The sanctuary Pavel offered was a small, windowless storage room behind the tavern's main bar. It smelled of stale beer, sawdust, and unwashed bodies. It was cramped, filthy, and, for the moment, the safest place in the entire Russian Empire. Pavel brought them a bottle of cheap, searing vodka and a bowl of greasy but hot stew, depositing them on an overturned barrel with a thud.
"You can stay for two days," he said, his one good eye fixing them with a look that was neither friendly nor hostile, but purely transactional. "After that, my hospitality runs out. The Okhrana raids this district every few weeks. You bring a heat I don't need."
"We are grateful," Kamo said, his voice a low rumble of sincerity.
Pavel was not interested in gratitude. "I help you, you help me," he stated, the words a simple declaration of terms. He leaned against the doorframe, his massive arms crossed over his chest. "My crew… we are not politicians. We are men who take what we are owed. The owner of the Putilov factory owes us. He cut our wages to fill his own pockets. The monthly payroll is delivered by armored wagon, two days from now. My boys and I are planning a… special expropriation of our own."
He grinned, a humorless expression that showed a row of stained, broken teeth. "We are good with fists and knives. We know how to break heads. But we are sloppy. Our last job was a mess. Too loud, too chaotic. We got the cash, but we lost two men to the police."
His gaze shifted from Kamo's brutish strength to Jake, who was nursing his wounded arm and listening in silence. Pavel's eye was shrewd. He saw past the injury, past the exhaustion. He saw the quiet, intense intelligence in the man's eyes.
"You," he said, pointing a thick finger at Jake, "you do not look like a man who breaks heads. You look like a man who knows how to make a plan. And you," his finger moved to Kamo, "look like a man who knows how to use a gun. You will help us. You will make our plan clean. In return for my hospitality."
It was not a request. It was a condition of their survival.
Jake and Kamo were now guests and prisoners, their fates irrevocably tied to this crew of common thugs. To refuse was to be thrown back onto the streets, into the waiting arms of the Okhrana. They had no choice.
"We will help you," Jake said, his voice flat. His mind was already working, the familiar gears of strategic calculation beginning to turn, overriding the pain in his arm and the weary disgust in his soul.
The following day, they gathered in the storage room, the air thick with the smell of unwashed men and cheap tobacco. Pavel and his three top lieutenants laid out their plan on the filthy floor, using bottle caps to represent guards and a stained napkin as a map of the factory gate.
The plan was exactly as Jake had expected: crude, suicidal, and fatally simplistic. A frontal assault. They would block the road, overwhelm the four guards with sheer numbers, and grab the cash box. It was a plan that relied entirely on speed and brutality, with no thought for contingencies, escape routes, or the inevitable police response.
Jake listened in silence, his expression unreadable. When they were finished, a proud, expectant silence fell over the small room. Pavel looked at him. "Well, planner? What do you think?"
Jake took a slow, deliberate breath. Against his will, against every fiber of his being that screamed in protest at this sordid, common crime, the strategist inside him took over. He could not help it. It was what he was. It was what he had become.
"I think your plan will get you all killed or arrested," he said, his voice quiet but carrying an authority that made the brutish men fall silent. "You are thinking like brawlers. You need to think like soldiers. Like hunters."
For the next hour, Jake dissected their plan with a cold, clinical precision. He pointed out a dozen flaws, a dozen points of failure. Then, with a chilling, methodical clarity, he laid out a new one. It was a classic 'Soso' operation, miniaturized and adapted for the streets of St. Petersburg. It was a symphony of violence, composed on the fly.
"You are attacking the wagon where it is strongest: at the factory gate, where the guards are most alert," he began. "This is foolish. You must attack where it is weakest." He moved the bottle caps, redesigning the entire operation. "The wagon makes a stop here," he said, pointing to a spot on the napkin-map, "at the district bank, to drop off the management payroll, before it proceeds to the worker payment office. For three minutes, two of the guards go inside. The wagon is stationary, with only two men protecting it. That is your window."
He continued, his voice gaining strength, his mind alive with the cold, clean logic of the problem. "A frontal assault is still too noisy. You need a diversion. A fire. Here, in this tenement down the street. A small one. Enough to draw the local police patrol away from their usual route. You," he said to one of Pavel's men, "will start it. At precisely ten minutes before the wagon is scheduled to arrive."
He outlined the rest of the plan. It was a masterpiece of ruthless efficiency. Two men would create a blockage with a cart further up the road to slow any reinforcements. The main assault team would hit the wagon during the three-minute window of vulnerability. Kamo would not be a brawler; he would be a sniper, positioned on a rooftop with a rifle, providing overwatch, ready to eliminate any guard who posed a real threat. The escape routes were layered, with pre-arranged points to split up and melt back into the city's crowds.
The gangsters listened, their expressions shifting from sullen skepticism to a kind of wide-eyed, almost childlike awe. This quiet, wounded man was a genius. He saw angles they never knew existed. He saw a battle where they had only seen a brawl.
And as Jake worked, a strange and deeply disturbing thing happened. He began to enjoy it. The familiar, intoxicating thrill of creating a perfect, interlocking plan, of commanding the absolute respect of these hard, violent men, was a potent drug. The grand, abstract revolutionary cause, the moral weight of his world-saving mission, the gnawing guilt over Kato—all of it faded into the background. There was only the pure, clean, addictive logic of a successful operation, the satisfaction of a complex problem solved.
His internal monologue was a jarring, discordant clash of voices. Is this all I am? the ghost of Jake Vance whispered in horror. A better, more articulate class of bank robber?
But the voice of Stalin, a voice that was growing stronger every day, replied with a cold, seductive pride. You are a leader. You are a survivor. You impose order on chaos. That is all that matters.
The line between Stalin the revolutionary, who robbed banks for the good of the party, and Stalin the gangster, who planned robberies for his own survival, was becoming terrifyingly, indistinguishably thin.
He knew they could not stay here forever. They were living on borrowed time. He needed to re-establish contact with the outside world, with what was left of the party. He incorporated one final, subtle element into the plan, a desperate long shot.
"You," he said, pointing to the man assigned to start the diversionary fire, a wiry young thug named Misha. "After you set the fire, you will run. You will run north, towards the Finland Station. On your way, you will pass the old Smolny church. Behind it, there is a loose brick in the wall of the monastery garden. You will place this inside." He handed Misha a small, tightly wrapped package no bigger than his thumb. It contained a coded message, detailing their situation and identifying a new, 'cold' dead drop for a reply. It was a message in a bottle, thrown into the vast, hostile ocean of the city.
The plan was finalized. Pavel slapped his hand on Jake's good shoulder, his one eye gleaming with avaricious delight. "With you two," he grinned, "we cannot fail. You will get your share, of course. You have earned it."
Jake and Kamo were now locked in. They were full partners in a common armed robbery, using the very methods Jake had always justified in the name of a higher cause, now reduced to a simple, brutal equation of survival.
Jake looked at the eager, violent faces of the gangsters around him. He looked at Kamo, his loyal, deadly sword, who was now quietly field-stripping a rifle with the calm focus of a master craftsman. This was his army now. This was his inner circle. He had been stripped of his network, his authority, his grand strategy. He was back where the historical Stalin had begun: a brilliant organizer of crime.
A final, terrifying question echoed in the silent chambers of his soul. Was he using these criminals as a temporary, distasteful means to get back to his noble mission?
Or was the mission, the grand cause, just a convenient, high-minded excuse to be this person all along?
The empathetic, guilt-ridden history teacher, Jake Vance, felt further away than ever. He was not saving the world from Stalin. He was becoming him, in the grimiest, most fundamental way imaginable.