‘So much has been said about that place, and yet nobody can understand who was not made to suffer it. Neither of my dear parents survived, of course. My mother died in the first month, my father a month later. Me, I had to make myself strong. To will myself to survive, God willing, no matter what horrors took place there. And so, I did. I was the only one who returned, after the Red Army liberated the camp on January 27th, 1945.’
‘Weren’t there four of you?’ Madison said. ‘Dad told me you had a brother. Gabriel.’
The old woman was silent for a beat, then another, then she slowly shook her head. ‘Gabriel was never in the camp. I have to thank the Lord that he did not have to endure that torture. His suffering was brief and merciful by comparison.’ Again, she passed her long, slender fingers over the stain on the manuscript.
‘This is my brother’s blood,’ she said quietly. ‘The day the Germans came, he wouldn’t let them take our family treasure. And so, they shot him. Murdered him with a bullet, in his own home. I was not even allowed to touch his body before they took us away. It was the single most terrible moment of my life, and I have had many. Too many.’
‘That’s why you wanted the manuscript so badly,’ Ben said. ‘Not because of what it was. It was all you had left of Gabriel.’
Miriam nodded. ‘I wanted nothing more than simply to touch him, one last time. Now I feel him again with me. There is no need for me to keep this.’
She gently placed the manuscript on a sideboard next to where she sat. ‘When your father awakes, please express to him my undying thanks and give him this token of my gratitude, and my love.’
‘He loved you,’ Madison said. ‘Right from the moment he met you.’
Miriam’s lips curled up at the corners. ‘I know. Of course, I always knew. He is a wonderful man, your father. He would not give up, even after the search for the manuscript had broken him in body and spirit. I hope he will be happier now, bless him.’
‘I think so.’
Then Miriam Silbermann heaved a long, long sigh, as if the pain of the ages had been stored inside her body and now at last she was able to exhale and release it all. She gave Madison and Ben each a beaming smile. Her teeth were white and even, like shiny little pearls. She reached forward with both hands outstretched, patted the arms of the armchair with a decisive flourish, then stood up, from primly seated to rod-straight in one sprightly, flowing movement. There were times when Ben couldn’t stand up that fast. After the death struggle with Zarko Kožul on the floor, this was one of them.
‘And now,’ Miriam Silbermann said, ‘may I desire one of you dear young souls to please call me a taxicab back to the airport?’
Ben had never in his life before been called a dear young soul. He stood with her. ‘Let me accompany you, Fräulein Silbermann. I think Madison wants to be alone a while with her father.’
Late that night, after Ben had seen Miriam’s flight off, he left the airport and walked slowly under the sultry Hawaiian sky and wondered about what he would do next. Choices.
He’d been away from Le Val so long that a day or two longer wouldn’t change anything. A day or two spent by the ocean, taking in the sunshine and relaxing to the pace of island life while his hand healed up. Walking on the beach. Drinking rum and talking history with old man Cahill. And perhaps spending some of that time with his daughter. Ben liked Madison. He liked her a good deal.
But a lot of things that could have been, could not be. Sometimes things were better that way, for everyone. And some choices were really not choices, after all.
Ben walked until he found himself faced with the great black expanse of the ocean. A vast canopy of nebulae and star clusters and galaxies and things he could only begin to imagine filled the infinite sky above him. He stood there, alone in the darkness, and smiled to himself as he thought about Special Agent Maddie Cahill and her father, and a story that had been so long in the telling but finally come out well. Happy endings were a rare and precious thing in this life. Why spoil it?
He could hear the neverending rush and whisper of the surf rolling in. He could hear its voice calling him. Somewhere across that ocean was home. Friendship, a bottle of French wine and a glass or two of single malt whisky. The love of a dog. And a woman whose name was Sandrine Lacombe.
Ben smiled to himself once more, and then slipped into the night.
