The Moscow Cipher (Ben Hope, Book 17)

by Scott Mariani

  ‘That’s the essence of it.’

  ‘It would help if I understood just what the hell you’ve got that’s so valuable to them.’

  Grisha was shaking his head, but Yuri reached into his pocket. ‘I was coming to that. Here it is. The red pill moment. The point of no return. I warned you, but you wanted to know. Your funeral, my friend.’

  Ben watched as Yuri produced an old tobacco tin, so speckled with rust that the manufacturer’s logo was almost obliterated. It looked like an old piece of junk that had spent the last few decades slowly rotting in a damp corner.

  Yuri said, ‘I discovered this in an old warehouse in Moscow, exactly where Ingram, the British spy, had planted it all those years ago in 1957, not long before his capture. The cipher was simply a set of directions designed to lead his colleagues to its hiding place. Needless to say, they never found it.’

  Ben asked, ‘So what’s inside?’

  Yuri unscrewed the lid of the tin. Inside was a modern flash drive that was unlikely to have been left for fifty years in an old warehouse. Next to it was a tiny roll of what Ben thought looked like microfilm, though he’d never seen one before. But what Yuri wanted to show him was wrapped inside a folded square of rough cloth, which he spread open with his fingers to reveal a small metal object nestling within.

  As though handling a precious stone, Yuri lifted it out and laid it delicately in Ben’s outstretched palm. Ben ran a fingertip along its shiny metal surface. The object was just over half a centimetre in length, smooth and oblong like a medicine capsule, cold and almost weightless in his cupped hand.

  ‘Congratulations. You just joined the exclusive club of people who have actually set eyes on one of these gadgets. With any luck, you may even live to regret it.’

  ‘With any luck, you might actually tell me what this is,’ Ben said.

  ‘Evidence,’ Grisha said.

  Ben’s eyes flicked from one man to the other. Both looked grimly serious. ‘Evidence of what?’

  Yuri replied, ‘Of everything truth seekers have been saying about what these bastards are into, and have been for years. That little thing you’re holding in your hand, it’s the confirmation of all our worst fears.’

  Grisha said, ‘It’s the fucking Holy Grail of conspiracy theories, man.’

  Ben gazed down at the smooth, shiny object in his palm, then looked back up to meet the deadly earnest eyes of the two men.

  Yuri and Grisha exchanged a brief conspiratorial glance. Grisha said, ‘You really going to tell him?’

  ‘We said we would tell the world about this,’ Yuri replied to his friend. ‘Why not let him be the first?’

  ‘What about her?’ Grisha asked, pointing a chubby finger at Tatyana.

  Tatyana hadn’t spoken a word for several minutes, just standing to one side of the room with a thoughtful look on her face. ‘She’s with me,’ Ben said. ‘What you say to me, you say to her.’

  Yuri leaned close to Ben. His eyes were full of fear. They darted towards the window, as if he thought that enemy agents might be out there in the night, listening to every word.

  He said, ‘What do you know about mind control?’

  Chapter 26

  Ben’s silence filled the room. Tatyana remained quiet, too, frowning at the two men on the sofa.

  ‘What a relief,’ Ben said at last. ‘I thought maybe you were going to tell me this was an artifact recovered from the wreckage of an alien spacecraft that crashed in Soviet territory sixty years ago. The USSR’s very own answer to Roswell and Area 51. And that this little metal bean was a special chip containing all of the aliens’ knowledge, which could save humanity from nuclear disaster and global warming.’

  ‘I told you not to show it to this prick,’ Grisha said angrily to Yuri. ‘He’s not going to take anything we tell him seriously.’

  ‘Oh, mind control is no joke,’ Ben said. ‘It happens all the time. Fifty million people are sitting watching a TV channel and an ad comes on, full of happy faces enjoying Coca-Cola in the sunshine and telling them how happy it could make them, too. Next thing you know, half of these idiots are guzzling the foul-tasting swill like there’s no tomorrow. Mind control. That’s about as sinister as it gets.’

