The Moscow Cipher (Ben Hope, Book 17)

by Scott Mariani

  Ben said, ‘Hmm.’ This case was starting to feel as if it were going upside-down on him. Something wasn’t right. There were details he was missing here.

  Tatyana looked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, and clicked open the next file. Back to the VW Beetle now, a short piece of video footage filmed from the front passenger seat as the car travelled up a crowded motorway on the sleety ninth of October. A pair of pink-shod feet was visible in the shot, perched up on the VW’s dashboard. A man’s hand – presumably Yuri Petrov’s – could be seen resting on the steering wheel.

  ‘That is the Federal Highway M10,’ Tatyana said. ‘I have travelled it many times. It goes all the way to St Petersburg, seven hundred kilometres.’

  Ben wondered where Yuri and Valentina’s road trip might have taken them. By the time the kid had snapped the next image later the same day, her father had turned off the highway and the Beetle was deep in the sticks. The road looked like little more than a dirt track, winding through snowy countryside and woodland. The focus of Valentina’s photo, taken through the side window of the car, was a great Gothic church standing alone and apparently abandoned in the middle of open fields. Even from a distance, the signs of sad decay were obvious. Part of the roof had collapsed and trees had grown up through the nave. It would probably have been vandalised to an even worse state, if vandals bothered to venture out into the middle of nowhere.

  ‘I know that place,’ Tatyana said. ‘I was taken there once, as a child. We had family living in the area, dead now. The church once belonged to the family of an old manor estate nearby, where nobody has lived for a hundred years. When I saw it, it was already falling to pieces. I remember my father telling me how, in the Soviet days, it was used as a grain warehouse.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘My father believed that everything would get better, now that the Communists were gone. He was wrong. Things change, but they do not get better.’

  ‘Could you find it again?’

  After a hesitation, she replied, ‘I think so. It is a few hours’ drive, maybe two hundred kilometres to the east of Moscow.’

  Ben peered closely at the screen, trying to drink in the picture and understand its significance. ‘Where are they going?’

  ‘That region is a very empty place,’ Tatyana said. ‘Under the old regime many villages were abandoned and became phantoms.’

  It took him a second to understand her meaning. ‘Ghost towns?’

  ‘Also many farms were left in ruin. There was much depopulation. It has taken years for the people to return but still there are thousands of square kilometres of nothing. This is a big country, you understand.’

  And it looked as if Yuri and his daughter had taken a road trip into the empty heart of it last October. The subsequent images Valentina had taken were of forests and lakes and winding country roads that stretched over large distances with not a single other vehicle, let alone a human dwelling, in sight.

  After that, there was a gap of two days before any new pictures or bits of video footage appeared.

  The next one was something unexpected.

  Chapter 19

  ‘Those are kozy, goats,’ Tatyana declared. As if nothing so exotic existed outside Russia.

  ‘Yes, we have them too,’ Ben said.

  ‘Disgusting.’

  ‘You don’t like goats?’

  ‘I hate them. They smell worse than rats.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to be a vet.’

  ‘At age ten I had not yet smelled a goat.’

  ‘So you decided to pursue a career in detection. Makes sense.’

  They were looking at a video clip filmed on what appeared to be a somewhat rundown rural smallholding in winter. The bottom left corner of the shot was a little hand, a child’s hand, wearing a fluffy pink mitten that was curled in a fist to grasp a handful of some kind of dried animal feed. In the middle of the picture, a cluster of hungry-looking white goats with floppy ears and staring split-pupil eyes were scrumming up to a rickety barbed-wire fence to get the food she was offering them. Valentina was giggling off-camera and speaking Dutch to the goats as they barged past one another and pressed tight against the wire to lick the food from her outstretched palm, condensation billowing from their breath in the cold air. The camera was shaky in her other hand, and as the image swayed this way and that, the right edge of the frame offered a momentary glimpse of a stone farmhouse half-hidden behind snow-laden conifers. A dog barked in the background. A couple of chickens could be seen scratching at the frosty ground near the farmhouse. The camera flickered again and Ben thought he saw something else, right on the edge of the frame.

  ‘There,’ Tatyana said, pointing.

