The Moscow Cipher

by Scott Mariani

  Yuri stared up at Ben. His whole face was trembling with tension and his eyes were rimmed with red. There was absolutely no doubt in Ben’s mind that he was being totally sincere.

  ‘If you know Auguste Kaprisky even half as well as I do,’ Ben said, ‘then you know that when he’s not being dear, sweet Tonton he’s the most vengeful, ruthless, cold-hearted man you’ll ever meet in your life. There are very few people he trusts, but I happen to be one of them. I can persuade him to ease off on you. In return, I need to know the truth. If you’re in trouble, I might even be able to help.’

  ‘Why would you help him, man?’ Grisha spat. ‘You don’t even know him.’

  ‘For the sake of the family,’ Ben said. ‘And for Valentina. There’s been enough hurt already. So talk. You owe this Bezukhov money? It is over drugs? Gambling? It doesn’t matter. He can be paid off, with interest.’

  To Ben’s surprise, Yuri Petrov suddenly burst out laughing. ‘Oh, God. This is too much. You really have no idea, do you?’

  ‘I’m on the level here,’ Ben said. ‘Help me to help you.’

  The laughter stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Yuri fixed him with a look of the utmost intensity. ‘You think you’re so clever, finding me. But really you’re so blind. You think you can take Valentina away, just like that?’

  ‘It’s my job,’ Ben said. ‘I aim to finish it.’

  ‘You’re going to look after her, huh?’

  ‘She’ll be safe with me. You have my word on that.’

  Yuri sneered. ‘Your word. Your word? Bullshit. You don’t have a clue. You wouldn’t even make it back to Moscow, let alone out of the country. They’re watching, don’t you see? They’re watching everything.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Yeah, they,’ Grisha snorted. ‘Who else?’

  ‘They’ll catch you,’ Yuri went on. ‘Before you even know it, they’ll be on you. And they’ll take her and use her to force me to come out of cover, and then that’ll be the end of me. They’ll torture me to death to find out what I know. Don’t you fucking get it?’

  Valentina had started crying again. She forced her way past Ben and flung her arms around her father’s neck, pressing her face into his shoulder, tears streaming down her little cheeks. ‘I don’t want anyone to hurt you, Papa!’

  ‘Cut me loose,’ Yuri said. ‘At least let me hold my little girl.’

  Ben took the clasp knife from his pocket. Yuri held his bound wrists away from his back so that the cable tie could be slashed. When his hands were free he hugged Valentina for all he was worth and he began crying, too. ‘Nobody’s going to hurt me, baby. I promise.’

  ‘This is called a sign of good will,’ Ben said as he cut Grisha’s wrists free as well. ‘Don’t even think of abusing it.’

  ‘Asshole,’ Grisha muttered under his breath as he rubbed the circulation back into his hands.

  At last, the dog had gone quiet outside. The silence of the night enveloped the remote little farmhouse, just the occasional bleat of a goat in the distance.

  ‘Enough messing around,’ Ben said to Yuri. ‘Are you going to tell me what this is about, or am I going to have to torture it out of you myself?’

  Yuri blinked away the last of his tears. ‘Be careful what you wish for, my friend. Once you learn the truth, it can’t be unlearned. Are you ready for that?’

  ‘Don’t trust this ublyudok,’ Grisha hissed at his friend. ‘I still think he’s one of them.’

  ‘I was born ready,’ Ben said to Yuri, ignoring Grisha.

  ‘And there are things you don’t know about me that would surprise you, as well,’ Yuri replied. ‘And others.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘What if I don’t want to tell you?’

  ‘What if you really have no choice in the matter?’ Ben said.

  Yuri considered for a moment, fixing Ben with the same intense look. Then he ran his fingers through his little girl’s hair and tenderly kissed the top of her head. ‘Sweet Pea, why don’t you go back to the other room and read your book for a while longer? We have some grown-up stuff to talk about.’

  ‘Okay,’ Valentina sniffed reluctantly. She wiped her face with her sleeve and peeled herself out from her father’s arms. Tatyana gave her a smile, which was not returned. Valentina walked self-consciously past the adults, over to the rickety slat door that led to the bedroom, grasped the old iron handle and disappeared inside with a last doe-eyed glance at her father.

