SCOTT MARIANI
The Moscow Cipher

Copyright

Published by Avon an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Scott Mariani 2018

Cover photographs © Getty Images

Cover photographs © Arcangel

Cover design © Henry Steadman 2018

Scott Mariani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007486250

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780007486434

Version 2020-01-22

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‘I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.’

Joseph Stalin, 1925

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Vladimir Putin, 92 years later

‘A man does not have the right to develop his own mind. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.’

José Delgado, neuroscientist and pioneer of

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program, 1975

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

The Ben Hope series

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About the Author

By the Same Author:

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

The city was Moscow and the date was February 10th 1957. It was to be the last night in Leo Ingram’s life, although he didn’t yet know it.

The bitter cold day was turning to a frigid evening as the deserted streets darkened, urging Ingram to turn up the collar of his heavy greatcoat and walk faster along the slippery pavement. His shoes were sodden from trudging through the dirty slush. The whistling wind carried flurries of snow that threatened to re-cover everything in white.

Ingram detested the unrelenting cold, as he detested the palpable fear and oppression that gripped this city. He could see it in the eyes of the people everywhere he went; could almost feel it oozing from the grey, dirty, ice-rimed streets themselves; and the same fear was pulsing deep inside his own heart that night as he carried out his mission.

Leo Ingram was his real name, as opposed to the identity shown on the forged papers he was carrying. His spoken and written Russian were easily good enough to pass for a native, as long as he didn’t get into protracted conversation with any of the locals, something he had studiously avoided since being smuggled into the USSR five weeks earlier. His cover had been carefully set up. For the last five weeks, as far as anyone was concerned, he had been Pyotr Kozlov, self-employed piano tuner. Had he been required to actually tune a piano as proof of his false identity, he could have done so, as that had been his profession before the war.

Quite how a mild-mannered, cultivated and peace-loving gentleman like Leonard Ingram could be transformed into a highly decorated British Army captain and then, post-1945, into a special agent of the Secret Intelligence Service: that was a testament to the deep, dark impact that terrible war had had on the lives of everyone it had touched.

Ingram’s mission in Moscow was nearly complete. He had been planted here to play a relatively brief role, but one that was key to the success of the operation. If all went well tonight, the five weeks of perpetual nail-biting tension, of constantly looking over his shoulder, half-expecting to see the KGB thugs coming for him at any moment, would be over and he would begin the journey home. Not that getting out of the Soviet Union would be an easy matter.

If all didn’t go well … Ingram closed his mind to that dreadful possibility.

The package thrust deep inside one pocket of his greatcoat was the first thing his plan required him to offload that night, before moving to the second phase. The package was innocuous enough at first glance, just an ordinary tobacco tin imprinted with Cyrillic lettering, identical to millions of others carried by millions of men across the USSR. But what that little round tin contained could not have been more explosive if it had been packed full of super-concentrated TNT. If they caught him with it, all was lost. Not just his own life, but all the efforts and risks taken by others in order to obtain the extremely precious and hard-won information inside.

As Ingram rounded an icy corner of the dark, empty street and a fresh blast of bone-chilling wind slapped him in the face and made his eyes water, the warehouses came into view. A mile’s walk from his rented digs, this industrialised zone of the city was even more dismal and rundown than the rest of Moscow. Most of the ancient pre-revolutionary buildings were semi-derelict and abandoned behind rickety fences nobody guarded. All the same, he was cautious. The failing bulb of a street light flickered on, off, on, off, throwing long shadows that he watched carefully in case they might conceal enemies with guns.

Satisfied he was alone, Ingram approached the fence and made his way along the snow-rimed wire mesh to the hole, large enough for a man of his slender build to slip through easily, he’d cut three nights earlier.

The warehouse was an old meat packing plant that hadn’t been used for many years, its doors rotted off their hinges. Ingram stepped over the half-eaten body of a frozen rat and moved into the darkness of the building. The hiding place was very specific. The package would remain there only a day or so before, if all went according to plan, his contact would collect it. It had been decided back at the start of the mission that a dead drop of this sort was a safer, more prudent way for the package to change hands. Ingram would have preferred to deliver it straight to his contact, but these were not his decisions to make.

The package carefully hidden, Ingram slipped unseen from the warehouse and continued on his way through the cold darkness. Phase two of the plan was the rendezvous with his colleague, a man he had never met and would never meet again after tonight. A small waterproof envelope in Ingram’s pocket contained a slip of paper on which were written four lines of code: an enciphered message that, among other information, gave precise directions to the location of the hidden package. Once the envelope was passed on, Ingram would walk away relieved of a tremendous burden. His part in the mission would effectively be complete as his contact decoded the directions using a special key known only to a select few, then retrieved the package and whisked it away to East Berlin, where others in their organisation would be anxiously waiting to take possession.

When the package finally reached the safety of London and its contents were analysed, it would cause a sensation. Careers would be made out of this, though the men and women who’d risked their lives to obtain the information would likely get little credit.

Ingram walked on through the half-deserted streets, checking his wristwatch and his bearings and glancing behind him now and then to ensure he wasn’t being followed. A police car hissed by, tyres churning brown slush on the road, and made his heart race for a moment before it passed on into the night without so much as slowing down to check him out.

His anxiety was peaking as he walked on. His meeting with his contact, however brief, would be the moment of maximum danger for both of them; when they would be at their most vulnerable if either of them had fallen under suspicion. To be caught together was their worst nightmare. ‘It’s almost over,’ he kept telling himself. ‘You’ll soon be home free.’

As Ingram crossed a sidestreet, a large figure of a man in a long coat and a brimmed hat appeared from nowhere and stepped towards him. ‘Good evening,’ the man said in accented English. He was smiling. His right hand was in his pocket, clutching a hidden weapon. And he was most certainly not the man Ingram was supposed to meet.