  ‘Yup.’ Ben rewound the clip a few frames, found it, paused the playback and clicked keys to zoom in on the frozen screenshot until it was as large as he could make it without losing resolution. There they were, two vehicles parked on a hardcore track near the farmhouse door. One was some kind of early-model Japanese pickup truck. The other was Yuri Petrov’s dilapidated pale blue Beetle. There was no doubt that this place, wherever it was, marked the destination of the road trip on which Yuri Petrov had taken his daughter last October.

  ‘They visited a farm?’ Tatyana said.

  ‘Either that, or the world’s crummiest theme park.’

  ‘The child is fond of smelly animals. Maybe she wanted to be taken to see the goats.’

  ‘But why the need to travel so far?’ he said. ‘They don’t have animals in Moscow? Like a zoo?’

  ‘Of course. The Moscow Zoo is one of the finest in the world.’ Naturally.

  The next file was a posed photo of Yuri Petrov and another man standing outside the farmhouse. Up close, the building seemed in a neglected state, surrounded by the usual kind of countryside junk: empty feed sacks, firewood logs, rolls of chicken wire and rusty butane gas bottles. The two men had their arms around each other’s shoulders, like old friends hamming it up for the picture. The stranger was a bigger guy, some five inches taller than Yuri and much broader. His hair and beard were even more unkempt and he had teeth missing. The boiler suit he was wearing was covered in old grease and mud and possibly goat shit too, but he didn’t seem to care. Welcome to life in the sticks. Maybe he was regarded as one of the stylish trendsetters and eligible bachelors of the region.

  ‘A relative?’ Ben wondered out loud.

  ‘According to the records, Petrov is an only child,’ Tatyana said. ‘A distant cousin, perhaps.’

  ‘Do we have any details on former schoolmates? Friends from student days?’

  Tatyana shook her head. ‘None. Though I would not say this man is educated. A peasant like that does not keep intelligent company.’

  ‘Some of my best friends are peasants,’ Ben said.

  ‘My point exactly,’ she fired back.

  ‘Funny.’

  She motioned at the screen. ‘Keep looking. There may be more.’

  There wasn’t, at least not of the mysterious goat farm nor of Yuri Petrov’s unknown rustic buddy. There now followed a whole series of images and clips taken back in France. Christmas at the Kaprisky estate. Parties. More kids. More horses. Dozens of uninformative image files later, the season moved into spring, then finally into summer, bringing the record more closely up to date.

  ‘Here we go at last,’ Ben said. ‘Full circle.’ Just like before, Valentina had captured her most recent trip to Moscow on her trusty little pink Nokia – the trip from which she had unexpectedly and dramatically failed, so far, to return. Photos and video clips tracked her progress from France to Russia, except now it was summertime. More exterior shots of Yuri Petrov’s building, more inside pictures of the apartment, more brief clips of father and daughter messing around and laughing in the immediate lead-up to the abduction and disappearance. The last file was a still image of Yuri, sitting over plastic food in a McDonalds, making a goofy face for the camera. It was dated the same day as the pair had vanished.

  ‘And tha
t’s it,’ Ben said.

  Tatyana turned away from the screen to fix him with a quizzical look. ‘What are you making of this?’

  ‘You’re the professional investigator,’ he said. ‘What’s your take?’

  Tatyana hesitated and glanced around the room at the other IT lounge users. Some had gone, some newcomers had arrived. Lowering her voice, she said, ‘I am thinking about this farm.’

  He nodded. ‘And what strikes you about it?’

  ‘That it must be very remote,’ Tatyana said. ‘A place where nobody could find you. How do you say? A hide?’

  ‘A hideaway,’ Ben said. ‘A refuge. A safehouse. All of those things.’

  ‘If he has taken Valentina there before, then he could possibly return there. No?’

  ‘I’d say that’s a reasonable assumption,’ Ben said.

  ‘He would want to go to a place where a loyal friend would help him to stay hidden. And with animals everywhere, so the child would feel comfortable and happy. It would seem like just another visit, part of the holiday. Her father could have told her he had arranged it with her mother. With no phone, she would not be able to know otherwise. The question is, what is the next stage of Petrov’s plan? He may not wish to stay long in one place, and so it is urgent to follow this lead quickly before he disappears again.’