  Yuri waited for the bedroom door to creak shut and close with a click of the latch. With the girl out of earshot he said to Ben, ‘I can guess what the old man probably told you about me. He thinks I’m just a nobody, a waste of time. Right?’

  ‘Those weren’t his exact words,’ Ben said. ‘But it’s fair to say you haven’t exactly endeared yourself to him.’

  ‘Yeah, well, maybe that’s what I wanted him to think. Him and my dear ex-wife too.’

  Ben stared at him. ‘And why, pray, would you want your spouse and her family to think that about you?’

  ‘To protect the truth,’ Yuri replied with a flash of pride. ‘Like I said, there are things about me that might surprise a few folks.’

  ‘No kidding,’ Grisha interjected.

  Yuri nodded. ‘It’s true. For a long time I even kept the truth a secret from this guy here, my best friend. Because in my former profession we were trained to secrecy, and the training sticks.’

  ‘You shouldn’t tell him,’ Grisha said, jerking his chin Ben’s way.

  ‘I need to,’ Yuri replied. ‘Then maybe he’ll understand why I can’t let him take my little girl away from me.’

  Chapter 25

  Slowly, deliberately, Yuri Petrov related to Ben the secret of the double life he’d been leading throughout his marriage to Eloise, and the reason for the lie. Ben didn’t allow a flicker of astonishment to show on his face when Yuri revealed that he’d worked for years as an agent of the Russian secret service.

  Yuri’s story was frank and convincing in every detail, though that didn’t necessarily make it the truth, as far as Ben was concerned. However, if Yuri was lying, he was putting on a fine show. As candid as he was about his former career as an intelligence operative and code-cracker, he was even more so when it came to describing the long, painful decline that had led to his wanting out.

  ‘I came to hate that whole world. I was ashamed that I’d ever played a part in it. It felt so good to get away. I almost managed to forget what I’d once been.’

  ‘We’re all pawns of the New World Order, brother,’ Grisha said sympathetically. ‘It’s like I always say. If they don’t get us one way, they get us another.’

  ‘They got me, all right,’ Yuri grunted. ‘No matter how much I tried to get away from them, there they were again. And there I was.’ He sighed and shook his head as he retold the chilling moment when the agents had found him and taken him to meet his former chief, Antonin Bezukhov.

  Ben found it hard to imagine this man as a spy. Then again, the perfect spy would be the man nobody could picture in that role. But what was an ex-spook for Russian intelligence doing holed up in a backwater hideout with a conspiracy nut spouting about the New World Order?

  Ben asked, ‘What did Bezukhov want from you?’

  ‘To tell me a story. The story of a British spy who got caught in Moscow back during the Cold War, in the winter of 1957. He was posing as a Russian citizen under the false identity of Pyotr Kozlov. His real name was Ingram, Captain Ingram, of SIS, the British Secret Intelligence Service.’

  Ben was listening intently but still thoroughly mystified. ‘Am I to assume that this old tale has some relevance to today?’

  ‘Oh yes. Keep listening, okay? Ingram was arrested by Soviet agents and detained in the old Lubyanka prison, where they tortured him and would have executed him, too, if he hadn’t died under interrogation. They weren’t able to extract much information about the nature of his mission. That was that. Just another forgotten horror story. Just another bunch
of secret shit that lay hidden for years, decades. Until now.’

  Yuri paused, sighed as though the weight of the world were crushing down on his shoulders, then continued. ‘Not so long ago, some workmen were demolishing an old house in the crumbling section of the city where, it so happens, Ingram was arrested in 1957. They found a piece of paper. A cryptogram. Code, cipher, call it what you want.’

  ‘And that’s where you come in?’

  ‘Bezukhov gave me the job of decoding it,’ Yuri replied bitterly. ‘Why me? Good question. Because I was so good, back in the day? Or because being off the reservation for so long made me so easy to get rid of, when the job was done? Take a guess. Whether I cracked it or not, they were handing me a death sentence. I was so stupid, I didn’t realise that until it was too late. Some part of me wanted to relive those glory days, I suppose. I had to break that cipher. I worked at it night and day. Drove myself crazy over the damned thing.’

