The Moscow Cipher

by Scott Mariani

  Nothing suspicious. No helicopters tracking overhead in the clear blue sky, either. The car-switch ploy had seemingly done the trick. Or else maybe he’d imagined the whole thing and he was just going crazy. Certainly, he was beginning to feel he had no real handle on what was going on. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt such unease on what had started out as a fairly straightforward job. It was hard not to let the doubts creep into his mind that he shouldn’t have let himself be talked into taking it at all.

  He could always blame Jeff Dekker for that one.

  They made a quick pit stop at a motorway services, topped up their fuel on Kaprisky’s expenses account and sat in the car munching cold sandwiches and sipping a non-alcoholic brew called kvass, which Tatyana insisted was much better for you than cola. Something else Ben had already decided to avoid if he ever returned to Russia.

  Soon afterwards, they turned off the highway. Ben had seen nothing sinister and was sure nobody was following them, but the worry wouldn’t pass. He went on driving in silence, puffing Gauloise smoke out of his open window, as Tatyana checked the landmarks against Valentina’s photos and guided their route. He kept asking, ‘Are you sure?’ , to which she kept frowning and saying she thought so.

  As they left the major artery of the M10 behind them, Ben began to discover the truth of the old saying that the country’s terrible roads had done more to hamper the advance of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in World War II than the efforts of the Red Army. He was glad of his off-road driving skills, because their luxury mode of transportation had most certainly not been built with such a patchwork of rutted dirt and broken asphalt in mind. The only other vehicles they passed were an overloaded poultry truck with a mangy dog hanging out of one window, and a pre-war tractor held together with rust and baling twine. The occupants of both, including the dog, all stared at the Mercedes. Not many strangers would tend to come out this way, let alone in an executive limousine worth ten or twenty times more than the value of the average roadside homestead.

  ‘Want a sip?’ he asked, taking out his whisky flask.

  Tatyana pulled a face. ‘It stinks like gasoline.’

  Ben shrugged and let a swig of £600-a-litre Macallan Rare Cask Black wash away the revolting aftertaste of the kvass.

  The deeper they ventured into the countryside, the more obvious were the signs of poverty everywhere. They passed through semi-derelict and half-abandoned backwater settlements slowly being reclaimed by forest, where wild boars roamed freely, scavenging for food and apparently quite unafraid of the occasional passing vehicle. On the edge of a dismal village whose Russian name Tatyana translated as ‘Black Dirt’, Ben saw an emaciated old man with arms like sticks struggling to replace a tyre on a truck that looked almost as old as he was, and didn’t have the heart to drive on without stopping to help. The old man might have been the archetypal square-jawed, thick-chested, uncomplaining Soviet worker back in his heyday, but now he was a worn-out empty husk in danger of being blown away by the next gust of wind. He kept jabbering toothlessly in Russian as Ben crouched by the roadside, twisted off the rusty wheelnuts, hefted the punctured wheel up onto the truck’s flatbed and manhandled the new one into place. When the job was done, the old man gave him a solemn nod of thanks and offered him a swig of some kind of clear alcohol from a dirty bottle. Ben took a drink, so as not to offend him, and got back into the Mercedes wiping the grime from his hands and wondering what the hell the old man’s moonshine was made out of. Tatyana was watching Ben with curious eyes as they drove on.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘You like to help people, don’t you?’

  ‘If they need it,’ he replied. ‘If I can.’

  ‘You are a very unusual man.’

  The endless route climbed and fell, twisted and turned, on and on. Ben began to wonder if Yuri and Valentina had come this way at all. Kilometres from anywhere, a lone woman with snow-white hair and skin like tanned rhino leather sat on an upturned bucket outside a dilapidated wooden chapel at the roadside, smoking a corn-cob pipe and looking as though she was waiting for God. But God seemed to have vacated the place long ago, along with most everyone else. After a dozen more disappearing settlements, Ben was seriously questioning whether they were on the right road – if indeed it could be called a road – when Tatyana suddenly pointed and exclaimed, ‘There. We found it. Did I not tell you?’

