The roar of the crowd was a physical force, pressing in on Jake from all sides.
Dmitri stared at him, his face pale and slack with shock. "They are calling you the Zolotoy D'yavol," he whispered over the din, the words barely audible. "The Golden Demon."
The name sent a chill down Jake's spine. A legend was being born in the street, and he was its unwilling subject.
"Let them," Jake said, his voice a low growl. He grabbed the boy's arm, his grip like iron. "Right now, we need to disappear."
He used the surging, chaotic mob as cover, a human sea to hide in. He pulled Dmitri into a narrow side street, the roar of the revolution fading slightly, replaced by the sound of their own ragged breathing.
The air in the alley was different. It carried the sudden, sharp, acrid smell of gunpowder. Somewhere, not far away, the first shots had been fired. The game had just changed from a riot to a war.
"This way," Dmitri gasped, leading him deeper into a maze of frozen, filth-strewn alleyways. "The press is nearby. It should be safe."
The Bolshevik hideout was the freezing, damp basement of a small printing press. The air was thick with the smells of cheap ink, cold metal, and a palpable, choking fear.
Four other men were huddled around a small, sputtering stove. They were little more than boys, students with thin beards and wire-rimmed glasses, their faces pale in the flickering light. They were theorists, debaters, pamphlet-writers. They were utterly, hopelessly unprepared for the firestorm raging in the streets above.
They looked at Jake, then at the half-empty but still heavy bag he dropped on the floor. Their eyes were a mixture of awe, suspicion, and raw, naked terror.
A young man named Sasha, their clear leader, stood up. He tried to project an air of authority, but his hands were trembling slightly.
"You are Koba?" he asked, his voice thin. "The Central Committee mentioned you. You had a delivery for us."
He eyed the bag. "Is that what's left of it?"
"It's what's left of your revolution," Jake corrected, his voice flat. He was exhausted, his adrenaline starting to fade, leaving a bone-deep weariness.
Sasha drew himself up. "The revolution is proceeding according to the will of the people! We are following Party discipline. We are waiting for orders from Comrade Lenin in Zurich."
Jake almost laughed. The sound that came out was a harsh, humorless bark.
"Zurich is a library," he said, kicking a loose stone on the floor. "Petrograd is a warzone."
He looked around the cold, damp basement, at the terrified faces of the young intellectuals. "Your theories are useless here. Your discipline is a fantasy. All you have is a cold room and a dying fire."
He nudged the bag with his foot. "What I have," he said, his voice dropping, "is not."
Sasha's face flushed with anger. "You cannot just buy the revolution, Comrade!"
"I just did," Jake shot back, the words like stones. "Out on the street. With a few chunks of metal. I bought it from the women who were actually fighting it while you were down here reading Marx."
He let the insult hang in the air, a deliberate, calculated provocation.
"Now," he continued, his tone shifting from contempt to business, "I'm hiring soldiers. And you're going to help me."
He unslung the bag, opened it, and poured a small, glittering pile of gold coins onto the grimy wooden table. The sound of the metal clinking was impossibly loud in the tense silence. It was enough to feed them all for a month. Maybe two.
"This is your payment," Jake stated. "In exchange, I want three things."
He held up a finger. "One, this printing press is mine now. We're not printing theories. We're printing news. Real news, from the street. Demands. Locations of troops. We are going to become the voice of this chaos."
He held up a second finger. "Two, you and your men work for me now. You're my eyes and ears. I want to know everything that's happening in this city. Troop movements, food shortages, which regiments are wavering."
Sasha stared at the gold, then back at Jake, his expression a mixture of outrage and mesmerized greed. "And the third thing?"
"The third thing," Jake said, his voice turning to ice, "is a meeting. Not with students. Not with theorists. I want to meet the men who are actually running things here. The Petrograd Soviet. The men who know how to hold a rifle."
He leaned forward, his eyes locking onto Sasha's. "I want to meet Shliapnikov."
The name landed like a bomb in the small room. Alexander Shliapnikov was the head of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, a metalworker, a hard man forged in the fires of the factory floor, not the university library.
"That's impossible," Sasha stammered. "He doesn't meet with... with people like you."
"People who get things done?" Jake countered. "People who have the one thing this revolution needs to survive past tomorrow?" He gestured to the gold. "You will arrange it."
The raw, brutal pragmatism of the offer was undeniable. The glittering pile of coins on the table was more real than any letter from Zurich. The revolution in the streets was more real than any dusty book.
Sasha looked at his comrades. He saw the hunger and fear in their eyes. He saw their revolution slipping away, about to be claimed by the Mensheviks or crushed by the Tsar.
And he saw this strange, terrifying man who smelled of the outside world, of violence and purpose. He was not a comrade. He was a weapon. A weapon they were too afraid not to use.
Sasha gave a slow, resentful nod. "I will send a message."
Jake nodded back, the bargain struck. He had his foothold.
As he turned to find a corner to rest, Sasha gave him a final, chilling warning.
"Be careful, Comrade," he said, his voice low and laced with a new kind of fear. "The men you are going to meet... they do not trust outsiders."
He paused, his eyes flicking from Jake's face to the bag of gold. "Especially ones who smell of German money and look like they enjoy the chaos a little too much."