The Moscow Cipher

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Speak English?’

  There was a slight nod.

  ‘Good. Then you’ll understand what “one stupid move and I’ll shoot you through the liver” means. Let’s go.’

  They marched through the darkness, Ben maintaining enough leverage on his prisoner’s arm to hurt. The man stumbled over the fence, tripped and fell on the other side, and Ben saw a trick coming and kicked him hard in the ribs, extracting a yowl. ‘That was your warning shot, Boris. Don’t be a silly boy.’

  ‘You think you will make me talk,’ the prisoner said, as best he could through his broken lips. ‘But you are wasting your times. I know nothing.’

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to make you talk. Maybe I have absolutely no interest in anything you have to tell me, and all I want is to take you somewhere I can pull you apart, nice and slow, piece by piece. What do you think about that?’

  ‘I was only following the orders.’

  ‘That’s what they all say, Boris.’

  ‘My name, it is not Boris.’

  ‘I don’t give a hoot what your name is,’ Ben said. ‘And I’ll call you Doris if it pleases me. Keep moving.’

  Soon they had reached the woods, the burning house just an orange glow far behind them and the trailer just a couple of minutes’ march through the trees ahead. Ben was still keeping up the painful pressure on his prisoner’s arm, forcing him to walk hunched over and wincing at every step. Twigs crackled underfoot. Twice the man stumbled again and nearly broke his own arm. ‘Go ahead and cry out,’ Ben said. ‘Your friends are long gone. Nobody’s going to hear you.’

  Then Ben stopped, hearing a movement close by. He turned, thinking it was Alyosha again. Why had Grisha let the mutt out of the trailer to go mooching about on his own?

  But this time, it wasn’t a four-legged creature wandering about the forest. As the figure stepped closer from between a pair of pine trees, the dim moonlight fell across her face.

  ‘Tatyana!’

  She had blood on her face from a gashed lip, but otherwise seemed unharmed. ‘I didn’t know where you’d gone,’ Ben said. ‘You had me worried.’

  ‘There was so much shooting. I … I just ran. One of those men caught me, but I hit him and kept running.’ Her voice was low and husky and faraway, like someone not quite fully engaged in the present moment. Ben noticed that her breathing seemed a little laboured. The moonlight gleamed in her eyes, which were moist and appeared somehow distant, detached. Those were all signs of shock.

  Ben motioned with the pistol. ‘Grisha’s trailer is just up ahead. When we get there I’m going to look you over and examine that cut, okay?’

  ‘Who … who is that man?’ she asked, apparently only now noticing the prisoner in Ben’s grip.

  ‘Meet Boris,’ Ben said. ‘Our new recruit.’

  Moments later, five bodies instead of three were crowded together inside the trailer. Grisha had helped Yuri to the tiny bunk area at the far end, where Yuri was sitting slumped and pale, nursing his bandaged leg.

  ‘Where did she pop up from?’ Grisha said. ‘And who is this fucker you brought into my trailer?’

  Ben roughly dumped Boris’s muscular mass on the floor. ‘A contender for the Russian Bodybuilding Federation championship who lost his way in the woods. What do you think?’

  Tatyana blinked in the light and seemed disorientated. Ben helped her over to a bench seat and sat with her. He checked her pupil reflex and pulse, which seemed okay. Examining the cut on her lip he said, ‘It looks worse than it is. You won’t need stitches.’ He spoke gently, even though he was full of questions about how she’d managed to get away from the attackers. This was no time for an inquest.

  Yuri opened his pain-racked eyes and stared at Ben. ‘Where’s Valentina? You said she was hiding. You said you were going to bring her back. You said—’

  Ben heaved the deepest sigh of regret, turned to him, and told him the unhappy truth. ‘They have her, Yuri. I’m sorry. I couldn’t have stopped them.’

  Yuri sank his face into his hands.

  ‘You have any idea what they’ll do to her, man?’ Grisha demanded angrily.

  ‘They won’t harm her,’ Ben replied. ‘She’s a bargaining chip, and that will keep her safe. It’s her father they want. But I’m not going to let them have him.’

  ‘So what’s the plan, smart guy? You gonna march in like Rambo and take her back, just like that, on your own?’

