The Moscow Code

by Nick Wilkshire

  “Come on,” she said urgently, moving to the door.

  “What’s this?” Charlie pulled the little bear from the bag and grabbed the metallic object, the end of which was visible where the leg had separated from the torso. He gave it a tug, and out came a silver rectangle about two inches long and a half inch wide.

  “It’s a USB stick.”

  “What the hell?” Charlie said. “Give me your laptop.”

  “Are you crazy? Someone’s going to stumble across our friend any minute.” She gestured to the door.

  “You’re right. Let’s get out of here.” He headed out into the hallway and dropped the pillowcase into the garbage bag of an abandoned cleaning cart after confirming that there was no one else around. He stopped just before the elevators.

  “What are you doing?” Sophie pressed the down button.

  “You check out,” he said. “I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

  He rushed back toward the stairwell, pausing at an alcove near the door to the stairs containing an ice machine and next to a door to what looked like a utility closet. He glanced up and down the hall, then tried the handle. Locked. He looked for something to wrench it open with, but there was nothing. Noticing the recessed light in the ceiling above the alcove, he looked at the large ice maker and made up his mind. Grabbing one side, he slid the heavy machine forward before stepping around to the other side and doing the same. Then he covered his hand with his handkerchief, reached up, and unscrewed the light bulb overhead so that the alcove was suddenly cast in a grey gloom. Checking the hallway again, he opened the door to the stairwell and ran down to the next landing, then dragged the body back up the stairs and into the alcove. There was just enough space to get the body in behind and still push the machine back a couple of inches. In the dim light, it would be difficult to spot anything amiss. He returned to the stairs and bolted down the four flights to the lobby, just in time to see Sophie stepping away from the reception.

  “We all good?”

  She nodded tentatively as they headed outside and got in a cab for the airport. Once there, they were able to get seats on the last flight to Paris with a timely connection to Berlin. They had to race through security and it wasn’t until they were seated on the plane that they had the opportunity to open her laptop and see the contents of the USB stick.

  “It’s the MC document,” Charlie said, pointing at the file directory that appeared when Sophie plugged in the stick. “You remember the ghost title we saw on Steve’s laptop? This must have been the stick he was working from.”

  “So we’ve been carrying this fucking thing around for days?” she whispered in frustration. “We’re lucky I didn’t toss it,” she added, clicking on the document.

  They both stared in silence as a large document opened onto the screen, the title underlined at the top: Moscow Code. It was about fifty pages in length and appeared to be part text, part notes.

  “There,” Charlie said, spotting Sergei Yermolov’s name. “This is about United Pharma being the anchor tenant in Petr Square.” They scanned the page of text and scrolled down to the next page, which was an article cut-and-pasted from a newspaper. The subject was the Customs Union agreement, effectively giving responsibility for controlling access to several of the former Soviet republics to Kazakhstan — a role that had been carried out by Russia long after the Soviet Union had crumbled.

  “Go to the next page,” he said as the flight attendant announced their impending departure from the gate. Sophie ignored the instruction to stow all electronics and scrolled down. The next page was a digital image that left them both staring at the screen. Under it was the text: T. Evseeva, SVR operative. They looked from the text back to the picture of a woman with cold blue eyes and long blond hair. The same woman whose dead body they’d left back at the Negresco Hotel.

  Sophie minimized the screen, closed the file, and popped out the stick, shutting the cover of her laptop as the flight attendant walked by.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Charlie said as they buckled their seat belts.

  Sophie nodded. “This plane can’t get off the ground fast enough.”

  Chapter 35

  It was after midnight when they touched down at Tegel Airport in Berlin. By force of habit, Charlie pulled out his BlackBerry and turned it on. He wasn’t expecting any news, much less the email from Brigitte Martineau that was waiting for him. Reading it as they moved down the aisle toward the exit, he was so absorbed in the message that it took Sophie several attempts to get him to respond when they reached the gangway.

  “What is it?” she repeated.

  “You’re not going to believe this. I’ve been cleared to return on the noon flight to Moscow. And your visa was renewed for another week.”

  “You’re kidding! That’s fantastic. For both of us.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said without much conviction.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I guess so. I’m just surprised it happened so quickly — my clearance, that is. As for your visa … well, that’s pretty unusual, too, now that I think about it.”

  “What flight are you on? I need to get a ticket.”

  “You’re already booked on the same flight as me — Lufthansa. I assume they knew you were good for it.”

  They hurried outside into the cold night air — a marked change from the south of France — and hopped in a cab. Twenty minutes later they were in a suite back at the Berlin Marriott. As soon as they were through the door, they had the laptop out on the desk. They read together for half an hour, jumping back and forth through the text.

  “So Steve knew that UPI was going to sign on at Petr Square long before it was common knowledge.” Charlie pointed to a portion of text. “And look at the initials — SY. There’s no question Sergei was his source. It must have been Yermolov who let it slip that Steve was asking questions. Whoever he told, it got them both killed.”

  “Look at this,” Sophie said, pointing to the bottom of the screen. “These are notes of a conversation with a Piotr Zhibek.”

