Jake found a moment of solitude in a small, unused vestry at the back of the church. The air was cold and smelled of dust and decaying velvet. He sat on a hard wooden bench, the distant, muffled roar of the Congress a world away. His hands, usually so steady, trembled slightly as he unfolded the note from Tbilisi. The message, relayed from Kamo, was written in their now-familiar code. He deciphered it quickly, his mind translating the cryptic symbols into a new, terrifying reality.
Asset has new directive from St. Petersburg. Urgent.
He stared at the words, a cold knot tightening in his gut. The relative quiet of the past few weeks, the steady stream of low-level, fabricated intelligence he had scripted for Danilov, had been a prelude. The real test had just arrived. He burned the initial message with a match, then deciphered the second, longer part of the communication, which contained the directive itself.
As he read, the cold knot in his stomach turned to ice. This was not a simple request for information. It was a move of diabolical, strategic genius.
Stolypin's message, filtered through Danilov and Kamo, began with a word of praise, a baited hook. "Your information on Lenin's agrarian position was of the highest value and has been well received. Your utility is confirmed."
Then came the razor blade hidden in the honey. "We now have an opportunity to permanently cripple the revolutionary movement from within. Our intelligence has confirmed the primary operational centers of two key terrorist factions. The Socialist Revolutionaries have their main bomb-making factory in a Geneva safe house, where their entire combat organization is currently gathered. Separately, the Bolshevik Combat Organization, under your comrade Krasin, has its primary illegal arms cache in a warehouse in Moscow. We only have the resources and political capital for one major strike at this time. Your mission is to provide an analysis. Which target, if eliminated, would cause the most catastrophic, long-term damage to the overall revolutionary cause? Your assessment will determine our next major operation."
Jake read the message three times, a wave of cold sweat prickling his skin despite the church's chill. It was the most perfect, elegant trap he had ever seen. It was not a test of his knowledge; it was a test of his soul, a demand that he place his own head in a philosophical noose.
His mind, conditioned now to deconstruct such threats, immediately broke the trap down into its component parts, each one a path to his own destruction.
First, if he advised Stolypin to strike the Socialist Revolutionaries in Geneva. This would be the logical move for a loyal Bolshevik. He would be using the state's power to eliminate his party's chief rival on the violent, radical flank. It would be a huge victory for his faction. But in doing so, he would reveal his true nature to Stolypin. He would prove that he was, first and foremost, a Bolshevik partisan, not an objective state asset. He would be useful, but his loyalties would be clear, his future actions predictable. And a predictable agent was a controllable one.
Second, if he advised Stolypin to strike the Bolshevik Combat Organization in Moscow. This would be the ultimate act of betrayal, sacrificing his own comrades—the party's most dedicated and violent fighters, men personally loyal to Lenin and overseen by his new ally, Krasin. To do so would be to prove to Stolypin that he was a truly objective and ruthless asset, a man whose loyalty was to his mission, not to his comrades. He would become Stolypin's most valuable agent. He would also become a monstrous traitor, responsible for the deaths of his own people. Even if his secret was never discovered, he wasn't sure he could live with the knowledge.
Third, if he refused to answer, or if he provided a vague, non-committal analysis. This would be the worst of all. It would signal incompetence or, more likely, disloyalty. Stolypin, a man who did not tolerate ambiguity, would assume the entire double agent operation was a sham. The trust he had carefully cultivated would evaporate. The hunt for the true force controlling Danilov would begin in earnest, and the full weight of Stolypin's new, centralized security apparatus would come crashing down on them.
He was trapped. Stolypin had presented him with a fork in the road where all three paths led off a cliff. He was being asked to profile himself, to declare his allegiance, and every possible answer was a loss.
For a long moment, the old Jake Vance surfaced, whispering of the sheer impossibility, the utter hopelessness of his situation. He felt a wave of despair so profound it was almost paralyzing.
But then, the new Jake, the man who called himself Stalin, took control. He stood up and began to pace the small, dusty room. He was not a man who chose between bad options. He was a man who created new ones.
He had to find a fourth path. An answer that was completely unexpected, that demonstrated a level of strategic thinking even Stolypin would not have anticipated, and that, most importantly, secretly served his own interests.
His mind sifted through his historical knowledge, searching for an event, a piece of leverage, a detail from the future that he could deploy in the present. He thought of Kamo, his ruthless, loyal, and currently underutilized enforcer back in Tbilisi. He thought of the Bolsheviks' desperate, constant need for funds. And then he found it. The 1907 Tiflis bank robbery. Kamo's most infamous and successful "expropriation." An event that, in his timeline, was just a few weeks away from happening. An event that Stolypin could not possibly know about.
A new, audacious, and terrifyingly risky answer began to form in his mind.
He sat back down, his hands now perfectly steady. He took out his small cipher book and a pen. He began to craft his reply, a message that he would send back to Kamo to be relayed through Danilov.
"Your question is flawed," the reply began, an opening of breathtaking arrogance. "You ask me whether to cut off the serpent's left head or its right. I tell you to ignore the heads and strike at the heart that feeds them both."
He continued, laying out his prophetic bait. "Both the SR bomb-makers and the Bolshevik combat squads are preparing for a new wave of terror. But they are currently inert. They lack one crucial element: funding. My intelligence indicates that the true center of gravity for both organizations' immediate future is not in Geneva or Moscow, but back in my own city. A massive fundraising operation is being planned. A bank expropriation in Tiflis. It is this action, scheduled for the coming weeks, that is intended to fund the next year of terrorist activity for multiple factions."
He paused, crafting the final, brilliant stroke. "To seize the money from this robbery is to financially decapitate both the SRs and our own party's radicals at once. Forget the arms caches and the bomb factories. They are useless without gold. Strike at the source. Strike in Tiflis."
The answer was a work of diabolical genius. It avoided the A/B trap completely. It made him look like he possessed an almost supernatural level of forward-looking intelligence. And most critically, it redirected Stolypin's immense, threatening power away from the party's vital centers in Geneva and Moscow and focused it back onto his own home turf: Tbilisi. A city where he, and he alone, controlled the flow of information, the key assets, and the entire narrative. He was about to "predict" and "betray" his own party's most famous historical operation, all in a desperate, high-stakes gamble to save it.
He encoded the message. He had just placed an enormous bet, a wager that gambled the lives of Kamo and his men against his own ability to manipulate history in real-time.
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