KGB. The acronym stood for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security. A name that struck terror into the hearts of those who opposed the Soviet regime, as well as the Russian citizens it oppressed as virtual captives in their own homeland. The KGB had been created only three years earlier and already forged a fearsome reputation as a direct descendant of the dreaded Cheka secret police of the olden days. Its agents were as ruthless as they were efficient.

Ingram’s stomach twisted as he realised they were onto him. He bolted diagonally away across the icy street, then skidded and almost fell as a second figure appeared around the corner up ahead, cutting off his escape. The second agent wasn’t smiling and he had drawn his service automatic.

Had someone betrayed him? Had the KGB already caught his contact and made him talk? Had a mole inside his own agency given him away? Ingram didn’t have time to ask those questions as he sprinted off in the opposite direction with the two agents in pursuit.

A shot cracked out. Splinters of brickwork stung Ingram’s leg as he darted around a corner. He knew that the KGB would shoot to wound, not to kill. He also knew what kind of horrific tortures they would use to force information from him. He would give them nothing. He and his fellow agents had all been sternly lectured on the risks associated with getting caught. Like his colleagues, Ingram carried hidden in the heel of one shoe a small glass vial containing a cyanide pill, to be swallowed in the event of imminent capture. The death it offered was by no means a pleasant one – but it was, he had been assured, far quicker and kinder than the treatment a spy would receive at the hands of his or her captors.

He sprinted along a cobbled alleyway, vaulted a railing and almost broke his neck hurtling down a long flight of icy steps. A sharp right turn, then a left, then another right; and now Ingram was quite lost in the maze of dark narrow streets, but all that mattered was getting away from his pursuers. Escape was his only hope. Ingram had killed over a dozen enemy soldiers in the war and was quite proficient at armed combat, but the Secret Intelligence Service didn’t issue weapons to undercover agents posing as innocent piano tuners. The couple of tuning forks he carried about with him wouldn’t be much use.

He paused, heart pounding in his throat, breath rasping. Listened, hard, but could hear nothing. Had he lost them? Maybe, but he could afford to make no assumptions.

The cipher in his pocket. It must not be found. He snatched out the envelope and looked desperately around him for a hiding place to which, if he made it out of this, he could always return later. The buildings either side of the narrow street were old grey stone, slowly crumbling with decay and neglect. He ran his fingers along the rough, cold masonry, found a crack big enough, and stuffed the envelope inside it and poked it in deep with his fingers. Then he ran on, careering over the slippery pavement.

For a few elated moments longer he thought he’d given them the slip. That was when he heard the rapid thud of footsteps closing in behind him and in front, and realised they had him cornered.

He was done. Ingram felt the strange calmness that can sometimes come over a man when he knows, and accepts, that the end is here. He reached down and slid the false heel off his left shoe, trying to get to the cyanide pill inside before the enemy grabbed him; but his hands were numb with cold and he fumbled with the vial and accidentally let it slip from his fingers. He dropped to his knees, groping about in the shadows for it, but it was too late. Powerful hands seized his arms and yanked him roughly to his feet.

A pistol pressed against his head. If he could have struggled fiercely enough to make them blow his brains out, he would have, but then a cosh struck him hard over the back of his skull and knocked him half senseless. The KGB men dragged Ingram down the street to a waiting car where a third agent sat impassively at the wheel, smoking a cigarette. Ingram was bundled roughly inside. The two who had caught him sat to his left and right, boxing him into the middle of the back seat. The car sped off.

Its destination was the infamous Lubyanka prison and KGB headquarters in the heart of Moscow, where men highly expert in extracting the truth from their victims awaited their new arrival.

The last night of Leo Ingram’s life would be a very long and agonising one.

Chapter 1

The present day

Inside the confessional, filled with the serenity of the magnificent cathedral that was one of only two Catholic churches in his home city of Moscow, Yuri Petrov knelt humbly on the step and prepared to bare his soul to God.

On the other side of the grid, the priest’s face was half veiled in shadow. Yuri made the sign of the cross and, speaking low, began the sacrament as he’d been doing all his life.

‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was over two weeks ago and these are my sins.’

Yuri ran through the list of various lesser, venial sins, such as drinking and occasionally skipping his nightly prayers. But it was something else that was weighing so heavily on him and was the real reason he’d come seeking guidance. ‘I’m struggling with a great burden, Father,’ he explained nervously. ‘A terrible secret has been revealed to me and I don’t know what to do. I’m frightened.’

The priest listened sagely. ‘Would the right course of action be to share your secret, my son?’

‘Yes, Father. But in so doing, I could be in serious danger.’

‘The only danger is in doing wrong, my son.’

‘I know it’s wrong to lie, or hide the truth. I’ve done that too many times, Father. I’ve been used to keeping secrets, in my past career. But nothing like this. If I tell, I’m a dead man. I need God’s guidance on what to do.’

The priest reflected on this in silence for some time. ‘Pray to Him, my son. Open your heart to His wisdom, and the guidance you seek will be heard.’ Having given his counsel, the priest gave Yuri the penance of two Hail Marys, invited him to make an act of contrition, and ended the sacrament with the usual ‘Through the ministry of the Church, may God give you pardon and peace. I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’

‘Amen.’

‘Go in peace. Do the right thing, my son.’

Yuri left the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and trudged down the steps to Malaya Gruzinskaya Street feeling scarcely any more reassured than before. Moscow was enjoying a warm June; the sky was blue and the sunshine was pleasant, but Yuri was too taken up with confusion and dread to notice. How had it come to this, he kept asking himself. As he walked away from the grand Gothic church, he cast his troubled mind back over the events of the last few days and the path his life had taken to lead him to this awful situation.