Read on for an exclusive extract
of the new Ben Hope thriller
by Scott Mariani
The Moscow Cipher
Coming May 2018
PROLOGUE
The city was Moscow and the date was February tenth, 1957. It was to be the last night in Leo Ingram’s life, although he didn’t yet know it.
The bitter cold day was turning to a frigid evening as the deserted streets darkened, urging Ingram to turn up the collar of his heavy greatcoat and walk faster along the slippery pavement. His shoes were sodden from trudging through the dirty slush. The whistling wind carried flurries of snow that threatened to re-cover everything in white.
Ingram detested the unrelenting cold, as he detested the palpable fear and oppression that gripped this city. He could see it in the eyes of the people everywhere he went; could almost feel it oozing from the grey, dirty, ice-rimed streets themselves; and the same fear was pulsing deep inside his own heart that night as he carried out his mission.
Leo Ingram was his real name, as opposed to the identity shown on the forged papers he was carrying. His spoken and written Russian were easily good enough to pass for a native, as long as he didn’t get into protracted conversation with any of the locals, something he had studiously avoided since being smuggled into the USSR five weeks earlier. His cover had been carefully set up. For the last five weeks, as far as anyone was concerned, he had been Pyotr Kozlov, self-employed piano tuner. Had he been required to actually tune a piano as proof of his false identity, he could have done so, as that had been his profession before the war. How a mild-mannered, cultivated and peace-loving gentleman like Leonard Ingram could be transformed into a highly-decorated British Army captain and then, post-1945, into a special agent of the Secret Intelligence Service: that was a testament to the deep, dark impact that terrible war had had on the lives of everyone it had touched.
Ingram’s mission in Moscow was nearly complete. He had been planted to play a relatively brief role, but one that was key to the success of the operation. If all went well tonight, the five weeks of perpetual nail-biting tension, of constantly looking over his shoulder, half-expecting to see the KGB thugs coming for him at any moment, would be over and he would begin the journey home – not that getting out of the Soviet Union would be an easy matter.
If all didn’t go well … Ingram closed his mind to that dreadful possibility.
The package thrust deep inside one pocket of his greatcoat was the first thing his plan required him to offload that night, before moving to the second phase. The package was innocuous enough at first glance, just an ordinary tobacco tin imprinted with Cyrillic lettering, identical to millions of others carried by millions of men across the USSR. But what that little round tin contained could not have been more explosive if it had been packed full of super-concentrated TNT. If they caught him with it, all was lost. Not just his own life, but all the efforts and risks taken by others in order to obtain the extremely precious and hard-won information inside.
As he rounded an icy corner of the dark, empty street and a fresh blast of bone-chilling wind slapped him in the face and made his eyes water, the warehouses came into view. A mile’s walk from his rented digs, this industrialised zone of the city was even more dismal and rundown than the rest of Moscow. Most of the ancient pre-revolutionary buildings were semi-derelict and abandoned behind rickety fences nobody guarded. All the same, he was cautious. The failing bulb of a street light flickered on, off, on, off, throwing long shadows that he watched carefully in case they might conceal enemies with guns.
Satisfied he was alone, Ingram approached the fence
and made his way along the snow-rimed wire mesh to the hole, large enough for a man of his slender build to slip through easily, he’d cut three nights earlier.
The warehouse was an old meat packing plant that hadn’t been used for many years, its doors rotted off their hinges. Ingram stepped over the half-eaten body of a frozen rat and moved into the darkness of the building. The hiding place was very specific. The package would remain there only a day or so before, if all went according to plan, his contact would collect it. It had been decided back at the start of the mission that a dead drop of this sort was a safer, more prudent way for the package to change hands. Ingram would have preferred to deliver it straight to his contact, but these were not his decisions to make.
