Winter Palace (Зимний дворец), Saint Petersburg. February 1908.
The wind howled against the Winter Palace's double windows, searching for thermal cracks with the persistence of a fluid under pressure. For Alexei, who was now approaching four years old, the cold was largely irrelevant. What mattered was the heat emanating from the fireplace in his father's private office, and more specifically, the gray, opaque stone resting on the mahogany table, out of place among the state documents and Fabergé jewels.
Stolypin had returned.
The Prime Minister looked exhausted. The dark circles under his eyes were deep, but there was a vibration in his posture, one that Alexei recognized immediately: the excitement of discovery, the kind all human beings experience when they find something marvelous in their lives.
"The geologists from the Mining Academy were skeptical at first, Your Majesty," Stolypin said, his voice low so as not to alert the guards in the corridor. "But they followed the coordinates from the... Tsarevich's dream. In the Caucasus mountains, near Tyrnyauz."
Nicholas II took the stone. It was heavy, dense.
"And you say this is valuable, Pyotr?" the Tsar asked, weighing the mineral as if it were a curious paperweight.
"The preliminary report suggests it's one of the largest deposits in Eurasia," Stolypin responded. He turned slowly toward Alexei, who was sitting on the floor pretending to read an illustrated book of Russian folk tales. The Prime Minister's gaze no longer held any trace of condescension. It was the look of a man who has seen a miracle and is trying to assess its political utility. "If we process this, our capacity to harden artillery steel will surpass the Germans' within a decade. And even our artisanal industry will improve at an accelerated pace."
'In five years, if we optimize the smelting process,' Alexei corrected mentally, turning a page of the book without looking at it. 'And not just artillery. Cutting tools. High-speed lathes. Tungsten is the difference between artisanal industry and modern war industry.'
"It's a gift from God," Nicholas murmured, crossing himself. "Providence protects Russia through the Tsarevich."
Alexei suppressed a sigh. Providence was a non-quantifiable value and therefore useless. But if superstition served to accelerate mining, he would accept it.
"Uncle Pyotr," Alexei said, looking up with large, clear eyes. "Will we make the cannons strong now?"
"Yes, Your Highness," Stolypin responded with solemn gravity. "We will."
. . . . . . .
With the tungsten success, Alexei's political capital skyrocketed, though it remained hidden within the inner circle. But each victory at home revealed a defeat abroad.
Professor Stanislav, his mathematics tutor and reluctant industrial spy who continued to be called such, arrived one afternoon with a pale face. He brought the usual books to maintain the teaching facade, but between the pages he had slipped a commercial report from the London Stock Exchange.
"We have a problem, Your Highness," Stanislav whispered while pretending to write an equation on the blackboard.
Alexei, standing on a chair to reach the table, read the document.
It was a report on patents. Specifically, patents related to the synthesis process of ammonia and nitrates.
In the history Alexei remembered, the Haber-Bosch process wouldn't be massively industrialized in Germany until a few years later, allowing the production of fertilizers and explosives without depending on Chilean saltpeter.
But the report indicated something anomalous. A British firm had begun aggressively buying small chemical companies in Bavaria and the Ruhr. Companies working on high-pressure catalysis.
The purchasing firm was a subsidiary: Anglo-American Industrial Partners.
Alexei traced the corporate structure in his mind. Anglo-American was owned by a trust fund in New York. The paper trail was complex, designed to obfuscate, but the purchasing patterns were unmistakable. They were predators.
"Who are they?" Alexei asked, his childish voice lacking any childish inflection.
"The final trail leads back to London," Stanislav said, wiping sweat from his forehead. "To that consortium you mentioned last month. H&A Holdings. They're hoarding German chemistry, Your Highness. And not just that. They've blocked the purchase of turbines for our new destroyers at the Glasgow shipyard. They claimed 'existing contract priority.'"
Alexei closed his eyes. He visualized the map of Europe again.
The Consortium wasn't simply investing. It was building a bottleneck. They were buying the future. Tungsten. Nitrates. Turbines. They were ensuring that when war broke out, if it would break out—Alexei couldn't stop the geopolitics of 1914—the traditional powers would find themselves without critical materials to sustain it, or would have to buy them at extortion prices.
It was a resource strangulation strategy. Brilliant. And lethal.
