The Moscow Cipher

The oncoming car veered in front of him and stopped directly in his path with a soft hiss of tyres. It was another black Mercedes S-Class identical to the one that had transported him to Le Mans-Arnage earlier that day. The windows were tinted, so he couldn’t see anyone inside. The rear passenger door swung open and a black high-heeled shoe stepped out, followed by a long, slim but well-muscled leg and then the rest of a woman in a charcoal business suit. Ben didn’t know her, but she seemed to know him.

‘Major Hope?’ Her English was marked with the unmistakable intonations of the Russian accent.

‘I’m Ben Hope,’ he said. The woman stepped towards him from the Mercedes. In her heels she was as tall as he was, an inch under six feet. She had the build of a model, but wide shoulders like a competitive swimmer. The eyes fixed on Ben could have been airbrushed aquamarine blue. Her blond hair was cut very short, which accentuated the angular contours of a face that would have been pleasantly attractive, except for the severe expression of hard purposefulness as she approached and stuck out a hand as rigid as a blade.

‘I am Tatyana Nikolaeva,’ the woman said. ‘I am employed to assist you in whatever way may be required during your visit to Russia.’

Ben took her hand. Her grip was as strong as it looked. ‘So I’ve been informed,’ he replied. ‘But I prefer to work alone whenever possible. If you’d like to show me to my accommodation and pass on any particulars I might need, after that you can feel free to stand down and let me take it from there, okay? I’ll square things up with Mr Kaprisky, so there’s no misunderstanding.’

‘Regrettably, that is outside of my remit to decide,’ she answered with a frosty smile. ‘My orders are clear. I take my obligations very seriously.’

Ben returned the smile. ‘Well, then, it appears neither of us has much of a choice, do we?’

The driver’s door opened and the chauffeur unfolded himself from the car. The Mercedes wasn’t a small vehicle, but at very little under seven feet in height, the guy would have been cramped in anything less than a Humvee. If Kaprisky’s driver back in France had been a racing driver in a past life, this guy had been an ultra-heavyweight boxer. The broken nose, shaven head and cauliflower ear, he had it all. The hulk exchanged some quick-fire words of Russian with Tatyana that made Ben wonder whether having an interpreter might not be such a bad thing, after all, then stepped around the car and held out a girder-like arm to take Ben’s bag and load it into the boot.

‘You have no other baggage?’ Tatyana asked, eyeing the tatty old haversack with an air of obvious distaste. ‘You are a man who likes to travel light, I see.’

‘Thought I’d leave the golf clubs at home this time,’ he replied.

Tatyana Nikolaeva frowned. ‘I do not think there would be time to play. There is work to do.’

Some people were too armoured for humour, obviously. Ben decided that would be his last attempt to break the ice with his new assistant.

She motioned towards the open rear door of the Mercedes. ‘Please.’ Ben got in. Tatyana climbed into the front passenger side. The chauffeur hefted his monstrous bulk back behind the wheel without another word, and they sped off.

Twenty-eight kilometres later, Ben was getting his first taste of Moscow. For the moment he had no idea what awaited him there.

Chapter 10

Deep into the night, the heart of the city was alive and in full swing. The driver carved fast and efficiently through the busy traffic while Tatyana gazed absently out of her window and ignored Ben’s presence behind her. Now and then the two of them spoke in Russian and Ben listened, trying to pick out some of the words from the limited vocabulary he’d sifted from his memory of the language. Twenty minutes after entering the city, Tatyana said, ‘We are here,’ and the Mercedes pulled up outside their hotel.

Ben climbed out of the car and looked up at the towering facade of the building, light spilling from hundreds of windows across what he understood to be Neglinnaya Street in the heart of Moscow. So much for the basics, he thought. If the Ararat Park Hyatt was Auguste Kaprisky’s idea of the rougher side of life, then he wouldn’t plan on taking the old guy on a camping expedition any time soon.

‘You are booked into the Winter Garden Suite,’ Tatyana said to Ben. The chauffeur removed Ben’s bag from the boot of the car and handed it to a hotel valet, who didn’t seem all that perplexed by it. Maybe frayed, battered and faintly fusty-smelling army surplus could become the new chic, set to spark off a fashion craze among the super-rich. Ben and Tatyana followed the valet into the cathedral-sized atrium, which was bustling with activity. Ultra-modern steel and glass wasn’t Ben’s style, but then he wasn’t the one forking out thousands of rubles a night for the room.