  ‘One way or another,’ Ben said. ‘Whatever it takes to get her out of there, that’s what’s going to happen. But right now we need to get away from here.’

  ‘We’re okay right where we are,’ Grisha said, shaking his head. ‘Nobody can find this trailer.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on that, Grisha. We might have beaten them back, but that was only the first wave. More will come, and soon.’

  ‘“Beaten them back,”’ Yuri echoed in a ghastly voice. ‘They took my girl. You call that a victory?’

  ‘It’s not over, Yuri.’

  ‘I’m not leaving here,’ Grisha insisted, waving his arms around him. ‘This place is my life.’

  ‘And you can die here just as easily,’ Ben said. ‘Face it, it’s over. They know where you are now. You can’t ever come back, understand? What you need to do is focus on not getting caught again.’

  Ben slipped the pistol out of his belt. Popped the magazine. Seventeen rounds plus the one in the chamber. The shiny new 9mm cartridges were copper-jacketed hollowpoints, designed to expand into little mushrooms inside their target, for maximum damage. He wondered how much more damage he was going to have to do before this was over.

  Grisha muttered, ‘It’s like they knew exactly where to find us. But how?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ben replied. ‘That’s what I’m hoping our friend here is going to help us figure out.’ He pointed down at Boris on the floor.

  ‘I tell you, I know nothing,’ Boris groaned, gingerly touching his bloody, broken nose and glowering up at his captors.

  Grisha directed a stream of Russian obscenities at the prisoner. ‘Bullshit he knows nothing. Let me have five minutes alone with the son of a bitch and he’ll soon talk, trust me.’

  Ben found that hard to believe. A broken nose and a couple of loose teeth wouldn’t have hampered big Boris from ripping the chronically unfit Grisha apart with his bare hands.

  ‘You can make yourself more useful by coming up with ideas of where we can go from here,’ Ben said. ‘There’s got to be a village nearby, or a trading post. Supplies, and a vehicle. Our first priority is to establish a secure base.’

  ‘The nearest village is an hour’s drive away. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Why else would I have chosen to live here?’

  ‘This isn’t Siberia,’ Ben said. ‘The place can’t be completely empty.’

  Grisha reflected. ‘Well, there’s old Georgiy’s farm. It’s about six, seven kilometres through the forest.’

  ‘Will your neighbour be happy about us landing on him in the middle of the night?’

  ‘He won’t complain,’ Grisha replied. ‘Old Georgiy died in March. His wife’s been dead for fifteen years, and it was just him. He must’ve been a hundred when he croaked. Now the place is empty, as far as I know.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘As sure as I can be, man. They had no family, no kids, and I can’t see anyone queuing up to buy the place.’

  ‘Then here’s our plan,’ Ben said. ‘We fall back to the neighbouring farm, where I’ll attend to Yuri’s leg. There might be some kind of supplies we can scavenge, maybe even some kind of vehicle we can use to widen the distance between ourselves and whoever comes looking for us. We’ll find a properly safe place to hole up in. Then I’ll go after Valentina. Okay?’

  Yuri was too distraught to speak. Tatyana was sitting dumb, as though she’d barely registered any of what was being discussed. The debate was between just Ben and Grisha, and Grisha wasn’t liking Ben’s plan one bit.

  ‘It’s a hell of a long
trek through the woods to old Georgiy’s farm. We got a spaced-out chick who looks like she just swallowed half a bottle of zombie pills, a grieving father with a chunk of leg shot away and this ublyudok here who’ll bolt back to his masters the instant any of us turns our back on him. How the hell do you propose we can make it even halfway?’

  Ben couldn’t do much about Tatyana except hope she soon came out of the strange, silent, almost dreamlike state she’d fallen into. As for the other two, he’d already hit on a secondary plan that cancelled out both problems.

  ‘Boris is a strapping big bloke. He’ll make a fine pack horse. Yuri’s going to ride cross-country to Georgiy’s in comfort.’

