The pamphlet landed like a fuse. Kamo wanted a hammer—public, violent, obvious. Jake knew that would be exactly what the pamphlet wanted: proof that the party was brutal and afraid. He chose a quieter reply.
"We will not hang anyone from a lamppost," Jake said in the cellar, voice low and calm. "Public terror is the Tsar's tool. We will be silent. We will be surgical."
He set his makeshift intelligence to work. A pamphlet is physical: written, printed, handed out. That meant a trail. He intended to follow it and cut it off.
He called Luka and Anna in. He showed them the pamphlet. "This is priority," he said. "Anna, your observers watch who slips these into papers and leaves them on benches. Not the readers — the handoff. Descriptions. Locations. Times. Luka, run those descriptions against the list Danilov gave us of Yagoda's contacts."
This stopped being romantic idealism. It became counterintelligence: small, tedious work—notes, comparisons, confirmations. It would wear the enemy down more surely than a street beating.
Outside, pressure grew. Yagoda's poison spread through taverns and tea houses into corridors of power. Stepan Shaumian asked for a private meeting, his worry plain.
They met in the dusty bookstore, the smell of old paper at odds with the new danger.
"Soso, your actions were necessary," Shaumian said without preamble. "I defended them. But this pamphlet… it's stirring instability. Doubt is spreading. People on the Central Committee—good comrades—are asking for proof. They say the party can't run on one man's secret judgments, no matter his skill."
Jake listened. He kept his face still.
"They want proof," Shaumian went on. "They want Danilov presented. They want to hear Orlov's confession themselves."
Danilov was both Jake's asset and his Achilles' heel: shattered, terrified, held together only by Jake's pressure. Under a dozen skeptical committee members he could break in a way that unravelled everything—Yagoda, the secret ops, Jake himself.
Shaumian could only stall so long. "I can't hold them forever," he said. "They've called a closed session. You must bring Danilov tomorrow night. It's the only way to calm them and secure your authority."
Thirty-six hours. Jake left the bookstore with the city under drizzle and a head full of plans. He needed a message that would hush the committee before the meeting. He had to cut the pamphlet's head off cleanly and quietly.
Anna's network found a lead by afternoon: a back-alley print shop run by Viktor Malenky, a malcontent and occasional illicit-printer. Luka's cross-checks confirmed it: Danilov had once named Malenky as a man who took risky, under-the-table jobs.
A public abduction was useless. A secret execution would leak and validate the pamphlet. The solution had to be deniable. It had to look like the city's ordinary cruelty.
He found Kamo in a smoky tavern, cleaning his revolver.
"I need a message sent," Jake said, sitting across from him.
Kamo looked up. "What kind?"
"A loud message that makes no sound," Jake said. He explained: Malenky has to disappear. No fanfare. No trace of us. A robbery that turned bad. Tragic, but ordinary.
Kamo stared. The plan settled in. This wasn't vengeance. It was camouflage: political murder dressed as street crime.
"Robberies happen," Kamo said finally. "Especially to men who carry their week's pay home after dark."
He left without more words.
That night Viktor Malenky was found in an alley near his shop. Pockets emptied. Head caved in with a loose cobblestone. One more brutal street crime among many. The police poked, then moved on.
But the right people noticed. Anyone who'd passed a pamphlet through Malenky's hands heard the news and felt the chill: not a robbery. A warning. The invisible hand of Soso's committee reached out and crushed dissent before it could spread.
The pamphlet distribution stopped. The whispers thinned and sputtered.
Jake had won that round. He had cut the enemy's supply chain without making a spectacle. But the committee still wanted Danilov on the stand tomorrow. Danilov was a bomb with a slow fuse.
Jake sat alone in the cellar as the city slept and felt the fuse burn down.