Yuryev decided to summon the rest of the team and discuss it with them. As it was, only four answered his summons: Feliks, Zakhar, Nikita, and Lazar. The others either did not respond or couldn’t be found.
“Thank you for coming,” said Yuryev, as he poured tea for the group gathered in his sitting room. It was late March, almost a year to the day after he had first met these men. “I know our mission is supposed to be over, but something has been bothering me.” And he shared his thoughts with them.
“Nikifor, this is madness!” said Zakhar. “The war is over, those Bolshevik scoundrels have won, and if you think otherwise you’re deluding yourself. With no war to distract them, they’ll be onto us in no time if we resume the mission.”
“I agree with Zakhar,” said Feliks. “Besides, it would be disobeying orders. We were ordered to stop and we must stop.”
“But this isn’t disobeying for mere vanity, insubordination or fanaticism,” protested Yuryev. “It’s about finishing what we started, and doing justice for the House of Romanov.”
“I agree with your sentiments,” said Nikita, “but I must concede that both Zakhar and Feliks make good points. We’d get caught before we finished the remaining thirteen, and it would be insubordination.”
“But what if we don’t get all thirteen?” asked Lazar. “What if we just get one? Yurovsky and Yermakov were the top two on our list. What if we sneak back into Russia, eliminate whichever of them we can find first, and get out of there?”
“All right,” said Yuryev. “I’m amenable to that. Those two are the leading ones who literally have the tsar's blood on their hands. If we get either of them, I will consider the mission accomplished."
In the end, Lazar and Nikita agreed to go with Yuryev, while Feliks and Zakhar refused. Yuryev immediately began making preparations. Yuryev secured funding for the venture from Prokhor Budylin, a wealthy Russian merchant who had lived in Harbin since before the Revolution and supported Grand Duke Kirill’s claim to the throne. Next, Yuryev, Lazar and Nikita secured a two-month leave of absence from their units, under the pretext of purchasing land in Jiangsu Province, where they hoped to go into partnership to develop salt deposits. And on a wind-blown day in early April they set out.
After sneaking across the border, they disguised themselves as peddlers; in that difficult period, with the civil troubles and problems of movement around the country, there was a multitude of “sackmen” as they were scornfully known: second-hand dealers, peddlers and other traffickers, so the agents would have a cover that would enable them to travel about Russia, and perhaps make a small profit to boot.
During the month of April they began tracking down leads from those old local informers they were able to find. The rumors were constant about impending meetings involving Yurovsky, Yermakov, or both. On two occasions—once in Moscow and once in Samara—Yuryev and Lazar, with Nikita acting as a backup, had started surveilling apartment buildings to which the regicides were supposed to come. On both occasions they had rifles in the bed of their wagon, ready to do a frontal attack on sighting any of their targets. On both occasions they did see men in black armbands entering and leaving the buildings, but they made no move. Nor would they do so without actually seeing Yurovsky, Yermakov, or Nikulin, without making a positive identification.
Which they were unable to do in either Moscow or Samara.
Then, early in May, Yuryev was able to make contact with a man he knew only as Fyodor. Fyodor had been a member of the National Center, and before the Cheka had broken up that organization, Fyodor had been one of the team’s best sources. After the Cheka had dismantled the National Center, Fyodor had gone to ground, but Yuryev had stumbled into him by chance in Moscow.
Fyodor still had a handful of good connections of his own left, and he soon had news for Yuryev: “Yakov Yurovsky is in Vesyegonsk, on the Mologa River. He’s in a compound guarded by all the predictable trouble. It’s dangerous, going after Yurovsky. But he shot the tsar.”