Yuri Petrov was thirty-nine years old, divorced, single, currently unemployed and going nowhere fast. The reason he’d been so used to keeping secrets in the past was that, for over fifteen years, he had been a spy for Russian intelligence, albeit a minor and lowly one. Not that any of his former neighbours or acquaintances in Amsterdam, where he had lived for ten of those years, would have known it. As far as anyone was concerned, even (especially) Yuri’s ex-wife Eloise and their daughter Valentina, he led the steady, plodding and unexciting existence of a senior technical support analyst working for an international software company based in the Netherlands. The ability to speak Russian being a key part of his phony job, the story fitted well and he’d carried it off for years without drawing suspicion. Each morning at eight he’d kissed his wife and cycled off to a fake office with a fake secretary, and got on with the real job of being an intelligence spook. Whatever that was, exactly.

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, nor even handled, 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’ as the Americans termed it – 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 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. With alarming rapidity, the human factor was being 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 trailer at a remote farm many miles from Moscow. He lived alone with only a dog, an assortment of feral cats and a few goats and chickens for company, and spent most of every night in the trailer 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, for that would have instantly branded him as the enemy. 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 who 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. After all, Yuri was privy to facts and secrets that were kept from ordinary folks, and so it wasn’t hard for him to imagine that all kinds of levels of secrecy existed above him. 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 believe 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 the whole concept of democracy was a carefully concocted 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 remote countryside. 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.

Chapter 2

For a dedicated conspiracy buff tainted by more than a whiff of paranoia, nothing could be more alarming than happening to be walking down the street minding your own business when a mysterious black car full of mysterious men suddenly appears from nowhere and pulls up beside you.

That was exactly what happened to Yuri Petrov one day that summer as he strolled aimlessly about the streets of Moscow. He instantly knew the black Mercedes was an Intelligence Services car. Gripped by panic, he was ready to bolt as the back doors opened and two men, very obviously government agents, climbed out and walked calmly towards him.

He’d never seen either of them before. But they seemed to recognise him, even with the hair and the beard. Yuri hadn’t been paying so much attention to personal neatness of late.

‘Hello, Yuri,’ one of them said.

The other motioned towards the car’s open door. ‘Let’s go for a drive, shall we?’

Powerless to refuse, Yuri climbed into the back seat. The two men sat flanking him as the Mercedes sped off. ‘What’s this about?’ he kept repeating. ‘Who are you people? What do you want with me?’

‘You’ll find out soon enough. Shut up and enjoy the ride.’

Twenty minutes later, the Mercedes arrived at a lugubrious government building Yuri had never visited before. They passed through two armed security checkpoints, then whooshed down a ramp into a subterranean car park from where Yuri’s escorts ushered him up several floors in a lift. They stepped out into a corridor that was devoid of any windows or furniture and painted institutional grey. Yuri was so nervous he could hardly control the shaking in his knees as they led him up the corridor. After two years of the Grisha Solokov academy, it seemed to Yuri like the dystopian nightmare coming true.

Yuri had no idea of what he was about to step into.

The agents stopped outside an unmarked door. ‘Go in,’ one said to Yuri.

Yuri did as he was told. He found himself in an office, not a cosy one. The walls and steel filing cabinets and ancient iron radiators and exposed pipes were all painted the same grey as the corridor. There was no carpet and only one window, through whose dusty glass little sunlight was able to penetrate. In front of the window was a large, plain desk, which was completely bare except for a telephone and a slim cardboard folder that lay closed on the desktop.

Behind the desk sat a man whom Yuri, unlike the men who had brought him here, did in fact recognise. It was his former chief, the man who had first interviewed and employed him in the service, Antonin Bezukhov.

The chief was a large, heavyset figure in a dark suit. His white hair was buzzed military-short and his face appeared to have been chiselled from a lump of granite. He had to be in his mid-seventies, but if anything he looked more severe and intimidating than Yuri remembered, which was saying something. This was a man rumoured to have personally executed several CIA operatives, back in the glory days of the Cold War. As far as Bezukhov was concerned, the old regime had never ended.

Bezukhov invited him to sit, and offered him a ghost of a smile. ‘You’re a hard man to find, Yuri. We obviously trained you too well. Where’ve you been hiding yourself these days?’

Yuri swallowed. ‘Why am I here? What do you want from me?’

‘We need you to come back and work for us, one more time,’ said Bezukhov.

‘But I’m retired,’ Yuri protested. ‘Out, gone, done with the whole thing. I don’t want anything more to do with any of it.’

‘Consider this your heroic comeback,’ the chief said, faintly amused. ‘Come on, Yuri, don’t you know that once you’re in the club, we’d never really let you go? That’s how the game is played, my friend. And now we have another job for you.’

Yuri could find nothing to say. Bezukhov reached a thick arm across the desk, and a brawny paw of a hand slid the solitary card folder over its surface towards Yuri. ‘Open it.’

Again, Yuri did as he was told. Inside the card folder was a transparent plastic sleeve, and inside that a single oblong slip of paper. It was heavily aged, as if it had spent many years exposed to the elements. And creased, as though it had been folded up very small throughout that time. Long ago, someone had written four lines of text on the paper, using black ink that had faded somewhat but was still clearly legible. The writing wasn’t in Russian. It used the letters of the English alphabet, though the language wasn’t English either.

‘It’s a cipher,’ Yuri said. An old one, too, dating back a good few decades. Seeing it, he couldn’t pretend not to feel a slight stirring of curiosity.

‘Good to see you haven’t lost your powers of observation, Agent Petrov.’

‘Please don’t call me that.’

‘This cipher is the reason I called you in,’ the chief said. ‘You’re going to decode it for us. Just like old times.’