Ben was checked in without having to do anything, and Tatyana said, ‘I will meet you here downstairs, in the Neglinka Lounge, in thirty minutes.’

The Winter Garden Suite offered panoramic views of the Bolshoi Theatre and Red Square, the Kremlin towers grandly silhouetted against the night sky and the colourfully striped domes of St Basil’s Cathedral lit up like a gigantic, gaudily elaborate dessert. Ben had what he considered a silly amount of furniture for one person, an art collection that could have graced a small gallery, a bathroom with a marble bathtub you could swim lengths of, a separate guest bathroom in case he got tired of the main one, and a bedroom that compared size-wise with little Valentina Petrova’s at Kaprisky’s chateau, except it wasn’t pink. As for the remote-controlled window blinds, forget it. Could people not close their own blinds any more?

The suite did, however, come with an Illy coffee machine, and that Ben could appreciate. Paying as little attention to the sumptuous decor as he would have to a drab-olive military barracks dorm, he showered, changed into fresh black jeans and a clean denim shirt from his bag, killed a Gauloise on his own private terrace while gazing down at the speeding traffic on Neglinnaya Street, then went downstairs to meet his assistant, who so far seemed to be calling all the shots.

Tatyana Nikolaeva was waiting for him in the bar, sipping some kind of vodka cocktail in a tall glass with an umbrella sticking out of it. The bartender spoke English, and Ben ordered a straight double scotch from the amazing selection of single malts. The battered old steel whisky flask he’d carried on many travels was getting low on its customary Laphroaig, which had been Ben’s favourite scotch for a good many years. He had the barman top it up with Macallan Rare Cask Black, a single malt that retailed for over £600 a litre back in the UK. Ringing the changes, and Kaprisky was paying.

Ben and Tatyana perched on a pair of bar stools. They were the last two guests in the place and the staff were starting to clean up in preparation for closing for the night, though an establishment like the Ararat Park Hyatt was far too classy to boot out the stragglers.

‘I was told you are no ordinary kind of army major in your country,’ Tatyana said, nonchalantly twirling her glass on the table and stirring it with the cocktail stick. Ben noticed for the first time that her fingernails were painted the exact same blue as her eyes, and immaculately polished. ‘That you belong to a special regiment, something like our GRU Spetsnaz forces.’ As she finished saying it, her eyes flashed up at him in a look he couldn’t quite read.

Old man Kaprisky must have been blabbing about him, Ben thought. He replied, ‘I thought we were going to discuss our plans for tomorrow, not indulge in idle chit-chat about me.’

‘It is important for me to know something about the colleague I am to be working with. Are you saying it is not true?’

This wasn’t Ben’s favourite topic for discussion, but he could see she wasn’t going to let it go. ‘Technically, no, seeing as I’ve been retired for a long time. Prior to that, yes, it’s true, I did serve in UK Special Forces, 22 SAS if you really want to know, and that I did reach the rank of major by the time I quit. But I no longer go by that title. Do those details satisfy your curiosity?’

‘So I should not call you Major?’

‘If you have to call me anything, call me Ben. That’s my name.’

‘I prefer a more formal address.’ She scrutinised his face for a moment, then added, ‘You are much too young to be retired.’

‘I didn’t say I stopped working.’

‘Looking for missing people, is that the work you do now?’

‘I’ve done a lot of K and R missions over the years. That’s short for kidnap and ransom. But I’m sure you could deduce that, detective.’

She smiled. ‘It seems an unusual career change for a retired soldier to become a person finder.’

‘There are a lot of people in the world who go missing because someone stole them, usually for money, sometimes for other reasons. I wanted to do something about that, because I know how much pain and suffering it causes to the victims and their families.’

She watched him for a moment, looking deep into his eyes as if she could see unspoken secrets there. ‘You have suffered from it too.’

‘When I was in my teens, my younger sister was kidnapped by human traffickers in Morocco. The police never found her.’

‘You never saw her again?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘But it explains why you do this,’ Tatyana said. She paused, sipping delicately from her drink without taking those vivid eyes off him. ‘Is there a Mrs Hope?’ she asked, switching tracks.