  In Valentina’s picture the broken-down church had been clearly visible through the shedding October branches; in summer it was half hidden by foliage and they could easily have driven right by without noticing. A little more of the roof had collapsed in the intervening months, but there was no doubting it was the same landmark they’d been looking for. A short way further on, Tatyana had Ben slow the car, and they were able to glimpse the abandoned country estate mansion through a copse of trees, a sorry sight as it gradually crumbled away to nothing.

  ‘Now what?’ Ben said.

  ‘I would expect we will pass this lake soon,’ Tatyana said, holding up the smartphone to remind him. ‘It will be on the right side of the road, down below us in a valley.’

  ‘But which road?’ Ben said. He pointed ahead at the fork that split their chances fifty-fifty. If only the kid had taken more pictures. Or brought a full film crew along to record the entire trip for posterity.

  ‘That one,’ Tatyana said, nodding in the direction of the left-hand fork.

  ‘Reason or intuition?’

  ‘You do not trust me?’ she said, cocking an eyebrow.

  He shrugged. Fifty-fifty wasn’t the worst odds. In any case, if they drew a blank they’d just come back on themselves and keep scouring every lane and track across this whole godforsaken wilderness until they got lucky. Ben was used to doing it the hard way, though he’d have preferred going about his business alone. ‘You’re the tour guide. The left fork it is.’

  Four kilometres later, Tatyana let out a laugh of triumph as they topped a rise and the lake suddenly came into view, stretching smooth and blue between steeply rising banks of forest in the distance. ‘See? You should be glad that you trusted me.’

  ‘What would I do without you?’

  ‘It cannot be much further to the farm,’ Tatyana said. ‘Keep going on this road and I am sure we will find it.’

  Ben kept going, though if he’d known better he would have turned back. Nine kilometres later, as dusk was beginning to fall, they found the farm. That should have been the end of the journey. As he was soon to discover, it was only the beginning.

  Chapter 21

  The track snaked along the crest of a hill, overlooking a vista of forest out of which maybe four or five acres had been cleared to make way for the smallholding. Ben slipped the gearbox into neutral, cut the engine and let the Mercedes coast down the slight gradient until a stand of trees hid it from view of the farmhouse below.

  He brought the car to a silent halt, got out, opened the back door and reached inside his bag for a compact but powerful pair of night vision binoculars he had carried on many kidnap rescue missions. ‘Stay low and out of sight,’ he instructed Tatyana, noting the peeved look she fired back at him.

  Ben crept through the trees to the crumbling edge of the steep hillside, rested himself against a fallen trunk and drank in a clear aerial view of the farmstead. The image was bright and clear even in the failing light, and the aerial view confirmed right away that this was definitely the same smallholding he’d seen in Valentina’s video clip from last October. Free of snow, the haphazard beaten earth paths that crisscrossed the property were visible, and the rust that covered the tin roof of the farmhouse itself. The land stretched over maybe three or four acres, the smallest of hobby farms, partitioned into paddocks and small fields by rickety fences and the whole encircled by barbed wire. The smallest area contained a couple of ramshackle chicken coops, though the poultry ranged free and Ben could see a few of the shabby-looking birds foraging here and there. The largest enclosure housed the same meagre flock of white, flopp
y-eared goats Valentina had been feeding in the video clip.

  The farmhouse lay to the right of where she’d been standing, closer to the entrance gate at the narrowest part of the property. Ben edged forward to get a view of the whole building. It was the simplest kind of country dwelling, a good century and a half old and showing every day of it; a single low-slung storey that had had bits added on here and there during the years, creating a strange rambling layout. The outer walls were blackened by soot washed down by the rain. The battered front door was so low that anyone of average height or taller would have to stoop to pass through, as though it had been intended for impoverished nineteenth-century country folks with empty bellies and stunted growth – which, Ben thought, was doubtless the case. The windows were even tinier, likely made that way because they’d had to wait until sometime in the twentieth century to be fitted with glass panes to keep out the winter wind. A single metal stovepipe jutted up from the middle of the rusty tin roof. The bare ground around the farmhouse was littered with all the same junk – crates and old feed sacks and assorted gas bottles – that had been there last October, only now it was all overrun with a fresh summer growth of weeds springing up everywhere. An elderly cat lounged on a broken rocking chair outside the front door, watching the loose gang of chickens scratch about the yard in the dusk but obviously not considering them worth going after. The chickens let out the occasional squawk. The goats bleated and milled about in their paddock. A dog was barking incessantly inside the farmhouse.