  ‘But you beat it.’

  ‘In the end, yes, I did. It was me or it. There’s a winner and a loser.’ Yuri paused to savour his moment of triumph, then his shoulders sagged again and he sighed. ‘Some victory, hey? Crack the cipher, find out the truth, and Bezukhov would have me killed the moment I reported back to him. Fail, admit defeat, go back to Bezukhov and tell him it was too tough for me, I’d still have been a dead man.’

  Yuri looked Ben in the eye. ‘And if I tell the secret to you, so are you, my friend. Until that moment when you hear the truth, the only thing protecting you is your ignorance. Once you know what’s in the cipher, and what it led me to discover in an old abandoned warehouse the night I finally cracked it, the death sentence is handed to you as well. Like some kind of ancient demon curse that damns anyone who comes into contact with it.’

  ‘You must have been a cryptologist too long, Yuri. You’re talking in riddles.’

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  ‘Truthfully? I think you’re full of shit.’

  ‘Oh, you want to see some proof of what these people are capable of? Let me show you something.’ Yuri pointed across the room, at the table. ‘The newspaper.’

  Tatyana stepped to the table and picked up the paper that both Yuri and Grisha had been scrutinising with such interest earlier. She frowned at it for a moment and then handed it to Ben, saying, ‘It is Metro Moscow, a daily tabloid for local city news. The date is from last week.’

  Predictably, not a word of the Cyrillic writing on the front page meant anything to Ben. He looked in puzzlement at Yuri, who said, ‘See the picture?’

  ‘I see a picture of some geeky Russian pop star with silly hair,’ Ben replied.

  ‘Not that one. The small one, below, with the sidebar article.’

  ‘A priest?’

  ‘A dead priest. Found hanging from a bridge the night before, having apparently committed suicide.’

  Ben glanced again at the picture, a grainy head-and-shoulders portrait shot of a grey-haired, slightly chubby man in the garb of a Catholic priest. Nothing remarkable about it whatsoever, other than the circumstances of his death, the Church taking a somewhat dim view of suicide among its clergy. Ben understood that this was the newspaper article that had seemed to so fascinate both Yuri and Grisha earlier, but he didn’t understand why. ‘Okay, a priest killed himself. What’s that got to do with us?’

  ‘Only the fact that I was probably the last one to see him alive,’ Yuri shot back. ‘And that he’s dead only because I did see him.’

  ‘This secret of yours, you told him?’

  Yuri shook his head. ‘I wanted to, so much. Or did I? I don’t even know. The stress of what I’d found out was driving me insane. I didn’t know who else to talk to at that point. I needed to confess, to ask for help. But they were already onto me by then, and watching the church.’ He clasped his hands in front of him as though praying, squeezing until the knuckles showed white. He closed his eyes for a moment, anguish etched into his face, then reopened them and fixed on Ben. ‘The worst thing is knowing that poor old man died for no reason, except that he and I shared a few moments together. I wish I could have warned him. It was all happening so fast. Do you think, if I’d known they were onto me already, I’d have gone straight from the church to pick up Valentina at the airport and take her home to the apartment? It was only when I saw the paper, the next day, that I realised the danger we were in. We left Moscow the same day.’

  ‘But not before stopping off at the apartment on the way,’ Ben said, still highly sceptical. ‘Do people fleeing from hired government killers normally take risks like that?’

  ‘I could only hope I was still half a step ahead of them,’ Yuri explained. ‘I thought I’d been cautious. I was so wrong. Only by pure chance, we got away.’

  Ben narrowed his eyes and waited for more.

  ‘They tried to get us. Not once, but twice. The first time was shortly after we drove away from the apartment. There was a car following us, a black Mercedes.’

  ‘It’s always a black Mercedes,’ Grisha said, shaking his head in disgust. ‘Like they don’t even try to hide any more.’

  Ben might have pointed out that he and his companion had just driven there in the very same kind and colour of vehicle, but he decided to withhold that information.