Yuri studied the cipher more closely. Right away, he could tell it was like no other code he’d come across before. Even back in the pre-cybertechnology dark ages, cryptology had reached a level that was far from crude. ‘It’s not going to be easy.’

‘Why do you think we selected you for the task?’ the chief said. ‘Some people haven’t forgotten you used to have a way with these things, back in the old days before these fucking computers took over.’ He spat out the expletive with surprising bitterness.

As Yuri went on peering at the encrypted text, the chief recomposed himself and explained, ‘The cipher was discovered two weeks ago by a crew of workmen who were demolishing a block of old post-war houses in Novogireyevo District. Coming across an envelope that had been crammed into a crack in a wall, they opened it, saw it was something peculiar and handed it in to the police. Thank God for patriotism, heh?’

Yuri asked, ‘What was it doing there?’

Bezukhov smiled, aware that Yuri was being drawn in despite himself. ‘We believe that it was concealed there in February 1957 by a British spy working as part of a network. His cover ID was Pyotr Kozlov, real name Leonard Ingram, a British Army captain recruited to SIS after the war. He and a couple of others were inserted into the Soviet Union that January, as part of a special operation you don’t need to know about. Let’s just say they were stealing secrets. That was before the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart was put up, and these shits could creep in and out almost as they pleased.’ This was all long, long before Yuri’s time, but he knew the chief was talking about the Berlin Wall.

Bezukhov levered himself from his chair and went to gaze out of the dusty window. With his back to Yuri he went on, ‘Of course, our boys were onto them the moment they stepped on Russian soil. And we had our suspicions about what they were up to. The cipher is obviously a set of instructions of some kind, which would indicate the nature of the secrets they stole, and their whereabouts. Ingram was on his way to pass those instructions to one of his fellow spies when the KGB jumped the gun and nabbed him too soon. If they’d allowed the meeting to take place, they could have captured both of them together as well as the information they were sharing.’ Bezukhov turned away from the window with a sigh. ‘Mistakes happen. Anyway, when he knew they were closing in on him, Ingram managed to hide what he was carrying, presumably intending to return there if by some miracle he escaped.’

‘But he didn’t.’

Bezukhov shook his head. ‘Before he knew it, he was carted off to Lubyanka for interrogation. Sadly for us, however, the clumsy fools who worked him over were a little overenthusiastic with their use of force. He expired before they were able to get much out of him.’

Yuri felt sick. He tried not to visualise the scene too vividly, but couldn’t shut off his imagination.

‘Before he died,’ the chief went on, ‘he revealed knowledge of some highly sensitive information. And I do mean highly,’ he repeated for emphasis. ‘We want to recover that information, and we believe the cipher is key to understanding how much he knew, who else might have been passed that information and how much damage might have been done to our security.’

‘So long ago,’ Yuri said, frowning. ‘How could it still be important?’

‘The biggest secrets are like plutonium,’ Bezukhov replied. ‘Their potency doesn’t fade over time.’

The chief let those words hang in the air for a moment, then yanked open a drawer of his desk. ‘As you probably know, the old KGB archives on dissidents and enemy spies detained during the Cold War were never destroyed after the fall of the Soviet regime. They were simply hustled away to a new location and now reside inside a high-security underground vault, one to which I happen to have access. I’ve examined the contents of Ingram’s file and found something that may be of value to us. Ingram was carrying these items the night he was captured.’

Bezukhov took a packet from the drawer and slid it across the desk towards Yuri. Yuri hesitated, looked inside, then glanced quizzically up at the chief.

‘Tuning forks,’ Bezukhov said. ‘Part of his cover. Never mind those. It’s the book I’m interested in.’

The paperback was an old mid-fifties edition of Lucky Jim by the English novelist Kingsley Amis, yellowed by decades spent in secret government storage.

‘Certain pages of the book appear to have been very well thumbed,’ Bezukhov said. ‘You know what that means.’

Yuri did indeed. Old-fashioned ciphers often made use of random phrases and passages from books, likewise chosen at random and known only to the codemaker and the codebreaker. Without the book, it could be literally impossible to decipher the encrypted message. Yuri shook his head. What a fool the British spy had been, to be caught with it. A basic error of tradecraft, one that had cost him dear. Needless to say, Russian agents didn’t make such mistakes.

‘Get to work,’ Bezukhov said. ‘I expect results, Agent Petrov, and I expect them soon. And for pity’s sake, get a shave and a haircut. You look like one of the beatniks we used to send to the Gulag.’

Chapter 3

Yuri returned to his dingy apartment, his nerves rattled by the idea that the intelligence services could just scoop him up and put him back to work like he was one of their mindless, unquestioning drones. But what choice had he, other than to do their bidding?

And if he was perfectly honest with himself, a tiny part of him was thrilled to be working on the cipher. For so long, he had lacked any sense of purpose. This was the stuff he did best, and he was determined to crack it. Not just to please Bezukhov, but to prove to himself that he still had what it took.

First impressions had been right: the cipher was indeed like nothing else he’d encountered before. It was like a modern-day locksmith suddenly faced with picking some antiquated and fiendishly complex device from ancient China or Egypt. Yuri carried it over to the cluttered work table in the corner of his tiny living room. With a cup of coffee at his right elbow, Ingram’s copy of Lucky Jim at his left and the cipher, notepad, pen and his trusty laptop in front of him, he got down to his task with an energy he’d forgotten he had. The laptop was loaded with a decryption program he’d designed himself, called CAESAR. But, just like in the good old days, technology would be no substitute for sheer brainwork. Man, not machine, would be doing most of the heavy lifting.

The thing was a modified Polybius square with straddling bipartite monoalphabetic substitution, superenciphered by double transposition. In short, it was a tough little bastard to crack. Without the yellowed, dog-eared old book, he’d have been lost. Somewhere within its pages was the key to whatever message the British spy had been trying to pass to his colleagues. He was damned if he couldn’t find it.

