The office they gave him was an insult.
It was a converted storage room beneath the main stairs of the Kremlin. It had no windows. The radiator hissed and leaked rusty water onto the floor. The desk was a scarred piece of oak that wobbled.
Jake sat behind it. He didn't mind.
"It is small, Comrade," Anatoly grunted, squeezing his large frame into the corner. He looked ready to punch the wall. "Trotsky has a balcony. Lenin has a fireplace. You have... a closet."
"Let them have the view," Jake said.
He opened the first file on the stack. It was a personnel roster for the Petrograd food distribution network. Boring. Tedious.
Jake picked up his red pencil.
"Trotsky looks out the window and sees the horizon," Jake said, scratching a name off the list. "I look at this paper and I see who eats dinner tonight."
He wrote a new name in the margin. A man loyal to him.
"Take this to the telegraph office," Jake ordered. "The current director of food supply is relieved. Incompetence."
"And if he refuses?" Anatoly asked.
"Then he doesn't get his ration card," Jake said without looking up. "Hunger is a very convincing argument."
Anatoly took the paper. He looked at Jake with a mix of fear and awe. He realized, perhaps for the first time, that the war hadn't ended. It had just moved indoors.
The War Commissariat. Two floors up.
Leon Trotsky felt like a tiger in a cage.
He paced in front of the massive map of the Southern Front. The White Army, led by General Mamontov, was regrouping. They were furious about the stolen artillery. They were preparing a massive counter-attack to retake Tsaritsyn.
"We need to strike first," Trotsky told his generals. "A lightning offensive. We sweep down the Volga and crush them while they are demoralized."
"We need the armored train," General Tukhachevsky said. "And the artillery. Comrade Stalin brought them to Moscow."
"They are state property," Trotsky snapped. "Not his toys."
He sat at his desk and drafted an order.
ORDER 667: IMMEDIATE TRANSFER OF ARMORED TRAIN 'VERA' AND ALL ATTACHED ARTILLERY TO THE SOUTHERN COMMAND. EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.
He signed it with a flourish.
"Take this to the railyard," Trotsky commanded his aide. "Tell the garrison to seize the train. If Stalin's men resist, arrest them for hoarding military assets."
The aide saluted and ran out.
Trotsky smiled. He took a sip of tea. Koba wanted to be a secretary? Fine. Let him push pencils while the real men fought the war.
Within an hour, the train would be his. Koba would be humiliated, stripped of his military power, left with nothing but a closet and a title.
The Railyard. One hour later.
The aide returned. He was sweating. He didn't have the train.
Trotsky looked up from his book. "Well? Is it moving south?"
"Comrade Commissar..." the aide stammered. "The station master refused to release the engine."
Trotsky stood up slowly. "He refused an order from the War Commissar?"
"He said... he said the train is no longer a military asset."
"What?"
The aide handed over a piece of paper. It was a carbon copy of a bureaucratic form. Cheap, yellow paper.
RECLASSIFICATION ORDER 101, it read. SUBJECT: ARMORED TRAIN 'VERA'. STATUS: REDESIGNATED AS 'SPECIAL INDUSTRIAL TRANSPORT FOR HEAVY MACHINERY'. JURISDICTION: SECRETARIAT OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE.
Trotsky stared at the paper. His signature was worthless. The train wasn't a weapon anymore. According to the filing system, it was a moving factory.
And factories were controlled by the General Secretary.
"He reclassified a warship," Trotsky whispered. His face turned red. "He fought me with a filing cabinet."
"Also," the aide added, wincing. "The station master said they have no coal. The fuel allocation for the military was... delayed. Pending a review of consumption rates."
Trotsky threw his tea glass against the wall. It shattered into sparkling dust.
"He is strangling us," Trotsky hissed. "He is sitting in the basement turning off the air."
He grabbed his coat.
"I will not be defeated by a clerk," Trotsky roared. "I am going to end this."
The Closet.
The door banged open. It hit the wall with a crack that shook dust from the ceiling.
Trotsky stood in the doorway. He was vibrating with rage.
