The coded message was a single, brutal sentence, a death knell transmitted across a continent. Jake stared at the decoded words—THEY TOOK LUKA—and the noisy, chaotic world of the Party Congress, the passionate debates and the political maneuvering, simply ceased to exist. All that remained was a cold, silent, roaring panic in his own mind.
Luka. Not a random soldier. Not a disposable asset. Luka, the quiet observer, the first man he had personally recruited for his security committee. The man who had stood with him in the tannery, his face grim with resolve, as they planned the purge. The man who had witnessed the execution of Danilov's predecessor. The man who had seen the Fikus operation from the inside. The man who knew, with firsthand certainty, that Danilov was not a loyal Bolshevik, but a captured assassin who had been turned.
Luka didn't just know some of the secrets. He knew all of the secrets. He was not just a thread that could unravel a small part of the tapestry; he was the foundational knot. If he was pulled, the entire intricate, blood-soaked enterprise would come undone.
Jake's mind, now honed by months of paranoia and crisis, became a frantic engine of analysis. He shoved his own personal feelings of dread and betrayal—Luka was a good man, a loyal man—into a cold, dark box. Sentiment was a luxury he could not afford. He had to analyze the threat.
Luka was brave, but he was not Kamo. He was not a man forged in the crucible of violence. He was a thinker, an observer. Under the methodical, scientific application of pain by the Okhrana's specialists, he would break. It was not a question of if, but when. Days? Hours? And when he broke, he would tell them everything. The complete, unvarnished, and utterly unbelievable truth.
The truth would be a weapon in the hands of his enemies. Not just Stolypin, but his rivals within the party. The story Luka would tell—of a secret leader manipulating the party, sacrificing informants, orchestrating executions, and running his own double agent against the state—was so monstrously conspiratorial that it would be his undoing. He would be exposed as a viper they had nurtured in their midst.
His first move, he knew, had to be to control the narrative here, in London, before the shockwave from Tbilisi arrived. He had to compartmentalize the crisis. He found Leonid Krasin in a small pub, deep in a technical discussion about the chemical composition of dynamite with another operative.
Jake pulled him aside, his expression a mask of grim, controlled urgency. "Comrade Krasin," he began, his voice a low whisper. "I have received a troubling report from Tbilisi. There were… complications during the extraction of the funds. One of my key financial operatives was captured during the retreat."
He chose his words with surgical precision. "Financial operative." "Extraction of the funds." He was deliberately framing the crisis in terms Krasin would understand and prioritize: a threat to the money.
Krasin's calm, professional demeanor instantly sharpened. "How much does he know? Does he know the routes you planned to move the gold out of the country?"
"He knows the primary and secondary routes," Jake lied, building the fiction on the fly. "We must assume that under interrogation, he will reveal them. The entire fund is at risk. The money must be moved from its current location immediately. It must be passed through the network to your people in Berlin before the Okhrana can act on this intelligence."
It was a brilliant piece of misdirection. By creating a five-alarm fire around the money, he was ensuring Krasin and the other leaders would be too distracted to ask inconvenient questions about the captured man himself. He was also making himself seem like a responsible, security-conscious leader, proactively managing a crisis. Most importantly, he was further binding Krasin to his conspiracy, making him a partner not just in receiving the funds, but in laundering them from this new, invented threat.
"I understand," Krasin said, his face a grim mask. "I will send the necessary directives at once. You have done well to inform me so quickly, Comrade Stalin."
One fire was contained. Now he had to face the inferno.
He returned to his small, spartan room, the full, terrifying scope of the problem crashing down on him. Stolypin. In a matter of days, the Tsar's Prime Minister would be receiving two wildly contradictory streams of intelligence. From the interrogation rooms of Tbilisi, he would receive the raw, unbelievable truth from the tortured Luka. And from his "trusted asset," Danilov, he would continue to receive Jake's carefully crafted fiction about party infighting.
When those two reports landed on his desk, the contradiction would be absolute. He would know, with certainty, that Danilov was a double agent and that he, Stolypin, had been played for a fool. The game would be over. The hunt for the puppet master would begin with the full, terrifying resources of the Russian state.
Jake paced the small room, a caged wolf. He could not stop the interrogation. He could not rescue Luka. Therefore, he had to control the outcome of the interrogation. He had to find a way to discredit Luka's testimony before Stolypin ever heard it. He had to poison the well.
A plan began to form in his mind. A plan of such breathtaking cynicism, of such profound and calculated cruelty, that it made all his previous gambits seem like child's play. He would not just sacrifice Luka's life; he would sacrifice his very identity, his reputation, his soul. He would use his own direct line to Stolypin to betray his own captured man, to frame him so perfectly that his every truthful word would be heard as a lie.
He sat down at his small table, his heart a cold, heavy stone in his chest. He took out his cipher book and began to compose the most dangerous message he had ever written, a message to be sent to Kamo, who would then pass the instructions to Danilov. He was about to perform psychological surgery on the Prime Minister of Russia from a thousand miles away.
The message for Danilov to send was a work of diabolical genius. It had to be timed perfectly, to arrive on Stolypin's desk just before the first interrogation reports from Luka could.
"URGENT OPERATIONAL UPDATE," he began, framing it as a message of critical importance from a loyal asset. "A CRISIS HAS DEVELOPED. MY LEADER, SOSO, HAS UNCOVERED A HIGH-LEVEL TRAITOR WITHIN HIS OWN INNER CIRCLE. A MAN NAMED LUKA."
He was proactively betraying his own man, seizing control of the narrative before the enemy even knew what the narrative was.
"EVIDENCE SUGGESTS LUKA HAS BEEN SECRETLY WORKING FOR THE MENSHEVIKS, FEEDING THEM OUR PLANS AND ATTEMPTING TO SOW DISCORD. HE IS THE SOURCE OF THE RUMORS AGAINST SOSO'S LEADERSHIP. SOSO HAS ORDERED A SECRET INTERNAL PARTY TRIAL TO EXPOSE AND EXECUTE HIM. THE SITUATION IS VOLATILE."
He laid out the final, brilliant stroke, a move designed to make Danilov seem utterly indispensable.
"THIS PRESENTS A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY FOR ME. SOSO HAS TASKED ME, DUE TO MY 'PROVEN LOYALTY' AFTER THE ORLOV AFFAIR, TO BE PART OF THE TEAM GUARDING THE PRISONER UNTIL HIS TRIAL. THIS WILL ALLOW ME TO GAIN SOSO'S ULTIMATE TRUST. I WILL BE AT THE VERY CENTER OF HIS INNER CIRCLE. I WILL REPORT MORE AS THE SITUATION DEVELOPS."
The message was a perfect trap. When Stolypin received the field report about the capture of a man named Luka, it would seem to perfectly corroborate his asset's intelligence. And when the interrogation reports began to arrive, filled with Luka's wild, fantastic, and entirely true stories of Soso's grand conspiracies, Stolypin would read them through the lens Jake had just provided. He wouldn't hear the truth. He would hear the desperate, elaborate lies of a captured Menshevik agent trying to sow chaos and discredit his rivals before his execution.
Jake stared at the encoded message, the death warrant for Luka's reputation and soul. He was betting everything on his own ability to out-think, out-maneuver, and out-manipulate one of the most intelligent and ruthless men in the Russian Empire.