  ‘We’ll make a detective of you yet, Comrade.’

  Tatyana smiled. ‘Your idea about the phone was very good work.’

  ‘That’s why I get paid the big bucks,’ Ben replied. ‘And now we know where to go next.’

  ‘How will we get there?’ Tatyana asked as they were leaving the IT suite.

  ‘Leave that to me.’

  ‘It is a long drive.’

  ‘If you want to freshen up before we leave, my room has a guest bathroom. Feel free to use it.’

  ‘Thank you. I am hungry, too. We should have lunch before we set off. The restaurants of the Ararat Park Hyatt are among—’

  ‘The best in Moscow. I know. But we’ll grab a bite to eat once we’re on the road. This place is a little too public for my tastes right now. Ten minutes, and we’re out of here.’

  ‘You think they are still watching us?’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘Do you still believe it is Kaprisky?’

  If it was, Ben was deeply disappointed in the old man. As far as Ben was concerned, he’d been hired as an expert specialist Kaprisky could absolutely trust to get the job done, based on his past record. However understandable the family’s panic and anguish over Valentina’s disappearance, he resented having his progress covertly checked on at every step. He also resented being lied to. That was, if Kaprisky was behind the surveillance.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘But we’ll find out soon enough, if they show their faces again.’

  ‘You would ask them nicely, I suppose?’

  ‘I’ve always found that the gentlest methods work best.’

  ‘So I am learning, Major Hope.’

  Chapter 20

  Ben had said ten minutes, and he held her to it. Once they’d sneaked up to the Winter Garden Suite with nobody following them, he finally found a use for the remote-controlled blinds by closing them without risking being seen from the window. Tatyana disappeared into the guest bathroom while he set the coffee machine going, then took the world’s fastest shower and changed in the master bedroom. Not bothering to shave he gulped down a cup of fresh black coffee potent enough to keep him fuelled for the next few hours, grabbed his bag and was waiting for her in the corridor when she emerged. Her short hair was still damp and spiked from the shower, and she hadn’t had time to reapply her makeup. She tutted at herself in one of the corridor’s fancy mirrors. ‘I look terrible.’

  Women. Ben had long since given up trying to understand why they did these things to themselves. He said, ‘You look a lot better without the face paint. Let’s go.’

  The unknown watchers could be lying in wait for them anywhere, but fortunately it was a big hotel with too many nooks and crannies for a surveillance team to cover completely. Ben led Tatyana downstairs via a fire escape staircase. They avoided the main lobby and repaired to an empty conference room on the ground floor, where at his request she made two calls: the first, to the driver who’d chauffeured them from the airport; the second to the taxi firm that operated the yellow minivans with the dark tinted windows.

  With typical Muscovite efficiency, a minivan arrived around the rear of the hotel exactly seven minutes later and the two of them hustled aboard like a couple of celebrities trying to escape the paparazzi. The kitchen staff must have been starting to wonder who they were. As the taxi and its invisible passengers sped off down Neglinnaya Street, Ben was scanning the pavements for anyone obviously scoping the hotel, and the road for anyone in pursuit. Neither materialised.

  Twenty minutes’ hack through the dense traffic, and the minivan pulled up at their destination, a dirty concrete underpass near the Lefortovo road tunnel on the city’s third ring road. Ben overpaid the taxi driver handsomely, and the minivan sped happily away, leaving them standing there in the shadows of the underpass with the sound of traffic rumbling overhead.

  They weren’t alone. The hulking chauffeur had got there ahead of them, as arranged, and was leaning against the side of his Mercedes S-Class with a cigarette. He’d obviously had little to do except polish the car since they’d last seen him. The black paintwork gleamed like a mirror, even in the shadows. He peeled his hefty frame off the S-Class and muttered something in Russian to Tatyana.

  ‘What’s he say?’ Ben asked.

  ‘He says this is a hell of a strange place for a rendezvous and where do we want him to take us?’