  The animals were the only visible or audible signs of life about the place. But someone was at home, all right. The same beaten-up pickup truck sat parked outside the farmhouse, in the exact same place, as though it hadn’t turned a wheel since last October.

  Next to it was the pale blue Volkswagen Beetle.

  Yuri and Valentina were here. Ben resisted the urge to jump to his feet and go clambering down the hillside, march up to the door and wrench it open. He took a breath. One step at a time.

  He was eyeing the Beetle through the binoculars when he sensed a presence next to him, and twisted around. Tatyana had made no sound at all creeping up behind him. Impressive, and unsettling. He didn’t like being sneaked up on.

  ‘We found them,’ she whispered at his shoulder, peering down at the farmstead with hungry eyes.

  Ben whispered back, ‘I’ve seen no sign of the kid yet. That’s all I’m interested in.’

  The daylight was fading fast. As Ben went on watching, the glow of a lamp came on in the nearest window, offering him a limited view of the inside of the farmhouse. He could make out the corner of an old rustic pine table in what must be a living room or kitchen. Someone walked past the window, too fast to make out details, but someone large and heavyset. That someone made their way around the table and plonked themselves down in a chair beside it.

  Ben recognised the portly figure of Yuri’s rustic buddy from the photo. He’d traded his dirty boiler suit for grimy, faded blue dungarees and a tatty khaki army-surplus jumper. He reached across the table and slid something square, flat and white towards him. It was a newspaper, and obviously of interest to him, the way he hunched himself over to stare at the front page. After a few moments he looked up from the paper and began gesticulating and talking to someone else on the other side of the room. The dog was still barking away, showing no sign of running out of steam. Yuri’s pal seemed irritated by the noise. After a minute he hefted himself brusquely from his chair and disappeared from view.

  A moment later, the low front door creaked open. Yuri’s rustic friend reappeared briefly in the doorway, along with the dog which streaked outside into the yard, barking and baying loudly. It was some kind of hunting dog, gangly and lean. Ben didn’t recognise the breed but he knew right away the thing was trouble. Some dogs will rip into an intruder without hesitation, and this was one of them. The hound went dashing about the yard, filling the air with its explosive noise. The old cat, obviously an experienced veteran of past conflicts with the brute, slipped off the rocking chair and disappeared into the weeds.

  This was a problem. The SAS had spent decades trying to work out effective ways of defeating guard dogs, without ever finding a wholly satisfactory solution. They were the best kind of low-budget early warning system going, able to detect a potential threat from crazy distances. Once they started barking, they wouldn’t stop until someone made them. You couldn’t go up and pacify them; killing the poor beasts was a noisy business at the best of times and only made you feel rotten afterwards; and feeding them drugged meat to knock them out only worked in bad action movies.

  The dog was barking even more loudly. In towns and cities, the usual first thing people did was to yell at them to shut up. They didn’t generally go to see why the dog was barking. In the countryside, it was a different matter. Farmers with livestock to protect were more likely to follow up on the alert signal, to see what, or who, might be lurking out there.

  As were jumpy folks harbouring fugitives. Or the nervy fugitives themselves.

  The door opened again and now the fat guy in the dungarees stepped out into the yard. Ben’s night vision binocs offered a green-hued daylight view of him in the falling darkness. He was looking edgy. Edgy enough to have brought a torch and a shotgun outside with him. The gun was a far cry from short-barrelled urban street sweeper the barman of the Zenit had been toting, but even a farmer’s old-fashioned knockabout double-hammer gun was one of the deadliest close-range weapons a civilian could own, anywhere in the world. This situation wasn’t getting any easier to deal with.