The package carefully hidden, Ingram slipped unseen from the warehouse and continued on his way through the cold darkness. Phase two of the plan was the rendezvous with his colleague, a man he had never met and would never meet again after tonight. A small waterproof envelope in Ingram’s pocket contained a slip of paper on which were written four lines of code: an enciphered message that, among other information, gave precise directions to the location of the hidden package. Once the envelope was passed on, Ingram would walk away relieved of a tremendous burden. His part in the mission would effectively be complete as his contact decoded the directions using a special key known only to a select few, then retrieved the package and whisked it away to East Berlin, where others in their organisation would be anxiously waiting to take possession.
When the package finally reached the safety of London and its contents analysed, it would cause a sensation. Careers would be made out of this, though the men and women who’d risked their lives to obtain the information would likely get little credit.
Ingram walked on through the half-deserted streets, checking his wristwatch and his bearings and glancing behind him now and then to ensure he wasn’t being followed. A police car hissed by, tyres churning brown slush on the road, and made his heart race for a moment before it passed on into the night without so much as slowing down to check him out.
His anxiety was peaking as he walked on. His meeting with his contact, however brief, would be the moment of maximum danger for both of them; when they would be at their most vulnerable if either of them had fallen under suspicion. To be caught together was their worst nightmare. ‘It’s almost over,’ he kept telling himself. ‘You’ll soon be home free.’
As Ingram crossed a sidestreet, a large figure of a man in a long coat and a brimmed hat appeared from nowhere and stepped towards him. ‘Good evening,’ the man said in accented English. He was smiling. His right hand was in his pocket, clutching a hidden weapon. And he was most certainly not the man Ingram was supposed to meet.
KGB. The acronym stood for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security. A name that struck terror into the hearts of those who opposed the Soviet regime, as well as the Russian citizens it oppressed as virtual captives in their own homeland. The KGB had been created only three years earlier and already forged a fearsome reputation as a direct descendant of the dreaded Cheka secret police of the olden days. Its agents were as ruthless as they were efficient.
Ingram’s stomach twisted as he realised they were onto him. He bolted diagonally away across the icy street, then skidded and almost fell as a second figure appeared around the corner up ahead, cutting off his escape. The second agent wasn’t smiling and he had already drawn his service automatic.
Had someone betrayed him? Had the KGB already caught his contact and made him talk? Had a mole inside his own agency given him away? Ingram didn’t have time to ask those questions as he sprinted off in the opposite direction with the two agents in pursuit.
A shot cracked out. Splinters of brickwork stung his leg as he darted around a corner. Ingram knew that the KGB would shoot to wound, not to kill. He also knew what kind of horrific tortures they would use to force information from him. He would give them nothing. He and his fellow agents had all been sternly lectured on the risks associated with getting caught. Like his colleagues, Ingram carried hidden in the heel of one shoe a small glass vial containing a cyanide pill, to be swallowed in the event of imminent capture. The death it offered was by no means a pleasant one – but it was, he had been assured, far quicker and kinder than the treatment a spy would receive at the hands of his or her captors.
He sprinted along a cobbled alleyway, vaulted a railing and almost broke his neck hurtling down a long flight of icy steps. A sharp right turn, then a left, then another right; and now Ingram was quite lost in the maze of dark narrow streets, but all that mattered was getting away from his pursuers. Escape was his only hope. Ingram had killed nine enemy soldiers in the war and was quite proficient at armed combat, but the Secret Intelligence Service didn’t issue weapons to undercover agents posing as innocent piano tuners. The couple of tuning forks he carried about with him wouldn’t be much use.
He paused, heart pounding in his throat, breath rasping. Listened, could hear nothing. Had he lost them? Maybe, but he could assume nothing.
The cipher in his pocket. It must not be found. He snatched out the envelope and looked desperately around him for a hiding place to which, if he made it out of this, he could always return later. The buildings either side of the narrow street were old grey stone, slowly crumbling with decay and neglect. He ran his fingers along the rough, cold masonry, found a crack big enough, and stuffed the envelope inside it and poked it in deep with his fingers. Then he ran on, careering over the slippery pavement.
For a few elated moments longer he thought he’d given them the slip. That was when he heard the rapid thud of footsteps closing in behind him and in front, and realised they had him cornered.