Yuri worked all night. And all of the next day. And all of the following night as well. He worked until he was exhausted, skipping meals, snoozing for short periods at the desk, reluctant to leave his chair even for toilet breaks. He worked until the whole room was littered with screwed-up sheets of paper covered in gobbledegook.

But he got it. Finally, as the first streaks of dawn were breaking on the third day, with just a little help from CAESAR, he got it.

When the computer finally spat out the finished decryption, Yuri fell back in his chair and stared at the screen for a long time. The decoded message was short. The bottom lines were a set of geo coordinates. The top line consisted of just five words, in English. OPERATION PUPPET MASTER IS REAL.

Those five words couldn’t have hit Yuri harder if they had been bullets fired from a high-powered rifle.

‘Operation Puppet Master’ was the translation of the Russian ‘Oперaция кукольныи мaстер’, and one of the great mythical beasts in the pantheon of conspiracy theory dating back to Cold War times. On internet forums and all across the blogosphere, debate still raged among paranoid nutjobs and serious investigators alike over whether the highly classified Soviet project had ever been more than a wild fantasy. He and Grisha had talked about it often. While Grisha was an avid believer, of course, Yuri had been privately sceptical: file under ‘Giant Alien Lizards’.

Suddenly that scepticism had been blown to smithereens. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ he breathed.

The bastards had actually been developing this stuff all along? It was real?

Not only real, but worrying enough, apparently, to have drawn the attention of SIS, the British Intelligence Service, precursor to MI6, so long ago. Enough of a threat for the likes of Captain Leonard Ingram to risk and lose his life over. Things didn’t get more real than that.

Yuri fed the geo coordinates into Google and discovered that they pointed to a location right here, in Moscow. It was obvious what he had to do next.

Yuri’s car was an ancient Volkswagen that wheezed and rattled and grew lighter each year as more parts dropped off. Traffic was mercifully sparse at that time of morning, and the banger was able to reach its destination without expiring. The area was in the east of the city, part of the Novogireyevo district where the KGB had apprehended the British spy back in ’57. The coordinates led Yuri to a fenced-off row of old Soviet-era warehouses that must have been disused even then, now decades overdue for demolition.

Ingram’s decoded directions were amazingly precise. Behind a stack of rusty, jagged metal and empty crates, Yuri came across the tobacco tin exactly where the spy had left it all those years ago. He hustled back to his car to open it. The round pocket-sized tin was red with rust on the outside, but when he used a coin to pop the lid he found the airtight seal still intact, opening with a little hiss of stale air trapped in there since 1957.

Inside the tin was a roll of microfilm, then the summit of technology, nowadays easily scanned and read on a home computer. The other item left Yuri breathless. He peeled away the square of oiled cloth in which it had been wrapped, and let the thing roll into the cupped palm of his hand, careful not to drop it. It was only a few millimetres in length, oblong-shaped and rounded at both ends like a medicine capsule, but made of shiny metal that was smooth and cold to the touch. If it was what Yuri thought it was, it was beyond sensational. Its discovery could change everything. Never mind myths and speculation: here, for the first time, was the hard physical evidence that could blow the lid right off the whole conspiracy.

No wonder Bezukhov and his people didn’t want this coming out. Like plutonium, the chief had said. The secret was as explosive now as it had been sixty years ago. Maybe even more so. What were these bastards still up to? How much more advanced must the technology be today? It was a terrifying thought.

He had to tell Grisha about this. Grisha would know what to do.

Yuri fished out his mobile, then swore as he realised that in his hurry to leave the apartment he’d snatched his regular phone instead of the burner he used to communicate with Grisha. He’d been so busy he hadn’t checked his emails the last two days – and now there was one waiting there from Eloise, his ex-wife.

‘Bitch!’ he yelled out loud when he read it.

In her latest scheme against him, Eloise was now threatening to prevent future visits from their daughter and ending his custody rights, on grounds of poor parenting. Specifically, because for three out of five of Valentina’s last trips to Moscow, he’d failed to turn up to collect her.

Yuri knew he was guilty as charged. But Eloise’s vindictiveness had reached new heights. She couldn’t do this! Then again, Yuri thought angrily, maybe she could. Eloise’s uncle, whom Yuri had always despised, had all the money and power in the world. He was probably a lizard person, too.

The email reminded Yuri that he was due to pick Valentina up at the airport later that day. He’d been so focused on the cipher, he’d nearly forgotten that she was visiting for the next five days. He couldn’t afford another no-show, in case that harpy of a mother of hers made good on her legal threat. The idea of not seeing his beloved kid again for a long time upset him enormously.

As if Yuri’s mind wasn’t already overloaded with stress right now. What was he going to do about his discovery? Forcing himself to think logically, he realised his options were few. If he delivered the decryption and the contents of the tin back to Bezukhov, he’d be signing his own death warrant. People who knew too much were made to disappear just as efficiently as in the days of the KGB. Maybe even more so. But if Yuri chose to deny Bezukhov his prize, he was a marked man. They’d hunt him to the ends of the earth until they found him and put a bullet in his skull.

With shaking hands, Yuri replaced the precious items in the tin, screwed it tightly shut and was about to start the car when his phone rang.

‘Well?’ Bezukhov’s voice rumbled in his ear. ‘Any progress? It’s been days.’

‘It’s you, chief,’ Yuri said, thinking furiously. It was decision time. ‘Well, I, uh, you see—’

‘I told you I expected results.’

‘And you’ll get them. I just need more time, that’s all.’

‘What’s taking so damn long?’

‘It’s been tougher to decipher than I expected. I’ll get there, trust me.’

Bezukhov growled a series of dire warnings about what would happen if he didn’t, and soon, and then hung up.

