Scott Mariani - The Moscow Cipher

‘Good morning, Comrade Major Hope,’ she said briskly.

‘And a very good morning to you, Miss Nikolaeva.’

Ben followed her out of the bustling hotel lobby into the buzz of Neglinnaya Street. Eight months of the year the place was icebound, but the summer sun felt warm. Then why wasn’t everyone smiling?

‘So what’s the travel plan?’ he asked. ‘Are we getting a bus? Tram?’

‘Neither,’ Tatyana said. ‘The Moscow metro system is the most efficient in the world. I have been to New York, Paris and London,’ she added with a shake of the head, clearly not impressed with what the western world had to offer. ‘Here, you often have to wait less than one minute for the next subway train. And our stations are far superior, naturally. We even have free wi-fi everywhere in the system. As for the architecture, prepare yourself to be amazed.’

‘I’m so glad to have you as my guide,’ Ben muttered, but she either missed the sarcasm or didn’t give a damn either way.

Tatyana had certainly been right about the road traffic, which was so heavily congested that it could have taken them hours to get anywhere by car. As they walked through the fume-filled streets, Ben tried not to breathe in too deeply and gazed around him at the unfamiliar city in daylight for the first time. If he’d been expecting Moscow to be filled with the brutal relics of the old USSR, he’d have been disappointed. Streets down which Stalin’s tank battalions had once rumbled in an intimidating show of might to the West were now transformed into a modern, vibrant space that had Starbucks and Le Pain Quotidien outlets on every corner and looked and felt much like anywhere else in the world, except that there wasn’t a single non-white face in evidence anywhere.

He asked, ‘Why are there so many flower shops?’ He’d never seen such a proliferation of them before.

Tatyana replied, ‘Because Russian men are the most romantic in the world, and they love to make their women happy.’

Ben wondered if Kaprisky’s niece felt that way. Maybe Yuri Petrov was the single exception in all of Russia and she’d just been unlucky in her choice.

Five minutes’ walk from the hotel, they came to Lubyanka metro. The subway station was in sight of a much more infamous building bearing the same name, with which Ben was familiar from his historical reading. The first real relic of the old regime he’d glimpsed so far, the Lubyanka prison had once doubled up as the headquarters of the feared Soviet secret police, the Cheka, later restyled as the no less notorious KGB. Lubyanka had been intimately connected with the worst atrocities of Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s, and those that had followed all through the darker history of the USSR, involving many more horrific tortures and brutal executions than would ever be officially admitted.

As for the metro station that shared its name, Ben knew of it only as the scene of the 2010 bombing that had left a swathe of dead in its wake and been blamed on Islamic terrorists – although some independent news sources had claimed the attack to have been a false flag operation carried out by the Russian security forces to justify political ends. Ben had seen enough of covert dirty dealings to know such tactics were a reality, and not just here in Russia. The official versions of tragic events were often far from the truth, a truth known only to a tiny few.

They passed under the arches of the station’s entrance and were quickly swallowed up in the throng of fast-moving commuters. Tatyana had a pair of prepaid contactless Troika cards that were the fastest way to negotiate the metro, and gave one to Ben. On their way down to the trains, without warning he paused to crouch down in the middle of the tunnel and retie his left bootlace. The river of foot traffic parted around him, jostling by with more than a few looks as Tatyana waited impatiently for him to finish. ‘So you see, it is not me who slows us down,’ she said acidly.

The slight delay caused them to miss the train, which departed as they were stepping out onto the platform. The short wait gave Ben time to decide that the station’s Soviet-era architecture looked pretty much as plain and severe as he’d have imagined. ‘Doesn’t look any great shakes to me so far,’ he observed.

‘Just wait,’ she said, smirking at the sceptical look on his face.

True to her promise, the next train came whooshing into the station within less than a minute. Crowds bundled out; more crowds piled on board. Ben and Tatyana’s carriage was crowded, with standing room only. As they began to snake their way beneath the city, Ben was in for a revelation. Station after station offered a staggering display of vaulted ceilings and grand chandeliers, amazing murals and friezes, stained glass and gilt, marble arches and columns and great bronze statues of Socialist icons, each one designed around its own individual architectural theme and every inch as pristine and magnificent as London’s underground was dingy and depressing.

‘Stalin intended the metro to be a triumph of Communist ideology,’ Tatyana said, keeping her voice low enough that only Ben could hear over the clatter and rumble of the moving train. Ben supposed that maybe mentioning Stalin’s name too loudly in liberal Moscow was akin to referring to the unmentionable Adolf Hitler in public anywhere in modern-day Germany, a serious social misstep. Though he’d read that many Russians were still misty-eyed about their ruthless mass-murdering former dictator, which worried a few folks. ‘While Khrushchev and later leaders condemned the luxuries of the old era,’ Tatyana continued, ‘resulting in many of the stations of the 1960s and 1970s being much plainer in style.’

‘I see. Interesting.’ Ben nodded and listened as she prattled on, while glancing around him at the sights. The truth, which he was keeping to himself for the moment, was that he was observing more than just the breathtaking architecture.

Almost from the moment they’d left the hotel, he’d become aware they were being followed. Ben had enough years in the field under his belt to have developed an extremely acute spider sense, which was the name soldiers gave to that feeling of being watched. Sure enough, he and Tatyana hadn’t walked a hundred steps from the doorway of the Ararat Park Hyatt before he’d used the reflection in a shop window to spot the two goons shadowing them.

The pair were dressed casually, not tall, not short, well blended into the crowds and as instantly forgettable as all good shadows should be. They were doing a creditable job of hanging back and looking unsuspicious, and would have been perfectly invisible to most ordinary Joes; not, however, to a former SAS man trained in the delicate art of counter-surveillance.

Without having to turn around, Ben had been able to keep the two in almost constant view. When the goons had followed them into Lubyanka metro station, Ben knew exactly where they were. When he had deliberately paused to fiddle with his bootlace as a way of testing their response, they’d stopped moving and huddled to one side of the tunnel, pretending to be gawking at something terribly fascinating on a mobile phone. And when Ben and his companion had got on the subway train, the pair had slipped surreptitiously on board after them. Now they were loitering at the opposite end of the carriage, innocently chatting to one another and throwing the occasional discreet glance at their targets, obviously unaware that they, the watchers, had themselves been spotted.

Tatyana looked surprised as Ben bent close to her ear, interrupting her history lecture. Her cropped blond hair smelled of fresh apples. In a whisper just loud enough to be heard he said, ‘Tell me, what’s Russian for “Don’t look now, but someone’s following us”?’