Kamo moved through the shadows of Tbilisi like a restless predator. For days, he had been a coiled spring of violent potential, his entire combat organization on a hair trigger, waiting for the order that felt inevitable. He expected a command from Soso to arm the men, to begin the grim work of scouting the approaches to the Metekhi Citadel, to plan the bloody calculus of an assault. Every fiber of his being screamed for action, for the clean, simple release of a gunfight, for the chance to strike back at the sneering power that had snatched one of their own.
Instead, the message that finally arrived from Geneva was a splash of ice-cold water in the face of his rage. It was so bizarre, so completely alien to the crisis at hand, that for a moment he thought it must be a trick, a clever Okhrana forgery designed to sow confusion.
He sat in the smoky back room of the safe house, the decoded message laid flat on the table before him, and read it for the third time. His lieutenants, Sandro and Davri, stood over his shoulder, their faces etched with disbelief.
CEASE ALL RESCUE PLANNING. IT IS A TRAP. NEW PRIORITY: LOCATE A MAN NAMED PYOTR DOLIDZE. FORMER PARTY. LIVES IN THE GORGA DISTRICT SLUMS. A DRUNKARD. FIND HIM. TAKE HIM ALIVE AND UNMARKED. BRING HIM TO THE SECONDARY SAFE HOUSE ON EREVAN STREET. ABSOLUTE SECRECY IS PARAMOUNT. NO ONE IS TO KNOW. THIS IS OUR ONLY PATH. MOVE NOW.
Silence. The only sound was the dripping of a leaky pipe somewhere in the walls.
"What is this?" Davri, a man whose solution to most problems involved a bomb, finally growled. His hand instinctively rested on the butt of the Nagant revolver tucked into his belt. "Shaumian is in the Tsar's dungeons, waiting for a noose, and Soso wants us to go on a snatch-and-grab for some drunken bum? Has the pressure finally broken him?"
Sandro, more thoughtful but equally confused, shook his head. "It makes no sense. Who is this Dolidze? Why is he the 'only path'?"
The doubt was a corrosive acid, eating at the certainty that had held their cell together. Kamo felt it too, a flicker of profound unease. The Soso he knew was a man of ruthless, crystalline logic. Every order, no matter how brutal, had a clear strategic purpose. This felt… unhinged. A wild goose chase while their house burned down.
But then Kamo looked at the faces of his men, at the confusion threatening to curdle into insubordination. He knew in that moment that his own faith, his absolute, unquestioning belief in Soso, was as critical a piece of their arsenal as any rifle or bomb. It was the pillar holding up the entire structure. If it cracked, they would all fall.
He slammed his fist on the table, the force of the blow making the decoded message jump. "Enough!" he snaried, his voice a low, dangerous rumble that commanded immediate attention. "Have you forgotten the Orlov affair? Did you forget the rail yard? How many times have we thought Soso's plans were madness, only to find out he was seeing a game none of the rest of us could even comprehend? He sees the whole board. We see one square."
He stood up, his powerful frame seeming to fill the small room. "I don't know who this Dolidze is, and I don't care. Soso says to find him, so we will find him. He says this is the path, so this is the path. We follow the order. We do not question. We act."
His confidence, a sheer force of will, was infectious. The doubt in his men's eyes was replaced by a familiar, grim resolve. Their faith in him, and by extension their faith in the unseen Soso, was restored. An order was an order.
"Sandro," Kamo commanded, "take three men and put eyes on the Citadel. I want to know every guard rotation, every delivery wagon. We maintain the threat of a rescue. Let the Okhrana see us sniffing around. Let them waste their resources reinforcing the walls. It will keep them busy."
He then turned to Davri. "You and I will handle this… ghost hunt. We'll take Mikheil and Levan. We need men who can move quietly and know the slums. We move out in one hour."
