The return to the wine cellar felt unreal, as if Jake were walking through a dream made of stone and cold air. Kamo was nearly shaking with excitement, grinning wide enough to hurt his cheeks.
"It worked, Soso! It worked!" he kept repeating, his voice echoing against the damp walls. "They bought it completely! They think he's theirs!"
Danilov stumbled in behind him, ghost-pale and trembling. He looked like a man who had walked through hell and back on scraped knees. When his eyes met Jake's, something inside him seemed to collapse. Awe, terror, and a kind of reverence mixed on his face—as though he were staring at someone no longer entirely human.
Jake didn't share Kamo's thrill. As he slid the heavy bolt across the cellar door, his thoughts were still in the cathedral. That face. Those sharp, intelligent eyes framed by a clipped beard. Pyotr Stolypin.
The name hit him like a punch. Cold sweat prickled instantly along his spine. He hadn't outwitted some provincial paper-pusher. He had crossed blades with the Tsar's right hand—the empire's mind and mailed fist. This was the man who had run the field courts, who had crushed the 1905 revolution with clean efficiency and a hangman's rope. The inventor of the "Stolypin necktie." A man history remembered for breaking movements, not losing to them.
Now that man knew that "Soso" existed.
Jake's clever games suddenly felt like a child's trick in front of a lion.
"Soso?" Kamo's voice cut through the fog. "Did you hear me? What do we tell him to send next?"
Jake turned slowly. Whatever expression was on his face wiped the grin off Kamo's instantly.
"The game has changed," Jake said quietly.
He stepped toward Danilov, who flinched back as though expecting a blow. Jake had once seen him as a liability. Now he understood what Danilov really was—a direct line into one of the most dangerous minds in the Russian Empire.
"The meeting is over," Jake said. "The interrogation isn't."
He circled the frightened agent like a teacher pacing before a failing student. "Tell me everything. Every word. Every hesitation. How he stood. What he didn't ask. The codes, the drops, the signals. I want to see the meeting through your eyes."
For hours, the cellar filled with their voices. Danilov stammered through his answers, and Jake questioned, corrected, reshaped. He wasn't simply gathering intelligence—he was molding Danilov into a real double agent, a man whose fear made him obedient and precise. A human weapon.
Slowly, a plan began to form in Jake's mind. Stolypin was too sharp to swallow hollow lies. He would need something real—something that looked like a victory. Something worth a Prime Minister's attention.
And that meant sacrifice.
When Danilov finally sagged from exhaustion, Jake straightened and faced Kamo.
"The time for pretending unity is over."
Kamo frowned. "What do you mean?"
"The Mensheviks," Jake said. "They fight us for the workers. Their weakness drags us down. They slow the revolution."
Kamo blinked, unsure he'd heard right.
"Stolypin needs proof our new 'asset' is worth using," Jake continued, voice calm and deliberate. "Danilov's first official report will expose the Menshevik printing press."
Kamo's jaw fell open. "Soso… they're comrades. We don't feed comrades to the Okhrana."
Jake didn't look away. "Anyone who isn't with us is against us. They're a liability. Their loss strengthens our position—and gives Stolypin a victory. Everyone wins. Except them."
Silence filled the cellar like smoke. Even Danilov, half-conscious on the floor, stared in horror.
Jake sat at the small wooden table and drafted the message. His handwriting was steady, deliberate, and each sentence had two purposes—inform Stolypin, destroy rivals.
By the time he finished, Jake Vance was a ghost in his own mind.
Only Soso remained.
Writing the message felt like corruption made flesh. The lantern light flickered against the wall, making Jake's shadow loom enormous. He dictated the last lines while Danilov's trembling hand scratched coded symbols onto paper—symbols that would damn men who still used the word "comrade" when speaking about him. Each mark was a betrayal of the idealistic teacher Jake Vance had once been.
But Soso saw the world as a board, not a graveyard. This was geometry, not cruelty. Remove a weak piece; open a path.
The message went out the next morning, slipped through Stolypin's polished dead-drop network. Then came waiting.
Two days passed like a city holding its breath. The Bolsheviks moved with new discipline under Soso's hidden direction. The Mensheviks continued printing calls for unity, still dreaming of democracy. Still doomed.
On the third night, the silence shattered.
The Okhrana raided the Menshevik committee's "secure" apartment above a bakery. A midnight strike—precise, brutal, professional. Leaders arrested. Lists and documents seized. Their printing press gone. In one sweep, the rival faction in Tbilisi was gutted.
By morning, Bolshevik headquarters buzzed with whispered satisfaction. Outwardly, they mourned and issued statements condemning "Tsarist terror." But behind closed doors:
"A tragedy," one man said with a half-smile.
"Clarifying," another murmured.
"Now the workers will see who the true vanguard is."
Their eyes drifted to Soso. His silence gave them the answer they wanted: that he had somehow steered the Okhrana's blade away from them. To them, he wasn't just strategic anymore—he was dangerous. A man who played on a board touched by shadows.
Shaumian approached him later. "Danilov," he whispered. "This was his work?"
"He gave us the intelligence to avoid being hit," Jake said evenly. "We were… fortunate."
Shaumian accepted the explanation without question and gave Jake more authority. No one asked what his "Security Committee" actually did. Results were enough.
The victory was absolute—and tasted like ash.
That afternoon, a citywide socialist meeting convened. The surviving Mensheviks were hollow-eyed, furious, grieving. Jake gave a fiery speech of solidarity. Each word scraped at him.
Afterward, Noah Jordania approached. His son had been arrested that night. His eyes were red, but his voice steady.
"Thank you for your support, Comrade Soso," he said, extending his hand. "In times like these, we must stand together."
Jake shook the man's warm hand and felt nothing. The last pieces of Jake Vance were screaming inside him, but far away, muffled.
He walked home through a cold drizzle. At the cellar entrance, Kamo intercepted him with a folded note.
"A reply," he said softly. "From the new drop-point."
Jake opened it and decoded the symbols. His pulse hammered as the meaning formed.
What is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov's current thinking on the agrarian question?
Stolypin wasn't testing him anymore.
The Tsar's Prime Minister was now asking for intelligence on Lenin himself.
The board had shifted again.
And this time, the opponent was history.