The act of writing the message was a deeply perverse one. Jake sat at a small, rickety table in the cellar, the lantern light casting his shadow, large and monstrous, against the stone wall. He guided Danilov's trembling hand, dictating the precise, coded language that would condemn men he considered, on some level, to be his comrades. Each symbol he formed felt like a small betrayal, a violation of the revolutionary solidarity he, Jake Vance, the idealistic history teacher, had once lectured his students about.
But Jake Vance was a ghost now, a faint echo in a pragmatic machine. The man in control, the man who called himself Soso, saw only the cold, hard lines of the grand chessboard. He saw a necessary sacrifice. The Mensheviks were a weak piece, poorly positioned and cluttering the board. By sacrificing them to his opponent's queen, he could improve his own position, gain a tempo, and prepare for the more critical stages of the game.
The message was sent the next morning, passed through the new, sophisticated dead-drop protocol Stolypin's agent had provided. It was an act of casting a stone into a deep, dark well. All they could do now was wait for the splash.
For two days, a tense quiet settled over the city's revolutionary underground. The Bolsheviks, under Jake's iron-fisted but invisible control, went about their business with a newfound discipline. The Mensheviks, oblivious, continued to argue in their talking circles and distribute their pamphlets calling for a broad, democratic coalition. To Jake, who knew what was coming, their hopeful idealism seemed like a tragic, pitiable naivety.
The splash came on the third night. It was not a quiet ripple; it was a tidal wave.
News tore through the city like a fire. A massive, coordinated Okhrana raid. Not on a Bolshevik target, but on the Mensheviks' central committee headquarters, a supposedly secure apartment above a bakery. The raid was brutally efficient. A dozen of the Mensheviks' key leaders and organizers in Tbilisi were dragged out in chains. Worse, the Okhrana had seized their primary printing press, the lifeblood of their propaganda efforts, along with membership lists and financial records.
In a single, decapitating strike, the Menshevik faction in Tbilisi had been crippled, perhaps permanently.
The next morning, in the Bolshevik Central Committee, the atmosphere was thick with a grim, secret satisfaction. Outwardly, they expressed outrage and solidarity. Stepan Shaumian drafted a powerful statement condemning the "latest act of Tsarist tyranny against our revolutionary brothers." But behind the closed doors of their own meetings, the mood was different.
"A tragedy," one committee member said, stroking his beard, a poorly concealed smile playing on his lips. "But one that clarifies the situation. Their weakness was a liability to us all."
"Their calls for compromise with the liberals were always a poison," another added. "Perhaps this will teach the workers who the true vanguard of the revolution is."
They all looked at Jake. He sat silently through their posturing, his face a mask of solemn gravity. He was the only one in the room who knew the truth, and his silence gave him an aura of immense, almost mystical power. They didn't know the details, but they suspected. They saw him as a man playing a game so deep, so complex, that they could only guess at his moves. He had somehow steered the Okhrana's wrath away from them and onto their chief rivals. He was not just a security chief; he was their protector, their shepherd, their Machiavellian prince. His authority, already absolute, became something more. It became legendary.
Later, Shaumian approached him privately. "Soso," he said, his voice a low murmur. "Your… asset. Danilov. This was his work?"
"He provided the intelligence that allowed us to anticipate the Okhrana's target," Jake replied, using the carefully constructed half-truth. "It is fortunate that their focus was not on us."
Shaumian nodded slowly, his intelligent eyes studying Jake's face. "Fortunate indeed," he said. He did not ask for more details. He did not want to know. It was enough that Soso's dark work was producing results, strengthening the party. He granted Jake an even larger discretionary budget for his "Security Committee," asking no questions about how it would be spent.
The political victory was total. But the personal cost was immediate and corrosive. That afternoon, Jake was obliged to attend a broad, inter-party meeting to discuss a unified response to the raids. The room was filled with the remaining Mensheviks, their faces a mixture of grief, fear, and impotent rage.
He had to stand before them and deliver a speech filled with feigned sympathy and fiery condemnations of the Tsar. Each word felt like acid on his tongue. He was a masterful hypocrite, his performance flawless. After the meeting, Noah Jordania, the dignified, silver-haired leader of the Georgian Mensheviks, approached him. His own son had been among those arrested.
Jordania's eyes were red-rimmed, but he stood tall. "Thank you for your words of support, Comrade Soso," he said, extending a hand. "In these dark times, solidarity is all we have."
Jake took the man's hand. It was warm and dry. He looked into the grieving father's face, into the eyes of a man whose life he had just deliberately shattered, and he felt… nothing. A cold, terrifying emptiness. The part of him that should have recoiled in guilt, the part that was still Jake Vance, was silent. It was as if it had been locked away in a distant, soundproof room. All that was left was the cold pragmatist who saw the handshake as a necessary political gesture. The act of shaking the hand of the man he had betrayed chipped away another, larger piece of his soul, and he barely even noticed it was gone.
He was walking back to his headquarters, the empty victory leaving a bitter taste in his mouth, when Kamo caught up with him, a folded piece of paper in his hand.
"A reply," Kamo said, his voice low. "From the new drop-point."
Jake took the message, his heart beginning to pound with a familiar, cold dread. He had proven his asset's worth to his new masters. Now, they would give him his new task. He unfolded the paper and decoded the simple, elegant script.
It was not a request for more information on local factions or arms caches. Stolypin was finished with provincial matters. The message contained a single, chilling question. It was a question that leaped over the Caucasus, over Russia, over the entire continent, and landed in a small, smoky room in London.
The message read: "What is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov's current thinking on the agrarian question?"
Jake froze in the middle of the street, the decoded message trembling in his hand. Stolypin was no longer interested in the pawns and rooks in Tbilisi. He was now using Jake, his new, valued asset, to gather intelligence on the Bolshevik's king himself. The game had just expanded from a regional skirmish to the entire global stage.
To be the first to know about future sequels and new projects, google my official author blog: Waystar Novels.