The hunt for a man is easy when the entire city is his cage.
Jake stood before his map, which was no longer a piece of paper but a living, breathing web of pins and string. He wasn't looking for a minister. He was looking for a ghost.
Lenin's order was a blade at his throat: Find Protopopov. Erase him.
Jake didn't use thugs to beat down doors. That was the old way. The stupid way. He used his new weapon, his network, his Shadow Soviet.
He sent his runners, his "nerve endings," into the hungry, chaotic city. They didn't carry guns. They carried a single, simple question.
"Where would a frightened, rich man with a guilty conscience hide?"
The answers began to flow back within hours, whispered fragments of a city's secrets. A baker had seen a fancy, unmarked motorcar speeding towards the south. A dockworker had heard two well-dressed men asking for directions to the holy sites.
The most valuable tip came from an old woman in a bread line, her face a mask of wrinkles and hunger. The runner had shared a piece of his own meager bread with her, and she had rewarded him with a piece of gold.
She had seen the car. It was parked in a small, discreet alley near the great Alexander Nevsky Monastery. The smell of wet, earthy potatoes from her sack was sharp in the cold air as she whispered her secret.
Jake took the information and overlaid it with his own 21st-century knowledge. He remembered the files, the history books. Alexander Protopopov wasn't just a butcher. He was a mystic, a follower of Rasputin, a man rumored to be deeply, cripplingly mentally unstable.
He wouldn't hide in a military barracks. He wouldn't seek refuge in an ally's palace. He would seek absolution. He would run to the one place he thought could wash the blood from his soul.
Jake went alone.
He walked through the high, arching gates of the monastery. The chaos of the revolution faded away, replaced by a profound, ancient silence. The air smelled of cold stone and melting beeswax.
He found Protopopov not in a grand chamber, but in a small, bare monk's cell. He was kneeling on the stone floor before a dark, gilded icon of a suffering saint.
The former Minister of the Interior of the entire Russian Empire was a wreck. A small, weeping man in an expensive but hopelessly disheveled suit. He was muttering, praying, his body shaking with ragged sobs.
He looked up as Jake entered, his eyes wide and bloodshot with terror. He didn't see a revolutionary. He saw an assassin. He assumed it was the Tsarists, coming to silence him before he could talk.
"Please," Protopopov whimpered, scrambling backwards until he hit the cold stone wall. "I did everything they asked. I was loyal. Don't kill me. I can pay you! I have money, jewels..."
Jake stood there in the doorway, his hand on the butt of the pistol in his belt.
This was not the monster he had expected. This was not a snarling beast of the old regime. This was a pathetic, broken, terrified creature.
Lenin's order had been clear. Erase him. A clean, simple command for a bullet to the back of the head. An execution to be celebrated, a symbol of revolutionary justice.
Jake looked at the terrified, weeping man, and the 21st-century Jake Vance rebelled. This wasn't justice. This wasn't a revolutionary act.
This was just murder.
Lenin wants a martyr, the thought screamed in his mind. He wants a symbol to parade. But this... this is just a sad old man. Killing him won't feed anyone. It won't win the war.
He couldn't disobey a direct order. Not now. Not when his position was so new, so fragile. But he could redefine the terms. He could fulfill the letter of the command, while utterly defying its spirit.
He would "erase" Protopopov from the Bolsheviks' problem list. Permanently.
Jake pulled his pistol. The sound of the hammer clicking back was deafening in the small cell.
Protopopov let out a thin, high-pitched squeal and curled into a ball on the floor, his hands covering his head.
Jake didn't point the gun at him.
He turned and fired two shots into the stone ceiling. The blasts were shocking, violent explosions of sound that shattered the monastery's sacred silence. Plaster dust rained down.
He grabbed the terrified Protopopov by the collar of his expensive coat, hauling him to his feet. He dragged the whimpering man out of the cell and into the wide, snow-dusted monastery courtyard.
As expected, a patrol of soldiers came running, drawn by the gunshots. But they weren't Red Guards. Their uniforms were different. They were soldiers loyal to the new Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks' chief political rivals.
Jake shoved the former minister towards them, sending him stumbling into the snow.
"I have a gift for you!" Jake shouted, his voice ringing across the courtyard. He was already backing away, melting into the shadows of the cloisters.
"A prisoner for your new republic!"