The notebook's leather cover began to curl and blacken, the smell of burning hide a sharp, sickening offense in the small cellar. Kamo held it over the lantern's flame with the unwavering certainty of a priest burning a heretical text. For him, this was a cleansing, a necessary act to protect the party's soul from a vile Okhrana lie.
Jake had seconds.
His first instinct was to lunge, to snatch the book from the fire, but he crushed the impulse before it could take root. Kamo was a monolith of physical power and ideological certainty. Any attempt to physically stop him would be futile and, worse, would confirm Kamo's suspicion that Jake was either delusional or, impossibly, an agent provocateur himself. He couldn't fight the man's body; he had to attack his mind.
"Stop."
The word was not a plea. It was a command, delivered with a voice so cold and sharp it seemed to cut through the cellar's damp air.
Kamo hesitated. His hand, holding the book over the flame, paused for a fraction of a second. He turned his head, his eyes narrowed, a dangerous glint in their depths. "What did you say, Soso?"
"I said stop," Jake repeated, taking a deliberate step forward into the lantern's flickering light. He met Kamo's glare without flinching, forcing his own expression into a mask of cold, calculating logic. "You are thinking like a soldier, Kamo, not a strategist. You are about to do exactly what they want you to do."
Kamo's frown deepened, a mixture of confusion and suspicion. "What I want is to destroy this poison before it infects us."
"And what they want is for their poison to be untraceable," Jake countered, his mind racing, building the argument brick by brick. He was no longer Jake Vance, the terrified teacher. He was someone else now, a political creature born in the bloody alley. "You say this is a trick? A lie planted by the Okhrana to make us devour ourselves? Good. Let's assume you are right. Let's say this is the most clever lie they have ever told."
He let the words hang in the air, allowing Kamo's own paranoia to become the foundation for his argument.
"So why would we do them the favor of burning the evidence of their own plot?" Jake continued, his voice dropping, becoming more conspiratorial. "This notebook… this isn't just poison. It's the recipe for the poison. It's a map of our enemy's mind. We don't burn it. We study it. We use it."
Kamo slowly, almost unconsciously, pulled the notebook away from the flame. The edge was blackened and warped, but the book was saved. He stared at Jake, his expression unreadable. "Use it how? By accusing one of the party's greatest leaders? That will tear us apart faster than any Okhrana bomb."
"No," Jake said, shaking his head. "We accuse no one. We say nothing." He lowered his voice further, forcing Kamo and the wide-eyed Pyotr to lean in. "We will treat this information like a loaded gun, held to the head of a man who doesn't even know he's a target. We watch him," he said, the pronoun heavy with the unspoken name of Orlov. "We listen to his proposals. We observe who he meets in the dead of night. We see if his actions align with this 'lie' they have planted."
He could see the logic taking root in Kamo's mind, appealing directly to his deep-seated suspicion of all things.
"Think of it, Kamo," Jake pressed, his confidence growing. "The Okhrana believe they have planted a seed of discord. They will be waiting for us to erupt into infighting, to purge a good man based on their fabricated evidence. But we won't. We will do the opposite. We will pretend to fall for their trick. We will let this 'traitor' continue his work, all the while watching his every move, gathering proof of the Okhrana's own conspiracy against us. When the time is right, we will expose not the man, but the plot itself. We will use their own poison to inoculate the entire revolutionary body."
It was a masterful piece of manipulation, a twisted logic that transformed a direct threat into a tactical opportunity. He had taken Kamo's conviction that the information was a lie and weaponized it.
Kamo stared at the singed notebook in his hand, then back at Jake. A long, tense silence filled the cellar, broken only by the distant, mournful sound of a ship's horn from the harbor.
"This is a dangerous game, Soso," Kamo finally grunted, his voice a low rumble.
"This is a dangerous war," Jake replied, his own voice steady.
With a final, decisive movement, Kamo closed the notebook and tucked it securely inside his own coat. "Fine," he said. "We do it your way. We watch. We wait." His eyes narrowed. "But this stays between us. Only us. If a word of this gets out, true or not, the panic will destroy everything. No one else can know. Not Pyotr. Not anyone."
"Agreed," Jake said. This act of shared secrecy was a new kind of bond between them, a dark alliance forged over a lie he was presenting as a truth. It also served his purpose perfectly. It isolated them. It made the cursed knowledge his and his alone to manage, with Kamo as his unwitting, heavily armed guard dog.
As the decision settled over the room, the cellar door creaked open. Another revolutionary, a thin, nervous man with ink stains on his fingers, slipped inside. He was panting, his eyes darting around the small space until they landed on Jake and Kamo.
"Comrades," he gasped, his message delivered in a hushed, urgent whisper for security. "An urgent summons. From Comrade Orlov."
Jake and Kamo exchanged a single, grim look. The name, spoken aloud, felt like a physical blow.
The runner continued, oblivious to the sudden tension. "The recent raids… the loss of Mikho… Comrade Orlov says the leadership must meet immediately. He says the Okhrana's aggression demands a new, bolder strategy from us. The meeting is at the old print shop. In one hour."
The air in the cellar grew thick and cold. The theoretical chess match Jake had just outlined was no longer theoretical. The loaded gun he spoke of was real, and it was now pointed directly at them. They weren't just going to observe the lion from afar. They had been summoned directly into his den.
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