  ‘You’re a pretty clever guy,’ Yuri said, ‘for such a fool.’

  Grisha shot Ben a sneer. He said to Yuri, ‘Let me talk to him, man. Maybe I can convince him.’

  Ben looked at Grisha. ‘So if your pal here is the runaway spy, what does that make you?’

  ‘He’s an expert,’ Yuri shot back in his friend’s defence. ‘He’s spent years studying this stuff. Nobody knows it like he does.’

  ‘If I need a lesson in milking goats, I’ll be sure to give the professor here a call.’

  ‘You never heard of Truth Radio?’ Grisha grumbled at Ben. ‘Part of the Freedom Network, broadcasting on shortwave and across the internet to twelve million listeners across Russia and Europe?’ He jabbed a thumb to his bulky chest. ‘You’re looking at its founder, host and CEO. The man the New World Order globalist elite lives in fear of, because one day the truth is gonna bring ’em down. I run the whole show myself out of my trailer, deep in the woods where the fuckers could never find it.’

  ‘A trailer.’

  Grisha nodded proudly. ‘Oh yes. Got the works out there, all totally hidden. They’ve wanted to close me down for years, but I’m too clever for them.’ He slyly tapped a finger against the side of his nose.

  In his dungarees and holey jumper, chicken shit all over his boots, few people would have mistaken Grisha Solokov for a successful entrepreneur and media personality, let alone the scourge of power-mongering global conspirators or a major threat to any sovereign country’s national security. A large part of Ben wanted to get out of this madhouse, grab the girl and speed back to Moscow, jump on Kaprisky’s jet and go home. Another part of him was too intrigued not to listen to what crazy Grisha had to say.

  Ben would later curse himself for his curiosity.

  ‘Mind control,’ Grisha repeated. ‘Brainwashing. Coercive persuasion. Psychological programming. Re-education. Call it what you like, man, it’s real and it exists, and it ain’t just about selling you Coca-Cola. Look it up on Wikipedia or wherever. First thing you’ll see, they’re telling you it’s a non-scientific concept, therefore something phony and suspicious that you should avoid, like fake news.’ He spat. ‘Bullshit! That’s mind control right there, instructing you what to think, persuading you not to consider for one moment what’s actually happening all around us in the world. See, when you control people’s thoughts, you control everything. Tell ’em what to believe, what to do, who to vote for, who to support and venerate, who to boo and jeer at. Tell ’em it’s okay to shovel genetically modified food down their throats and pump toxic vaccines into their kids and old folks. Tell ’em how lucky they are to live in a nice police state and give up all their personal freedom. Most importantly, drum it into their heads never, ever, ever, to question anything for themselves. What does that sound like to you?’

  ‘I’d say it sounds much like the modern world we live in,’ Ben conceded.

  ‘A society of brainwashed zombies. But what if it went even deeper than that? What if you could take a person, even a very smart and capable person, and turn them into a total robot you could literally program to do anything you wanted them to do?’

  ‘Anything, like what?’

  ‘I need a drink,’ Grisha said in a cracked voice. Ben allowed him to pause in his narrative while more vodka was served into four shot glasses that looked like egg cups. The Russians muttered their toast of ‘ Zazdarovje’ and emptied their glasses, Tatyana included. Ben swallowed his in silence. It was like jet fuel. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d tracked down a den of kidnappers, only to end up having a drink with them. But then, nothing about this case had been normal so far.

  ‘All right,’ Grisha said, helping himself to a refill. He launched back into his narrative by firing a question straight at Be
n. ‘Tell me, man. Who’s the perfect assassin?’

  After a moment’s pause to wonder why on earth he was being asked this, Ben replied, ‘Someone picked at random, without any apparent motive, whom nobody would suspect. Someone expendable, who if they get caught doesn’t even know who they’re really working for.’

  ‘Wrong,’ Grisha said. ‘The perfect assassin is someone who doesn’t even know they’re an assassin, not even after the deed is done, because they have no memory of the event.’ He gave a dark smile. ‘That’s just an example of what this is all about. Forget everything you think you know about the “non-scientific concept” of mind control. Because the science is very real, man, and the secret rulers of our world have been perfecting it for decades. Let me tell you all about it. We start from the beginning. Psychotronic warfare 101.’