Jake didn't jump. He didn't reach for a weapon. He slowly finished signing a document, blew on the ink to dry it, and placed it in a tray marked OUT.
"You petty little thief," Trotsky spat, slamming the requisition order onto the desk. "Give me the train."
Jake looked up. His yellow eyes were flat, unreadable.
"The train is undergoing maintenance," Jake said calmly. "The boilers are damaged. Safety regulations."
"Safety regulations?" Trotsky laughed. It was a hysterical sound. "We are in a civil war! Mamontov is marching on Tsaritsyn! If we lose the city, we lose the grain, we lose the oil!"
"Then you should have fought harder when you had the guns," Jake said.
He opened a drawer and took out his pipe. He began to fill it with slow, deliberate movements.
"You killed her," Jake said.
The change in tone was sudden. The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
Trotsky froze. "We did what was necessary for the state."
"And now I am doing what is necessary for the train," Jake said. He lit the match. Flare. "It requires a thorough inspection. It might take weeks. Months."
"You are sabotaging the defense of the revolution for a vendetta!" Trotsky shouted.
"No," Jake said through a cloud of smoke. "I am securing my assets. The train belongs to the Party. I run the Party's personnel and assets. Therefore, the train is mine."
He leaned forward.
"You want guns, Leon? Build them. You want coal? Dig it. But don't ever walk into my office and demand things from me again."
Trotsky stared at him. He saw the wall he had hit. He realized that Koba didn't care if the Whites took Tsaritsyn. He would let the city burn just to break Trotsky's legs.
"You will destroy us all," Trotsky whispered.
"I am purifying us," Jake corrected.
He picked up another piece of paper.
"By the way," Jake said, glancing at the sheet. "Your aide, Captain Volkov? His transfer papers just came through. He is being reassigned to a weather station in Arkhangelsk."
Trotsky's mouth fell open. "He is my chief of staff!"
"Was," Jake said. "We need good men in the North. It's very cold there."
He stamped the paper. Thump.
It sounded like a guillotine blade falling.
Trotsky turned and fled. He ran from the quiet man with the stamp. He ran from the realization that his power—the power of speeches and armies—was nothing compared to the power of the list.
The Loading Dock. Midnight.
Snow swirled under the harsh electric lights.
A truck idled by the secret service entrance. The back was covered with canvas.
Two soldiers carried a stretcher out of the building. On it lay Professor Ipatieff. He was unconscious, his breathing shallow and rattling.
Behind him, four men struggled with the weight of the lead box.
Jake stood by the truck, watching.
"Where is he going?" Taranov asked quietly.
"The Urals," Jake said. "There is a mining camp. secluded. No maps."
"He won't survive the trip," Taranov noted.
"He doesn't need to survive," Jake said. "He just needs to write down everything he knows before he dies. Every formula. Every failure."
Jake walked up to the stretcher. He looked at the dying scientist. The man who had given them the fire of the gods, only to reveal it was poison.
"The weapon is too early," Jake whispered to the unconscious man. "The technology isn't ready. The planes are too slow. The triggers are too slow."
He patted the man's shoulder.
"But time is on my side now."
He signaled the driver. "Go. If anyone stops you, shoot them."
The truck rumbled away into the dark, carrying the demon core and its creator into exile.
Jake turned back to the Kremlin. He had one last file to handle.
He walked back to his closet. He sat at his desk.
He opened the drawer and pulled out a file marked SVANIDZE, EKATERINA.
It contained her Party records. Her service history. Her photo.
In the photo, she wasn't smiling. She looked sharp, dangerous. Beautiful.
Jake looked at it for a long time. He felt the hole in his chest where his heart used to be. It wasn't healing. It was cauterizing.
He couldn't let them use her against him. He couldn't let them point to her as a weakness, or a martyr for their cause.
He struck a match.
He held the photo over the flame.
He watched her face turn black and crumble. He watched the history of Kato Svanidze turn into smoke.
"You don't exist," Jake whispered. "You never existed."
He dropped the burning file into the metal wastebasket.
He picked up his red pencil. He pulled the next file from the stack. It was a list of grain quotas for Ukraine.
Jake Vance was gone.
Stalin began to work.