension in the cellar became electric. Kamo and Jake retrieved the message themselves, taking a long, circuitous route to ensure they weren't followed. The note was a small, tightly folded piece of paper, identical to the ones that had started this whole nightmare.
Back in the secure confines of the cellar, Jake carefully unfolded it. The message was written in the same coded shorthand as the one he had forged. He handed it to Danilov, whose hands were shaking so badly he could barely hold it.
"Read it," Jake commanded.
Danilov stared at the page, his eyes scanning the cryptic symbols. A low moan escaped his lips, and his face, already pale, turned the color of tallow.
"What is it?" Kamo demanded, his hand instinctively going to the gun in his belt. "Is it a trap? New orders?"
"It's a meeting," Danilov whispered, his voice trembling. He looked up at Jake, his eyes wide with a fresh, undiluted terror. "They… they want to meet me. Face to face."
He read the decoded message aloud, his voice cracking. "MEET US. MIDNIGHT. ST. GEORGE CATHEDRAL. BEFORE THE MAIN ALTAR. COME ALONE."
Jake felt a chill run down his spine that had nothing to do with the cellar's dampness. This was wrong. This was a radical break in protocol.
"They never do this," Danilov stammered, shaking his head frantically. "Never. For an asset at my level, everything is done through dead drops. Always. A face-to-face meeting… it's a death sentence. It's a cleanup. They're going to kill me."
Kamo slammed his fist on a crate. "I knew it! The message was a trick to lure him out! They're cutting their losses, Soso! We can't let him go!"
Kamo's conclusion was logical. It was the brute-force assessment of the situation. But Jake's mind was working on a different level, sifting through the layers of deception. He saw something else, something far more dangerous than a simple assassination plot.
The Okhrana of Tbilisi, the one run by the provincial thugs that Orlov had worked with, would do this. They were clumsy, direct, and prone to solving problems with a bullet. But Jake's gambit had cost them their most senior agent, Orlov, and had resulted in a catastrophic, humiliating public failure at the rail yard. A failure of that magnitude would not go unnoticed in St. Petersburg.
The rules had changed. The game had a new player.
"No," Jake said, his voice quiet, thoughtful. "They are not trying to kill him. Not yet."
"What are you talking about?" Kamo growled.
"If they wanted him dead, they would send a man with a knife to his sister's bakery," Jake explained, his cold logic silencing both Kamo and Danilov. "It would be quieter, cleaner. No, this isn't an execution. This is an interview. A test."
He looked at the decoded message again. The crude force of the local Okhrana was gone, replaced by a more sophisticated, more intelligent hand. This was the work of Yagoda, or more likely, Yagoda's new masters. This wasn't the local police captain trying to clean up a mess. This was a professional intelligence officer from the capital.
"They didn't fall for our bait," Jake continued, thinking aloud. "Not completely. The story of an internal feud is too convenient, too perfect. They are suspicious. They are testing the line, Kamo. They want to see who is holding the pole. They want to look their asset in the eye and see if he is still theirs, or if he has been turned."
The full, terrifying implication of the situation settled over the room. Jake was now in a battle of wits not with the thuggish local police, but with a trained, professional spymaster from the very heart of the Tsarist regime.
He was faced with an impossible choice.
If he sent Danilov to the meeting, the man would almost certainly break under the pressure of a professional interrogation. His lies, coached as they were, would fall apart. He would be exposed, and a knife in a dark alley would surely follow—not just for him, but likely for his family as well. The entire double agent gambit would collapse.
But if he didn't send him, if Danilov failed to show up for a direct summons, it would be an unambiguous signal of defiance. It would confirm the Okhrana's worst suspicions. They would know, with absolute certainty, that their asset had been turned. The operation would be blown, and they would immediately begin a new, more aggressive hunt for the force that was controlling him.
He was trapped. Both paths led to disaster.
Jake stared at the decoded message, at the simple, elegant trap that had been laid for him. He looked at the terrified, weeping face of Danilov, the man whose life was now a playing piece in this deadly game. He needed to control the meeting without being present. He needed to be inside Danilov's head, to guide his every word, his every nervous twitch. And that was impossible.
A new, even riskier idea began to form in his mind. An idea born of pure desperation and an almost insane level of self-belief.
He turned to Luka, who had been standing silently in the corner. "The priests at St. George Cathedral," Jake said, his voice suddenly sharp, decisive. "I need a list of every priest, every deacon, every acolyte who serves there. Their names, their schedules. Now."
He then looked at Kamo. "And find me a choir boy's robe. A small one."
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