The news of the printer's death moved through the underground like a cold wind. Whispers stopped. Pamphlets vanished. Jake's message had landed—quiet, brutal, believable.
He sat in the cellar and felt nothing but a hollow. He'd bought time. That was all.
The committee meeting still stood. Shaumian and the others still wanted Danilov presented. The rank-and-file stopped talking, but leadership thought differently. They wanted a political answer, not a scare story played out in alleys.
Jake ran the possible moves in his head until they all looked like traps.
Option one: bring Danilov before the committee. Let a dozen suspicious men prod a terrified witness. Under pressure he could crack. He might name names. He might unravel every story Jake had built. The secret ops, Yagoda, even the way Orlov was handled — everything could come spilling out.
Option two: refuse. Say Danilov's unstable, unfit to testify. That would look like hiding something. It would confirm the pamphlet's accusation that Jake was a dangerous, secretive force. The committee would move to strip him of power.
Both options ended the same way. Checkmate.
He needed a third move. Something audacious enough to change the rules.
He went to the locked box of evidence and pulled out the Okhrana markers they'd found in the drop-box. He sat with them until the code began to read like a pattern. His twenty-first-century habits of systems and patterns worked where others' instincts failed.
He wrote a short, ugly message on fresh paper: ASSET 12 IS COMPROMISED. ACTIVATE ASSET 17. AWAIT CONTACT. URGENT.
It looked official. It looked dangerous.
He handed it to Luka. "Plant this where a search would find it," he said. "Make it look accidental. Bring it to Kamo like you stumbled on it. Act worried."
Luka nodded. He did not ask why. He did not need to.
Kamo burst in an hour later, breathless and angry. "Luka found this," he said, thrusting the paper forward. "We don't know what it means."
Jake took it and pretended puzzlement. He fed the expression the room expected: the face of a man who had uncovered a serious thread.
"Get Shaumian," he said. "Tell him this is urgent."
When Shaumian arrived, Jake laid the note on the table. "I was going to present Danilov tonight," Jake said. "But this changes everything."
He let the sentence hang.
"This is an Okhrana command," he lied smoothly. "Asset 12 is Orlov — they know he's gone. They're panicking. They're activating another asset. Asset 17. This message was meant to reach Danilov. They were attempting to activate him."
Shaumian blinked. A slow, cold look crossed his face.
"He's not just a hitman anymore," Jake continued. "He's a key. He knows codes, contacts, methods. He could open the whole network for them."
Jake watched Shaumian's worry turn to calculation. He kept pushing.
"To expose him to a dozen committee members now would be strategic madness. If the Okhrana are listening, if they're watching— we hand them our asset on a silver platter."
Then Jake did what he'd decided he had to do. "We will turn him," he said. "We will make him ours. He will go back to them as a double agent. He will feed them whatever we want. He will watch them for us."
The words dropped like a stone. Kamo and Shaumian sat frozen. The decision solved everything. Danilov could no longer be paraded before the committee without risking the mission. The committee's demand became a liability to itself. Jake turned a weakness into strategic necessity.
It was audacious. It was dangerous. It was a lie on top of a lie.
He didn't wait for approval. He unlocked the back room and entered where Danilov sat, gaunt and hollow-eyed. The small light from the outer room cut his face into thin shapes.
Danilov looked up and saw the man who had made him what he was: broken, useful, trapped.
"You have a new job," Jake said, almost gently. "You're going to be a hero of the revolution. Whether you want to or not."
Danilov's eyes lost focus. Jake felt the fuse burn down again — closer this time.
Outside, the city moved on. Inside, he'd rewritten the board.
It would work. It had to.
But every time he built the lie higher, the risk under it grew. He'd bought himself more than a day. He had also set a bomb in his own hand.