  ‘I never said he was going to take us anywhere. Please inform him that he’s just been given the day off, so he can go off and wrestle bears or whatever he does for fun. We won’t be needing him, we just want the car. We’ll call him when we’re done with it.’

  Tatyana relayed the message, which was not especially well received.

  ‘He says what if we damage it?’

  ‘Tell him I’ve never damaged a car in my life,’ Ben said. ‘But if we break it, Kaprisky will send him a new one.’

  The hulk balked for a moment, clenched his fists as though he might want to start something, then took note of the serious look in Ben’s eye and reluctantly handed over the keys.

  Ben asked Tatyana, ‘How do you say, “Now take a hike” in Russian?’ Tatyana made it simple. A jerked thumb and a whistle work in any language.

  ‘I didn’t like him anyway,’ Tatyana said as the big man skulked furiously away. ‘He has bad attitude. And he asked me four times to go out with him.’

  ‘I thought the two of you were getting along well.’

  ‘How do you say? Not my style.’

  Ben wasn’t about to ask what was. He got into the plush leather cabin and handed her his smartphone, now containing the images of key landmarks downloaded from Valentina’s phone.

  ‘You navigate, I’ll drive.’

  She huffed. ‘Of course. The woman never drives.’

  The Mercedes purred smoothly into life, as silky quiet as an electric turbine. Ben snicked it into drive and they took off. ‘Have you ever driven in Russia before?’ she asked.

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘There are some things you should know. First, anyone can buy a driving licence without passing a test. Most Moscow drivers do not follow the rules, even if they are sober. There are many more fatal crashes here than in any other country. Nobody ever uses their turn signals, obeys the speed limits or stops for pedestrians. But if you fail to stop at a red light, officers of the traffic police are authorised to open fire on your vehicle.’

  ‘Any more tips for me?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Drive as if everyone wants to kill you, and you will be okay.’

  ‘I appreciate the advice. Now where to?’

  ‘Around the third ring, and then take the tunnel,�
�� she said, pointing ahead, and soon they were joining the lanes of traffic speeding beneath the Yauza River. ‘The Lefortovo Tunnel is over three kilometres long,’ she informed him as they plunged into the darkness. ‘One of the longest built.’

  ‘There’s a longer one in Dublin,’ Ben said, glancing at her. Her lips had gone purple in the tunnel lights.

  ‘In Ireland?’

  ‘My mother’s home country. It’s not all green fields and potatoes.’

  ‘Really? They have motor cars there?’

  ‘You’d be amazed.’ And so was Ben. It appeared that Comrade Nikolaeva might have a sense of humour after all.

  ‘Oh. Careful of the water,’ she said, pointing ahead. The fast-moving traffic was slowing for the deep slick that covered part of the tunnel floor, reflecting the headlights. Ben dabbed the brake in time, and they hit the water with a spray that forced him to turn on the wipers. ‘So much for superior Russian architecture. Your tunnel has a leak.’

  ‘More than one,’ she admitted. ‘In winter the road becomes frozen and causes many fatal accidents. They call it “the Tunnel of Death”.’

  ‘Remind me not to visit during the coming Ice Age.’

  She looked at him. ‘What Ice Age? They say the planet is getting warmer, not colder.’

  ‘My friend the solar scientist would disagree.’

  ‘It sounds as if you have some strange friends.’

  He smiled. ‘You have no idea.’

  They finally emerged back into the sunshine, and, guided by Tatyana, Ben escaped the city. As fascinating as Moscow was, it felt good to leave the concrete jungle behind. They soon picked up the M10 Federal Highway, following in the footsteps of Yuri and Valentina’s excursion the previous autumn. Tatyana fell silent, scrolling through the images on the smartphone, and as the conversation lagged Ben was left alone with his thoughts.

  His confidence that they were on the right track was variable – but the simple truth was that, at this moment, the few fragile scraps they’d found were all they had to go on. He distracted himself from his worries about not finding Yuri and Valentina by worrying instead about the strangeness of the case. Then when he’d exhausted that track, he switched his thoughts back to the perplexing question of who had been trying to follow them. As he drove he was flicking his gaze constantly up to the rearview mirror, now and then varying his speed to let other vehicles pass and watch for the ones that stayed behind.