The message from Tbilisi arrived like a ghost at dawn — a small, clinical report that felt heavier than its paper. Jake decoded it in the thin grey light of his London room. The words were blunt, final.
CONFIRMED. THE PRISONER WAS TRANSFERRED FROM THE TBILISI CITADEL LAST NIGHT. HE IS GONE. YOUR PLAN WORKED.
The plan had worked. The last, awful thread of the Luka gambit had been tied off. The man who knew too much was gone, silenced not by Jake's hand but by the hand of the enemy he'd been trying to expose. It was perfect. Elegant. Monstrous.
Jake struck a match and burned the decoded note. The flame swallowed the words and turned them to black ash that drifted to the sill. He watched the ash fall and felt nothing like relief. Nothing like triumph. Only a hollow cold, the kind that settles after a storm when the landscape is ruined and strange.
He had become a machine at this game. He could pull strings across continents and make the most powerful man in the Empire act as his instrument. He had used state power to erase a comrade. He had done it with surgical calm.
But ghosts would not be indulged. The living were more dangerous.
In St. Petersburg, Pyotr Stolypin sat under a bright, official light and read his morning reports. Colonel Sazonov stood beside him, rigid, presenting folders in order.
"Sir," Sazonov said, "a final report from Tbilisi on Luka Mikeladze."
Stolypin opened the file. The prose was neat, bureaucratic.
Prisoner Mikeladze, identified as a high-risk security threat and the target of a potential rescue/assassination plot by his former comrades, was transferred to a secure, undisclosed location for final sentencing. The threat has been neutralized.
"Expedited his final sentencing," Stolypin murmured. The phrase sat cleanly on the page. How efficient.
Sazonov nodded. "Our asset—'The Accountant'—was correct. His intelligence proved invaluable."
Stolypin's fingers steepled. "Indeed. Invaluable." But his mind was elsewhere. He felt the hum of gears beneath the outward order. Something didn't sit right.
"It is all too neat," he said aloud. "Review the sequence with me." He paced the steps like a man mapping a clock. Asset warns of a traitor named Luka. We capture Luka. Asset warns Luka is target of a plot by his leader, 'Soso.' That warning forces our hand. We expedite sentencing.
He looked at Sazonov. "Either our asset is unbelievably lucky, or someone is playing a very clever game."
Sazonov, a man of action, saw only the result. "Either way, sir, the Bolsheviks are weaker. Another operative gone."
"Or their leader purged a rival, solidified power, and used our apparatus to do it," Stolypin said. A slow smile of calculation touched his mouth. "He made us his executioner. No one gives a service like that for free."
He walked to the great map on the wall and tapped the Caucasus. "That 'secret internal trial' our asset mentioned—fiction, of course. But even a fiction has structure. Protocol implies witnesses, judges, evidence. Structure can be mapped. It has pressure points. It can be broken."
He did not confront the asset. He would not reveal suspicion. He would probe the lie. He would ask for what only a true puppet master could invent.
Two days later a note arrived in London. Jake decoded it with the taste of victory still bitter in his mouth. The message was polite. Academic. Dangerous.
Your intelligence on the Luka affair was exemplary and has solidified your value to our enterprise. To better understand the new power dynamics within the Bolshevik committee, a detailed protocol of Luka's secret party trial is required. Who were the judges? What evidence was presented? Exact charges? These details will be used to sow discord among remaining Menshevik sympathizers.
The room tilted. The request was a trap in white gloves.
Stolypin was asking Jake to invent a legal proceeding that never happened. He wanted minutes from a trial that was a fiction. Jake would have to name judges, call witnesses, and fabricate evidence. One mistake—one name Stolypin could cross-check—would expose the whole deception.
This was not a simple test. It was a demand to open the blueprint of the lie.
Jake read the note again. He felt the vertigo of being cornered by a mind as cold and hungry for detail as his own. Invent the tribunal. Spin the minutes. Make the fiction plausible enough to survive scrutiny.
He folded the paper slowly. Outside, rain turned London's streets to mirrors. Inside, Jake tasted the calculus of survival. The game had changed. The stakes had been raised.
He would answer. He would construct the lie. But he knew now the man he faced was not merely lucky. Soso had learned to use the enemy's own machinery against it. And Stolypin wanted to see the gears.
Jake set the cipher book on the table and, without a tremor, began to imagine a courtroom that never convened, names that had never stood as judges, and proofs that had never been produced.