  ‘I didn’t come here for a history lesson,’ Ben said. ‘I asked you what this thing is.’

  ‘None of what I tell you is gonna mean shit unless you know the background first,’ Grisha insisted.

  ‘Listen to him,’ Yuri said. ‘He’s the man.’

  Ben sighed. ‘All right, I’m listening.’

  Grisha shifted to the edge of the sofa, fixing Ben with his big, intense eyes. ‘You have to understand, my friend, that the quest to develop effective mind-control methods goes back decades. Right from the start it became a race between world powers, just like the space race and the arms race. But for a good many years, before the electronic age, the lack of technology meant they had to focus on using drugs. The Brits, the Frenchies and the Krauts were all secretly experimenting with drug-induced interrogation techniques in the 1930s. The Nazis even devoted a whole section of Dachau concentration camp to mind-control experiments. Which afterwards led to the Nuremberg Code of ethics that banned using these experimental techniques without the participant’s consent. Of course, the Nuremberg Code was completely flouted and pissed on by everyone after 1945, and especially when the Cold War got underway. The CIA spent years messing around with drugs like LSD for their MK-ULTRA mind-control program. They drove a lot of people crazy and caused a lot of deaths.’

  ‘Tell him about Cameron,’ Yuri chipped in.

  Ben said, ‘Cameron?’

  Grisha nodded. ‘Right. In the fifties, the head of the US Psychiatric Association, a guy called Dr Ewan Cameron, came up with this idea of “depatterning” the mind as a way to cure mental illness. It was a simple theory. You use the available methods to wipe the diseased mind clean to the point where you can “repopulate” it’ – Grisha wiggled bunny-ear fingers to simulate quote marks – ‘with healthy thoughts and behaviour. Erase the old personality and replace it with a new one, basically. His experimental test subjects were mostly ordinary citizens suffering from mild depression and other everyday psychological issues. Cameron’s system was to reduce these poor people to a vegetative state by overdosing them for days and weeks on end with LSD, combined with super-aggressive electroconvulsive therapy.’

  ‘Which meant you strapped them to a metal bed and fried their brains with high voltage,’ Yuri explained helpfully.

  Grisha went on, ‘The idea was to roll back the clock on these adults and return them to some kind of infant state, like babies. A totally blank sheet, literally washed clean of any memory of their previous life and waiting to be rewritten. Theoretically, once you reduced them to such a state, you could get them to do anything you wanted. Stick a loaded pistol in their hand and tell them to blow their own brains out with it, they’d go right ahead without a second thought. By the same token, if you ordered them to assassinate someone else, whether it be a stranger or a loved one, they’d obey unquestioningly.’

  Ben gazed at the metal object in his hand. ‘But this isn’t about drugs any more.’

  ‘You’re dead right,’ Grisha said. ‘The researchers all eventually began to realise the chemical approach just wasn’t working. It was too labour intensive and crude. Blasting people’s minds with cocktails of hallucinogens was not the most sophisticated way of achieving their goal. That’s why other researchers had already started turning to alternative technologies. By the time of the Cold War they were messing about with hypnosis, thinking maybe here was the magic system they could use to create some kind of super-spy, a whole new concept in espionage, who could carry out missions with no risk of confessing valuable intelligence secrets if they got caught and interrogated, because they had no conscious knowledge of why they were there, who or what they were spying on, who they were working for, or even who they were. You could torture that person until they died, and they wouldn’t reveal anything useful. That was the dream, the gold standard. And it was here in Russia, back then the Soviet Union, that the idea of combining hypnosis with other techniques like sleep deprivation and drugging developed into the concept of “brainwashing”. Do you know about the Moscow show trials?’

  ‘Stalin’s answer to Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives,’ Ben said.

