The journey back to Tbilisi was a descent into a cold, silent clarity. Jake traveled under a false name, his face obscured by a workman's cap, his thoughts turned inward. The frantic panic he had felt in Geneva had burned away, leaving behind the hard, dense ash of pure, unadulterated purpose. He was no longer a history teacher wrestling with a monstrous persona; the persona was now fully in control, the moral qualms of Jake Vance a distant, muffled echo from another lifetime. He was a strategist on his way to the battlefield, an engineer preparing to execute a complex and terrible piece of machinery.
He did not go to the main Bolshevik headquarters, a place now buzzing with Kamo's carefully orchestrated, and entirely fake, preparations for a prison assault. He went instead to a quiet, anonymous safe house on Erevan street, a place used for holding sensitive prisoners or hiding men on the run. The air inside was still and cold.
Kamo met him at the door, his face a mask of grim confusion. "He is in the back room," Kamo said, his voice a low rumble. "We have kept him sober. He weeps. He begs. He is… nothing."
"Nothing is what I need," Jake replied, his voice devoid of any warmth. "He is clay. He needs to be molded. Has anyone else seen him?"
"Only the four of us on the snatch team. We have kept this place sealed, as you ordered."
"Good," Jake said, stripping off his travel coat. "No one else is to enter. No one. This is a tomb until I say otherwise."
He walked down the short, dark hallway and pushed open the door to the back room. The scene inside was one of utter desolation. The room was bare except for a thin mattress on the floor, a bucket in the corner, and a single, barred window high on the wall that let in a sliver of grey, unforgiving light.
Pyotr Dolidze was huddled on the mattress, wrapped in a threadbare blanket. Days of forced sobriety had stripped away the alcoholic bloat, revealing a gaunt, skeletal man who trembled with a constant, palsied tremor. His eyes, wide and bloodshot, darted to Jake as he entered, and a flicker of something ancient and terrified passed through them. Recognition.
He remembered this man. He remembered Soso Jughashvili. The cold-eyed disciplinarian with the quiet, menacing voice who, years ago, had stood before a party tribunal and clinically dissected Pyotr's failures—the stolen funds, the drunkenness, the betrayals of trust. Soso had not shouted or condemned. He had simply presented the facts, his voice a monotone scalpel, and had calmly, methodically, severed Pyotr from the only thing that had ever given his life meaning. Soso had been the one to cast him into the abyss. And now, the architect of his damnation had returned.
"Soso," Pyotr whispered, his voice a dry, rasping thing. "What… what is this? I have done nothing. I am no one."
Jake closed the door behind him, the latch clicking shut with a sound of grim finality. He pulled over the room's only stool and sat down, his posture relaxed, his presence utterly dominating the small space. He did not waste time with threats, reassurances, or explanations. He began to speak, his voice low, even, and as inescapable as the stone walls around them.
"Your life, as you know it, is over, Pyotr," he began. The words were not a threat; they were a simple statement of fact. "You died years ago. You just haven't had the decency to stop breathing. You are a ghost, haunting the slums, a worthless man drinking himself into a worthless grave. I am here to offer you something you have not had in a very long time. A purpose."
Pyotr stared at him, his trembling lips parted, unable to form a response.
"You have been given a chance to have your life, your death, mean something," Jake continued, his gaze unwavering. "You have the opportunity to die a hero's death, a martyr's death, instead of a drunkard's. Your name will not be on the monument, but your act will save the revolution."
Step by agonizing, methodical step, Jake laid out the entire, insane architecture of his plan. He spoke of Comrade Shaumian, a great man wrongly accused. He spoke of the Okhrana's trap. And then he spoke of the solution.
"There was another man," Jake said, his voice a hypnotic drone. "A comrade. His name was Luka Mikeladze. He is dead. But the Okhrana does not believe he is dead. They believe he was murdered. To save Comrade Shaumian, Luka Mikeladze must be brought back to life."
He leaned forward, his eyes boring into the terrified man on the cot. "You, Pyotr, are going to become Luka Mikeladze."
The sheer, breathtaking insanity of the proposal seemed to suck the air from the room. Pyotr could only stare, his mind struggling to process the words.
"We have everything," Jake went on, his voice relentless. "We have his letters to his wife. We have his party records, his mission reports, testimony from comrades who knew him well. For the next few days, you will eat, sleep, and breathe this man's life. You will learn the names of his children, his favorite foods, the way he walked, the sound of his voice. You will learn his fears and his passions. You will study his photograph until his face is more familiar to you than your own. You will cease to be Pyotr Dolidze, the drunkard. You will become Luka Mikeladze, the dedicated Bolshevik."
He paused, letting the weight of the command settle. "And when you are ready, when you are no longer yourself, you will walk into the main Okhrana headquarters on Golovin Avenue."
Pyotr began to sob, a choked, hopeless sound. "No… please…"
Jake ignored him. "You will walk in and you will surrender. You will tell them a story that we will prepare for you. You will confess that you were a secret Menshevik sympathizer, that the Bolsheviks discovered your treachery and you were forced to fake your own death to escape their justice. You will tell them you have been in hiding and now seek the protection of the state. You will give them Luka Mikeladze, alive and well."
"They will kill me!" Pyotr wailed, the first coherent words he had managed to speak.
Jake nodded slowly, his expression unchanging. "Yes," he said, the word cold and final. "Eventually, they will. After they have interrogated you for weeks. After they realize you are not who you say you are. They will kill you in a dark cell, and no one will ever know. But by then, it will be too late. The murder charge against Comrade Shaumian will have evaporated. If the victim is alive, there can be no murder. The state's case will collapse. Shaumian will be released. Your death, your final act, will have saved him. It will have saved us all."
He stood up and looked down at the weeping, broken man. He delivered the final, crushing blows of his argument, the twin pillars of the cage he was building around Pyotr's soul.
"Your old life was worthless. An embarrassment. I am offering you a chance to erase it with a single act of supreme sacrifice. Do this, and I will personally see to it that your estranged wife and children, the ones you abandoned to a life of poverty, receive a secret party pension. A generous one. Enough for them to live in comfort, enough to see the children educated, for the rest of their lives. They will never know what you did, but they will benefit from your courage."
He leaned down, his face inches from Pyotr's. "Refuse," he whispered, his voice now laced with a chilling menace, "and we will simply kill you and dump your body in the Kura River. Your death will mean nothing. And your family will get nothing but the enduring shame of your memory. They will be left to starve, and I will not give them a second thought."
The choice was laid bare. It was not a choice at all. It was a sentence, a path to annihilation paved with either martyrdom and provision, or meaninglessness and oblivion.
Pyotr Dolidze finally broke. A great, shuddering sob escaped him, the sound of a soul surrendering its last defenses. He curled into a ball on the cot, his weeping the only sound in the cold, silent room.
Jake watched him for a long, dispassionate moment. His internal monologue, the voice of the history teacher, was silent. It offered no protest, no pang of conscience, no recoil of horror. There was only the cold, detached focus of a craftsman examining a flawed, difficult piece of raw material. He felt nothing for the weeping man on the floor. No pity. No remorse. Only a clear-eyed assessment of the work that lay ahead. This weeping wreck, this piece of human debris, had to be taken apart, scoured of its own identity, and meticulously reassembled into the shape of the weapon he needed. The forging had begun.