  Chapter 35

  The night-time hike through the woods seemed to take forever. The reluctant Grisha led the way, his lantern bobbing as he trudged wearily at the head of the line and casting menacing shadows of branches that looked like hooked claws. Grisha was not always sure of his path, stopping now and then to rethink their direction as the trees seemed to thicken and the terrain seemed to grow rougher with every kilometre.

  Yuri, who’d at first resisted the idea of being carried even more strongly than their prisoner had objected to piggy-backing the injured man all that distance, had finally relented and now rode along slumped like a sack of potatoes on Boris’ shoulders. Ben walked close to Tatyana, watching her and wondering about the odd change that seemed to have come over her.

  Now and then Alyosha, tagging along in their wake, would freeze and let out a low growl directed at the darkness, as though sensing some other presence observing them from the depth of the forest. Ben had read somewhere that wolves were on the rise throughout much of Eastern Europe. But whatever was out there, it kept its distance and they saw and heard nothing. They stopped only once, to let Boris rest for a couple of minutes. Yuri sat propped up against a tree and petted the dog, as though seeking comfort from his company. Tatyana was still weirdly silent and detached, in a world of her own.

  An arduous ninety minutes after abandoning the trailer, as the first glimmers of dawn were beginning to streak pink and purple above the tree line to the east, they finally came across old Georgiy’s farm. The abandoned homestead lay in a wide forest clearing, deathly still and as quiet as a graveyard. It consisted of a scattered collection of ramshackle buildings, towards the largest of which Grisha led them across an overgrown wasteland. The house was perhaps a quarter of the size of Grisha’s former home. By the light of dawn it looked like the dwelling of a tenth-century hermit who made his living by hunting and gathering. The walls were insulated with dried manure and the roof was made of thatch.

  ‘Careful,’ Grisha warned as they approached. ‘The porch steps are kind of rotten.’ Which was an understatement, as even Alyosha’s weight was too much for the decayed wood to bear.

  The tiny house was cluttered with junk, and every bit as damp and uncomfortable on the inside as it looked from the outside. Georgiy and his wife had obviously lived all their lives without electricity. One room served as the main living quarters, in which the old man had slept, eaten and most likely died. There were candles in every corner, which Ben lit with his Zippo. His next priority was to secure the prisoner. By candlelight he used a length of dirty nylon baling twine to truss up the sullen and fuming Boris, and propped him up in a mouldy corner away from the others. ‘I haven’t finished with you,’ he said as he left him.

  Next, Ben set about lighting the ancient cast iron range, the only form of heating in the house, to get some of the damp chill out of the air. The firewood logs were damp and gave off a lot of smoke. Ben had to open the window so everyone could breathe. Then it was time to attend to his patient, who was in a lot of pain. Glad he’d brought the first-aid kit from the trailer as old Georgiy certainly hadn’t possessed such items, Ben sprayed more local anaesthetic on the gunshot entry and exit wounds in Yuri’s leg, waited for the painkilling effect to kick in and then packed each hole with antiseptic and stitched up the wounds with the suture kit. When he was done he said to Yuri, ‘You’ll never win the lovely legs competition, but that should sort you out reasonably well until we can get you to a doctor.’

  ‘You know what, I don’t even care if it rots off. I don’t care if I live or die. I’ve lost my little girl.’

  ‘You’re wrong. I will find her. I will get her out of there. I swear to you, Yuri. Valentina’s going to be okay.’

  ‘You shouldn’t make promises you can’t honour, my friend,’ Yuri said.

  The Russian would never know how deeply those words lanced through Ben, more keenly than the sharpest knife.

  Ben touched his shoulder. ‘Get some rest.’

  Leaving Yuri in peace, Ben went over to Tatyana. She seemed to have grown steadily even quieter and more withdrawn with every passing hour. Now she was curled up in a battered armchair that had been one of old Georgiy’s few items of furniture, and was staring unblinkingly out of the open window at the pale sun rising over the forest. She barely appeared to be breathing. Ben crouched next to her and studied her for a moment. He noticed that Grisha, sitting against the wall opposite, kept looking at her too.

  Something strange was definitely up.

  Ben whispered to her, ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ she mumbled semi-coherently back.

  ‘You want me to see if there’s any coffee or tea in this place?’

  ‘No. Leave me alone.’

