The Moscow Cipher

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I just do what I am told,’ Boris said. ‘We are told there are terrorists in that house. Our job is to strike the target. That is all I can tell to you, I swear.’

  ‘Terrorists,’ Ben repeated. ‘A twelve-year-old girl and her father, on the run and scared half to death. And what about this tub of lard here?’ Ben pointed at Grisha. ‘You think he looks like a terrorist? He couldn’t terrorise a three-legged gerbil.’

  Grisha, who for a moment there had actually looked quite pleased at the idea of being considered so dangerous, scowled. ‘Hey. Watch it, asshole.’

  ‘They tell us there is one guy,’ Boris said. ‘Real badass. Mercenary, something like that. They say to us, this is a real hardcore motherfucker. Killed a shit load of people. They say he will fuck you up good, in a heartbeat. They say we will need many men to kill him.’

  Ben’s eyes narrowed. ‘Did they say this person has a name?’

  Boris turned to look at him. ‘Yes. They say his name is Hope. And I think you are him.’

  Chapter 36

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Grisha said, wrinkling his face up into a deep frown. ‘How did they know—?’

  ‘That I was at the farm?’ Ben finished for him. ‘Good question.’ And a baffling one. Now he understood why such a large force had been deployed to attack the house. But he could think of no way the enemy could have anticipated his being there in the first place. He glowered at Boris for an answer.

  ‘I tell you everything I know,’ Boris quavered, his eyes full of the terror of Sausage Man. And Ben believed him.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Grisha asked as Ben stood up.

  ‘To sharpen my knife,’ Ben said. ‘Watch him until I get back.’

  The truth was, he needed to think. Nothing was adding up and his head was almost spinning with confusion. Stepping outside, he filled his lungs with the fresh morning air and listened to the chirping of the birds. Maybe they knew what was going on.

  Nothing would be gained by standing there racking his brains like an idiot. He began to explore the farm. Lugubrious was the word for the place. Adjoining the tiny house were a few old sheds filled with the same kind of agricultural junk as Grisha’s place, but even more neglected. A bunch of old tools lay about, disintegrating into rust. Rats were nesting in the straw bales and had been eating into sacks of decaying animal feed. The livestock were long gone, their deserted pens all dilapidated and overgrown. Ben peered into a barn that looked as though it was about to collapse, and thought better of going in.

  Still no ideas had come to him. He was about to head back to the house when he glanced under a ramshackle lean-to next to the barn, and amongst all the heaped-up junk his eye picked out a shape hidden by a plastic tarp.

  Under the tarp was old Georgiy’s VAZ station wagon, about as ancient as its owner had been. Probably just as dead, too, he thought. To his surprise, it coughed into life after a few reluctant heaves of the motor. The car might actually be serviceable, except one tyre was hopelessly flat.

  While he worked to change the wheel, Ben was thinking about a lot of things. How he’d been inexplicably tracked to Grisha’s farm was one of them. How he ever hoped to get Valentina back was another. And the perplexing matter of Tatyana was yet another.

  More than a couple of times since he’d landed in Russia, Ben had found himself not entirely disliking his travelling companion. After that frosty start, he’d warmed to her quite a bit. Maybe that was why, until now, he’d chosen to turn a blind eye to the oddities about her that had been slowly stacking up almost from the beginning of their acquaintance.

  For a partner in a top detective agency that was the pick of a billionaire accustomed to always getting the very best of the best, Tatyana Nikolaeva appeared to be curiously inept at her job. Ben remembered the way she’d relied heavily on his lead back at Yuri’s apartment in Moscow. How she’d admitted to a lack of experience in missing persons cases. Then there was the fact that she hadn’t thought to question the apartment block’s concierge before he came along. Ben had almost felt as though he was working with a rookie detective.

  Yet Tatyana seemed to possess a high level of other skills, ones that seemed out of place in her line of work. Such as the ability to disarm a gun-toting opponent, at which she was far more proficient than a lot of the experienced police and military guys who came to Le Val for training. And the way she’d been able to sneak up on Ben in the darkness while watching Yuri’s place, which had struck him as odd and even a little unsettling. Those were weird talents for a detective, more like things a soldier would be good at. And she certainly talked like a soldier, too, familiar with a lot of military facts and coming out with expressions like ‘Comrade Major’ that seemed to trip just a little too easily off her tongue.

