Batumi felt like another planet compared to Tbilisi. The sea wind hit hard, carrying the stink of salt, tar, and smoke from ships that never slept. The streets buzzed with sailors shouting in half a dozen tongues, merchants arguing over crates, and drunk dockhands stumbling home at dawn. It was the kind of place where money and secrets changed hands faster than the tide.
Perfect for a lie big enough to buy survival.
Jake didn't go himself. Those days were over. His job wasn't to run into danger anymore—it was to send others. From his cold basement in Tbilisi, he pulled the strings, the spider at the center of the web. The thought didn't bother him anymore. In fact, it felt natural. Almost too natural.
He sent Kamo.
Before Kamo left, Jake drilled him for hours. Not on fighting—but on pretending.
"You're not Kamo the bandit today," Jake said. "You're Gigo. Arms broker from Rostov. Nervous. Greedy. Always counting coins. You trust no one, not even your own shadow."
Then he handed over a plan as precise as a clock—signals, phrases, escape routes.
Kamo wasn't just a man anymore. He was a weapon loaded and primed.
Kamo reached Batumi with two men dressed as dockworkers. Their contact was Mikheil, a rat of a smuggler who always smelled like fish and fear. Jake had picked him on purpose—useful and expendable.
Kamo, now "Gigo," slid a small crate across the table of a tavern.
"European goods," he said. "High quality. You'll get ten percent if you find me a buyer."
Mikheil's eyes gleamed. "Ten?"
"Ten now," Kamo said. "If I live to spend it, maybe fifteen."
The bait was taken.
The meeting with Stolypin's man came next. A warehouse by the water. Dim light. Wind howling through broken windows. The officer—Sidorov—looked too clean for this place. His questions were polite, but his eyes searched like scalpels.
Kamo kept to the role—sweaty palms, darting glances, too eager for the payout.
Sidorov stayed cool, bureaucratic, the kind of man who could lie while measuring your heartbeat. Every word was a test. Every silence, a trap.
By the time they left, neither trusted the other—but both believed just enough to keep the game alive.
The final link was the buyer: the Armenian Dashnaks.
They met in a cellar that smelled like boiled cabbage and cheap wine. Three men sat waiting. Hard eyes. Harder faces. Their leader, Armen, had a mustache big enough to hide a knife behind.
"You have guns," Armen said. "We have money. But tell me, broker—how do I know you're not Okhrana bait?"
Kamo laughed nervously. "If this was a trap, I'd already be dead, my friend. I just want my cut and a train ticket out."
The Dashnaks didn't laugh. They whispered among themselves, suspicion thick as smoke. Finally, Armen said, "We inspect the goods first."
That broke the script. Jake's plan didn't allow it. The deal was dying fast.
Kamo stepped outside "to consult his partners." In truth, he was thinking—fast. He needed a way to flip fear into trust. A trick so bold it would make even Jake proud.
An hour later, chaos erupted.
Whistles. Shouts. The pounding of boots. Two "police officers" stormed a nearby warehouse, yelling about a raid. The whole district panicked.
Inside the cellar, Kamo burst in, panting, eyes wide.
"Okhrana!" he hissed. "They're raiding the docks! I'm leaving before they find me!"
The Dashnaks froze. Armen's hand went to his gun. "Wait—if they're here—then this is our only chance! We do it now. Fast."
The fake fear had become real greed. Perfect.
Ten frantic minutes later, the deal was done.
A moving cart. A single crate of Brownings. A heavy briefcase full of Tsarist gold.
Everyone just wanted to vanish before the "police" came back.
Kamo and his men left Batumi before sunrise, slipping into the fog like ghosts. Behind them, the port was alive with rumors—raids, gun deals, disappearing Armenians. No one knew the truth. No one ever would.
When Kamo returned to Tbilisi, the cellar filled with noise. Laughter. Relief.
He dropped the briefcase on Jake's desk with a thud that echoed.
"As promised," he said, grinning. "A gift from Stolypin himself."
Jake opened it. Stacks of gold rubles. Enough to fund the revolution for a year.
