Chapter 11: A Gift from God

Nicholas II still found it difficult to compose himself.

Things had already gone too far to write it all off as… surely just coincidence.

After all, it was no less than a section chief of the Petersburg Okhrana who had showered the boy with praise.

The observational powers of a child who would turn 8 in a few months had stunned the Tsar of the Russian Empire, then the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, and now the Okhrana itself.

And so, heading quite naturally toward his son’s room, the Tsar belatedly realized just how ridiculous this whole business was.

Unable to answer his subordinates’ request, he was making for his 7-year-old son’s room under the excuse of going to the bathroom?

If word of this ever got out, rumors would surely spread that the Tsar of Russia was the greatest moron the world had ever seen.

No, no.

Could such a rumor even spread in the first place?

Even if someone witnessed the scene, who in the world could possibly deduce the causal chain, that the Tsar was going to seek advice from a small child?

Apart from Chief Procurator Pobedonostsev, who knew the whole story, surely no one would even consider the possibility.

…Then it didn’t matter, did it?

He had simply dropped by the room of a young relative in the middle of his lessons to offer a word of encouragement.

It was perfectly natural, perfectly normal, and perfectly befitting a Tsar.

Having arrived at this flawless rationalization, Nicholas II’s steps grew noticeably lighter.

“Petrovich. Pardon me for interrupting the lesson.”

As he opened the study door, tutor and son looked up at once.

He caught sight of Mikhail’s face, the boy having been dutifully reading French sentences aloud at his desk, brightening visibly.

“Your Majesty, what brings you all the way here….”

“Misha, I’m sorry to interrupt your lesson.”

“Not at all, Your Majesty!”

Was he really so happy just to see his father’s face?

Every time he looked at this child, the boy had a knack for making something in his chest tickle.

The Tsar held the documents out toward his old tutor.

“Petrovich, I’d like you to look over this with me. Of course… I think it would be fine for Misha to stay with us as well.”

The old man’s eyebrows twitched ever so slightly.

He seemed to have already guessed why the Tsar had come.

“If that is Your Majesty’s wish.”

“Ahem, hm-hm. I simply wish to see whether he can go beyond merely stating what he observes and manage actual inference. Much of the content will be difficult for a child to understand, so I would appreciate it if you could break it down for him, Petrovich.”

“I shall.”

Mikhail looked up at the two adults in turn with round eyes.

“Is there something I need to answer again?”

“Young Master. Thanks to you, the Okhrana has been investigating that Japanese gentleman. They are now weighing three questions for the next stage. His Majesty has come because he hopes you might point something out from a fresh perspective.”

“…Will I be able to answer?”

“It’s no problem at all if you don’t know. In fact, it’s only natural that you wouldn’t, so just tell us whatever comes to mind.”

This was absolutely not a matter of coming to a child for help.

It was merely a test, nothing more.

The boy’s small shoulders stiffened a little.

Honestly, last time had been a string of miraculous coincidences piling one atop another; hoping for another such miracle would be asking too much.

Pobedonostsev began to lay out the first question in the simplest terms he could.

“Young Master. The Okhrana has been watching that Japanese gentleman for quite a while, looking for the people connected to him. If they arrested him right this moment, everyone would be startled and run away, wouldn’t they?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But if they leave him be too long, he’ll do more bad things. So when would be the best moment?”

A question even adults could not easily answer, and the Chief Procurator had rendered it as simply as he could, in a child’s language.

The Tsar did not miss the change in Mikhail’s expression.

The round eyes stared off somewhere into empty air for a moment, then came back down.

“Hmm… I’ve seen mice being caught at home before.”

“…Mice?”

“A long time ago we used to get mice at our house. When Mother caught them, she never pounced right away. She waited for the time when the mice were busiest. There are days when they move their food somewhere else, and if you set the trap on that day, you catch several in a single day.”

“Ohh…….”

“That Japanese gentleman is always very careful too, so if you pounce now, I think you’d only catch a few people. But someday he’ll have to send all the material he’s worked so hard to gather back to his country, right? That’s when he’ll be busiest… so couldn’t you catch him then?”

Truly an answer straight out of the textbook.

That the moment intelligence is sent home is the optimal timing for counterintelligence was a fact that went without saying.

Glancing over, he saw that Pobedonostsev was already sitting with his hands folded neatly, his gaze fixed on the desktop.

“…Young Master. Shall we move on to the next question? When it comes to catching that Japanese gentleman, there are two opinions within the Okhrana itself. One says to deal with him quietly, in secret; the other says to announce it to the whole world and humiliate Japan. Which would be better?”

“Hmm….”

Unlike the first, this one had no textbook answer to speak of.

It was, after all, a matter on which even the Okhrana was divided.

The boy kept his eyes on the desk and thought for a long while.

