The new safe house was worse than the cellar — an abandoned ice-house on the industrial fringe, a brick cavern smelling of rot and standing water. Cold lived here. It seeped into bones and language. Under a single lantern, Jake spread the plan before his hand-picked team: Kamo, Pyotr, and two veterans named Levan and Davit. They watched him like converts. In one night he had stopped being merely useful; he had become the strategist to follow.
He drew a crude map on a crate with a stub of charcoal — the tavern, the alleys, the tannery roof. "This is not a street brawl," he said. "This is a surgical extraction." He pointed: "Levan, you hold the mouth of the main alley. Don't engage. Block exits. Davit, you're on the tannery roof — overwatch. Signal us the moment a patrol turns toward the district. Kamo and I take the target. Pyotr, cart one block away. Once we have him, one minute. Silent in, silent out. Understood?"
They nodded, faces hardening. Kamo barked the orders again like a prayer. "You heard Soso — no mistakes."
It went like the plan: Orlov's diversions flared on the far side of town, pulling patrols toward smoke and spectacle; Davit signaled clear; Jake and Kamo slid down an alley, ghosts among the crates. The back door of Fikus's tavern opened and a portly man shambled out with a bucket of slop. He dumped it, turned — and the world closed around him.
They were on him in a second. Kamo's hand clamped over his mouth; Jake's arm pinned his chest. The tavern-owner's eyes bulged; a burlap sack was shoved over his head. Pyotr's cart swallowed them and vanished into the dark. Thirty seconds of movement, clean and efficient — the opposite of the bloody, clumsy firefight that had hollowed Giorgi.
Back at the ice-house they threw Fikus on the dirt floor and pulled the sack away. He stared at the lantern, at the faces, and panic unstitched him. Kamo cracked his knuckles, already hungry for cruelty. "Now," he growled, reaching for chain.
"Wait," Jake said, and Kamo stopped, surprised. "We need his mind, not his screams. Pain makes men say anything. We need truth."
Kamo hesitated, then, trusting Soso's mind now, left them. The others filed out. Jake crossed to a crate and sat, keeping his voice low and ordinary.
He did not accuse. He filled the silence with fact: names, meeting places, sums from the notebook they'd taken off the dead officer. "Your Okhrana handler is Sergeant Volkov," he said. "Tuesdays behind the fish market. Fifty rubles a month. Ten-ruble bonus for the railway-reading group." He spoke with the calm certainty of a man who already knew the answers.
Fikus went from terror to blanching disbelief. "How do you know that?" he whispered.
"We know everything," Jake said quietly. "So you can tell us what we already know, or make it harder on yourself."
The tavern owner broke. He babbled scraps: names of small informants, who collected what for whom. When pressed about the bakery raid he recoiled. "Not me! I swear on my mother's grave — it wasn't me! I didn't know about the bakery!"
Jake watched him closely. The dead notebook had fodder; Fikus' fear was ordinary, improvisational. Desperate men name bigger fish to save themselves. In a panic, Fikus offered the one name that would make his captors sit up: Orlov. "It wasn't me," he cried. "It was… Comrade Orlov! Volkov told me that the bakery job was Orlov's. He said Orlov handles high-value work. I— I stayed away."
The door slammed open. Kamo filled the frame, face carved in rage, revolver in hand. "Liar!" he roared. "He blames a comrade to save his skin."
Kamo raised his pistol to the man's head. Every instinct in the room rustled toward finality.
Jake moved between them. "Wait," he said, quiet but hard.
"Move aside, Soso! He's a dog —" Kamo began.
Jake held up a hand. He didn't speak to soothe Kamo; he was thinking, the wheels of a darker plan clicking into place. Fikus' lie was perfectly useful: whether true or not, it pointed to something Jake suspected — someone keeping high-value sources to themselves, managing operations so others couldn't taste the credit. Whether Fikus was protecting Orlov or inventing a savior, the accusation could be weaponized.
"Don't kill him," Jake said, the words flat and inevitable.
"Why not?" Kamo ground.
"Because he's worth more alive. He just gave us the rope to hang a bigger man," Jake answered, and his voice had the chill of someone who had moved past mercy into calculation.