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!"
The port in Narvik, Norway, was a place of frozen silence.
The only sound was the low, mournful groan of the Swedish freighter's hull as it shifted against the ice-choked pier. The mission, as Kato had outlined it, was simple. Get on board, secure the cargo, get out.
Pavel moved like a ghost. He flowed up the gangplank, a dark shape against the snow, his movements economical and silent.
He encountered the first Norwegian guard near the bow. The man was bundled in a thick coat, his breath a white cloud in the frigid air. He never heard Pavel coming.
One arm snaked around his throat, cutting off any sound. A single, brutal twist. The crunch of bone was a small, dry sound in the vast silence. Pavel lowered the body gently to the deck, out of sight.
There was no hesitation. No remorse. Just the cold, efficient completion of a task.
Watching from the shadows of the pier, Kato felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. She had wanted a soldier. She had created an automaton.
The second guard was in the small watch station overlooking the cargo cranes. Pavel was a shadow at the door, a flicker of movement. The guard started to turn, his mouth opening to form a question. He never finished it. Pavel's garrote was a thin, dark line that appeared and vanished in the same instant.
Pavel gave a short, sharp nod. The signal. All clear.
Kato and Murat moved, their boots quiet on the packed snow. They boarded the ship. The air on deck was clean and sharp, but as they descended into the ship's interior, it grew thick and heavy with the smell of diesel and cold steel.
The faint, coppery smell of blood clung to Pavel as they passed him. He said nothing, his face a blank mask in the gloom.
They made their way to the main cargo hold. The experimental British artillery shells were exactly where the German intel said they would be. Three massive wooden crates, stenciled with English warnings and the crest of the Royal Arsenal.
The plan was elegant. Use the ship's own small deck crane to lift two of the crates directly onto the flatbed of a waiting truck Ivan had procured. A simple, quiet theft.
"Murat, we have the cargo," Kato whispered into the speaking tube that connected them to the deck. "Prepare the crane. We are coming out."
"Understood," Murat's voice crackled back, tinny and distant.
Pavel and Kato began attaching the heavy crane hooks to the thick ropes binding the first crate. Their movements were practiced and efficient, a silent dance in the dim light of their hooded lantern.
As they tightened the last hook, a shape detached itself from the deeper shadows of the hold.
A man. The ship's first mate, carrying a lantern and a heavy, industrial wrench. He wasn't on any watch schedule they had seen. A random inspection. A ghost in their machine.
He saw them. His eyes went wide with shock and fear. His lantern cast long, dancing shadows that turned the hold into a cavern of moving monsters.
He opened his mouth to shout.
Before Kato could even raise her pistol, before she could process the threat, Pavel moved.
It was not a takedown. It was an explosion of pure, horrifying violence. He didn't try to silence the man. He tried to obliterate him.
He lunged forward, not with a knife, but with his entire body. He drove the heel of his heavy boot into the first mate's knee with the force of a battering ram. The sound of the man's leg shattering was a wet, cracking noise that echoed horribly in the steel hold.
The man screamed, a high, thin sound of pure agony, but it was cut short. As he fell, Pavel brought the steel-plated butt of his rifle down on the side of the man's skull. The sound was a sickening, hollow thump, like a melon splitting open.
The first mate collapsed in a heap, his lantern flying from his hand. He fell without another sound.
It was utterly efficient. It was brutally final. It was monstrous.
I told him to handle it, Kato thought, her mind reeling, a cold dread washing over her. I never thought... he wouldn't know when to stop.
The dead man's lantern, its glass shattered, rolled across the steel floor. It came to a stop against a stack of oil-soaked tarpaulins. The burning wick ignited the oil.
A sudden, hungry whoosh filled the hold as a wall of orange flame erupted, licking at the dry canvas.
And that wasn't the worst of it.
The heavy, jarring impact of the first mate's body hitting the deck must have triggered something. A tripwire. A pressure plate.
A loud, clanging alarm bell began to ring, its frantic, desperate clangor screaming throughout the ship and echoing across the silent docks.
They were trapped.
The fire was spreading, casting a hellish, flickering light on the scene. The alarm was a physical assault, a screaming announcement of their failure. From the deck above, they could hear the sudden shouts of the awakened crew, the sound of running feet.
Pavel stood over the body, his rifle held loosely in his hands. He looked down at his handiwork, his expression utterly, terrifyingly blank. As if he had just tidied a messy room.
Kato looked from the spreading fire to the dead man, to the empty expression on Pavel's face.
The monster she had created had just saved her life. And it had doomed them all.
She scrambled for the speaking tube, her heart hammering against her ribs.
"Murat, forget the cargo! Scuttle the plan!" she yelled into the tube, her voice tight with a cold, rising panic.
"We need an exit! Now!"