  On top of all that, now there was this bizarre change that had come over her yesterday. Shortly after they’d all gone inside Grisha’s farmhouse and begun to talk, Ben had noticed the way Tatyana had gone increasingly silent. Now her behaviour was that of someone suffering from a bad case of post-traumatic stress, even though she’d apparently escaped virtually unharmed and without too much trouble from such a concerted and violent attack. She wouldn’t talk about it. Wouldn’t talk at all. The whole thing was a little too vague and hazy for comfort.

  Ben could no longer ignore the conundrum that was Tatyana Nikolaeva, or the fact that he knew virtually nothing about this woman. Something was not right about her, though he couldn’t put a finger on it. He had the impression that Grisha was suspicious of her too – although, admittedly, what wasn’t Grisha suspicious of?

  Ben tightened up the last wheelnut, wiped his dirty hands on an old bit of rag and took out his smartphone. He had to walk nearly two hundred yards from the buildings before he was able to get one bar’s worth of reception. In rural France, he wouldn’t even have bothered trying. Russian technological superiority to the rescue, once again. The mobile signal lasted long enough for him to run a quick internet search on her detective agency, using her name as a keyword.

  The Grendel Detective Agency had a suitably austere and no-frills website, readable in both Russian and English. A side menu tab popped up the names of its half dozen partners of which, sure enough, Miss Tatyana Nikolaeva was one. Fishing for all the detail he could get about her, Ben clicked on her name.

  A new page opened up on his screen, showing a short bio of Miss Nikolaeva along with a picture of her in a business suit and scraped-back hairdo. The professional bio described her as one of the firm’s most senior partners with an impressive body of experience. It was no surprise why Auguste Kaprisky would have picked her out. Nothing but the best.

  There was just one problem.

  Unless it had been taken on a very bad day indeed, the picture next to Tatyana’s name was of a totally different person. The Miss Nikolaeva on Ben’s screen looked at least fifteen years older. At least thirty pounds heavier. To resemble her in any way whatsoever, the woman Ben knew would have had to spend six hours in a movie makeup trailer receiving the full-on ugly treatment, warts, jowls, facial hair and all.

  So who was the woman Ben knew?

  He leaned against a tree, took a couple of deep breaths and then looked at his watch. It wasn’t yet office hours, but the contact mobile number on the agency’s site might lead him to an early bird. Ben dialled it. Four rings later, a scratchy male voice answered in Russian. Ben asked if he spoke English. Who didn’t, these days? Ben apologised for the early hour, and asked if he could speak to Tatyana Nikolaeva.

  ‘I am sorry,’ the scratchy voice said, sounding suddenly morose and guarded. ‘May I ask what this is regarding?’

  ‘A confidential client matter,’ Ben said. ‘It’s very important that I speak to her.’

  ‘Tatyana is no longer with us,’ the voice replied.

  ‘I see. Is she with a different agency now?’ Ben said, even more confused. ‘Perhaps there’s another number where I could reach her?’

  ‘No, I mean she is no
longer with us,’ the scratchy voice repeated with more emphasis. ‘It happened several days ago. So terrible. She … she is … We are all in shock here. The office is closed for the week.’

  Ben’s blood had chilled a couple of degrees. He said, ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nobody knows. The politsiya cannot say yet. She was found at her home. Perhaps she tried to stop a thief. Perhaps it was a crazy person.’ The man’s voice sounded genuinely upset. ‘I am sorry to be the one to tell you, if you knew Tatyana. We all loved her. We cannot believe it. I have not had the heart to update the website …’

  Ben offered his condolences, thanked the man for his help and ended the call. He stared into the distance for three long minutes, seeing nothing, his head churning, the ice in his blood turning to fire.

  Then he ran back to the house.

  Chapter 37

  The woman Ben had until a few moments ago known as Tatyana Nikolaeva hadn’t stirred from the armchair. Nor had she touched her plate of stew, which was being noisily gobbled up by Alyosha. Her glazed-over eyes were still fixed on the window.