  The fat man stalked about the yard, shining the torchbeam this way and that, over towards the goats that were now huddling inside a makeshift shelter, over at the cars, running the light along the perimeter fence.

  Then someone else came out of the farmhouse to join him. A smaller guy, plumpish but not fat, dressed more for the city than the country in jeans and a baggy shirt. The hair, the beard, the whole urban hippy look. Ben’s first sighting of Yuri Petrov, in the flesh.

  Tatyana whispered excitedly, ‘Is that him?’

  ‘That’s our man, all right. Take a look.’ Ben passed her the binocs for a moment, let her get a peek at their quarry, then snatched them back from her.

  Yuri seemed even more agitated than his buddy. He was also just as well armed, maybe even better. The weapon in his hands was some kind of old bolt-action military rifle left over from World War II. It looked from a distance like a Russian Mosin Nagant. With over forty million produced back in the day, it was hardly surprising that a few remained in civilian hands, still as effective now as then. Yuri was pointing the thing all over the place.

  Jumpy, all right. Invisible as they were from their hidden position among the trees, Ben instinctively ducked and pressed Tatyana down into the bushes as the gun momentarily pointed their way. These old battle rifles could still kill a man stone dead a mile away and sometimes had worn mechanisms prone to go off inadvertently, especially in the wrong hands.

  Now Yuri was stepping over to his friend, and the two of them were talking. They were much too far away for Ben to hear, even if he’d understood Russian.

  ‘What do you see?’ Tatyana hissed impatiently in his ear.

  Ben was about to let her have the binocs back for another glance when he saw someone else appear in the lit-up doorway of the farmhouse. The smaller figure of a twelve-year-old girl wearing a sleeveless pink gilet jacket, standing there clutching at the doorframe and looking uncertainly out into the darkness, clearly worried by the sight of the guns.

  Ben felt the air go out of his lungs.

  It was Valentina.

  Chapter 22

  ‘I see her,’ Ben whispered to Tatyana. ‘She’s scared, but she’s all in one piece.’

  ‘Let me look,’ Tatyana insisted, but Ben was holding on to the binoculars. He scanned his field of vision away from the farmhouse and back across the yard. The fat man was still shining the torch about but losing interest. The dog hadn’t stopped
barking the entire time.

  The fat man called its name. ‘Alyosha!’ Then called it again when he was flatly ignored, his voice angry now. At the tone of his voice the dog stopped barking and came slinking back. The fat guy grabbed it by its collar, hung on for a moment while he and Yuri took a last look around the yard, then dragged the reluctant Alyosha back to the farmhouse. Valentina had disappeared from the doorway. The men went inside, bringing the dog in with them. The door creaked shut and the yard fell back into darkness and silence. Ben put down the binoculars and eased himself back from the edge.

  ‘Well, you found them,’ Tatyana said in a low voice that was breathy with excitement. ‘Excellent work. I am most impressed, Comrade Major.’

  ‘We haven’t got him yet,’ Ben replied softly. ‘Now’s where the fun begins.’

  ‘A peasant, a beatnik and a little girl, and you are frightened?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say frightened,’ he replied. ‘It’s just that there are these things called bullets, and they hurt. I don’t fancy copping a load of buckshot either. Or you. It won’t do if I have to drag you all the way back to Moscow full of holes. What would your agency say?’

  ‘Thank you for your concern, but I thought that you SAS men were born to take risks.’

  ‘No, we’re the most cautious people you’ll ever meet. That’s how we live to collect all the medals the Queen gives us.’

  Tatyana’s eyes widened. ‘You have met the Queen?’

  ‘We’re like this,’ Ben said, holding up crossed fingers. He pointed down the hillside. ‘Let’s get back to business. It’s at least a two-gun household. We have to assume they have ammo, and that the country boy at least has done his fair share of potting rabbits and crows and isn’t afraid to pull a trigger. Plus they’re scared, and scared people are prone to shoot at shadows that might turn out to be us. Plus they have the ears and nose of that dog working for them. Not an easy proposition.’