The knock on his office door was not the knock of a friend. It was the frantic, desperate hammer of a man bringing news of a death.
Shliapnikov burst in, his face pale and slick with sweat. He had run all the way from the docks, his powerful chest heaving for air. He didn't waste time with words. He slammed a crumpled, damp piece of paper onto Jake's desk. It was from the Finn's network of dockside informants.
Jake smoothed it out. The paper was a scrap from a fishmonger, and it still smelled of salt and the sea. The message was four words, hastily scribbled in charcoal.
Cheka moving. Arrest tonight.
Shliapnikov finally found his voice, the words coming out in ragged gasps. "It's Lenin's direct order. The Finn's source is a clerk inside the Lubyanka. They're not just watching her anymore, Koba. They're taking her."
The world narrowed to a single, sharp point. The air in the room grew thin and cold. This wasn't a political probe. This wasn't a test. This was an execution. Lenin was taking his queen off the board to declare checkmate.
The rage that filled Jake was not hot and explosive. It was utterly cold, a glacier of fury moving slowly and unstoppably through his veins. The game of politics was over. There was only the fight.
He stared at the map of Petrograd pinned to his wall, the city laid out like an unwinnable battlefield. He had no moves left. The Red Guard answered to Trotsky's grand speeches. The Cheka, the state's sword, answered to Lenin's cold command. His own so-called army in the Urals was a fiction, a bureaucratic ghost a thousand miles away.
Officially, he was powerless. A Commissar with no one left to command.
This was the moment. The pivot point. His 21st-century conscience, the ghost of Jake Vance, screamed at him from inside the prison of his mind. He had put "Anna" in this position. He had used her, a stranger, as a pawn in his secret game. The logical, politically savvy move—the move the real Stalin would have made without a second thought—was to cut her loose. Let the Cheka have her. Disavow everything. Survive.
But Jake Vance couldn't do it.
He had sent men to their deaths in the October Revolution. He had ordered an attack on the Women's Battalion. He was already a monster, his hands stained red. But to abandon this woman, to let her be swallowed by the Lubyanka's cellars because he had put a target on her back… that was a line he could not cross. Not yet.
It was a suicidal, illogical choice. And he knew, with a terrifying certainty, it was the only one he could make.
He turned his head, his eyes finding the one part of the map that wasn't enemy territory. A small island fortress in the Gulf of Finland. Kronstadt.
He realized he had one last weapon. A power that existed outside the official structures of the state, a power that answered to no committee or council. A force of nature they had helped him create and now feared more than anything.
The "Golden Demon." His cult of personality. His sailors.
He turned to his loyal lieutenant. Shliapnikov was watching him, his expression a mixture of fear and resolute loyalty, waiting for the command that would surely damn them both.
Jake's voice was quiet, but it carried the weight of a final, irrevocable order.
"Shliapnikov, I need you to go to the Kronstadt naval base. Now. Use the private motor launch we secured last week. The one moored at the English Embankment."
Shliapnikov's eyes widened slightly. A clandestine, unsanctioned trip. "What is the message, Comrade Commissar?"
Jake met his gaze. "Find Petty Officer Anatoly. The big one, with the burn scar down his face. You will find him in the enlisted men's barracks. You will give him a message, from me and me alone."
He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "You will say this, and only this: 'Your commander is being hunted. He needs his honor guard. Not for the revolution. For himself.'"
The words hung in the air between them, thick with treason. This was no longer an order from a Commissar to a subordinate. It was a personal plea from a brother-in-arms to his most trusted soldier. A call to rebellion.
Shliapnikov understood instantly. He was being asked to commit an act of open mutiny against the state. Against Lenin himself.
He didn't hesitate for a second. His jaw set like iron. "I will not fail you," he said. And then he was gone, a loyal shadow disappearing into the night.
Jake was alone in his office. He walked to the window and stared out at the distant, glittering lights of the city. The clock on the wall behind him ticked with agonizing slowness, each second a hammer blow against the silence.
He was blind. He had no way of knowing if Shliapnikov would make it in time. No way of knowing if the fiercely independent sailors would answer a call that had nothing to do with the Party. No way of knowing if the Cheka's quiet professionals had already kicked down a door on a quiet street and dragged a German nurse into the darkness.
He had thrown his last desperate stone into the abyss and could only wait for the echo.
A terrifying clarity washed over him. He had come to this time to stop a monster, to prevent the horrors of Stalinism. But to fight the monsters Lenin and Trotsky were becoming, he had to unleash a demon of his very own making.
He had just bypassed the Party, the Council of People's Commissars, and the entire Soviet state. He had drawn a line in the snow and dared the leaders of the revolution to cross it.
All for a woman he barely knew. All for a ghost he was still chasing.
He had just declared war on his own government.