The hunt for Pyotr Dolidze was a descent into the city's forgotten underbelly. The Gorgasali district was not just poor; it was a place of terminal despair. A labyrinth of narrow, unpaved alleys choked with filth and reeking of cheap alcohol and human misery. Here, among the crumbling tenements and shadowy hovels, Kamo's men, hardened revolutionaries accustomed to confronting the armed power of the state, found themselves in a different kind of war. This was a war against anonymity, against the soul-crushing apathy of a place where men came to disappear.
They moved like wolves, their faces hard, their eyes scanning the shuffling figures in the gloom. They were aliens here. Their revolutionary zeal, their sense of purpose, was a foreign language in a land where the only concern was the next drink or the next crust of bread.
They started with the old party contacts, men who had long since fallen away from the cause but still remembered the names. An old baker, his face a roadmap of weary wrinkles, spat on the ground at the mention of Dolidze's name. "That one? He is a shame. A ghost who still breathes. Try the illegal chacha dens by the river. A man like that does not stray far from the poison that killed him."
The search led them deeper into the slum's dark heart. They moved from one squalid, subterranean drinking den to another, the air growing thicker, fouler. These were not taverns; they were holes in the ground where broken men gathered to collectively die. The faces that looked up at them were vacant, suspicious, their eyes clouded with cheap spirits.
Finally, in a cellar so dark and damp it felt like a tomb, they found him.
He was slumped over a sticky, warped table, a half-empty bottle of chacha clutched in his hand like a holy relic. The man was a ruin. His clothes were rags, his face was a pale, puffy mask of burst blood vessels and neglect. A thin film of grime covered his skin. He reeked of stale liquor and unwashed despair. Kamo stood over him, a feeling of profound revulsion mixing with a strange sense of pity. This was what happened when a man broke. This was the end of the line.
And yet… through the grime and the bloat, Kamo could see it. The shape of the head. The bone structure around the eyes. The hairline, thin and receding. It was a distorted, funhouse-mirror reflection, but the resemblance to the dead man, Luka Mikeladze, was undeniably there. It was the resemblance of a ghost, an echo of a man who once was.
"That's him," Mikheil whispered, his voice filled with a kind of morbid awe.
Kamo nodded. He gestured to his men. The operation was swift and silent. Davri moved to the front, blocking the view from the few other patrons, who were too drunk to care anyway. Mikheil and Kamo flanked the table. Kamo clamped a large hand over Dolidze's mouth while Mikheil pinned his arms.
The man came to with a terrified, gurgling gasp. His eyes, bleary and unfocused, widened in sheer panic. He began to struggle, but it was the weak, flailing resistance of a kitten. He had no fight left in him, only fear.
"Be silent and you will not be harmed," Kamo whispered in his ear, his voice a low threat that promised absolute violence.
The man went limp, trembling uncontrollably.
They lifted him from the chair, his legs barely holding him, and half-dragged, half-carried him out of the den and into the dark alleyway. They bundled him into a waiting cart, throwing an old tarp over him. The entire kidnapping had taken less than thirty seconds.
As they moved through the sleeping city, heading for the anonymity of the safe house on Erevan Street, Kamo felt a deep, chilling unease. They had their ghost. But what Soso planned to do with this pathetic, broken creature was a mystery far more terrifying than any fortified prison.
He dispatched a runner with a short, coded message to the party's secret courier in Batumi, who would forward it on the next ship to Europe. It would take days to reach Geneva. The message was simple, a confirmation that the strangest order he had ever received had been carried out.
WE HAVE HIM. HE IS A WRECK. BARELY A MAN. AWAITING YOUR ORDERS.
Across the continent, in Geneva, Jake received the confirmation that Lenin had granted him permission to travel. He was to return to Tbilisi to "personally oversee the crisis and coordinate the party's response." Lenin and the others believed he was going to organize a daring prison break, the kind of direct, brutal action they expected from their Caucasian enforcer.
Jake packed a small bag, his face an impassive mask. He was indeed going back to coordinate a response. But it was not a rescue mission. He was not going to break down the walls of a prison. He was going on a far darker journey: to break down the soul of a man, and forge a ghost from the pieces.