The Moscow Cipher (Ben Hope, Book 17)

by Scott Mariani

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.

  Ben spoke softly, in French. ‘Auguste, I thought you said your guys were off the job.’

  ‘They are,’ Kaprisky replied, sounding taken aback.

  ‘Positive about that? I seem to have picked up some company here.’

  ‘I can assure you, it has nothing to do with me. Are you quite certain you are not—?’

  ‘Imagining things? Thanks, Auguste. Talk later.’ Ben ended the call. It was hard to know whether to believe Kaprisky. The wily old fox could be hedging his bets by keeping an eye on him. Maybe you didn’t get to become a billionaire by being too trusting.

  Tatyana was looking at him, an eyebrow raised. ‘Well?’

  Ben thought about all the places in a subway system he could lure the two goons. Men’s toilets were always a good place for an impromptu roughing-up and forced interrogation of the ‘Who are you working for?’ variety. If indeed Kaprisky had sent them, the old man might not be happy to have Ben knock his hirelings around. If however they were someone else’s guys, the use of forceful tactics could be stirring up a hornet’s nest that Ben preferred to leave alone, for now. He decided he could worry later about who they were. For the moment, his priority
was to give them the slip so he could get on with the job he’d come here to do.

  ‘Next stop is ours,’ he said to Tatyana.

  ‘But we are not halfway there yet.’

  ‘I fancy a little fresh air, don’t you?’

  The next station they arrived at was even more ridiculously opulent than the last. As Ben stepped off the train, followed by a confused Tatyana, he saw the two goons filter among the throng of disembarking passengers and drift along in their wake. Ben moved faster, forcing Tatyana to trot to keep up. The goons kept following, keeping their distance like before but moving with greater urgency. If they were working as part of a bigger surveillance team, it was time to put their organisation to the test.

  Back up at street level, Ben saw they were still deep in the heart of the city. Traffic was heavy and pedestrians crowded the pavements. At a nearby taxi stand a line of yellow Ladas was waiting. Ben hustled over to the car at the head of the queue and got in the back seat. Tatyana piled in after him.

  ‘Speak English?’ Ben asked the driver.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Just drive. And step on it.’ Ben thrust a sheaf of rubles through the gap between the seats, where they disappeared instantly into the driver’s clutches.

  ‘Twenty years I waited for someone to say that,’ the driver said, gunning his engine with a grin. As the little Lada took off into the traffic, Ben turned to glance out of the window and caught a momentary glimpse of the two goons running out of the subway station and looking around in a panic for their disappearing targets. Then they were lost among the crowds.

  Chapter 12

  ‘This is a foolish waste of time,’ Tatyana protested.

  ‘Still think I’m imagining things?’ Ben asked her. He glanced left, right and to the rear, looking for telltale signs such as motorcyclists in black visors slipping through the heavy traffic after them.

  Tatyana said, ‘Even if Kaprisky is having us monitored, what does it matter? He already knows where we are going, to Petrov’s apartment.’