"We can't compete with them on the London Stock Exchange," Alexei murmured. "We don't have liquid liquidity, and the Imperial Treasury is a sieve."
"What do we do then?" Stanislav asked.
Alexei looked at his small hands. They still didn't have strength to wield a sword, but they had the dexterity for something more subtle.
"If we can't buy the market, we have to break it," Alexei said. He looked at the professor. "Stanislav, you're going to found a company. Not in your name. We'll use a front man. I have a private account from my grandmother in Denmark that nobody monitors. It's little, but it will serve as seed capital."
"What kind of company, Your Highness?"
"A patent and design office. Neva Technical Solutions," Alexei christened it instantly. "We're not going to buy H&A's patents. We're going to make them obsolete."
Alexei took a pencil and clean paper. He began to draw.
"The Consortium is buying the technology that will be used in a few years," Alexei explained while drawing a fuel injection valve that shouldn't exist until the 1920s. "We're going to patent the technology for the future. We're going to register theoretical designs that we could use to our advantage in the future."
"But... we can't manufacture that yet," Stanislav stammered, looking at the impossible drawings. "The metallurgy isn't ready."
"I know," Alexei said coldly. "The objective isn't to manufacture. The objective is to contaminate the intellectual property space. If we register these patents in Russia, France, and the United States now, H&A won't be able to monopolize the future. We'll force them to spend a fortune on litigation or negotiate with us. We'll create a legal minefield."
It was asymmetric warfare. Alexei didn't have the Consortium's money, but he had information from the future. H&A was playing checkers with the market; Alexei was going to play poker with the history of technology.
"Do it, Stanislav. And find a lawyer. A young one, hungry, and who hates the English. Above all, who hates them."
. . . . . . .
April 1908.
The Consortium's threat made Alexei reevaluate his internal security. If H&A had tentacles in German industry and British shipyards, they would soon have eyes in Saint Petersburg. Alexei was a child, which was his best camouflage, but also his greatest physical weakness.
He needed a praetorian guard. But the escort Cossacks were loyal to his father, not to him.
Alexei looked toward the corner of the playroom. His sisters.
Olga (12 years old) read a book in a corner. Tatiana (10 years old) organized dolls in perfect military rows. Maria (8 years old) and Anastasia (6 years old) tried to make a tower of cushions.
Educated to be decorative wives of foreign princes, ignorant that their original destiny was to be shot in a basement in Yekaterinburg (Екатеринбург).
'No,' Alexei thought. 'Nobody's going to die in a basement.'
He stood up and walked toward Tatiana. She was the key. The 'Governess.' She had a natural logistical mind.
"Tanya," Alexei said.
Tatiana looked up, smoothing her dress. "What is it, Alyosha?"
Alexei hated that nickname. "I need you to organize something. The servants... talk too much. And Papa loses papers from his desk."
Tatiana frowned. "Papa loses papers?"
"Yes. And there are bad people who want to read them," Alexei lied, moving closer to whisper. "We need to... protect him. But it's a secret between just us."
Tatiana's gray eyes gleamed. Order was her religion. The idea of protecting the Tsar's order appealed to her most basic instinct of a child to a father.
"What kind of game?" she asked, lowering her voice.
"The Game of Secrets," Alexei said. "You're the General. Olga is the Spy. I need to know who enters Papa's office when he's not there."
"Olga won't want to play," Tatiana said, looking at her older sister, always so serious.
"Olga will want to," Alexei assured. "Because if she doesn't play, she won't be able to protect Mama."
That afternoon, Alexei gathered his sisters. He didn't give them weapons; he gave them purpose. He taught them a basic substitution cipher, presenting it as a secret sibling language. He assigned them roles. Tatiana controlled the staff's schedules and movements. Olga read and summarized the foreign newspapers that arrived for the Empress. Anastasia, small and noisy, was the perfect distraction; she could enter anywhere without being suspicious.
The Romanov Network was born.
While his sisters laughed, believing they were playing spies, Alexei sat in his small chair by the window, watching the spring rain fall over Tsarskoye Selo.
The foundations were laid. Now, he had to wait for H&A's next move. Because he knew that somewhere in London or New York, someone had just noticed that a tungsten deposit in the Caucasus had disappeared from the free market, and that someone wouldn't be happy.