For a moment, he let himself feel the victory. It tasted like triumph—and danger.
Then Pyotr burst in, out of breath, an envelope in hand.
"Comrade Soso," he said. "A courier just arrived—from London."
Jake stared at the letter. His pulse quickened. Too soon. Too perfect.
He turned the envelope over once more. The thin paper was a bridge between two worlds: his grim, blood-soaked Georgia, and the distant, intellectual calm of London. Kamo stood nearby, the pride from Batumi's gold fading into a tense silence. Shaumian was there too, a ledger half-open in his hands. None of them spoke. They didn't have to. Everyone knew what this letter meant.
Jake broke the wax seal.
Inside, a single page, covered from edge to edge in sharp, forward-leaning handwriting. Words that looked like they were charging into battle.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.
Lenin.
Jake started to read—and for a moment, the cellar disappeared. The damp walls, the flickering oil lamp, the heavy scent of metal and earth—all gone. There was only Lenin's mind: cold, bright, and ruthless.
The letter began without greeting. It wasn't a conversation—it was a command.
To Comrade K. Stalin.
Your assessment of the Socialist-Revolutionary position is fundamentally correct, Lenin wrote, but your framing is insufficient. To debate them is useless. One must not argue; one must dismantle.
Jake read faster, his pulse syncing with Lenin's clipped rhythm. Line after line carved through ideology like a knife through flesh.
'Land and Liberty,' Lenin wrote, is a sentimental fraud. It flatters the peasant's selfish desire for property. It creates a new class of rural small-capitalists who will defend the old order. You must show them that this slogan offers not freedom, but a new form of slavery to the soil.
Jake's lips curled into a faint, involuntary smile. This was the Lenin he knew from history books—the pure strategist, the man who turned ideas into weapons. And now, those weapons were his to wield.
Lenin's voice on the page drove on:
The Party's position must be uncompromising. Nationalize all land—no division, no private plots. The estates must become collective farms, run by the state, powered by modern science. Your task is to expose the real class divide: between the kulak, the smallholder, and the landless laborer. Divide them. Turn them against one another. That is the key.
Jake exhaled slowly. He had his answer. The perfect intelligence for Stolypin—sharp, detailed, and dripping with ideological venom. Enough to keep both sides believing in him.
He thought that was the end.
But Lenin wasn't finished.
The tone changed. The words became personal.
Your questions, Comrade Stalin, were not those of a provincial agitator. They were the questions of a strategist. You think not only of what we believe, but how we fight. This clarity is rare. Too many of our comrades are either dreamers or brutes. You are neither.
Jake's hands trembled slightly.
Lenin had seen him.
Not as a provincial nobody, but as an equal.
For the first time, Jake felt the strange, electric thrill of recognition from a mind that history called genius—and a future dictator would call his own.
Then came the final lines. And they hit like a hammer.
The upcoming Fifth Party Congress in London will determine our path. The Caucasus delegation has long been undisciplined. I have recommended that you, Comrade Stalin, be added as a delegate. Your presence is required. Make arrangements to travel to London at once.
I wish to meet you.
Jake stared at the signature. Lenin.
A crown.
And a curse.
He had the perfect report for Stolypin—more than enough to secure his position as a double agent. But now Lenin himself had reached across the continent and pulled him into the center of the revolution.
London.
It was everything the real Stalin could have wanted—and exactly what Jake feared most.
He lowered the letter. His face had gone pale.
Kamo and Shaumian were watching him. Neither dared speak first.
"What is it, Soso?" Shaumian asked quietly. "Good news?"
Jake glanced at the gold-filled briefcase on the table, then at the letter still shaking in his hand. Two masters. Two worlds. Both waiting for him to choose.
"London," he said finally.
Kamo blinked. "London? That's insane. It'll take weeks. You can't go there and stay here. How can you be both Lenin's man and Stolypin's?"
The question hung in the cellar air like smoke.
Jake didn't answer. He didn't have one.
He'd just been given everything—status, recognition, a seat at history's table.
And it might be the thing that destroyed him.