  “Zhibek?” Charlie reached for Liepa’s book on international crime and flipped to the section on drug smuggling. “It’s a reference to a person, not a place,” he said, indicating the scribble in the margin that they had assumed was a reference to a city in central Asia.

  “It looks like this Zhibek guy’s a reporter.”

  “You keep reading. I need to start mapping this out.” Charlie grabbed the hotel notepad from the desk and drew a circle in the middle of the page around the initials SL.

  “Too small,” Sohie said, looking at the little pad. “Here.” She rummaged in her purse and pulled out a lipstick. “Use that,” she said, pointing to the enormous mirror over the dresser. Charlie drew his circle in the middle, then drew a line to a second one, with a B inside.

  “That’s Bayzhanov?” Sophie said.

  Charlie nodded. “I think we know for sure Steve was looking into him.” He drew another circle and connected it to Liepa’s. “This is Sergei Yermolov.” Charlie scribbled the initials in the circle.

  “Here, there’s a whole other section of notes on him,” Sophie said, then went quiet as she scanned the text. “He told Steve a lot of senior execs were getting kickbacks from Bayzhanov’s company to move United Pharma into Petr Square, even before the permit was granted.”

  “That would explain his fancy clothes and nice apartment, considering he was mid-level, at best.”

  “You remember what Steve’s Russian girlfriend said about him — how he liked to throw money around.”

  Charlie nodded. “And if he was flush with Bayzhanov’s cash, imagine what the top guys were getting. That would also explain why UPI signed on as anchor tenant at all.”

  “You mean because of the permit problems.”

  Charlie frowned. “There’s that, but I was thinking of the rents Bayzha
nov was charging for Petr Square. They were way above market, from what Rob Brooker told me. He was interested in the building as a possibility for the new embassy for a while, until he found out the rent they were asking.”

  Charlie tapped his finger on the circle surrounding Yermolov’s name for a moment, then drew an X across it. “So who killed him, and why?”

  “Bayzhanov?” Sophie suggested, standing up to join him at the mirror.

  “But why? And besides, he was killed well after Steve died.”

  Sophie shrugged and took the lipstick from him, drawing a line from the circle representing Bayzhanov to a new one, with the initials AS.

  “Alexander Surin.”

  She nodded. “We know he’s got to be in Bayzhanov’s pocket, since it took him all of five minutes as chair of the planning committee to green-light BayCo’s project. Then there’s the fact that they both own shares in the same Cypriot company.” She drew another circle for Krasnikov and connected it by a dotted line to Surin’s. “And I’m assuming Surin’s the prime suspect for Krasnikov’s fender bender in Nice.”

  “He’s former KGB,” Charlie said, remembering the information provided by the secretive journalist she’d met at the Conservatory. “Which means he’s probably still got connections to the FSB or SVR, and maybe to the Evseeva woman.” He took the lipstick back and drew a circle to represent Evseeva, then drew an X through it. A chill descended over the room as they considered the implications. Charlie was the first to voice their thoughts. “Someone is going to be expecting a report from Evseeva. Someone we have to assume knew we were there and sent her to kill us.”

  Sophie turned to stare at him. “You can’t go back to Moscow, Charlie.”

  “What am I supposed to tell Martineau? Besides, I don’t think the SVR respects borders. If they want to kill me, they can send someone to find me anywhere they want. You remember the guy they poisoned in London? He was one of theirs.”

  Charlie sat down heavily on the bed. Sophie continued to stare at the mirror for a while, then joined him at the end of the bed.

  “What are we going to do?”

  He turned to face her, then looked down at the floor. “I have no idea.”

  Charlie and Sophie walked north along Ebertstrasse, the vast expanse of the Tiergarten to their left as they made their way toward the Brandenburg Gate. After an early breakfast at the hotel, they had decided to get some fresh air. The sun was shining but the air was cold, and their feet crunched on the icy ground as they passed in front of the imposing facade of the U.S. Embassy. Charlie had been up early, poring over Steve Liepa’s mysterious document — part rough draft of a partially finished book, part collage of notes and source material. And while there was no shortage of information, there was no outline that Charlie could find, or anything else to tell them where Liepa had been headed before his life had been snuffed out. They had dissected the document in the hotel room and over breakfast. Even as they strolled along Ebertstrasse, they were still discussing it, particularly Liepa’s notes of his interview with Zhibek, the Kazakh journalist.

  “It’s got to be the trip Steve took to Astana,” he said. A police car raced by, sirens wailing, disturbing the relative calm of that Sunday morning.

  “The one Tania Ivanova said Steve was so excited about,” Sophie said, sidestepping a patch of black ice, though not enough to avoid a slip. She grabbed Charlie’s arm and righted herself, then left her arm entangled in his as they continued on toward the open space beyond the U.S. Embassy building that was centred by the massive classical gate featuring a general at the helm of a chariot.

  “But you remember she said he seemed down when he got back … disappointed or something?”

  “Yeah.” Sophie pulled a strand of windswept hair from her face. “She did say something like that. What did the notes say?”

