Two weeks passed in a state of suspended animation. The letter to Lenin was gone, a message in a bottle cast into the revolutionary sea, and all Jake could do was wait. The waiting was a quiet, grinding agony, a constant, low-level hum of anxiety beneath the surface of his daily work.
He used the time to consolidate, to transform his nascent security committee from a reactive squad into a proactive intelligence network. He drilled his agents—Luka, Anna, and the others—in the arts of surveillance and information gathering. He built his mental database, cross-referencing Danilov's intel with the whispers Luka gathered from the taverns and the faces Anna spotted in the markets. He was becoming an administrator of paranoia, the spider at the center of a growing web.
To keep the line to Stolypin warm, he had Danilov send a series of low-level, entirely plausible reports. There is a dispute over the funds from the last expropriation. The rail-yard workers are growing impatient with the bakers' guild. Soso met with the Menshevik Jordania, a sign of a potential temporary truce. Each report was a carefully crafted piece of fiction, designed to be just interesting enough to be credible but not important enough to require immediate action. He was feeding the beast, keeping it satisfied but not sated.
The reply from Stolypin, when it came, was not what he expected. It wasn't a demand for the promised intelligence on Lenin, nor was it a new set of questions. It was something far more insidious, far more dangerous.
The message, retrieved by Kamo from the now-familiar dead drop, was brief. Jake decoded it in the cellar, his brow furrowed in concentration.
"Your reports on the party's factionalism are proving useful," the decoded message read. "It is clear you are surrounded by volatile and unreliable elements. To aid in your efforts to… manage… them, we have arranged a gift. A crate of brand-new Browning FN Model 1903 pistols is being held by a sympathetic customs officer at the port of Batumi. He is one of ours. You are to arrange collection. Consider it a sign of our mutual trust."
Kamo read the message over Jake's shoulder, a slow, wolfish grin spreading across his face. "By the devil, Soso! He believes us! He completely trusts Danilov!" He clapped Jake on the back, the force of it nearly sending him sprawling. "This is a victory! Stolypin is now arming us to fight his other enemies! The fool!"
But Jake felt no sense of victory. He felt a cold dread seep into his bones. He stared at the decoded message, but he wasn't reading the words; he was reading the mind of the man who had sent them. And he saw the glint of a finely wrought trap.
His mind raced, a rapid-fire analysis of the possibilities, a silent, frantic chess game played out in the space of a few heartbeats.
First, there was the obvious trap, the amateur's move: The "sympathetic officer" was a lie. The crate of guns was bait. The moment his men showed up to collect it, the warehouse would be swarmed by Okhrana agents, and his best operatives would be captured or killed. It was a simple, brutal way to test the loyalty and intelligence of his new asset. A professional like Stolypin would expect his agent to be smart enough to anticipate this.
Then, there was the more sophisticated trap: The guns were real. The customs officer was real. The exchange would go smoothly. But the weapons would be marked. Every pistol's serial number would be recorded in a ledger in St. Petersburg. The moment one of those guns was used in a bank robbery, an assassination, or any revolutionary action, the Okhrana would have a direct, irrefutable link back to his faction. They would have proof of collaboration, a weapon they could use to destroy him and discredit the entire Bolshevik party at a time of their choosing.
But the true trap, Jake realized, was the third one. The psychological one. Stolypin, being a master of the game, would have anticipated both of the first two scenarios. He would know that a truly cautious and intelligent revolutionary leader would see the risks and refuse the gift. And that was the test. To refuse the guns would be to signal distrust. It would tell Stolypin that his asset, Danilov, was being controlled by a mind that was too cautious, too paranoid… too smart. It would effectively end the double agent relationship before it had even truly begun.
He was being tested. Stolypin was measuring his greed, his ambition, and his courage. To refuse was to fail the test by being too timid. To accept was to walk willingly into one of the first two traps. It was a perfect, elegant checkmate.
Kamo, seeing the grim expression on Jake's face, felt his own elation curdle. "What is it, Soso? You see something I don't."
"I see a box with a serpent inside, Kamo," Jake said quietly, his eyes still fixed on the message. "And we are being dared to open it."
He explained the layers of deception, the traps within traps. Kamo listened, his expression shifting from confusion to a grim, grudging respect for the enemy's cunning.
"So we refuse," Kamo stated, his voice flat. "It is the only safe move."
"No," Jake said, a new, dangerous light entering his eyes. "Refusal is what a cautious man would do. It is what a predictable man would do. We will not be predictable." He stood up and began to pace, the energy in the room shifting from passive analysis to active creation. "We cannot refuse his gift, and we cannot accept it on his terms. So we will find a third way. We will accept the gift, and then we will give it to someone else."
He turned to Kamo, a cold, predatory smile on his face. "We will not collect the guns for ourselves, my friend. We will broker a sale."
Kamo was stunned into silence. "Sell them? Our own guns? To who?"
"To the people Stolypin hates almost as much as he hates us," Jake said, his plan crystallizing with a terrifying clarity. "The Armenian Dashnaks. The Dashnaktsutyun. They are fighting their own war against the Tsar. They are disorganized, but they are desperate for modern weapons. And they have money from their own expropriations."
He laid out the final, audacious stroke. "We will use one of Danilov's worthless low-level contacts, a man we are willing to sacrifice, to broker a secret arms deal in Batumi. Our man will never know who he is truly working for. The Dashnaks will get their crate of brand-new Browning pistols. The Bolshevik party will get a briefcase full of gold rubles to fund our real operations. And Stolypin's marked guns will eventually turn up in the hands of a completely different revolutionary group, sowing chaos, confusion, and paranoia within the Okhrana's intelligence files."
He looked at Kamo, his eyes gleaming. "We will turn his poisoned gift into our own profit. He will have no way of knowing what truly happened. He will be left to wonder if we are the most brilliant strategists he has ever faced, or just the luckiest, clumsiest fools in the Caucasus. And that uncertainty, Kamo… that uncertainty is a weapon."
The sheer, breathtaking risk of the plan was matched only by its genius. It was a move that went beyond simple counter-espionage. It was a leap into a new level of grand strategy, a gambit designed not just to survive the enemy's move, but to profit from it, to turn the weapon back on its creator, and to drive the master of the game mad with doubt.
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