He was done. Ingram felt the strange calmness that can sometimes come over a man when he knows, and accepts, that the end has come. He reached down and slid the false heel off his left shoe, trying to get to the cyanide pill inside before the enemy grabbed him; but his hands were numb with cold and he fumbled with the vial and accidentally let it slip from his fingers. He dropped to his knees, groping about in the shadows for it, but it was too late. Powerful hands seized his arms and yanked him roughly to his feet.
A pistol pressed against his head. If he could have struggled fiercely enough to make them blow his brains out, he would have, but then a cosh struck him hard over the head and knocked him half senseless. The KGB men dragged Ingram down the street to a waiting car where a third agent sat impassively at the wheel, smoking a cigarette. Ingram was bundled roughly inside. The two who had caught him sat either side, boxing him into the middle of the back seat. The car sped off.
Its destination was the infamous Lubyanka prison and KGB headquarters in the heart of Moscow, where men highly expert in extracting the truth from their victims awaited their new arrival.
The last night of Leo Ingram’s life would be a very long and agonising one.
Chapter 1
The present day
Inside the confessional, filled with the serenity of the magnificent cathedral that was one of only two Catholic churches in his home city of Moscow, Yuri Petrov knelt humbly on the step and prepared to bare his soul to God.
On the other side of the grid, the priest’s face was half veiled in shadow. Yuri made the sign of the cross and, speaking low, began the sacrament as he’d been doing all his life.
‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was over two weeks ago and these are my sins.’
Yuri ran through the list of various lesser, venial sins, such as drinking and occasionally skipping his nightly prayers. But it was something else that was weighing so heavily on him and was the real reason he’d come seeking guidance. ‘I’m struggling with a great burden, Father,’ he explained nervously. ‘A terrible secret has been revealed to me and I don’t know what to do. I’m frightened.’
The priest listened sagely. ‘Would the right course of action be to share your secret, my son?’
‘Yes, Fat
her. But in so doing, I could be in serious danger.’
‘The only danger is in doing wrong, my son.’
‘I know it’s wrong to lie, or hide the truth. I’ve done that too many times, Father. I’ve been used to keeping secrets, in my past career. But nothing like this. If I tell, I’m a dead man. I need God’s guidance on what to do.’
The priest reflected on this in silence for some time. ‘Pray to Him, my son. Open your heart to His wisdom, and the guidance you seek will be heard.’ Having given his counsel, the priest gave Yuri the penance of two Hail Marys, invited him to make an act of contrition, and ended the sacrament with the usual ‘Through the ministry of the Church, may God give you pardon and peace. I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’
‘Amen.’
‘Go in peace. Do the right thing, my son.’
Yuri left the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and trudged down the steps to Malaya Gruzinskaya Street feeling scarcely any more reassured than before. Moscow was enjoying a warm June; the sky was blue and the sunshine was pleasant, but Yuri was too taken up with confusion and dread to notice. How had it come to this, he kept asking himself. As he walked away from the grand gothic church, he cast his troubled mind back over the events of the last few days and the path his life had taken to lead him to this awful situation.
Yuri Petrov was thirty-nine years old, divorced, single, currently unemployed and going nowhere fast. The reason he’d been so used to keeping secrets in the past was that, for over fifteen years, he had been a spy for Russian Intelligence, albeit a minor and lowly one. Not that any of his former neighbours or acquaintances in Amsterdam, where he had lived for ten of those years, would have known it. As far as anyone was concerned, even (especially) Yuri’s ex-wife Eloise and their daughter Valentina, he led the steady, plodding and unexciting existence of a senior technical support analyst working for an international software company based in the Netherlands. The ability to speak Russian being a key part of his phony job, the story fitted well and he’d carried it off for years without drawing suspicion. Each morning at eight he’d kissed his wife and cycled off to a fake office with a fake secretary, and got on with the real job of being an intelligence spook. Whatever that was, exactly.
The Bach Manuscript Page 34