While the Russian secret service had been stepping up its spying activities across Europe for some time and deploying their spooks on all kinds of cool missions such as nabbing state secrets, orchestrating cyber-attacks, infiltrating protest groups and generally helping to subvert the stability of nations, to Yuri’s chagrin he felt his own talents to have been woefully underused. He was not, never had been, Russia’s answer to James Bond. He had never carried a gun or been asked to do anything remotely risky. His role in Amsterdam was ostensibly to keep tabs on the intelligence agents of rival nations, but it seemed that his counterparts there had as little to do as he did – which all amounted to a life not much less drab and uninspiring than his fictitious cover, in which he had little to do except trawl the internet, drink too much coffee, eat too much stroopwafel, and become increasingly dissatisfied and frustrated with his career.
It hadn’t always been this way. Once upon a time, in the bygone days before he’d been sent into exile in Amsterdam, his Intelligence bosses had seemed to appreciate Yuri’s abilities. For Yuri might not have been endowed with many talents in his life, but for some reason and with very little effort on his part he just so happened to be a highly gifted code cracker. Back in the day, Yuri’s capacity for deciphering signals intelligence – or ‘SIGINT’ – encryptions intercepted from rival agencies such as the Brits, the Yanks or those pesky Israelis, had been second to none and earned him quite a reputation in Moscow. On several occasions, when Russian Intel operatives way above his pay grade had been unable to penetrate the firewalls protecting the secret files of MI6, CIA, Mossad and others, Yuri had been called in to assist. He’d cracked security passcodes that had been thought uncrackable, even complex fifteen-digit monsters that didn’t appear in a hash look-up table and presented over 700 million billion billion permutations.
But that was long ago, before the relentless march of technology had taken all the intellectual challenge out of codebreaking and pretty much rendered talents like his obsolete. Nowadays it was all just a war between computers: one to weave the incredibly complex code, another to attack its defences, and the winner was simply whoever had the most powerful machine. The human factor was almost completely removed from the equation. After just a few years in the job, Yuri’s special skills had become increasingly redundant. Then came the Amsterdam posting, and the long, slow decline. Frustration grew to bitterness; bitterness to hatred: against his employers back home, and the whole damn government.
During this unhappy period he hooked back up with an old friend from school and began regular contact with him on social media. Yuri Petrov and Grisha Solokov had known each other since the age of seven, and had the usual on-off friendship until their teens, when they’d become best buddies for a while until Yuri drifted off to university in St Petersburg to study IT and Grisha went to work for his father, who owned a radio repair shop.
During the years the two friends had been out of touch, Grisha had discovered the wonderful world of conspiracy theories and become deeply immersed. The repair shop long gone, he now operated his own internet radio station from a hidden bunker at a remote farm many miles from Moscow. He lived alone with only an assortment of feral cats and a few goats and chickens for company, and spent most of every night in the bunker streaming his rants about everything from illegal government surveillance operations to chemtrails to the Illuminati plot to enslave the human race to the covert deportation camps that really existed, according to him, on Mars.
Needless to say, in their Facebook chats Yuri had never divulged to his friend what he did for a living. Grisha had his own secrets, too. Because his show frequently attacked what he considered to be the corrupt dark underbelly of the Russian state and its president in particular, he kept his location extremely hush-hush so as to elude the government assassins whom he believed were intent on silencing him.
In short, Grisha was slightly nuts.
Looking back, Yuri couldn’t pinpoint the moment he’d started getting drawn into Grisha’s ideology. To begin with, he’d been dismissively sceptical of the whole thing, and almost stopped with the social media contact. The stuff his friend came out with was often more than Yuri could stomach, like his conviction that lizard-like alien beings capable of taking on human form really do run the planet, and that various celebrities as well as members of the British royal family were among these evil creatures hellbent on the total domination of humanity. But the more he’d listened to Grisha’s show, the more compelling Yuri started finding its less wacky theories of conspiracy and corruption at the heart of the global establishment. Gradually, tiny doubts about his own government, and the state of the world generally, percolated through his head and wouldn’t go away, feeding his increasing sense of restlessness that he was a pawn working for dark powers.
Maybe it was just an expression of his dissatisfaction with his own job, he told himself. Yet, the same creeping paranoia that fuelled Grisha’s radio show started haunting Yuri as he cycled the streets of Amsterdam. He became certain he was being watched and followed, his phone tapped, perhaps even his thoughts somehow monitored. A reasonably devout Catholic since his teens, he turned to God for moral support. When an answer to his fervent prayers failed to materialise, Yuri found solace in the sins of drink and marijuana, having developed a taste for both.
