The decoded words on the page seemed to burn with a cold, black fire. A loyal whelp. I will find a use for him.
For a long moment, Jake did not move. He simply stared at the message, the sounds of his London room—the gentle hiss of the gas lamp, the distant rattle of a carriage on the street below—fading into a dull, meaningless hum. The cold, calculating mind that had just brokered the future of the Bolshevik party, the mind that was methodically weaving a web around the Prime Minister of the Russian Empire, had shut down. In its place, a memory, sharp and unwanted, tore through him.
He was back in the filthy Tbilisi alleyway, the coppery stench of blood thick in his nostrils. Gunpowder smoke stung his eyes. And through the haze, he saw Giorgi. The boy was propped against a brick wall, his face a mask of chalk-white shock, his eyes wide and vacant, staring at the mangled bodies of the Okhrana agents. A dark stain was spreading across the sleeve of his thin coat where a stray piece of shrapnel had torn into his arm. He hadn't been crying. He hadn't been screaming. He had been utterly, terrifyingly silent, a child whose soul had been overloaded and had simply gone dark.
Jake had done that. He had taken a boy and used him as a piece of machinery in a monstrous equation. It was his first true, monstrous act, the moment he had crossed a line from which there was no return. He had compartmentalized it, buried it under layers of political necessity and strategic urgency. But a ghost, he was discovering, does not stay buried forever.
Kamo's casual words were a promise of further violation. To Kamo, a man forged in the crucible of revolutionary violence, Giorgi was no longer a child. He was an asset. His trauma was not a wound to be healed, but a feature to be exploited. A boy who had seen hell and survived was a boy who could be sent back there without complaint. He was a perfect, disposable soldier in the making.
A fierce, protective instinct, a feeling Jake hadn't truly felt since Kato had walked out of his life, surged through him. It was an echo of the man he used to be—the teacher who would stay late to help a struggling student, the man who believed in second chances. It was a completely irrational, tactically unsound emotion in this new world he inhabited. It was a weakness.
And he acted on it instantly.
He ignored the other decoded messages on his table. This took priority. He pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and his encryption key, his movements swift and precise. He could not write, Kamo, for the love of God, the boy is just a child, keep him safe. Kamo would see that as sentimentality, as weakness. It would raise questions Jake could not afford to answer.
He had to translate his humanity into the cold, hard language of the machine. The Stalin persona, his armor, had to be the one to give the order.
His pen scratched across the paper, forming the coded symbols. The message was short, brutal, and framed in the unassailable logic of security.
To Kamo. Priority. Re: Asset Giorgi.
Your assessment is noted. However, the asset is now a high-level security risk. His direct involvement in the Okhrana ambush makes him a known face. His psychological state is unreliable. He has seen too much of our operational methods and personnel. His continued use in active or courier operations presents an unacceptable liability. He is a compromised element.
Directive: Effective immediately, reassign Giorgi to a permanent, non-combat, low-visibility role. The central print shop or the kitchens. He is not to leave the primary safe house. He is not to be used as a messenger. This is a security protocol, not a suggestion. Acknowledge receipt.
He finished, his hand steady, his face an impassive mask. He had used the language of paranoia and control, the very tools of the monster he was becoming, to perform an act of mercy. It was a twisted, perverse kind of salvation. He had just declared a traumatized child a security risk to save him from becoming a child soldier.
He encrypted the message and set it aside for the courier. The immediate crisis was handled. The fire was out. He took a deep breath, forcing the image of Giorgi from his mind, and turned back to the primary task at hand, the grander, more important war.
He reached for the document he and Shaumian had so carefully crafted: the forged protocol of Luka's secret trial. He spread it out under the lamplight. It was a work of art, a masterpiece of bureaucratic fiction. The formal letterhead, the numbered clauses, the dense, jargon-laden text describing evidence that never existed and testimony that was never given.
As he reviewed it, preparing to distill its contents into a report for Danilov, the unsettling feeling about Giorgi was replaced by something else: the cold, intoxicating pride of the master craftsman. He admired the perfect, interlocking structure of the lie. The list of judges—Stalin, Kamo, Shaumian—was a brilliant touch. It presented Stolypin with a perfect image of his adversary's inner circle: the strategist, the enforcer, and the ideologue. A triumvirate of revolutionary power.
He imagined Stolypin's analysts in St. Petersburg, their clever, educated minds poring over this data. They would be building charts, drafting profiles, attempting to map the psychology of the man known as 'Soso.' And every conclusion they drew, every insight they believed they had gained, would be based entirely on this elaborate fiction he had constructed. He was not merely hiding from his enemy; he was building the enemy's conception of him from the ground up. He was the architect of his own myth. The sheer intellectual arrogance of it was thrilling. The fear he'd felt when he first received Stolypin's demand now seemed a distant memory, replaced by the cool confidence of a grandmaster who sees the entire board.
With meticulous care, he composed the message for Danilov to transmit. It was a dry, factual summary of the phantom tribunal, designed to sound like an informant's report.
Re: Luka Mikeladze affair. Protocol of internal party trial obtained. Tribunal consisted of Soso (as head of Security Committee), Kamo (representing Combat Organization), and Shaumian (representing Central Committee). Charges were: conspiracy with Menshevik agents to undermine party unity and divulging strategic information. Evidence presented included intercepted correspondence and witness testimony of clandestine meetings. Verdict was unanimous. Execution carried out by Kamo, as per the combat wing's prerogative in matters of treason.
He added that last detail with a flicker of cruel genius. It was perfect. It reinforced Kamo's public reputation as the party's brutal hatchet man, and it kept Soso's own hands symbolically clean, portraying him as the cold, decisive judge, not the executioner. It was a detail so plausible, so true to their characters, that it would anchor the entire lie in a bedrock of perceived reality.
He finished encrypting the message and placed it with the one for Kamo. The work was done. His deceptions were in motion. He had secured Lenin's control of the party, bribed his greatest rival into compliance, and turned his enemy's most dangerous test into a stunning strategic victory. By all accounts, he should feel triumphant, invincible.
He leaned back in his chair, the adrenaline of the past few hours finally beginning to fade, leaving a strange quiet in its wake. He had successfully manipulated the titans of his age, from Trotsky to Stolypin. He was the ghost in the machine, the unseen hand guiding the levers of power.
But as he sat in the silence of his room, the hiss of the gas lamp the only sound, his final thought was not of Lenin's gratitude or Trotsky's ambition. It wasn't even of Stolypin, patiently waiting in St. Petersburg for a report on a trial that never happened.
His mind drifted back to a dark, smoky kitchen in Tbilisi. He pictured a quiet, damaged boy, peeling potatoes, his hands shaking slightly, a living ghost that he had both created and now felt a terrifying, illogical compulsion to protect.
A cold dread began to seep into him, a feeling far more profound than the fear of capture. He had built a fortress of lies to protect his grand strategy, a complex machine of manipulation designed to save the world. But he now realized, with a sudden, chilling clarity, that the fortress was not empty. He had just willingly placed a human heart inside its walls. And the greatest threat to his entire monstrous enterprise was no longer a brilliant spymaster in St. Petersburg or a rival revolutionary in the next room. It was the last, lingering shred of his own soul, now embodied in a single, fragile boy a thousand miles away.