The palace of the Tsar's favorite ballerina had become the nest of his executioners.
Jake walked through the gilded, ornate halls of the Kshesinskaya Palace, a ghost in a working man's coat. His rough boots were silent on the priceless silk rugs. Every revolutionary he passed, every Red Guard with a rifle and a red armband, stopped and stared.
They weren't looking at a comrade. They were looking at the Golden Demon, a creature of myth who had walked out of the streets and into their headquarters. Their expressions were a volatile cocktail of awe and fear.
He wasn't storming the gates. He had been summoned.
A runner from Shliapnikov had found him at the steel works, in the heart of his new "Shadow Soviet." The message was two simple words that felt like a death sentence.
"Lenin wants to see you."
He was shown not into a crowded meeting room, but into a former ballroom. The massive, glittering crystal chandeliers still hung from the high, painted ceiling. They cast a cold, brilliant light on the three men waiting for him.
There was no committee. No audience. Only Lenin, Trotsky, and Shliapnikov.
This was a trial.
Lenin sat behind a massive, carved oak desk that had once belonged to a duke. He was a small man, but he radiated an aura of immense, compressed power, a human singularity bending the room around him. He did not rise. He simply watched Jake approach, his strange, slightly tilted eyes like a biologist studying a dangerous, unpredictable new specimen.
Trotsky stood to one side, his arms crossed, his face a mask of intellectual contempt. Shliapnikov stood near the door, a silent, grim-faced guard, his presence a clear statement: he was with Lenin, but he was also the reason Jake was here at all.
"They call you a demon," Lenin said, his voice quiet, almost conversational. The calm was more menacing than a shout. "A prophet. You have been busy, Comrade Koba."
He spit the word 'Comrade' like a deliberate, sarcastic insult.
Trotsky stepped forward, unable to contain his frustration. "Busy breaking every rule of Party discipline! Busy with adventurism, with playing the folk hero while the real work—"
"The real work is in the streets," Jake cut him off, not even glancing at him. His focus was entirely on the small, still man behind the desk. "And in the streets, your discipline is a death sentence."
He looked directly at Lenin. "Your Party was sitting in a basement in the Vyborg district, waiting for orders from another country. I was in the street, winning a war you didn't know how to fight."
Lenin's eyes narrowed. A flicker of cold, reptilian anger. "The Party is not a democracy for folk heroes, Koba. It is a weapon. A scalpel to cut the cancer of the bourgeoisie from the body of the proletariat."
He leaned forward, his small hands flat on the desk. "And I am the man who aims it."
"A fine speech," Jake said, the corner of his mouth twitching. "But you cannot aim a weapon if you are blind."
He walked over to a large, ornate map of Petrograd hanging on the wall. It was a general's map, showing streets and bridges. To Jake, it was useless, a dead thing. He began to transform it.
He pulled a piece of charcoal from his pocket. "Your weapon is blind, Vladimir Ilyich."
He drew a swift, sharp circle around the Winter Palace. "Kutepov's loyalists are not routed. They have fallen back here. They have two machine gun nests on the roof, covering the square."
He drew another circle around the main telegraph office. "The Provisional Government is using this building to send messages to the front, begging for loyal troops to come and crush us. But the soldiers guarding it are from the Pavlovsky Regiment. Their loyalty is... fifty-fifty. A push would take the building."
He kept talking, his voice calm and authoritative, a river of pure, real-time intelligence. He detailed loyalist movements, food shortages in the working-class districts, the wavering morale in every key barracks.
He was not offering fealty. He was demonstrating his power. He was showing them the nervous system of the city he had built in less than a day.
He finished, leaving the map covered in his black, charcoal scrawls. It was no longer a map. It was a living battlefield.
"I am the eyes of this revolution," Jake said, turning back to face Lenin. "Without me, and without this," he gestured to the map, "you are just guessing. And your guesses will get us all killed before the week is out."
A tense, heavy silence filled the magnificent room.
Shliapnikov, the pragmatist, gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. He had seen the demon's magic work. Trotsky looked furious, his poetic vision of revolution sullied by this brute's ugly, practical truths.
Lenin, the ultimate pragmatist, was trapped.
He hated this. He hated Koba's independence, his legend, his methods that stank of anarchy and German gold. But he was a master strategist, and he could not deny the devastating, undeniable value of the weapon standing before him. He could not afford to cast it aside. Not now.
Lenin made his choice. He would use the demon. But he would forge a leash for him.
He stood up, a priest acknowledging a necessary, blasphemous miracle.
"Very well, Comrade Koba," Lenin said, his voice like stone. "You will be my demon. You will run your 'Shadow Soviet.' You will be the eyes and ears of the Party."
He paused, his gaze hardening. "But you will report only to me. All intelligence comes to this desk. Is that understood?"
"Perfectly," Jake said.
"Good," Lenin replied, a flicker of a cold, predatory smile on his lips. "Then your first task is to hunt. The Tsar's Minister of the Interior, Alexander Protopopov, has gone into hiding. He is a butcher and a fool, and the people are screaming for his head."
He looked Jake directly in the eyes, a priest giving his demon its first bloody task.
"I want him found. And I want him... erased."