What made it so much worse was that he could never tell Eloise a word about his secret life, let alone the anxieties that plagued him. As a result he ended up barely speaking to her at all, with the inevitable consequence that she felt very neglected by him. When the marriage eventually fell apart, Yuri blamed the Russian intelligence services even more bitterly for his woes and took it as proof of their pernicious influence over society. Shortly after Eloise left him and took Valentina away to live in France, Yuri returned to Moscow, handed in his resignation and found alternative employment fixing computer bugs for private cash-paying customers. He managed to persuade Eloise to let Valentina, now ten, travel to Russia for visits. Eloise was difficult about it and barely spoke to him on the phone.
Yuri’s preoccupation with all things conspiracy-related had by then grown even more pervasive. Even if he wasn’t yet prepared to believed that shape-shifting alien lizards govern the planet, as a parent he was angry that his child would grow up as a drone of the globalist Deep State. He felt he needed to do something to make people wake up to the realisation that everything they thought they knew about the world was a lie. The media they trusted was simply an instrument for propaganda; the leaders they voted for in fact controlled nothing; the real rulers were hidden in the shadows and democracy was a myth.
He and Grisha now communicated daily on prepaid phones bought for cash and theoretically untraceable to them. On Grisha’s advice, as an extra precaution Yuri followed his friend’s practice of replacing his ‘burner’ every couple of weeks. As a means of living as much off the grid as possible in an urban environment, he also moved to a dingy hole of an apartment that he paid for in cash, utility bills all in the name of a former tenant.
He and Grisha started meeting in person. The first reunion took place at a bar in a small town eighty kilometres from Moscow. Later, as a sign of his growing trust, Grisha let Yuri in on the secret of his farm’s location, way out in the country. Never had Yuri mentioned his past as a spook for Russian intelligence. That was history now, anyway.
Over the next couple of years, Yuri visited the farm often. The two friends would spend days and nights in Grisha’s chaotic home drinking vodka and talking conspiracies. It was more than a hobby or belief system for Grisha, it was a total lifestyle. Yuri felt the infectious lure of that world. He was becoming seriously addicted.
‘It’s all building to a head, don’t you see?’ Grisha had kept insisting during their most recent late-night session. ‘It’s coming. Just you wait. Something’s going to happen that’ll prove everything we’ve been saying. Something that’ll show the world what these bastards have really been up to all along. Nobody will be laughing at us
then.’
‘“Something”?’
‘Something huge, my man.’
Yuri believed it too, even if neither of them knew what that ‘something’ could be.
Then, one sunny day in June two years after he’d left Amsterdam, Grisha’s prediction came terrifyingly true, in a way neither of them could have imagined.
The Moscow Cipher
Coming May 2018
Can an enemy from the past destroy Ben Hope’s future?
Ex-SAS hero Ben Hope is back and this time it’s personal.
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Where Ben Hope goes, trouble always follows …
The first in an explosive two-book sequence.
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Has Ben Hope finally met his match?
The thrilling sequel to Star of Africa
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About the Author
Scott Mariani is the author of the worldwide-acclaimed action-adventure thriller series featuring ex-SAS hero Ben Hope, which has sold millions of copies in Scott’s native UK alone and is also translated into over 20 languages. His books have been described as ‘James Bond meets Jason Bourne, with a historical twist’. The first Ben Hope book, The Alchemist’s Secret, spent six straight weeks at #1 on Amazon’s Kindle chart, and all the others have been Sunday Times bestsellers.
Scott was born in Scotland, studied in Oxford and now lives and writes in a remote setting in rural west Wales. When not writing, he can be found bouncing about the country lanes in an ancient Land Rover, wild camping in the Brecon Beacons or engrossed in his hobbies of astronomy, photography and target shooting (no dead animals involved!).
You can find out more about Scott and his work, and sign up to his exclusive newsletter, on his official website:
www.scottmariani.com
By the same author:
Ben Hope series
The Alchemist’s Secret
The Mozart Conspiracy
The Doomsday Prophecy
The Heretic’s Treasure
The Shadow Project
The Lost Relic
The Sacred Sword
The Armada Legacy
The Nemesis Program
The Forgotten Holocaust
The Martyr’s Curse
The Cassandra Sanction
Star of Africa
The Devil’s Kingdom
The Babylon Idol
To find out more visit www.scottmariani.com
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