Yuri started his engine with a rattle and a puff of blue smoke, and sped off. The thought of telling his secret to Grisha terrified him almost as much as letting Bezukhov have it. Grisha would waste no time plastering it all over the internet, and you didn’t need to be a genius to figure out what would happen next.

Yuri couldn’t wait to see what was on the microfilm, the final confirmation as if any were needed. Rushing back to his dingy apartment as fast as his jalopy would carry him, he dived into his desk chair and fired up his PC and scanner. The process of scanning the microfilm was a simple but time-consuming one, for such a small quantity of information. What in the fifties would take up a whole roll of microfilm now used only the tiniest amount of digital storage. But the data itself was even more astonishing than Yuri had anticipated. Everything was in Russian, officially marked with the stamp of a Soviet-era intelligence unit he’d never even heard of. It comprised a mind-boggling collection of detailed instructions and plans, blueprints, case studies and more. Yuri didn’t know whether to laugh out loud, or whimper in dread. He ended up doing both.

Yuri carefully encrypted the file, stored it on a flash drive that he would keep on his person at all times, and erased all trace of it from his computer. Even just walking around the apartment, he felt as though he was carrying a megaton warhead in his pocket.

At times like these, you need the counsel of an especially wise friend to guide you. Yuri swallowed down some coffee and a stale bagel, then ran back to his car and headed to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street to seek the advice of the wisest friend anyone could wish for, even if He wasn’t always forthcoming with His reply. A while later, Yuri emerged from the church feeling somewhat let down; but there was little time to agonise over it, as he then had to scoot over to the airport in time to pick up Valentina.

Yuri’s twelve-year-old daughter was his pride and joy. So full of light and sharp intelligence, she almost made him forget his predicament as they spent the first day of her visit together. He’d promised her a super-fun time, and it was, exploring the parks, visiting the zoo, cooking lunch together, laughing at Valentina’s hilarious impressions of her teachers, telling jokes, watching a goofy DVD. By evening, Yuri had managed to relax somewhat, and decided what to do. He called Grisha on his burner, but his friend didn’t pick up. Drunk again, no doubt, or working double shifts warning the world of the evil plots being hatched against them.

The following day – still no reply from Grisha and mercifully no more calls from Bezukhov, though that was just a question of time – Yuri took Valentina out for lunch. Nothing expensive, because he had no money. Over a McChicken sandwich meal, conversing in Dutch as they generally did together out of habit from their Amsterdam days, he discreetly raised the subject of her mother’s lawyer. Valentina appeared not to know anything about Eloise’s dirty little schemes, which was just as well. Yuri tried to console himself that it was just an idle threat. Eloise was well known for her manipulative ways, and this kind of emotional blackmail was not beneath her.

It was as they were walking home after lunch that Yuri passed a newsstand, did a double-take at something he’d glimpsed on the front page of the latest edition of Metro Moscow, and went rushing over to buy a copy.

He had to blink several times before he was sure he wasn’t dreaming.

The priest he’d spoken to the day before had been found hanging from a bridge. Suicide.

Yuri stopped breathing. Dirty bastards. If they’d pressed the poor old man for information before they murdered him … if they knew what Yuri had confided in him …

He threw down the paper and instantly glanced around him at the passers-by on the busy street. It all looked innocent enough, but Yuri was thrown into a panic. Remembering to his horror that he’d left the flash drive and tobacco tin containing all the incriminating evidence right there on his desk, he was suddenly terrified. Could they be watching the apartment? Did they know where he lived? Maybe, but it was a chance he had to take. He seized Valentina’s hand. ‘Quickly. We’re going home. No time to lose, Sweet Pea.’ It was a pet name she’d always loved.

‘Why? What’s happening?’ the girl asked, alarmed at the look on his face.

‘To pick up some things, then we’re leaving.’

‘On a trip, like the other time? To see Uncle Grisha?’

‘That’s right, Sweet Pea. You liked that, didn’t you? But don’t say his name, okay? Not until we get there.’

‘Why?’

‘Just because.’

Armed thugs didn’t pounce on them at the apartment, and to Yuri’s immense relief the evidence was still right where he’d left it. He snatched the tin and the flash drive and stuffed them into his pocket. ‘Okay, that’s enough. Let’s go, Valentina.’

‘But my things—’ the girl said, crestfallen.

They could be here any minute. ‘No time, baby. We can pick up anything we need on the way. Come on!’

‘Wait, my phone!’ It was by the bedside in the spare room. Pink, like most everything else Valentina owned.

Yuri was very aware of all the fancy geo-location toys the intelligence services could use to hack and track anyone’s smartphone. For the same reason, he was frightened to bring his laptop with him. ‘No. You have to leave it behind.’

‘But it’s mine.’

‘I’m sorry, baby. I can’t explain why, but you can’t bring it with you. Too dangerous.’

‘Don’t be silly, Papa. How can a phone be dangerous?’

‘It just is. Come on, Valentina!’ Yuri could see she wouldn’t listen. In his panicky frustration, he could think of only one way to end the dispute. He barged past his daughter into the spare bedroom, grabbed her phone, dropped it on the floor and crunched it several times with his heel until it was in bits. Valentina stared at the broken pink pieces, and in disbelief at her normally so placid father for what he’d just done, then burst into tears.

‘There,’ he said, feeling awful. ‘Now you don’t need to worry about your phone any more. Let’s go.’

Yuri Petrov hurried his daughter away from the apartment, knowing he would never return to this place. All that mattered to him now was getting away from here.

Minutes later, the first attempt would be made to snatch them.

Chapter 4

Normandy, France

Several days later

The light summer rain filtered through the oak woodland canopy to fall as drips and splashes to the ground that was soft and spongy with decayed moss and leaves layered season on season for thousands of years. The trees grew thick and wild, blocking out the sunlight; here and there a fallen trunk overgrown with creeping ivy and barbed-wire brambles.

