The match went out, plunging the alley back into an absolute, suffocating darkness. Jake stood perfectly still, the small, treacherous piece of paper clutched in his hand. The words were no longer ink on a page; they were acid, burning their way through his thoughts. Malinovsky. The name was a key, unlocking a hundred doors of historical knowledge, each one opening onto a fresh vista of horror.
Kamo, oblivious to the cataclysm unfolding in Jake's mind, clapped a heavy, reassuring hand on his shoulder. The gesture, meant to be one of solidarity, felt like the closing of a cage door.
"It is good news, Soso," Kamo's voice rumbled, full of simple, honest relief. The sound was a discordant note in the symphony of Jake's panic. "The Center has not forgotten us. An escape. Finland! This is a simple task they ask. The Mensheviks are vipers, always biting at the heels of the revolution. We have crushed vipers before. We will do it again, quickly and cleanly. And then we are free."
Kamo's faith was a thing of beautiful, terrifying simplicity. He saw a straightforward mission of party discipline, a distasteful but necessary chore on the road to freedom. Jake, burdened by the curse of his foreknowledge, saw the intricate, interlocking gears of the devil's own clockwork. He saw the hand of Stolypin, the cunning of the Okhrana, and the bottomless perfidy of the man who was supposed to be their savior. He wanted to scream, to grab Kamo and shake him, to explain the impossible, complex truth of their situation. But how could he? "Trust me, Kamo, I know this man is a traitor because I read about him in a history book a hundred years from now." He would sound like a lunatic.
"Yes, Kamo," Jake said, his voice a dry rasp that he barely recognized as his own. "Simple."
They walked back to the cellar in silence. Kamo strode with the light, purposeful step of a man with a clear mission. Jake walked like a man on his way to his own execution.
Back in the rank, familiar fug of their underground sanctuary, Jake feigned exhaustion. He lay down on his thin, lumpy mattress, turned his face to the damp brick wall, and closed his eyes. The cold from the stone seeped through his thin coat, a miserable, invasive chill. And it was the cold that did it. It triggered a phantom memory of warmth, so vivid it was a physical ache.
Kato. Borjomi. A stolen afternoon in a cheap room above a bakery, the air thick with the smell of warm bread and summer dust. The world outside—the Okhrana, the Party, the constant, grinding struggle—had ceased to exist. There was only the heat of her skin under his hands, the soft weight of her body against his.
His mind, against his will, plunged back into the memory. He could feel the rough linen sheets, the way her dark hair spilled across the pillow, the taste of her mouth, sweet and searching. He remembered the desperate, possessive way she held him, her fingers digging into the muscles of his back as he moved inside her. It wasn't just lust; it was a claiming, a defiant act of possession against a world that sought to tear them apart. He remembered the low, breathless sounds she made, the way her eyes, dark and full of a terrifying, absolute trust, had locked with his in the final, shuddering moments. In that room, he had not been Soso, the revolutionary, or Koba, the operative. He had been a man, loved and anchored.
The memory, explicit and complete, flared and then vanished, leaving him shivering on the filthy mattress. The warmth was gone. The scent of his wife was replaced by the stench of rot and cheap tobacco. The soft sounds of her pleasure were replaced by the snoring of one of Pavel's thugs in the corner.
The loss was a physical blow, a void that opened in his chest. And into that void rushed not grief, but a chilling, diamond-hard fury. The guilt, the constant, whining monologue of the history teacher lamenting his lost soul, was cauterized in that fire. That man, the one who had been capable of such tenderness, was a ghost. A liability.
This was a problem of pure, predatory logic. That life, that warmth, was what they were trying to take from him. Malinovsky, Stolypin, the entire rotten apparatus of the state. They hadn't just put him in a cellar; they had tried to erase the man from that sun-drenched room in Borjomi.
He thinks I'm a blunt instrument, Jake thought, the memory of Kato's body now fueling the cold engine of his intellect. The vulnerability he'd felt with her was a weapon they could never have. His love for her was not a weakness to be exploited, but the core of a rage so pure it was incandescent. He dangles freedom in front of me... He can't possibly know that I am the one man in the entire world who sees the strings.
The realization was not depressing; it was electrifying.
This isn't a trap I have stumbled into. The cold, calculating voice of Stalin whispered, no longer a separate entity but his own thoughts, honed to a razor's edge. It's a weapon he has just handed me. He has revealed himself. He has given me a target, a task, a direct line of communication. He has invited me into his game. The question is, how do I use it to cut his throat without him ever knowing I was the one holding the blade?
The problem did not inspire fear. It energized him. This was the ultimate chess match, the kind he had dreamed of as a historian. He was playing against a master of deception, but his opponent was ignorant of the fact that Jake could see every piece on the board, and knew the outcome of a dozen future games.