The question brought more memories to Ben’s mind. There had been a Mrs Hope, once upon a time, all too briefly. The vision of Leigh’s face flashed through his thoughts for a moment. And Roberta’s, and Brooke’s, accompanied by the same mixture of emotions those reminiscences always rekindled. The best times, the worst times. He didn’t share his deeper feelings, as a rule, and he wasn’t particularly inclined to discuss the current state of his personal life.

‘Is there a Mr Nikolaev?’ he countered.

‘I asked you first.’

‘Not currently.’

‘What about a girlfriend?’ she asked him, leaning forward to plant both elbows on the table and curling one side of her lips in a teasing smile. ‘Come now, I am sure you have many of those.’

Ben wasn’t going to be drawn into mentioning Sandrine Lacombe. Not that she could have been considered a girlfriend, exactly. They’d met by chance a few months ago, back home in France. A few dates since then, hints of mutual attraction, no commitments made, nothing serious. He had the impression she’d been hurt before, as he had. It might grow into something; it might not. Either way it was no business of Tatyana Nikolaeva’s, and he made no reply.

She frowned as a thought struck her. ‘You are not goluboi – what is the English expression – a sodomite?’

‘We in the West tend to use slightly more progressive terms nowadays.’

‘But you are not one of them?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m not one of them.’

She took a sip of her drink and looked relieved.

‘Shall we get down to business?’ he said.

‘Of course.’

‘Tell me what we know about Yuri Petrov.’

Tatyana replied that, in fact, they knew remarkably little. He didn’t appear on the voter register and finding an address for him had been quite a challenge for her investigation firm. The easy part had been checking for a criminal record, which had come up blank – he had never been charged with anything in Russia, at any rate.

‘Employment?’

She shook her head. ‘Whatever he does for a living, he is getting paid only in cash. His bank account is almost empty and shows no activity within the last twelve months.’

Which, as far as it went, seemed to fit with Kaprisky’s portrait of the man as a low-life ne’er-do-well, possibly involved in all sorts of petty criminal dealings for which he hadn’t yet been caught. Ben couldn’t be sure until he knew more. ‘First thing I need to do is check out his apartment.’

‘He is not there,’ Tatyana said. ‘I assumed you had been informed of this.’

‘Tell me what you found.’

Tatyana seemed mildly irritated by having to repeat the same information she’d already told Kaprisky. ‘It is all in my report. I accompanied the team to the address, where we found the door locked and the apartment empty.’

‘Did you look inside?’

‘Breaking and entering was not our purpose.’

‘If it’s an apartment block, there must be a caretaker or a concierge. You could have got the key from them.’

‘Only the police have authority to demand access to a private property.’

‘Okay,’ Ben said. ‘So if you didn’t get to look inside, how could you be so sure the apartment was empty?’

‘Petrov had been seen leaving, and not returned. I spoke to neighbours, who reported having not seen him for several days.’

‘All the same,’ Ben said, ‘I’d like to see the place for myself, first thing in the morning. I’ll need you to meet me here at eight o’clock on the dot.’

Tatyana seemed not to object. ‘Any other instructions for me?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘None, other than try to keep up. I’m using to working alone, which means I go at my own pace and push hard. I don’t believe this man intends to harm the little girl, but I don’t intend to let him hold her hostage any longer than absolutely necessary. Fall behind, I won’t wait for you, okay?’

‘I am a professional,’ Tatyana replied coolly. ‘You do not have to worry about me.’

‘Glad to hear it. The last thing to discuss is transport. Do you have a car, or are we using Kaprisky’s? Because if so, I’d like to ditch that big lunk of a driver.’

‘Car is a terrible way to travel in this city,’ Tatyana said breezily. ‘From early in the morning until late in the afternoon, Moscow is solid with traffic. It is worse than Los Angeles. But the public transport system is best in the world. That is what we will use instead.’

Ben wasn’t sure about that idea. For the first time since he’d met her, Tatyana Nikolaeva smiled with enough warmth to melt away the icy severity of her face.

‘I am a MOCКBИЧКА. A Muscovite. Trust me, Major Hope.’