  Charlie shrugged. “It’s just a bunch of questions and answers about the Customs Union thing.”

  “What was his obsession with that?”

  Charlie shook his head. “I can’t figure it out. It was a decision by Russia to essentially give Kazakhstan responsibility for all eastern border crossings.”

  “So the Kazakhs are responsible for checking passports and stuff for anyone coming in from China?”

  “Yeah, and anywhere else bordering Kazakhstan,” he said, recalling the map of central Asia that he had examined when he’d first seen the notes. “Which would include Tajikistan and Afghanistan, but so what?”

  “That’s pretty impressive,” Sophie said. They’d reached the base of the Brandenburg Gate, and they looked up at the towering statue.

  “Apparently, Napoleon took it with him on one of his campaigns,” Charlie said. This tidbit was one of the few things he had retained from a long-ago history course.

  “I guess he had to give it back.” Sophie pulled her collar up in response to another gust of wind. “So this was the dividing line between East and West Berlin, right?” In the silence that followed, Sophie looked at Charlie, who seemed not to have heard her question or to even know that she had spoken at all. “Charlie?”

  “Wait a sec,” he finally said, visualizing the map of central Asia with Kazakhstan at its centre. “I think I get it. Once they’re in the CIS, they’re into Russia.”

  Sophie frowned. “What’s the CIS?”

  “It stands for the Commonwealth of Independent States, and it’s like a eurozone for former Soviet Republics,” Charlie explained. “They share some authorities and co-operate on some things, including border security.”

  “You mean, once you have your passport checked at the border in Kazakhstan, you don’t have to check it again to cross into Russia?” Sophie grabbed his arm and started pulling toward the Adlon Hotel, on the far side of the open Platz. “Come on, let’s get a coffee and warm up.”

  “I still don’t get why Steve would be so interested in the whole Customs Union thing,” she said after they had taken a table at the Adlon’s lobby bar. “Or why he would bother going to Astana to talk to a reporter about it.”

  “Me, neither,” Charlie said. A server arrived and took their order for coffee. “And Steve’s notes,” he continued, “are in shorthand, or maybe they’re meant to be cryptic. Either way, it’s difficult to see what exactly they were talking about. It looks like Zhibek mentioned an interview he did with a prisoner named Kuatbekov, but I can’t make much sense of Steve’s shorthand. Can you?”

  He opened the slim laptop he’d been carrying and pulled up the document, turning it toward Sophie, who looked at the screen and shook her head after a few seconds.

  “It doesn’t look like any kind of shorthand I’ve ever seen before,” she said. “And look at the bottom of the page — the notation to follow up with PZ, and he’s got a bunch of question marks next to the initials.”

  Charlie nodded, moving the cursor over to the map and pausing for a second before entering Zhibek’s name into the main search box. It returned a full page of hits, some in English and several in Russian or Kazakh. He skimmed through the search results while Sophie slipped off her coat and blew into her hands. He was immersed in the third entry as she looked on.

  “Find anything interesting?”

  Charlie pointed to the screen. “This is an obituary for a Piotr Zhibek.”

  “Maybe that’s a common name in Kazakhstan.”

  “It says he was a reporter and … look at the date.”

  “August fifteenth,” she said. “He died two days after Steve left Astana.”

  Charlie stared at the screen. “It’s got to be connected to Bayzhanov somehow. Astana’s his hometown.”

  “But how?”

  They paused as the server delivered a pot of coffee and a small plate of biscuits.

  “I don’t know,” he said after the server had left. He was about to try another search when the shrill ring of his BlackBerry disturbed the calm of the
ir table. He plucked it from his pocket and saw Brigitte Martineau’s name on the caller display.

  “Hi Brigitte.”

  “You in Berlin?”

  “You bet.”

  “I just wanted to give you a quick debrief. I had a call from the head of Protocol at the MFA yesterday. The Moscow police have abandoned their inquiry into Yermolov’s death.”

  “Abandoned?”

  “They’ve ruled his death accidental and have given assurances that they won’t be requiring you to provide a statement or answer questions.”

  Charlie was reluctant to go into how ridiculous that sounded over a cellphone connected to Moscow, given how he had found Yermolov. “That’s kind of … surprising, but good, I guess.”

  “I have been promised a diplomatic note to confirm all this in writing when I get into the office. I’ll have my assist­ant send you a confirmation of receipt before you board the flight in Frankfurt. If you don’t have it, don’t get on the plane, understood?”

  “Got it.”

  “And the Durant woman’s visa is waiting at the Berlin embassy.”

  “I’ll get it on the way to the airport,” he said, checking his watch.

  “I’ll send a driver out to Domodedovo for you. We can have a chat when you get here.”

  “All right. I’ll see you later today.”

  He disconnected and put the phone down. “Your visa’s at the embassy here and we’re good to go, but we have to get to Frankfurt.”

  Sophie nodded, sipping her coffee. “I guess we should head back to the hotel.”

  He looked at her for a moment. “Are you sure you should go back?”