  Grisha nodded. ‘In the late thirties, during the Great Purge, when our illustrious leader was systematically wiping out all opposition from inside his party ranks. They created a trumped-up court in which subject after subject came forward to confess all manner of treason against the state. The fact is, they’d all been reduced to such a state of mental confusion that they’d have confessed to anything even if it meant their execution, which it did of course. By the time the Cold War began, we Russians had fine-tuned the brainwashing methods to a point where men could be turned into virtual automatons, tools for espionage, assassination, whatever their controllers desired. But things were just about to get really interesting, because a whole new technological revolution was just around the corner and the era of using crude mind-control drugs was history.’

  ‘Are we getting close to the truth now?’ Ben asked.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ Grisha said.

  Chapter 27

  Grisha paused, still fixing the same intense stare on Ben. ‘You know what an EEG is?’

  ‘Of course. It’s an electroenc‌ephalogram, a recording of electrical activity in the brain.’

  ‘Smart guy,’ Grisha said. ‘So was Hans Berger, the German dude who invented it in 1924. He was the first scientist who detected the rise and fall of alpha and beta waves in here.’ He tapped his head, took another slurp of vodka and continued: ‘By 1969, another extremely smart dude called Eberhard Fetz, American biophysicist and neuroscientist, had created the first brain–machine interface technology by connecting a neuron in a monkey’s brain to a rotating dial, which the monkey learned to operate just by the power of thought. So, for the first time it became possible for the brain to remotely control a machine. That’s technically known as bio-medical telemetry, if you really want to know. But the question was, what if you could reverse the process, and get a machine to remotely control the brain? Of course, scientists were quick to get in on the game. By then, you had guys like Delgado already figuring out how to make it work.’

  ‘Delgado?’

  Grisha rolled his eyes at Yuri as if to say, ‘This guy really doesn’t have a clue about anything, does he?’ He looked back at Ben. ‘José Delgado was a neuroscience researcher at Yale, way back in the fifties and sixties. A very strange and dark character, kind of like Mr Spock’s evil twin. He wrote a book called Physical Control of the Mind: Towards a Psychocivilised Society. The title kind of says it all, no? Years before Fetz had started messing about with monkeys, Delgado was putting wireless radio receivers into the brains of animals and controlling their behaviour. His most famous experiment was in 1963 when he faced a charging bull armed only with a remote control handset, and stopped the damn thing right in its tracks before it could touch him. The video’s all over YouTube. I guess you never got around to watching it. Anyway, before long Delgado stopped with animals and started applying his technique to humans. Which of course had been the goal from the start, and you can be sure the CIA were paying very close attention to his work. Hell, they were probably funding him.’


  ‘So Delgado turned people into his robots?’

  Grisha shook his head. ‘Not quite. He was never able to create specific behaviours in human subjects, like, say, if I wanted you to get up and walk across the room, pick something up and bring it to me without even realising you were doing it. What he did succeed in doing, with hundred per cent efficiency, was to control aggression levels in the brain. His methods could calm a raving psycho into a quiet little mouse, or spark off violent behaviour in a totally peaceful person. In one of his demonstrations, a brain-implanted woman quietly playing the guitar suddenly, at the flick of a switch, went nuts and smashed the instrument to pieces.

  ‘Needless to say, this was all seen as very progressive and important for psychiatric science. Being able to subdue a violent mental patient without having to hold ’em down and pump sedatives into them could only be a good thing, right? But Delgado was pretty forthright about the social engineering implications of his work. He wrote that “Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. We must electronically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electronic stimulation. ”’

  Ben was perplexed that he’d somehow managed to go all his life without hearing any of this stuff, whether it was true or not. Grisha seemed to read his expression. ‘Freaky, huh? And what’s even more amazing is that so few people’ve even heard about this crazy shit. Not that it would change a thing if they did. Before Delgado died in 2011 he wrote that you couldn’t stop the technology from developing on and on, despite ethics, despite anyone’s personal belief in how evil and wrong it was, despite everything. We can only guess at how far it’s secretly come.’

  Ben held up the shiny metal pill between thumb and forefinger, rolling it between his fingertips. ‘So this is what exactly?’