  Ben glanced around the room. Yuri was hunched up in one corner, apparently sleeping. Grisha hadn’t budged from his position either. Nor had Boris, who had less choice in the matter.

  ‘Look who’s back,’ Grisha said. ‘Sausage Man.’

  Without a word, Ben tossed the smartphone into Grisha’s lap. The internet connection was broken but the screen still displayed the detective agency webpage with the real Tatyana’s picture and bio. Grisha picked it up, stared at it, then gaped up at Ben with huge eyes. ‘Just as I thought.’

  Yuri gave a lurch and woke up from his slumber. ‘What’s that?’

  Ben strode over to the fake Tatyana and grabbed her arm. He jerked her round to face him, but her eyes seemed to register nothing. He waved a finger an inch in front of her face. There was barely a flicker of reaction.

  ‘Oh, man,’ Grisha said.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Yuri asked, straightening up and wincing from the pain in his leg. Grisha tossed him the phone. Yuri caught it and stared at the screen. Same astonished reaction. Only Boris seemed uninterested in the turn of events, for the moment.

  ‘She’s one of them,’ Grisha said.

  ‘She’s what?’

  ‘I knew it the whole time,’ Grisha said.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Of course I did. This is all your fault, man,’ Grisha snarled at Ben. ‘You brought this bitch right to our door.’ Catching the look Ben threw back at him, he shut up very quickly.

  Alyosha had finished licking the empty plate clean, and now went over to curl up contentedly in a corner. Dogs didn’t need to concern themselves with foolish human affairs.

  Ben turned back to the fake Tatyana and lowered himself to her eye level. ‘Tatyana Nikolaeva of the Grendel Detective Agency in Moscow is dead. I want to know who you are and who you’re working for, and I want to know now.’

  She said nothing. Her face was blank. If not for the fact that she was breathing and warm to the touch, she might have been as dead as her genuine namesake. Ben slapped her cheek to elicit some response, not hard, but not too softly.

  ‘Understand this. I’m not gender discriminatory. Which means that if you don’t tell me what I want to know, what I’ll do to you will be a lot more painful than the little nick one of your buddies back there gave you to make things look real. I’ll hurt you, Tatyana, or whoever you are. I’ll hurt you very badly.’

  Now Boris did start to pay some interest. He didn’t mind seeing a bit of bloodshed, as long as it was a pretty woman getting sliced up and not him.

  Ben’s threat was no less of a bluff than the Sausage Man story. But the fake Tatyana didn’t know that. The problem was, at this moment she didn’t seem to know anything or have the least understanding of what was happening to her.

  Ben drew the pistol from his belt and pressed the muzzle against the soft flesh of her neck, below a shapely ear. ‘You have three seconds to talk,’ he said. ‘One.’

  No response. Not a twitch. She remained perfectly still and composed.

  Ben said, ‘Two.’ In another second, his bluff would be exposed, but the gamble was worth taking to get her to open up.

  Or perhaps not.

  He said, ‘Three.’

  And pulled the trigger.

  The report of the gunshot was extremely loud in the confines of the tiny house. Yuri, Grisha and even Boris all jumped three inches in the air where they sat. Alyosha tensed and huddled deeper into the corner. Only the fake Tatyana didn’t flinch as the bullet passed over her head and punched a hole in the roof. Dust and bits of thatch showered down and landed on her head and shoulders.

  Grisha let out a long stream of Russian. Yuri’s mouth was hanging open and he pointed at the unresponsive ‘Tatyana’. ‘That can’t be normal,’ he managed to stammer to Ben.

  Ben’s bluff was well and truly called. Short of shooting her in the leg which might only result in her bleeding to death, there was no more he could do except shake her violently by the shoulders and repeat loudly, ‘ Who are you?’

  Tatyana’s cool blue eyes gazed impassively at him for two, three, four more seconds. Then something happened that Ben couldn’t have expected. Her eyes suddenly rolled over white and she slumped sideways in the armchair, as limp as a corpse.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Grisha yelled.