Chapter 11

Ben rose early, out of old habit. As sunrise broke over Red Square and bathed his balcony in a flood of golds and magentas, he ticked off a hundred press-ups in sets of twenty-five, followed by the same routine for sit-ups. It wasn’t much of a morning’s exercise session for him; maybe he could go for a ten-mile run later, or abseil up and down the towers of the Kremlin just for the hell of it. He brewed up a pot of espresso on his coffee machine, the one luxury of his suite that meant anything to him, then walked through onto the balcony to consume it, along with the first Gauloise of the day, and watch the city rumble into life below.

After a pummelling in the cavernous marble shower room, he was back downstairs at three minutes to eight to meet Tatyana. She was three inches shorter in the flat shoes she was wearing in anticipation of walking about the city, and had exchanged yesterday’s charcoal business suit for a double-breasted navy affair with heavy epaulettes a little reminiscent of Russian military dress uniform.

‘Good morning, Comrade Major Hope,’ she said briskly.

‘And a very good morning to you, Miss Nikolaeva.’

Ben followed her out of the bustling hotel lobby into the buzz of Neglinnaya Street. Eight months of the year the place was icebound, but the summer sun felt warm. Then why wasn’t everyone smiling?

‘So what’s the travel plan?’ he asked. ‘Are we getting a bus? Tram?’

‘Neither,’ Tatyana said. ‘The Moscow metro system is the most efficient in the world. I have been to New York, Paris and London,’ she added with a shake of the head, clearly not impressed with what the western world had to offer. ‘Here, you often have to wait less than one minute for the next subway train. And our stations are far superior, naturally. We even have free wi-fi everywhere in the system. As for the architecture, prepare yourself to be amazed.’

‘I’m so glad to have you as my guide,’ Ben muttered, but she either missed the sarcasm or didn’t give a damn either way.

Tatyana had certainly been right about the road traffic, which was so heavily congested that it could have taken them hours to get anywhere by car. As they walked through the fume-filled streets, Ben tried not to breathe in too deeply and gazed around him at the unfamiliar city in daylight for the first time. If he’d been expecting Moscow to be filled with the brutal relics of the old USSR, he’d have been disappointed. Streets down which Stalin’s tank battalions had once rumbled in an intimidating show of might to the West were now transformed into a modern, vibrant space that had Starbucks and Le Pain Quotidien outlets on every corner and looked and felt much like anywhere else in the world, except that there wasn’t a single non-white face in evidence anywhere.

He asked, ‘Why are there so many flower shops?’ He’d never seen such a proliferation of them before.

Tatyana replied, ‘Because Russian men are the most romantic in the world, and they love to make their women happy.’

Ben wondered if Kaprisky’s niece felt that way. Maybe Yuri Petrov was the single exception in all of Russia and she’d just been unlucky in her choice.

Five minutes’ walk from the hotel, they came to Lubyanka metro. The subway station was in sight of a much more infamous building bearing the same name, with which Ben was familiar from his historical reading. The first real relic of the old regime he’d glimpsed so far, the Lubyanka prison had once doubled up as the headquarters of the feared Soviet secret police, the Cheka, later restyled as the no less notorious KGB. Lubyanka had been intimately connected with the worst atrocities of Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s, and those that had followed all through the darker history of the USSR, involving many more horrific tortures and brutal executions than would ever be officially admitted.

As for the metro station that shared its name, Ben knew of it only as the scene of the 2010 bombing that had left a swathe of dead in its wake and been blamed on Islamic terrorists – although some independent news sources had claimed the attack to have been a false flag operation carried out by the Russian security forces to justify political ends. Ben had seen enough of covert dirty dealings to know such tactics were a reality, and not just here in Russia. The official versions of tragic events were often far from the truth, a truth known only to a tiny few.

They passed under the arches of the station’s entrance and were quickly swallowed up in the throng of fast-moving commuters. Tatyana had a pair of prepaid contactless Troika cards that were the fastest way to negotiate the metro, and gave one to Ben. On their way down to the trains, without warning he paused to crouch down in the middle of the tunnel and retie his left bootlace. The river of foot traffic parted around him, jostling by with more than a few looks as Tatyana waited impatiently for him to finish. ‘So you see, it is not me who slows us down,’ she said acidly.

