The air in the Tbilisi safe house was thick with the smell of damp wool, old tobacco, and boiled cabbage. A single oil lamp sputtered over the table where Kamo sat, its dim light cutting through the haze like a blade. This was his command post — the heart of the underground. Soso might have been the mind, far away in Geneva, but here in the Caucasus, Kamo was the fist. He ran the squads, the smuggling routes, the safe houses. Under Soso's cold brilliance, their network had become a machine — ruthless, disciplined, and feared.
Two decoded messages lay before him. Both bore Soso's cipher. Both carried weight.
The first concerned the boy, Giorgi.
Compromised element. Psychological state unreliable. Reassign to non-combat duties.
Kamo frowned. It sounded like paranoia. The boy was quiet, obedient, a perfect little automaton. He'd seen too much, sure, but he never complained. He worked. He obeyed. That should have made him useful. But an order from Soso was law. And if Soso said the boy was dangerous, then danger it was.
He called in his lieutenant, Sandro — a broad, scarred man with the patience of a wolfhound.
"The boy, Giorgi," Kamo said. "He's off runner duty. Kitchen detail only. Don't let him out of the house. Soso's orders."
Sandro blinked. "The kitchen?"
"You heard me."
A few minutes later, Kamo watched as Giorgi was led away, silent as ever, a pale shadow disappearing into the smoke of the safe house kitchen. He didn't protest. He didn't even look up.
Kamo dismissed it from his mind and turned to the second message. This one was cleaner, sharper — the official story of the Luka Mikeladze affair. A tribunal, three judges — Soso, Kamo, Shaumian — and a verdict of execution, carried out by Kamo himself.
He almost smiled. It was a lie, of course, but a beautiful one. It put him exactly where he belonged — the executioner of traitors. A symbol of revolutionary justice.
He called his men — Sandro, Davri, Mikheil — and laid down the new "truth."
"There was a trial," he said. "We were the judges. The traitor was executed. No questions. This is the version we stick to. Discipline is everything. Understood?"
They nodded. They didn't need reasons. Orders were enough. The story became law.
For about an hour, the fortress held.
Then came the knock. Fast, frantic.
Sandro opened the back door and nearly caught Levan, one of their city watchers, as he stumbled inside, drenched in sweat and panic.
"They took him!" Levan gasped. "Shaumian — they took him!"
Kamo shot to his feet. "A raid? Where?"
"At his house," Levan said, his voice trembling. "Not the police. The Okhrana's special section. They knew exactly who they wanted. They dragged him out in front of his family."
The room froze. Shaumian was untouchable — a public intellectual, a careful man who never went near weapons or plots. To take him meant escalation. This wasn't routine. It was war.
"Find out the charge," Kamo ordered. "Now."
The next hour crawled by in silence broken only by whispers and the creak of floorboards. Men paced. Others checked the windows. Kamo sat rigid, his eyes on the two coded messages that still lay on the table.
When the reply finally came, it was delivered by a trembling courier boy through a dead drop. Kamo tore into it, decoding the symbols by memory.
Then he stopped.
He read the message again, slower this time. The words refused to make sense.
The arrest had come directly from St. Petersburg. The warrant bore the Prime Minister's seal. The charge was capital murder.
The murder of Luka Mikeladze.
Kamo's hand went numb. The paper fluttered from his grip and landed on the table.
His men stared. "What is it?" Sandro asked.
Kamo didn't answer. He looked at the two messages from Soso — one calling Giorgi a security risk, the other naming Luka and describing a tribunal that had never happened. A tribunal that now, somehow, existed on paper inside an Okhrana file.
It was impossible. It was suicide.
They knew.
Not guessed. Not overheard. Knew.
Their fabricated story — the lie Soso had crafted — had been intercepted, twisted, and turned into the very weapon now tearing through their network.
The fortress wasn't being attacked from the outside. It was bleeding from within.
For the first time in years, Kamo felt fear. Real fear. Not the kind that came before a raid or an explosion, but the cold, helpless terror of being outplayed. This was no battle of guns and fists. This was a war of whispers. A war of minds.
And the mind that could fight it — Soso's mind — was far away in Geneva.
He grabbed a fresh cipher sheet, his hands shaking as he began to write. The message was short, raw, stripped of all formality.
FORTRESS BREACHED. SHAUMIAN TAKEN. OKHRANA CHARGE: MURDER. VICTIM: LUKA MIKELADZE. YOUR PROTOCOL. THEY KNOW. HOW DO THEY KNOW?
He sealed it, sent it through the fastest channel they had, and waited.
In Geneva, Jake Vance — the man the world knew as Stalin — sat across from Vladimir Lenin in a cramped rented room. The meeting had gone perfectly. His proposal for a centralized party security apparatus had been accepted. Lenin had clasped his hand, smiling in rare approval.
For the first time, Jake felt certain he'd won. He'd mastered this brutal new world.
Then the courier entered. Breathless. Urgent.
Jake broke the seal on the telegram and read.
The room around him fell away. The triumph evaporated, leaving only cold silence.
The message was a knife of words. Stolypin's countermove. Perfect. Precise.
The lie that had protected him was now the evidence that condemned his own men.
Pyotr Stolypin had seen through everything — and struck back with Jake's own weapon.
The fortress hadn't just cracked. It had collapsed. And the ghost he'd tried to control had just become his executioner.