Once upon a time the Neolithic forest had spread far and wide, later to form a battleground for invading Roman legions and the Celtic Gaulish defenders of the land, whose swords and arrowheads still remained buried deep under layers of soil. The areas of woodland that had survived to modern times probably looked no different from when Druids had practised their strange magic and rituals here, and wild boar and red deer and roebuck roamed free, preyed on by wolves, bears and tribal humans.

Today, the prey and predators were of a different kind.

From the green shadows stepped a man. His hair and clothing were wet from the rain, his face streaked with dirt. Alone, unarmed and hunted, he had been evading his pursuers for close to two hours. At times they’d been so close to him that he could hear the rasp of their breath, smell the tang of their sweat. They were all around him, spread out through the acres of forest like a net, and they wouldn’t give up until the fugitive was caught.

He paused, as still as the trees, scenting the air, his acute hearing filtering out the background hum of insects and the chirping of birds for the tiniest sound of his enemies closing in. There; three o’clock from his position, no more than twenty metres away through the foliage: the crack of a twig underfoot, followed by a wary silence. Someone approaching.

The fugitive fixed his enemy’s position and moved on, padding over the rough ground as silently as a hunted animal when danger is near. His pursuers were a dedicated professional four-man team equipped with automatic rifles and sidearms. He was alone and had no weapons other than his wits and experience. Which gave him an edge over his hunters. And as he knew very well, having an edge was everything in war.

He would not be caught. He refused to fail.

The fugitive stalked his way through the trees, pausing frequently to listen and observe. Then he stopped. The man whose careless footstep had given away his position was right there up ahead, just five metres away with his back turned, quite unaware that his quarry was creeping up close behind. His rifle was slanted across his chest, gripped tightly in his gloved hands. Like the fugitive, he was dressed in military disruptive pattern material camo, except the utility belt around his waist held a holstered pistol and a commando knife. He was glancing left and right as he paced slowly between the trees. The stress of the long, gruelling hunt was telling on the man’s tense body language and the rapid rate of his breathing.

The fugitive smiled. Those were good signs. The enemy is at his most vulnerable when he’s nervous. Get him spooked enough, grind down his morale, and he’s ripe for defeat.

All at once, prey became predator as the fugitive suddenly struck out of the shadows. It was all over in an instant: the pursuer down on the ground, face pressed into the moss and leaves, unable to make a sound for the strong hand clamped over his mouth. The fugitive unsnapped the commando knife from the man’s sheath and touched the flat of its blade against the soft flesh of his neck. The words the fugitive whispered into the man’s ear chilled his blood and froze him in mid-struggle.

‘You’re dead.’

The man relented, and the tension went out of his muscles as he realised it was over for him. The fugitive kept the pressure of the blade on his neck as he trussed the man’s wrists one-handed with a thick plastic cable tie. He did the same for the man’s ankles. Then he thrust the knife into his belt and picked up the fallen rifle. He moved on, still listening hard for the crackles and snaps of the remaining hunters moving through the forest.

He could sense them not far away. The map of their ever-shifting positions was like a three-dimensional model inside his mind, marked by the points of an imaginary compass. The nearest one was roughly southwest, less than forty metres off. The fugitive’s nostrils flared and twitched at the scent of him. Lesson number one: don’t wear aftershave when you embark on a manhunt after a seasoned operator.

In less than a minute, the fugitive was right behind his enemy. He touched the barrel of the captured rifle to the man’s back and whispered, ‘Bang.’ The man turned, put up his hands, immediately accepting defeat. Moments later he was trussed, gagged and helpless in the bushes, like his comrade before him. Without a sound, the fugitive dragged his captive over the ground to where he’d left the first one. The two lay helplessly side by side in the leaves, wriggling like caught fish and muttering stifled curses behind their gags. The fugitive left them to resume his stalk. The pursuit had gone on long enough. It was time to end it.

The last two were paired up together, slipping furtively through the trees when a section of shadow to their left seemed to come alive and detached itself towards them. By the time they saw the movement and the gun aiming at them, it was too late to react.

‘Lose your weapons. On the ground. Flat on your faces, arms out to the sides.’

The fugitive secured their wrists behind their backs and relieved them of their sidearms. He left their ankles unbound so that he could march them back at gunpoint to reunite them with their companions. Once all four were lined up sitting on the wet ground he slashed their plastic bonds and they rose warily to their feet, rubbing their wrists and looking up at him with just a little resentment in their eyes. They were unhurt, but thoroughly humiliated and dismayed. They had travelled to this location as a team, in the hopes of demonstrating their skills. This outcome was far from the one they’d anticipated.

The fugitive’s name was Ben Hope. He leaned against a tree trunk, reached into the pocket of his camouflage combat vest for one of the blue cigarette packs he always carried and went through in large quantities, and lit up with a battered steel lighter. As he contentedly puffed the Gauloise, he studied the expressions on the faces of his students and smiled.

‘Don’t feel so bad, boys. Education’s all about making mistakes and learning how to avoid making them again. That’s what you’re here for.’

The location of the training exercise was a place called Le Val, in rural northern France. In some circles it had become a key facility, just about the only place in the world where certain specialist skills could be acquired by those prepared to pay the fee and take the strain. Le Val was jointly owned and operated by Ben and his business partner and longtime friend, Jeff Dekker. It had been steadily growing for some years now, the latest development being the purchase of an additional forty-acre parcel of forest to add to the existing spread of the estate. It had been a huge undertaking to fence off so much extra land to keep it secure from intruders, unwitting or otherwise – but the investment meant Le Val could now offer courses in pursuit and tracking skills on top of all the other educational services they provided to the police, military and private security trainees who came to them from all over the world.