  Yuri went on, ‘They must have been watching the place the whole time we were in there, seen us go inside, seen us leave, just waiting for the right moment to pounce. Why they didn’t spring their trap when we were inside, I don’t know. They might have thought I was armed and would start shooting. That’s the only explanation I can think of, that they wanted to keep it quiet. I mean, not even they can get away with kidnapping a father and child in broad daylight.’

  ‘You obviously managed to get away, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

  ‘I didn’t think we’d make it. As the car kept tailing us, I could see no escape. I just kept driving aimlessly around the city, terrified that we’d eventually run out of fuel and then they’d grab us and take me away to be tortured. What would happen to Valentina? That was all I could think about. I was so scared I could hardly see straight to drive or hold the wheel steady. Next thing I knew, we were entering the Lefortovo road tunnel. Then something incredible happened. I mean, things happen there all the time, but—’

  ‘Stick to the point.’

  ‘I was going about eighty kilometres an hour, foot to the floor, as fast as my car can go. Most of the other traffic was overtaking, but the black Mercedes was stuck right on our tail. I could see the shapes of the two agents in the front. Just then, a car came speeding up behind us, much faster than the rest of the traffic. A Porsche, I think it was. Some rich reckless maniac, but I remember thinking that if I’d had a fast car like him I’d have been going like a bat out of hell too. As he swerved to overtake, he hit a pool of standing water. The Yauza River leaks in from all over the place.’

  ‘Just tell it,’ Ben said tersely.

  ‘The Porsche’s wheels must have aquaplaned on the surface of the water and lost grip. Just as he was about level with the Mercedes, the driver spun out of control. He slammed into the Mercedes and the impact drove it into the side wall of the tunnel. Next thing, all I could see in my mirrors was cars skidding and piling into one another and wreckage flying everywhere. I just put my foot down and got out of there. It was terrifying.’

  Yuri shook his head at the memory. ‘We sped out of the city. No more sign of the Mercedes following us. As much as I wanted to believe we were home free, I knew they wouldn’t give up so easily. They have eyes everywhere. The second attempt happened when we stopped for fuel, just before we left the Federal Highway. We needed some provisions for our journey, so I grabbed a few things. Valentina had to go to the bathroom and I was waiting for her to come back out when two men walked inside the building from the car park and approached me. Dark glasses. Short hair. More of Bezukhov’s thugs. One said, “Mr Petrov, please come with us.” I thought I was done. I thought maybe I could stall t
hem for a moment, so I asked who they were, if they were police, if they could show me ID. Then the other one pulled out a gun. Held it close to him, like this, so nobody would see. There were too many people around. He said, “Let’s go, moron,” and waved towards their car parked outside.’

  ‘How did you get out of it?’

  ‘Valentina,’ Yuri replied, as though he still could hardly believe it himself. ‘She’d left the bathroom and was making her way back to find me when she saw them getting out of their car. She ran back to the bathroom, closed herself in a stall, climbed up on the toilet seat and managed to wriggle through a narrow window and sneak around the side of the service station building to their car without being seen. While I was stalling for time, convinced I was done for, she let down two of their tyres. Next, she started screaming at the top of her voice and pointing at the two men who were trying to grab me, raising a whole big commotion. A woman cashier saw the gun and started going hysterical, thinking an armed robbery was taking place, or Chechen separatists had come to kill everyone, or God knows what. Some young guy tried to intervene and the thug with the gun pistol-whipped him right in the face. People were running, yelling, pure chaos, in the middle of which I managed to break away and make a run back to the Beetle. Valentina was already there. We sped away. The thugs tried to chase after us, but they couldn’t get far on two flat tyres. When we left the highway a few kilometres down the road, we stopped to switch the number plates from the Beetle for ones that I stole off an old farm truck. There was no way they could track us on these backroads. All the same, I didn’t stop shaking until we got here. Two lucky escapes. More than lucky. I think it means God intended for me to get away. Do you believe in miracles?’

  ‘I think you owe more to your daughter than you do to the Lord above,’ Ben said.

  ‘Then you accept that I’m telling the truth? You believe me now?’

  ‘Let’s run back through the facts. You’re claiming that the Russian secret service murdered a man and tried twice to abduct you and the kid, with the intention of torturing you to death to find out what you discovered from a Cold War code they employed you to crack for them.’