Scott Mariani - The Moscow Cipher

Ben walked from the plane with that dark thought in mind and his bag over his shoulder. Kaprisky had said his new assistant would be there to meet him – but nobody seemed to be around. Bright floodlamps lit up the tarmac and probed into the deep shadows between the private aircraft hangars. The screech of a jumbo jet coming in to land pierced his ears; then as the noise died away he heard the rev of an approaching car and turned. Strong headlights dazzled him momentarily, making him narrow his eyes and put up a hand to block out the glare.

The oncoming car veered in front of him and stopped directly in his path with a soft hiss of tyres. It was another black Mercedes S-Class identical to the one that had transported him to Le Mans-Arnage earlier that day. The windows were tinted, so he couldn’t see anyone inside. The rear passenger door swung open and a black high-heeled shoe stepped out, followed by a long, slim but well-muscled leg and then the rest of a woman in a charcoal business suit. Ben didn’t know her, but she seemed to know him.

‘Major Hope?’ Her English was marked with the unmistakable intonations of the Russian accent.

‘I’m Ben Hope,’ he said. The woman stepped towards him from the Mercedes. In her heels she was as tall as he was, an inch under six feet. She had the build of a model, but wide shoulders like a competitive swimmer. The eyes fixed on Ben could have been airbrushed aquamarine blue. Her blond hair was cut very short, which accentuated the angular contours of a face that would have been pleasantly attractive, except for the severe expression of hard purposefulness as she approached and stuck out a hand as rigid as a blade.

‘I am Tatyana Nikolaeva,’ the woman said. ‘I am employed to assist you in whatever way may be required during your visit to Russia.’

Ben took her hand. Her grip was as strong as it looked. ‘So I’ve been informed,’ he replied. ‘But I prefer to work alone whenever possible. If you’d like to show me to my accommodation and pass on any particulars I might need, after that you can feel free to stand down and let me take it from there, okay? I’ll square things up with Mr Kaprisky, so there’s no misunderstanding.’

‘Regrettably, that is outside of my remit to decide,’ she answered with a frosty smile. ‘My orders are clear. I take my obligations very seriously.’

Ben returned the smile. ‘Well, then, it appears neither of us has much of a choice, do we?’

The driver’s door opened and the chauffeur unfolded himself from the car. The Mercedes wasn’t a small vehicle, but at very little under seven feet in height, the guy would have been cramped in anything less than a Humvee. If Kaprisky’s driver back in France had been a racing driver in a past life, this guy had been an ultra-heavyweight boxer. The broken nose, shaven head and cauliflower ear, he had it all. The hulk exchanged some quick-fire words of Russian with Tatyana that made Ben wonder whether having an interpreter might not be such a bad thing, after all, then stepped around the car and held out a girder-like arm to take Ben’s bag and load it into the boot.

‘You have no other baggage?’ Tatyana asked, eyeing the tatty old haversack with an air of obvious distaste. ‘You are a man who likes to travel light, I see.’

‘Thought I’d leave the golf clubs at home this time,’ he replied.

Tatyana Nikolaeva frowned. ‘I do not think there would be time to play. There is work to do.’

Some people were too armoured for humour, obviously. Ben decided that would be his last attempt to break the ice with his new assistant.

She motioned towards the open rear door of the Mercedes. ‘Please.’ Ben got in. Tatyana climbed into the front passenger side. The chauffeur hefted his monstrous bulk back behind the wheel without another word, and they sped off.

Twenty-eight kilometres later, Ben was getting his first taste of Moscow. For the moment he had no idea what awaited him there.

Deep into the night, the heart of the city was alive and in full swing. The driver carved fast and efficiently through the busy traffic while Tatyana gazed absently out of her window and ignored Ben’s presence behind her. Now and then the two of them spoke in Russian and Ben listened, trying to pick out some of the words from the limited vocabulary he’d sifted from his memory of the language. Twenty minutes after entering the city, Tatyana said, ‘We are here,’ and the Mercedes pulled up outside their hotel.

Ben climbed out of the car and looked up at the towering facade of the building, light spilling from hundreds of windows across what he understood to be Neglinnaya Street in the heart of Moscow. So much for the basics, he thought. If the Ararat Park Hyatt was Auguste Kaprisky’s idea of the rougher side of life, then he wouldn’t plan on taking the old guy on a camping expedition any time soon.

‘You are booked into the Winter Garden Suite,’ Tatyana said to Ben. The chauffeur removed Ben’s bag from the boot of the car and handed it to a hotel valet, who didn’t seem all that perplexed by it. Maybe frayed, battered and faintly fusty-smelling army surplus could become the new chic, set to spark off a fashion craze among the super-rich. Ben and Tatyana followed the valet into the cathedral-sized atrium, which was bustling with activity. Ultra-modern steel and glass wasn’t Ben’s style, but then he wasn’t the one forking out thousands of rubles a night for the room.

Ben was checked in without having to do anything, and Tatyana said, ‘I will meet you here downstairs, in the Neglinka Lounge, in thirty minutes.’

The Winter Garden Suite offered panoramic views of the Bolshoi Theatre and Red Square, the Kremlin towers grandly silhouetted against the night sky and the colourfully striped domes of St Basil’s Cathedral lit up like a gigantic, gaudily elaborate dessert. Ben had what he considered a silly amount of furniture for one person, an art collection that could have graced a small gallery, a bathroom with a marble bathtub you could swim lengths of, a separate guest bathroom in case he got tired of the main one, and a bedroom that compared size-wise with little Valentina Petrova’s at Kaprisky’s chateau, except it wasn’t pink. As for the remote-controlled window blinds, forget it. Could people not close their own blinds any more?

The suite did, however, come with an Illy coffee machine, and that Ben could appreciate. Paying as little attention to the sumptuous decor as he would have to a drab-olive military barracks dorm, he showered, changed into fresh black jeans and a clean denim shirt from his bag, killed a Gauloise on his own private terrace while gazing down at the speeding traffic on Neglinnaya Street, then went downstairs to meet his assistant, who so far seemed to be calling all the shots.

Tatyana Nikolaeva was waiting for him in the bar, sipping some kind of vodka cocktail in a tall glass with an umbrella sticking out of it. The bartender spoke English, and Ben ordered a straight double scotch from the amazing selection of single malts. The battered old steel whisky flask he’d carried on many travels was getting low on its customary Laphroaig, which had been Ben’s favourite scotch for a good many years. He had the barman top it up with Macallan Rare Cask Black, a single malt that retailed for over £600 a litre back in the UK. Ringing the changes, and Kaprisky was paying.

Ben and Tatyana perched on a pair of bar stools. They were the last two guests in the place and the staff were starting to clean up in preparation for closing for the night, though an establishment like the Ararat Park Hyatt was far too classy to boot out the stragglers.

‘I was told you are no ordinary kind of army major in your country,’ Tatyana said, nonchalantly twirling her glass on the table and stirring it with the cocktail stick. Ben noticed for the first time that her fingernails were painted the exact same blue as her eyes, and immaculately polished. ‘That you belong to a special regiment, something like our GRU Spetsnaz forces.’ As she finished saying it, her eyes flashed up at him in a look he couldn’t quite read.