Having received the honorary rank of a Civil Councillor, Lykov temporarily leads the Eighth Office of the Police Department. “The Eighth” is a nationwide investigation agency—it coordinates the actions of all investigation units of the empire. But a bureaucrat doesn’t come naturally to Lykov: how can you lock a talented detective inside four walls of an office and make him sort through papers? Alexey dreams of a new case and is ready to move at the first call. And the call comes. From none other than Stolypin himself.
At the very beginning of 1910, a group escape occurred at the Kherson penal labor prison. As a result of a carefully planned diversion—while ten convicts fled in one direction, dying from the bullets of enraged guards—one man quietly climbed over a wall somewhere else, got into a carriage waiting for him, and vanished. The clever one was the well-known robber Alexander Yuzhikov, nicknamed Sasha Pop. And if someone was willing to free him from the prison with such effort, then a large-scale raid is being prepared. With victims, shooting, and big sums of money stolen…