The smell of cheap ink and wood pulp was the smell of power, and Jake's desk was now an arsenal.
He was buried in the logistics of his Ural gambit. Maps of the Trans-Siberian Railway were spread across the floor. Train schedules, hastily scrawled lists of loyal men he could dispatch from Petrograd, fuel requisitions—it was a shadow war fought with timetables and telegrams. For the first time since arriving in this century, he felt a flicker of genuine hope. He had a plan. He had a path.
Shliapnikov entered the office, his heavy footsteps silent on the worn floorboards. His face was grim, carved from stone. He didn't speak. He simply walked to the desk and placed a small, burnt matchbox in front of Jake.
Jake looked up, his concentration broken. He saw the tension in his lieutenant's shoulders. This wasn't official business. This was a message from the underworld.
Inside the matchbox was a tiny, tightly rolled piece of paper, no bigger than his thumbnail. It was a message from the Finn. His clandestine link to Sister Anna, and by extension, to the Romanovs.
He carefully unrolled it. The message was two words, scrawled in pencil.
Cheka watching.
A jolt of ice water flooded his gut. He stared at the tiny scrap of paper, the two words a death sentence for his entire operation.
It had started.
He knew Lenin and Trotsky would react to his decree, but he hadn't expected them to move this fast, or to strike on this front. They weren't launching a political attack against his Commissariat. They weren't challenging his authority in the Urals.
They were going after the nurse. The one, fragile link to Yakovlev. To the family.
They were trying to blind him before he could even make his first move. The hope he'd felt moments before curdled into a cold, precise rage.
"They are following her?" Jake asked, his voice dangerously quiet.
"The Finn said his best people spotted the watchers this morning," Shliapnikov confirmed, his voice a low rumble of anger. "They're good. Quiet. Not the usual thugs. They look like clerks, tax collectors. Men you wouldn't notice."
Menzhinsky's men. The quiet professionals.
"Get the Finn a message back," Jake said, his mind already racing, calculating, building a new strategy from the wreckage of the old. "Tell him to have his people back off. All of them. Do not engage. Do not make contact with her again until I say so. The last thing we need is a street fight between smugglers and the secret police."
"And what about the nurse?" Shliapnikov asked, a deep worry line creasing his brow.
"She's on her own for now," Jake said, hating the words. He was cutting her loose, hoping it would make her a less interesting target. It was a calculated risk. A gamble with a life that was not his own.
Shliapnikov nodded, his expression grim, and left to carry out the order.
Jake stood and began to pace the confines of his small office. The cage was closing in. How do you fight the secret police when you have no police of your own? How do you fight an enemy who operates entirely in the shadows, whose greatest weapon is the fear of the unseen?
He couldn't meet their force with force. That would be a street brawl, and in a street brawl, the side with the state behind it always wins. He had to be smarter. He had to fight them on a different battlefield.
His 21st-century mind, a mind that understood concepts his enemies couldn't even dream of, kicked into high gear. The Cheka's power didn't just come from their guns. It came from their information. From secrecy. From the terror that anyone, your neighbor, your friend, the man who sells you bread, could be their informant.
He couldn't fight their agents. But he could attack their information.
He stopped pacing. He looked at his desk, at the teetering piles of official documents, the mundane, boring, bureaucratic nonsense of the new state. Supply requests. Rosters. Petitions.
He wasn't sitting on a pile of paperwork. He was sitting on a goldmine of data.
He couldn't fight the Cheka head-on, but he could blind them. He could drown them in so much noise, so much false data, so many fake threats, that they wouldn't be able to tell a real conspiracy from a shadow.
He was going to invent information warfare, a hundred years ahead of schedule.
He called Shliapnikov back into the office. The big man returned to find Jake not panicked or enraged, but filled with a strange, cold energy.
"I have a series of tasks for you," Jake said, his voice crisp and clear. "They will sound strange. Do not question them. Just do them."
Shliapnikov straightened, his loyalty absolute. "Your orders, Comrade."
"First, get me a list of every private print shop in Petrograd. The small ones, the ones that print advertisements and wedding invitations. Any that aren't under direct Party control."
"Second, go to Kronstadt. Find me a dozen men from the sailors. Not the fighters, not the heroes. I need the clever ones. The card sharps. The ones who can follow complex instructions and, most importantly, keep their mouths shut."
"Third," Jake said, his eyes glinting, "bring me the complete personnel roster for the Cheka's Petrograd division. The one Dzerzhinsky submitted to the Council for budget approval last week. I want every name."
Shliapnikov was completely baffled. He had expected orders for a counter-surveillance operation, a confrontation, a fight. He was being asked to gather clerks and printers. But he had seen this look in Koba's eyes before—at Kronstadt, before the Demon's Fire. It was the look of a man seeing a victory no one else could.
"It will be done, Comrade," he said without hesitation.
That night, in the belly of a cold, damp warehouse on the industrial edge of the city, Jake met with his new unit. Twelve Kronstadt sailors, looking confused but resolute, stood before him in the flickering lamplight.
He didn't give them a speech about revolutionary glory. He gave them a lesson in modern warfare.
He held up a small, crudely printed leaflet, the ink still wet. The headline was simple, bold, and designed to inspire fear.
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY SPIES IN PETROGRAD! A WARNING FROM YOUR COMMISSAR OF NATIONALITIES.
A grim satisfaction settled over Jake. Lenin and Trotsky thought they were playing chess. He was about to release a virus onto their board.
He read the text aloud. It was a masterpiece of paranoia. It warned of "German saboteurs and wreckers disguised as ordinary people," and listed three "suspicious behaviors" for all loyal citizens to watch for and report to the Cheka immediately.
"1. Asking questions about military patrols or factory guard rotations."
"2. Spreading pessimistic rumors about food shortages."
"3. Attempting to use foreign currency or Tsarist-era gold coins."
The genius of it was simple: all three "suspicious behaviors" were the standard, day-to-day techniques used by the Cheka's own undercover agents and informants.
He was giving the people a guide on how to spot the secret police.
"Tonight," Jake told his new secret unit, his voice a low command, "you will paper the factory districts with these. Tomorrow, we will print a new one with new warnings. And the day after, another."
He looked into the faces of the twelve sailors, his first soldiers in a new kind of war.
"We are going to start a witch hunt. And we are going to make sure the Cheka is so busy chasing its own tail, they'll never see the real blade pointed at their throat."