“Professor, I think both of them are strange. If you catch him quietly, nobody will know, so next time another person will just come. If you announce it loudly, Japan will get really angry. Neither one is good, so why do you have to pick one of the two?”

“…Do you mean there is a better way?”

“You said there were other people doing bad things together with that Japanese gentleman. The mustache man and people like that. They aren’t Japanese, are they? So couldn’t you just publicly expose and punish only those people? And leave the Japanese gentleman’s name out of it.”

“Ohh…….”

“Then Japan won’t be able to get angry either. Because if they get angry, they’d be admitting that their own countryman did something bad.”

Asked to choose between two options, and the boy had pointed out that the very framing was wrong.

True enough, fury at being stabbed in the back by the likes of Japan had risen all the way to the top of his head.

At times like this one needed to calm down, and thinking about it coolly, the child’s opinion was right.

“Pe-Petrovich. Let us go on to the last question.”

“…Yes, Your Majesty.”

Suppressing the faint tremor creeping into his voice, the old man laid out the third question.

“Young Master. This is the problem the Okhrana is agonizing over most. That Japanese gentleman may already have sent a great deal of news back to his country over the past 2 years. But we have no way of knowing what it was. Is there any way to undo what has already leaked out?”

“You can’t gather up spilled water. But that Japanese gentleman hasn’t been caught yet, right? He must still be sending news to his country even now. So couldn’t you make what he sends from now on strange?”

“…Blanket it with disinformation?”

“Because the Japanese won’t be able to tell when they started receiving false facts. Then later on, I think they’ll start suspecting that what was sent before might have been fake too.”

Keep feeding disinformation to shake the credibility of everything leaked before.

A simple yet effective method, was it not?

In truth, if one thought about it with a truly cool head, this was something the professionals of an intelligence bureau could have come up with themselves.

But the Japanese spy had been collared so abruptly that the Okhrana must have been in a rush.

Besides, catching foreign spies was not their main line of work; with their field of vision narrowed, an immediate decision would have been hard to reach.

Yet this small child, upon hearing only a rough sketch of the situation, had reached conclusion after conclusion in a matter of seconds.

“You heard that too, Petrovich? We trust Our ears were not deceiving Us.”

“Yes. I heard it as well.”

“Are these words that could come from the mouth of a seven-year-old?”

“…In all my life I have seen countless noble children, but I swear this is a first.”

Each flash of intuition went beyond slapping the adults across the face; it came close to simply handing them the correct answer.

…What was more frightening was that the child wasn’t straining to think any of it up.

It flowed without a hitch, as if the answers already lay somewhere inside that small head, waiting only to be retrieved.

The Tsar sat in silence for a long while, then held out a sheet of paper to his old tutor.

“Petrovich. Would you write up the three things Misha just said? Strip out all the childish phrasing, just the essentials.”

“Yes. I shall.”

While the old man’s pen moved busily across the paper, the Tsar gazed quietly down at Mikhail.

What on earth was inside that little head?

This child who carried his blood was beginning to look more endearing still.

* * *

“…It took quite some time organizing my thoughts in the bathroom. My answer is these three points.”

Returning to the audience chamber, the Tsar set the paper down before Yakov with a perfectly composed face.

Yakov’s hand froze as his eyes fell on the first answer.

“…So Your Majesty also judged this to be the optimal moment.”

“Indeed. Would not the greatest number of contact lines be operating simultaneously at that very moment?”

As Yakov read down the second answer, his head bobbed up and down of its own accord.

“Leave Akashi’s name off the public list, and publicly punish only the Polish collaborators….”

“Touch Japan head-on and they will respond officially. But Polish émigrés are beyond Japan’s power to interfere with, are they not? Japan cannot officially admit that their own military attaché was involved, so they will have no choice but to quietly recall Akashi.”

Yakov slowly raised his head and looked at the Tsar.

In his eyes shone the conviction that the Tsar’s recent brilliance had been no mere coincidence.

“The suggestion to feed in disinformation is excellent as well.”

“Yes. What has already slipped through our fingers cannot be recovered, so the best course is to undermine the credibility of that intelligence, is it not? When truth and falsehood are mixed together, even the truth cannot escape suspicion.”

Yakov sprang to his feet and bowed with deep respect.

“Thank you for granting enlightenment to your inadequate officials. Your servants will continue to strive.”

“It cannot be helped; this is not your main line of work. We shall soon establish a proper counterintelligence agency, so bear with it until then.”

Yakov strode briskly out of the office.

The moment the door closed, the Tsar sank deep into the back of his chair and let out a long sigh.

Saved.

At the same time, he could feel vividly just how far his standing had risen in their eyes.

But of course, all too predictably, the matter did not end there.

Two days later.