  Ben quickly checked her pulse. It was steady and strong. She was breathing normally. Her skin was still warm to the touch. Nothing was wrong with her, except that she seemed, inexplicably and without warning, to have fallen into a complete catatonic state. He’d never seen anything like it before.

  ‘You shot her,’ Yuri said.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. The bullet missed her by a mile.’

  ‘Then she fainted,’ Yuri said. ‘From the shock.’

  Grisha shook his head vehemently. ‘No way, man. This is something else. This is far out.’

  ‘Then she’s faking it,’ Yuri said. ‘That’s all else it can be.’ Dragging himself over with a wince of pain he grabbed the fork from her empty plate and jabbed it hard into her leg. No response. He did it again, stabbing it into her hand. The tines broke the skin, leaving five little bleeding holes. No response.

  If she was faking, she was very good.

  ‘You try,’ Yuri said, thrusting the fork at Ben.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with that thing?’

  ‘I don’t know, poke her eye out or something.’

  Ben pointed the pistol at Boris. ‘Tatyana, if you can hear me, best drop this act right now. Because otherwise I’m going to shoot your comrade here.’

  Boris tried to shrink away. Ben grabbed him, shoved him hard down on the floor and jammed the pistol to his head. ‘You hear me? The death of an unarmed prisoner won’t be on me, it will be on you,’ he warned her.

  No response. Boris was struggling like a trapped animal. Ben whacked him hard on the skull with the butt of the pistol, and he went limp. Bluff number two called.

  ‘She’s not faking it, man,’ Grisha said. ‘She’s gone and there’s not a damn thing you can do to bring her back.’

  Yuri was shaking his head, his injured leg all but forgotten. ‘What the hell is happening here?’

  ‘They shut her down, is what’s happening here.’

  Ben stared at him.

  Grisha spread his hands. ‘It’s so obvious it hurts me to have to explain it, but here goes. She’s got a chip inside her head. An implant, like happened to Jan Wolker and probably a thousand others walking around as we speak.’

  ‘You can’t possibly know that,’ Ben said.

  ‘It’s the only explanation. Come on, man. Look at her. Her brain was already half shut down by the time you found her in the woods. She hardly even knew where she was any more. Then when you confronted her just now, it was like pressing the auto-destruct key. That’s how it works. Like a switch inside the brain. They’re programmed to deactivate under hard questioning, or
if specific keywords tell the computer the asset’s been captured and instructs it to pull the plug. It turns off sections of their mind like interrupting a circuit. If you were to do an MRI scan on her right now, you’d see that whole section of her brain is as dark as an aerial shot of North Korea at night.’

  If Ben hadn’t been looking at it right this moment with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have believed it. He was beginning to realise that Grisha’s idea, no matter how crazy it might sound, was the only possible explanation for what was happening here. If so, they were up against a powerful enemy, one with eyes and ears everywhere. The machinery had gone into motion the instant Yuri had gone on the run. No sooner had Kaprisky made contact with the Grendel Detective Agency in Moscow to hire the real Tatyana, than the poor woman’s fate was sealed and the impostor took her place.

  As if reading Ben’s thoughts, Yuri asked, ‘So what happened to the real Tatyana?’

  ‘They killed her,’ Ben said. ‘The police think it’s a burglary gone bad or a random murder.’

  ‘Now you’re talking,’ Grisha said. ‘See? She was taken out and this bitch was inserted to play the part. She’s a remote control intelligence spook, sent to recover Object 428 before we can expose the truth to the world.’

  ‘Then why didn’t she just pull out a gun, shoot us all and take it when she had the chance?’ Yuri said.

  Grisha shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe she was biding her time, waiting for the right moment. Looks like she missed her opportunity.’

  Yuri said, ‘All right, so now what?’

  Grisha seemed morbidly fascinated by the shut-down ‘Tatyana’. He crept closer to her on his knees, like a dog sniffing around a caught squirrel that might only be playing dead and about to jump up. He tentatively reached out and prodded her in the side with a finger. His eyes were running up and down her body and Ben could see all kinds of thoughts going on in his mind. ‘Oh man, we could do anything we wanted to her. She’d never know a thing.’

  ‘You can get that out of your head, for a start,’ Ben said.