The air in the cellar was thick enough to chew. It stank of stale vodka, of cheap, acrid tobacco, and of the raw, animal sweat of nervous men. In the sickly yellow glow of a single oil lamp, Pavel's crew made their final preparations. It was a pathetic display.
Viktor, a man whose brutish frame was betrayed by the panicked darting of his eyes, was sharpening a long, wicked-looking knife on a whetstone. The sound was all wrong—not a steady, rhythmic shing-shing-shing of a professional, but a frantic, uneven scrape, as if he were trying to carve his courage into the steel itself.
Across from him, Misha, a wiry thug with the face of a starved rat, fumbled with a pack of cigarettes, his hands trembling so badly it took him three tries to light one. He took a deep, shuddering drag, the ember illuminating the fear in his eyes.
Pavel, their leader, tried to project an aura of calm. He stood with his massive arms crossed, his one good eye scanning his men. But his jaw was clenched tight, a muscle twitching furiously beneath his tangled beard. He was a brawler, a breaker of heads, but this was different. This was organized. This was against armed men who would shoot back. This was war, not a tavern fight, and he was out of his depth.
A bottle of vodka was making the rounds, passed from hand to grimy hand. Each man took a long, desperate pull, seeking a liquid valor they did not possess. They spoke in low, boastful murmurs, their voices artificially deep, telling each other how simple it would be, how the guards would piss themselves at the first sign of trouble. They were children in the dark, whistling to keep the monsters at bay.
The cellar door creaked open.
Jake entered, followed by the silent, hulking shadow of Kamo. The nervous chatter died instantly, replaced by a tense, expectant silence. Every eye turned to him.
He took a moment, his gaze sweeping across the room, taking in every detail. He saw the trembling hands, the sheen of sweat on their brows, the half-empty bottle of vodka. The Jake Vance that still lived somewhere inside him felt a pang of something—pity, perhaps, or a shared, human fear. But that voice was a whisper now, drowned out by a louder, colder, and far more pragmatic presence.
The new voice, the voice of Stalin, did not see scared men. It saw flawed tools. It saw a sloppy, undisciplined unit on the verge of catastrophic failure. It felt not pity, but a surgeon's contempt for a poorly maintained instrument.
"Put the bottle away," Jake said.
His voice was quiet, almost conversational, yet it cut through the thick air like a shard of ice. It was not a request. It was an order. Misha, who was holding the bottle, froze as if struck. He looked to Pavel, his eyes wide.
Pavel hesitated for a fraction of a second, his authority challenged. He met Jake's stare, and whatever bluster he'd been about to muster died in his throat. He saw no fear in this wounded planner, no doubt. Only a chilling, absolute certainty. Pavel gave a short, jerky nod.
"You heard him," Pavel grunted. "Put it down."
Misha placed the bottle on the floor as if it were a bomb.
"We will walk through it one more time," Jake announced, moving to the overturned barrel that served as their table. He began arranging objects on its surface—a salt shaker, a blackened spoon, a shard of broken glass. "From the beginning."
For the next hour, he was not their partner; he was their master. He drilled them with a merciless, clinical precision. He was no longer the desperate fugitive, the wounded intellectual. He was a general, and these were his grunts.
"Misha," he snapped, his finger tapping the table. "The fire. What is your route after you light it?"
"Uh, I run. North. Towards the station."
"Which streets?" Jake's voice was sharp. "Name them. Now."
Misha stammered, his mind a blank. "The… the main one?"
"The main one will have the police patrol you are trying to divert," Jake said, his tone dripping with contempt. "You will be running directly into them. You are a fool, and you will get us all killed. Kamo, show him the back alleys. Again."
Kamo, who had been observing with a stoic impassivity, took Misha aside and began tracing a route on the grimy floor, his voice a low, patient rumble.
Jake turned his attention to the others. "Viktor. The cart. You create the blockage. What do you do if a police carriage approaches from behind before the wagon arrives?"
"I… I tell them the axle is broken," Viktor blustered.
"And when they offer to help you move it?" Jake countered, his eyes boring into the man. "When four armed officers get out of their carriage and surround you? What is your plan then?"
Viktor's face went pale. He had no answer.
"You will abandon the cart and walk away," Jake said, his voice flat. "The diversion will be lost, but the main team will still be safe. You do not engage. You do not improvise. You do not matter more than the mission. Do you understand?"
Viktor, the hothead who had questioned him the night before, could only nod, his eyes downcast.
And as he worked, as he stripped away their foolish pride and replaced it with cold, hard operational logic, Jake felt a deeply unsettling emotion rise within him. It was not guilt. It was not disgust.
It was pride.
This is it, a voice whispered in his mind. The voice of Stalin, clear and strong. This is real power. Not the hollow respect of committee men who praise your words while sharpening their knives. This is the primal, absolute authority that comes from pure competence. They don't respect ideals. They respect the fact that my plan will keep them alive and theirs will put them in a grave. Is this what it felt like for him? Not the paranoia, not the rage… but this clean, sharp, intoxicating feeling of being the only one in the room who truly understands?
He felt a chilling, god-like satisfaction in bending these violent, chaotic men to his will. He was forging them, tempering them, turning a clumsy mob into a precision weapon. And he was good at it. Terrifyingly good.
When the brutal catechism was over, Kamo pulled him aside, into the deeper shadows of the cellar. The big Georgian's face was troubled, his brow furrowed.
"Soso," he said, his voice a low rumble meant only for Jake. "This is not a party action. This is not for the cause. This is just… theft."
Kamo was searching for the man he had followed from Tbilisi, the fiery revolutionary who justified every ruthless act with the holy scripture of the coming utopia. He was trying to find an ideological anchor in this sordid mess.
Jake gave him none. He met Kamo's gaze, and his eyes were as cold and grey as the St. Petersburg sky.
"We are cut off, Kamo. The party in this city is a ghost. We are a party of two, with no funds, no shelter, and the entire Okhrana hunting us. Survival is the only ideology that matters today." He paused, letting the brutal truth sink in. "This is how we live to fight tomorrow. Nothing more."
The answer was so pragmatic, so devoid of the soaring rhetoric he usually employed, that it silenced Kamo completely. A subtle but undeniable crack formed in the giant's absolute faith. He was looking at his leader, but he was seeing a stranger. He gave a slow, weary nod and stepped back, his expression unreadable.
Jake turned back to the gangsters. They were no longer a nervous rabble. They were silent, their faces grim, their eyes fixed on him. They were waiting for their orders. The fear was still there, but it was a different kind of fear now. Before, they had feared the police.
Now, they feared him.
He looked at each of them in turn, his gaze holding them, branding them with his will.
"You do exactly as I've told you," he said, his voice leaving no room for argument. "You follow the plan to the letter. You do not think. You do not improvise. You act. Do that, and you will live to spend your share."
He turned and pushed open the cellar door, a sliver of pale, dirty grey light cutting into the gloom. He didn't look back to see if they were following. He knew they would be. He had become their master.
He stepped out into the biting cold of the dawn, the filthy alley a stark reminder of how far he had fallen. Or, perhaps, how far he had climbed. He took a breath of the frigid air, the strategist inside him humming with a terrible, vibrant energy. The operation had begun.