He could not refuse the mission. Silence or refusal would brand him as unreliable at best, a traitor at worst. Malinovsky would simply cut him loose and alert the Okhrana to his location. He had to accept. He also knew, with absolute certainty, that he could not carry it out as ordered. To simply destroy the print shop would make him Malinovsky's pawn, a murderer of fellow socialists doing the Okhrana's bidding. He needed a third option. Always, the third option. And for that, he needed information.
The next morning, he gathered Pavel and his top lieutenants. Kamo stood by his side, his face set with grim purpose, ready for a revolutionary action. Pavel and his men were restless, eager to start their new protection rackets. Jake had to manage them all.
He unrolled a crude map of the city on the barrel. He would not tell them the truth, not yet. He would frame the mission in the only terms his new army could understand: profit, risk, and power.
"Gentlemen," he began, his voice calm and authoritative. "Our plans to organize this district must wait. An opportunity has presented itself. A high-stakes job. Not a simple robbery. This is a matter of intelligence, a prelude to a much larger expropriation."
The gangsters leaned in, their eyes gleaming at the mention of a big score.
"There is a print shop on Vasilievsky Island," he said, tapping a location on the map. "It is a front for a rival organization, one with deep pockets. Before we can move on their treasury, I need to know everything about this shop."
He looked from man to man, his gaze sharp and commanding.
"I am not interested in your fists today. I am interested in your eyes and your ears. Pavel, I need a twenty-four-hour watch on this location. Two men at a time, in shifts. I want a log of every person who comes and goes. Viktor, your job is the street. Bribe the delivery boys, the street sweepers, the children who play in the gutters. Find out who works there, where they live, what they talk about. Misha, you watch the back alleys. I want to know about every delivery. Paper, ink, food… every crate that goes in or out, I want to know about it. I want to know what these printers eat for breakfast and what time they piss in the gutter. I want to own that street. Understand?"
It was a language they understood perfectly. They dispersed with a new sense of purpose, not as thugs, but as spies, components in a larger, more sophisticated machine. Kamo watched them go, a flicker of disapproval in his eyes. He saw revolutionary work being delegated to common criminals. Jake saw a tool being put to its most effective use.
For the next day and a half, the reports trickled in. They painted a picture of a typical, small-scale clandestine operation. Three printers, young men, Menshevik idealists by the look of them. Lightly guarded. Pamphlets printed through the night. It was exactly the soft target Malinovsky had described. Too soft. It felt wrong.
On the evening of the second day, the final piece of the puzzle arrived. The man Pavel had assigned to watch the deliveries, a quiet, observant thug named Dmitri, gave his report.
"It's mostly like you said, planner," Dmitri reported, twisting a dirty cap in his hands. "Paper deliveries in the morning, ink in the afternoon. Food brought in by a boy. But there was something else. Late last night. Long after the regular deliveries were done."
Jake leaned forward, his attention sharpening. "What was it?"
"A different carriage," Dmitri said, his brow furrowed in concentration. "Not a tradesman's cart. An expensive one. Polished black, with a fine-looking horse. A man got out. He wore a nice coat, a gentleman's hat. He didn't look like one of those socialist talkers. He looked… official."
Jake's heart began to beat faster. "What did he do?"
"He had the driver bring a crate from the carriage. A heavy, locked wooden crate, about so big." Dmitri held his hands about two feet apart. "The printers came out, unlocked the door, and took it inside very quickly. They were nervous. The gentleman in the coat didn't stay. He just watched them take it inside, then his carriage left. It was all very quiet."
Official.
The word hung in the air of the cellar. Jake froze, his mind a blur of connections, a cascade of historical facts and present-day intelligence slamming together.
Malinovsky is an Okhrana agent.
The Okhrana was known to secretly fund certain opposition groups—to sow chaos, to gather intelligence, to control the narrative.
An expensive carriage. An official-looking man. A secret, late-night delivery to a supposedly hostile print shop.
It wasn't just a simple Menshevik operation being targeted by a traitor. It was a state-sponsored false flag operation. A controlled opposition group, funded and manipulated by the secret police themselves. The Okhrana, through their agent Malinovsky, was ordering Jake to destroy their own asset.
The question was why? Was it a test of his blind loyalty? A way to eliminate a cell that had outlived its usefulness or perhaps grown too independent? Or something else entirely?
The trap was not a simple line. It was a complex, three-dimensional web, and he was standing right in the center of it. And that locked wooden crate… what was inside it? Was it just money? Propaganda materials? Or something far more valuable?
That crate, he realized with a sudden, shocking certainty, was not part of the trap. It was the flaw in the trap's design. It was the variable Malinovsky and his masters had not accounted for. It was the key. It was the linchpin he needed to stop just reacting to the game and to start building his own.