The letter of commendation for Sister Anna felt like a signed confession in his hand, and the ink was still wet.
Jake stared at the elegant script of his own signature, now an official seal on a document of lies. He had authorized a ghost, given power to a phantom who had outmaneuvered him at every turn. It was a necessary move, a pawn sacrificed for the king, but it left a bitter taste in his mouth.
The door to his office slammed open, cracking against the wall.
Shliapnikov stood there, his broad face a mask of thunder. He wasn't deferential. He wasn't calm. He was a storm about to break. He strode to the desk and threw a copy of Pravda down with a slap that echoed in the small room.
"They did it while you were out," he growled, his voice a low, furious rumble. "No debate. No vote in the Council. Just a decree."
The newspaper was open to the front page. Trotsky's name, under the headline for the "Supreme Revolutionary Military Committee," seemed to leap off the page in stark, black ink.
"He controls everything now," Shliapnikov continued, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. He was radiating a sense of betrayal. "The Petrograd garrisons, the Red Guards… our sailors, Koba. The men from Kronstadt. They all answer to him now."
Jake didn't rage. He didn't shout. He went unnaturally still, a predator sighting its prey. His eyes scanned the text, not reading the words but dissecting the attack. He felt a surge of cold, diamond-hard fury rise from his gut.
This wasn't just a political maneuver. This was a public castration. Lenin and Trotsky hadn't just sidelined him. In the cold, bureaucratic language of the new state, they had declared him an enemy. A hero no longer needed, a weapon to be locked away.
Shliapnikov saw the cold fire in Jake's eyes. In that moment, the big Bolshevik's loyalty, already strained, snapped free from the Party and welded itself to the man. He had chosen his side.
"What are your orders?" Shliapnikov asked, his voice dropping. It was no longer a question from one commissar to another. It was the question of a soldier to his commander.
"My orders?" Jake looked up, a thin, dangerous smile touching his lips. "My orders are to do my job. I am the People's Commissar of Nationalities, after all."
Shliapnikov stared, confused. Jake was already looking back down at his papers, his mind miles away, plotting a war from a battlefield his enemies didn't even know existed.
That night, in the freezing, abandoned cellar of a church, Jake met the jailer.
The air was thick with the smell of damp earth and decaying incense. A single candle cast long, dancing shadows on the stone walls. Commissar Yakovlev was a ghost of a man, thin and shaking, his uniform hanging loosely on his skeletal frame. His eyes were wide with a fear that had nothing to do with the revolution. It was the primal terror of a father watching his child die.
"Sister Anna said you could help," Yakovlev whispered, his voice cracking. He wrung his hands, a constant, nervous motion. "That you have influence. Is it true?"
Jake stepped closer, his shadow swallowing the smaller man. He projected an aura of absolute power and calm. He was the devil offering a deal in a holy place.
"I am a People's Commissar, Yakovlev. The revolution rewards its loyal servants." Jake's voice was low and reassuring, a stark contrast to the grim surroundings. "Your daughter will receive the best care the state can provide. I have arranged it personally. A quiet dacha outside the city. Clean air. The finest German medicine."
He let the offer hang in the silence, a lifeline in a storm. He was buying this man's soul with the life of his child.
Yakovlev broke. A raw, choked sob escaped his lips and he slumped against a stone pillar, tears streaming down his face. "Anything," he gasped. "Anything you ask."
"I want you to move the prisoners," Jake said, his voice flat. "Get them out of Tobolsk. I will arrange transport. Your only job is to get them on the train."
Yakovlev's relief vanished, replaced by a new, sharper terror. He shook his head frantically. "It's impossible. It's not me you have to worry about. It's the Ural Soviet."
He took a ragged breath. "They are fanatics. True believers. They see the Tsar as a symbol that must be destroyed. They watch my every move, my every requisition. They have their own Red Guards, loyal only to them. If I try to move the family without their direct order, they will stop the train and execute us all on the spot. Me, my men… and them."
The stakes had just skyrocketed. The mission wasn't a simple extraction anymore. It required neutralizing an entire regional government filled with radicals spoiling for blood.
It had just become a small-scale civil war.
Jake returned to his small office at the Smolny, the weight of the new problem pressing down on him. The building was quiet, the halls empty. The fires of revolution were banked for the night, but in his mind, they were raging.
He paced the room like a caged tiger. He couldn't use the military; Trotsky now held that leash. He couldn't appeal to the Party; Lenin would have him shot for even thinking about the Romanovs.
They had left him with nothing. A title. A desk. A mountain of useless paperwork.
And in that moment, Jake Vance, the 21st-century historian, saw the solution. He wasn't just Koba, the thug. He understood how power truly worked. Not just from the barrel of a gun, but from the tip of a pen.
A cold, fierce joy ignited within him. The thrill of the intellectual fight. He would turn their own weapon—the crushing, soul-destroying bureaucracy of the new state—against them.
He sat down at his desk, pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, and began to write. He didn't draft a military order or a secret plea. He drafted a new decree for his "useless" ministry.
It was a masterpiece of bureaucratic camouflage, titled: "On the Preservation of the Cultural and Historical Peoples of the Minority Regions."
It was dry. It was boring. It was perfect.
The decree called for the immediate and comprehensive "cataloging and state protection" of all ethnic minorities in the Ural mountain regions—the Bashkirs, the Tartars, the Chuvash. It was filled with clauses about language preservation and cultural artifacts. It was exactly the sort of thing the Commissar of Nationalities was supposed to be doing. No one would read past the first paragraph.
But buried deep within its dense, legalistic text, on the third page, was a single, poison-pill sentence.
"To facilitate this urgent census and protect state assets from local partisans, all authority over regional Red Guard militias, rail transport, and supply chain logistics in the designated Ural territories is temporarily transferred to the direct oversight of the People's Commissariat of Nationalities, effective immediately."
He had used a document about cultural preservation to legally seize control of an army. The very soldiers and trains he needed to defy the Ural Soviet and save the Tsar's family.
Jake picked up his pen and signed the document with a sharp, decisive flourish. He hadn't overturned the chessboard.
He had just created a new one right underneath it, a secret board where he, and only he, made all the rules.