“Your Majesty. Forgive me, but another question has arisen that we must ask you. This time opinion is split in two even within the Petersburg Okhrana, and we cannot reach a judgment.”

The Tsar took the proffered documents, looked down at them, and swallowed his curses.

Bastards, as if he could possibly know any of this.

Skimming just a few lines was enough to tell him that the contents already exceeded the capacity of his brain.

Still, what could he do?

With no counterintelligence agency in existence, these men had had the work all but forced upon them; losing his temper at them would only be spitting in his own face.

“…This is a matter on which even We cannot give an immediate answer. A moment… the bathroom.”

The instant he stepped out of the office, the Tsar’s pace quickened.

“Petrovich. Another matter has come up for us to discuss together.”

“…Come in, Your Majesty.”

This time the old man raised not a word of objection.

Even the motion of his hand as he called the boy back to the desk was perfectly natural.

And so there was a first time.

The second time produced the conclusion of sowing confusion through false personnel appointments.

The third yielded the inspiration for tracing their funding network backward to find the mastermind behind it.

By around the fourth, the Tsar no longer panicked.

By the fifth, even the excuse of stepping out to the bathroom had come to sound natural.

Come to think of it, the pretext was perfect.

After all, no man alive would have the gall to inspect the bathroom to verify whether the Tsar was really using it.

“I understand this is Your Majesty’s time for deep contemplation. Please, take your time.”

“…I shall.”

With each successive round, Yakov’s trust snowballed, and astonishingly, the rumor climbed its way up to the upper ranks of the imperial police.

“Your Majesty. Today the Director of the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs also requests an audience.”

The moment he saw one more familiar face standing behind Yakov, the Tsar’s heart gave a lurch.

“Alexei Alexandrovich Lopukhin, Your Majesty.”

Lopukhin, in his mid-forties, bowed courteously.

The power behind the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in direct command of the Okhrana.

In the end, an official several rungs above Yakov had appeared here today.

“Over the past few weeks I have heard no small amount about Your Majesty’s discerning insight through Section Chief Yakov. Having reviewed them myself, I concluded that every judgment passed up through the section chief was a masterstroke that pierced to the very heart of the matter.”

Somehow the escape routes seemed to be closing off one by one.

“Is that so? Then what matter brings you both today?”

“This matter has come to light in connection with the recent Akashi affair. The contents are complex, and we wish to gather as many opinions as possible.”

The moment he skimmed the questions on the paper Lopukhin held out, the Tsar felt his stomach sink.

For this matter did not stop at Akashi alone; it concerned the entire Japanese Legation, the whole Far East network they had woven, and on top of that, Georgy Plekhanov and the nationalists under Russian influence.

…Was this some kind of joke? Let them sort this out themselves.

But turning away men who had begun to believe their Tsar a genius and had come to seek their Emperor’s wisdom… that would be a bit much, wouldn’t it?

Above all, being on the receiving end of those admiring gazes felt good, damn it.

“…It seems We shall need a moment alone to sort this matter out. We shall go cool Our head in the bathroom.”

Lopukhin’s eyes wavered for a moment.

“…Pardon? Your Majesty?”

As he stood there flustered, wondering where the Tsar was suddenly going in the middle of such an important matter, Yakov, standing beside him, nodded with a satisfied smile.

“Director. If His Majesty has said he is going to the bathroom, it means he has already grasped the answer. Once it has taken shape in words, he will return and hand down his judgment.”

“Ah… so he has such a habit, you say.”

“I have already confirmed it five times with my own eyes.”

The Tsar slipped out of the office with an awkward smile.

The last thing to reach his ears was Lopukhin quietly asking Yakov behind his back.

“But… have there truly been cases of drawing inspiration from a bathroom?”

“His Majesty’s bathroom is kept immaculately clean, after all. Surely he contemplates there, in a space entirely his own.”

A brief silence followed.

“…Truly, that is our Tsar. A holy man who draws up wisdom from every corner of daily life.”

Striding down the corridor, Nicholas II found his mind far calmer now.

Not a trace of shame or hesitation remained in his steps as he went to find his son.

At first he had not even been able to comprehend it, but now the Tsar could accept it.

Why else would such an inexplicable thing have happened?

All of this could only be a gift, arranged by God for him, the Tsar of Russia.

Had he not repented of his sin and taken Misha in, could Misha ever have displayed such genius?

The boy would have lived out his days running some little shop somewhere in that backwater country, America.

“Your Majesty… this matter as well….”

“One moment. I shall go organize my thoughts in the bathroom.”

“Ohhh! His Majesty is off to the bathroom once again….”

“His Majesty is going to the bathroom!”

So let him accept this blessing with his head held high.

For Misha, his son, was a gift from God, sent down for him, the Tsar.