The Fifth Party Congress was a war of words, a grinding, exhausting battle fought with resolutions, amendments, and procedural motions. In the grand, echoing space of the Hackney church, Jake played his part as Stalin, the disciplined politician. He sat through tedious debates on party statutes, his face a mask of stern concentration. He delivered short, forceful interventions on behalf of Lenin's faction, his arguments always practical, always grounded in the cold, hard realities of the struggle. He was the perfect image of a loyal, no-nonsense Bolshevik, a man of action growing into a man of politics.
But his mind was elsewhere. With every passing hour, his thoughts drifted thousands of miles to the east, to the sun-baked, dusty streets of Tbilisi. His real work, his true, high-stakes gambit, was being conducted through the secret, fragile channels of the revolutionary underground. He was a conductor leading a phantom orchestra, his baton a series of cryptic, coded messages sent out into the darkness.
In a grimy safe house in Tbilisi, Kamo received the latest of these messages. He decoded it by the light of a single, sputtering candle, his brow furrowed in concentration. The authorization had come through: PROCEED WITH OPERATION BEAR. But it was the final, chilling lines that made his blood run cold. EXPECT HEAVY RESISTANCE. ENEMY HAS FOREKNOWLEDGE. PROCEED ACCORDINGly. TRUST NO ONE.
Kamo stared at the decoded message, the words seeming to writhe on the page. Soso's warnings were never idle. If he said the enemy knew, then they knew. Kamo was being ordered to walk into a prepared ambush. A lesser man would have questioned the order, would have seen it as a suicide mission. But Kamo's faith in Soso's strategic genius was now absolute. He did not see a death sentence; he saw a puzzle, a challenge. Soso was not sending him to die; he was testing him, trusting him to be smart enough to survive a trap that he, Soso, had already foreseen.
The knowledge was both terrifying and liberating. He was no longer just a bank robber planning a heist. He was a guerrilla commander preparing for a complex military engagement against a forewarned enemy.
Meanwhile, Jake, his mind split between two worlds, continued his work in London. He could not afford to send Kamo specific details of the trap, as any intercepted message that was too precise would expose his own omniscience, his impossible source of information. He had to guide his friend's hand from a distance, using the tools of suggestion and analysis, framing his life-saving intelligence as deductions from the London center.
His next message, sent a few days later, was a masterpiece of this subtle manipulation. To the Tbilisi Committee, it began, giving it the official weight of a party directive. London Center's analysis of recent Okhrana actions in the Caucasus suggests a significant tactical shift. Under pressure from St. Petersburg to deal with our 'expropriation' activities, they are moving away from static guard posts on high-value targets. Instead, they are relying on rapid-response Cossack cavalry patrols, hidden in side streets, ready to converge on any disturbance. Any future operations must account for this. Expect threats to emerge from the flanks, not from the front.
He was, of course, describing the precise historical details of the Tiflis bank robbery, but presenting it as brilliant strategic analysis.
He followed it with another message two days later. Further intelligence suggests the new police chief, under direct orders from Stolypin's ministry, is making a show of cracking down on bank transfer security. We can therefore anticipate that any major currency movements will be conducted with a much larger armed escort than has been traditional. Do not underestimate their numbers.
His final message was a piece of pure ideological manipulation, a direct order disguised as a Leninist principle. It is the consensus of the Central Committee that a successful revolutionary action is defined not by the material gains, but by the preservation of our dedicated cadres. Securing funds is a secondary objective to securing the lives of our revolutionaries. All future operational plans must prioritize clean and redundant extraction routes above all else. A plan without an escape is not Bolshevism; it is anarchistic adventurism.
Back in Tbilisi, Kamo absorbed these directives not as warnings about a specific event, but as a new strategic doctrine handed down from on high. And as a brilliant guerrilla tactician, he immediately began to adapt his existing plan for the bank robbery, a plan that had, until now, been a model of simple, brutal efficiency.
His original idea had been to simply ambush the coach in Erevan Square and shoot it out with the guards. Now, armed with Soso's "analysis," he saw how suicidal that would have been. He gathered his team, his face grim. "The plan has changed," he announced.
He took Jake's warnings to heart. He assigned a half-dozen of his men to do nothing but watch the side streets and alleys leading into the square, their only job to signal the approach of the cavalry patrols Soso had warned him about. He scrapped his plan for a simple firefight and replaced it with something far more complex and devastating. He acquired more bombs, not to throw at the bank coach, but to be used as tactical weapons, to create chaos and block the very streets the cavalry would use to charge. He spent two full days obsessively mapping, walking, and memorizing every alley, doorway, and sewer grate within a mile of the square, designing three separate, redundant escape routes for his team.
He was still walking into a trap. But thanks to the invisible hand of his conductor in London, he was now preparing for a battle on a completely different scale.
In a clean, well-lit office in the Tbilisi Okhrana headquarters, a different kind of planning was underway. Captain Valerian Rostov, a professional, ambitious officer recently transferred from St. Petersburg to oversee the new anti-terrorist directorate in the region, looked at the map of Erevan Square with supreme confidence. The intelligence he had received from the capital, forwarded from their new high-level asset, was perfect. He knew the target, the approximate time, and the revolutionary responsible: the infamous Kamo.
"They are violent, but they are predictable," Rostov explained to his lieutenants. "They will try to block the coach and engage the guards in a simple firefight." He laid out his own, elegant trap. "Our men will be positioned on the rooftops. A perfect kill box. The moment the first shot is fired, Captain Suladze's Cossacks," he said, tapping a side street, "will charge from here, and Lieutenant Orbeliani's from here. They will be caught in a crossfire, pinned down, and annihilated."
He was smart, professional, and utterly confident. He had been handed a gift from Stolypin himself, a chance to wipe out the Bolsheviks' entire combat wing in one clean, decisive action. His only blind spot, the one fatal flaw in his perfect plan, was the unshakable belief that his intelligence was exclusive.
The sun rose on the appointed day. In London, Jake, looking pale and sleep-deprived, was preparing to give a short, forceful speech on party discipline to the assembled Congress. In Tbilisi, Kamo and his twenty-man team, their pockets heavy with bombs and their coats bulging with Mauser pistols, were moving like ghosts through the morning crowds, taking up their positions around Erevan Square. The stage was set. The actors were in place. The hunter and the hunted were both perfectly prepared for the coming battle. But only one of them knew that he was being watched, and guided, by an invisible conductor, a ghost from the future, thousands of miles away.