  Ben stood up and did as she asked. Grisha caught his eye, shook his head doubtfully, and Ben shrugged in reply.

  As the unelected leader of the group, it was on him to take charge of their needs. Finding a couple of expired tins of some kind of Russian meat stew in Georgiy’s primitive kitchen he dumped their lumpy contents into an old tin pot and heated them up on the range. He doled portions of stew out on five mismatched plates and handed them around. Forks for everyone except Boris, who couldn’t be trusted with anything pointier than a wooden spoon.

  ‘What are you wasting food on that piece of shit for?’ Grisha challenged as Ben untied Boris’s wrists so he could eat.

  ‘Because we don’t let our prisoners of war starve in this army. Not while they’re still useful to us.’

  ‘I say shoot him.’

  ‘You shoot him.’

  ‘Hey, I don’t shoot people. That’s your job, friend.’

  ‘I forgot,’ Ben said. ‘You’re the brains of this operation.’

  Yuri barely touched his meal, and let Alyosha guzzle most of it off his plate. Tatyana didn’t even look at hers. Grisha and Boris both wolfed theirs down faster than the dog. When the prisoner had finished, Ben trussed him tightly up again and sat next to him. He said, ‘We can do this the easy way. Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll play fair with you.’

  Boris said, ‘What is play fair?’

  ‘Maybe I let you walk away from this alive. Or else we do it the unpleasant way. Which you don’t want to know about, Boris.’

  ‘You do not scare me,’ Boris said.

  Ben had been giving a lot of thought to what he should do with his prisoner. Rank and file men did what they were ordered, end of story, no questions, no explanations. Boris was a tough nut, as well as a low-down player who might not know a great deal. If he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, reveal anything useful, there was a limit to what Ben could do with the guy. What then?

  ‘If you are gonna shoot me,’ Boris said, glancing at the pistol in Ben’s belt, ‘then do it. You think I am afraid to die?’

  ‘No. But there are worse things than a bullet, Boris. Much worse. You should know that. You were a soldier once, weren’t you? I can tell.’

  ‘Spetsnaz GRU. Forty-fifth Guards Special Purpose Brigade. Fought in Abkhazia and Chechnya.’

  ‘I was a soldier too,’ Ben said. ‘For a while. British Army. But they kicked me out. Know why?’

  Boris’s eyes anxiously searched his. He said nothing.

  ‘Because of what I did to a couple of insurgents my unit picked up one day in this littl
e backwater province in Afghanistan. We happened to know they had information on where some of their Taliban pals had a fort, but they wouldn’t talk. So, I sneaked into the cell where we were holding the two of them. Afterwards, I got a nickname. Understand “nickname”?’

  Boris nodded slowly.

  ‘They called me Sausage Man. Because that’s what those two guys’ entrails looked like after I’d pulled them out and spilled them all over the floor. Next I lit up my Jetboil stove and dumped a few pounds of their guts into a mess tin, while these poor bastards were still alive. Fried them until they were sizzling and popping like chipolatas. Never forget the smell. Know what I did then? Have a guess.’

  Boris looked away.

  Grisha was staring at Ben from across the room with a look in his eyes that said, ‘ Sausage Man?’

  ‘Picture it,’ Ben said. Which he could barely do himself, stretching his imagination to the limit to conjure up such an insane tale. But Boris seemed to be buying into it. He was definitely picturing the nightmare scene in his mind, vividly enough to make his jaw clench and the sweat pop out on his brow.

  ‘You’ll talk to me,’ Ben said. ‘I promise you’ll talk to me.’

  Boris clenched his eyes shut and was silent for a drawn-out beat. Then he opened his eyes, gazed fearfully at Ben and muttered, ‘I work for government.’

  ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. What branch? What agency?’

  Boris shook his head, pouring sweat, fear in his eyes. As if the worst psychopathic horrors inflicted by Sausage Man were nothing compared to what his own people would do if he ratted them out. Or perhaps he simply didn’t know. A lot of these ex-military guns for hire would work for cash, get picked up by a van, do their job, come home – or not – and drink beer until the next anonymous call came in. From their perspective, the less they knew the better.

  ‘You work for Bezukhov?’ Ben prompted him.