The slight delay caused them to miss the train, which departed as they were stepping out onto the platform. The short wait gave Ben time to decide that the station’s Soviet-era architecture looked pretty much as plain and severe as he’d have imagined. ‘Doesn’t look any great shakes to me so far,’ he observed.

‘Just wait,’ she said, smirking at the sceptical look on his face.

True to her promise, the next train came whooshing into the station within less than a minute. Crowds bundled out; more crowds piled on board. Ben and Tatyana’s carriage was crowded, with standing room only. As they began to snake their way beneath the city, Ben was in for a revelation. Station after station offered a staggering display of vaulted ceilings and grand chandeliers, amazing murals and friezes, stained glass and gilt, marble arches and columns and great bronze statues of Socialist icons, each one designed around its own individual architectural theme and every inch as pristine and magnificent as London’s underground was dingy and depressing.

‘Stalin intended the metro to be a triumph of Communist ideology,’ Tatyana said, keeping her voice low enough that only Ben could hear over the clatter and rumble of the moving train. Ben supposed that maybe mentioning Stalin’s name too loudly in liberal Moscow was akin to referring to the unmentionable Adolf Hitler in public anywhere in modern-day Germany, a serious social misstep. Though he’d read that many Russians were still misty-eyed about their ruthless mass-murdering former dictator, which worried a few folks. ‘While Khrushchev and later leaders condemned the luxuries of the old era,’ Tatyana continued, ‘resulting in many of the stations of the 1960s and 1970s being much plainer in style.’

‘I see. Interesting.’ Ben nodded and listened as she prattled on, while glancing around him at the sights. The truth, which he was keeping to himself for the moment, was that he was observing more than just the breathtaking architecture.

Almost from the moment they’d left the hotel, he’d become aware they were being followed. Ben had enough years in the field under his belt to have developed an extremely acute spider sense, which was the name soldiers gave to that feeling of being watched. Sure enough, he and Tatyana hadn’t walked a hundred steps from the doorway of the Ararat Park Hyatt before he’d used the reflection in a shop window to spot the two goons shadowing them.

The pair were dressed casually, not tall, not short, well blended into the crowds and as instantly forgettable as all good shadows should be. They were doing a creditable job of hanging back and looking unsuspicious, and would have been perfectly invisible to most ordinary Joes; not, however, to a former SAS man trained in the delicate art of counter-surveillance.

Without having to turn around, Ben had been able to keep the two in almost constant view. When the goons had followed them into Lubyanka metro station, Ben knew exactly where they were. When he had deliberately paused to fiddle with his bootlace as a way of testing their response, they’d stopped moving and huddled to one side of the tunnel, pretending to be gawking at something terribly fascinating on a mobile phone. And when Ben and his companion had got on the subway train, the pair had slipped surreptitiously on board after them. Now they were loitering at the opposite end of the carriage, innocently chatting to one another and throwing the occasional discreet glance at their targets, obviously unaware that they, the watchers, had themselves been spotted.

Tatyana looked surprised as Ben bent close to her ear, interrupting her history lecture. Her cropped blond hair smelled of fresh apples. In a whisper just loud enough to be heard he said, ‘Tell me, what’s Russian for “Don’t look now, but someone’s following us”?’

She didn’t look, but two small vertical lines appeared above her nose and her blue eyes narrowed. ‘Who are they?’ she whispered back. ‘Why would this be happening?’

‘Perhaps I should go and ask them,’ Ben said. ‘What do you think?’

‘I am sure you are just imagining it,’ Tatyana said. ‘You are … what is the word?’

‘Paranoid,’ he said. ‘Maybe. All the same, don’t turn around and look for them. They don’t know I’m onto them, not yet.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Make a phone call, for starters.’

‘And then?’

‘Maybe we ought to confront them, shoot them, dump their bodies on the track and then make a run for it before the cops arrive,’ he said. ‘Have you got a gun on you?’

Tatyana frowned. ‘You are not serious.’

Ben had Auguste Kaprisky on his list of speed-dial contacts. Two taps, a couple of bleeps and a few moments’ wait, and the old man’s crackly voice came on the line. Hurtling through a tunnel deep beneath Moscow, and the signal from 1500 miles away was crystal clear. The benefits of superior Russian technology.