Today’s group were part of a specialist fugitive manhunt agency based in Belgium and affiliated to INTERPOL, seeking a five-day CPD training in the art and science of capturing a fleeing subject in a rural or wilderness environment. The first job of the Le Val Tactical Training Centre was to expose, break down and analyse their weaknesses as a team. That first morning’s session had revealed some issues. Now it was time to start examining what had gone awry.

The post-operation debrief took place in a prefabricated hut in a pretty wildflower meadow close to the edge of the woods, outside which were parked the two long-wheelbase Land Rover Defenders that would later shuttle everyone back to Le Val’s farmhouse HQ. Ben was joined by Jeff Dekker and their business associate Tuesday Fletcher to run through the results of the morning class. The various weaponry – consisting of trainer rifles, pistols and knives that felt and weighed exactly like the real thing but were made of bright blue plastic – were stacked on a table beside them, next to the obligatory canteen of hot coffee brewed up on the military Jetboil stove.

The Belgians were visibly demoralised and exhausted, and so Jeff spared them the scathing criticisms that were half-hanging off his tongue and contented himself with standing against the wall with his arms folded and a sneer of contempt on his face. After half an hour’s lecture detailing the many missteps that had allowed the team’s target to not only evade capture but turn the tables on them, Ben decided they had suffered enough.

‘Okay, folks, let’s break for the day and get some rest. You’ll need it, because tomorrow we’re going to repeat the exercise all over again and see if we can improve on today’s performance. Any questions?’

There was a chorus of groans. One of the trainees complained, ‘If it’d been for real, we’d have had dogs.’

‘It’s a fair point,’ Ben said. ‘But relying on a K9 unit is a luxury you might not always get to enjoy. Imagine the dogs have copped it. Put out of action by pepper spray, wire traps or a bullet. Now you’re on your own. Depending on your own skills. That’s what’s being tested here.’

‘Yeah, but you were an SAS major,’ moaned another. ‘Not even in the same ballpark as most of the crooks we go after. How many guys like you are we ever going to have to catch, in real life?’

Jeff just glared at them and shook his head. Tuesday was having a hard time not laughing – but then, the young Jamaican ex-soldier had a habit of always seeing the funny side, even when he was being shot at.

Ben shrugged and replied, ‘The Roman army used to train their legionaries with lead swords, three times heavier than their regular sidearms. Why? So that when it came to the thick of battle where the metal meets the meat and a man’s nerve is tested like never before, they felt invincible because their issue weapons were like a feather in their hand. If you don’t believe in your abilities, you’re already the loser. Belief is confidence. I want your team to leave here confident that you can catch not just some ordinary Joe, but anyone. Because you never know who you might be sent to take down.’

‘And nobody likes making a total bollocking fool of themselves, now do they, fellas?’ Jeff added, apparently unable to resist getting in some slight dig.

Ben was about to say something a little more reassuring when the thud of a fast-approaching helicopter suddenly rattled the hut’s windows. The chopper wasn’t passing over, it was coming in to land – and that definitely wasn’t part of the day’s schedule.

‘Hello, what’s this all about?’ Jeff muttered.

They stepped outside to find out.

Chapter 5

The afternoon sunlight made little starbursts on the chopper’s shiny red fuselage as it settled down to land in the meadow a little distance from the hut. Ben and Jeff walked out to meet it, both wondering who their unexpected visitor might be. The blast from the spinning rotor blades ruffled their hair and flattened a circle of grass and wildflowers around the landed aircraft. They could see the pilot through the Perspex window, shutting everything down. As the pitch of the turbine began to dwindle and the rotors slowed, a rear hatch swung open and the chopper’s two passengers stepped out.

The first to emerge was an elderly man named Auguste Kaprisky whom Ben and Jeff both knew well, due to the fact that he’d been a client of theirs in the not-so-distant past. Born August Kaprisky in Rottweil, Germany, eighty-two years earlier, he had become a devoted Francophile in his middle age, moved his home and business to Le Mans and suffixed the ‘e’ to his first name to make it sound more Gallic.

Kaprisky might be old, but he was still fit as a fiddle and as mentally sharp as the day he’d wangled his first million, sixty years ago. He was currently ranked fourth on the Forbes list of Europe’s richest billionaires, although aside from his surname and flashy corporate logo painted on the side of the helicopter nothing about his appearance hinted remotely at vast wealth. Tall and stringy in the same tatty old green chequered suit Ben remembered from every time they’d met, he looked more like a hobo clinging on to dignity than one of the continent’s most powerful and influential tycoons.

His co-passenger, awkwardly climbing out of the chopper after him, was a woman a fraction of his age. She appeared expensively groomed and polished, with a mass of long fair hair tied up in an elaborate braid that must have taken a team of top-class beauticians eight hours to perfect. Ben had never seen her before; he wondered fleetingly whether Kaprisky, a widower for many years, might have finally succumbed to the same temptation as so many other fabulously rich old men and got himself a trophy wife.

Whoever she was, Ben noticed as he and Jeff got closer, she looked teary and distraught. The expression on the old man’s face told Ben he wasn’t very happy either. Auguste Kaprisky was known as ‘the man who never laughs’. Come to think of it, Ben had seldom seen even the faintest ghost of a smile bend his lips. Today he looked grimmer than ever. Clearly, this unannounced visit was no social call.

Ben reached him and put out a hand to shake. ‘Auguste, what a surprise,’ he shouted over the diminishing yowl of the turbine. He and his client were in the habit of speaking French to one another, which Ben did fluently. Jeff was still struggling with the language, despite the best efforts of his new fiancée, a local teacher called Chantal.

‘Your staff told me I would find you here,’ Kaprisky shouted back, croaky and throaty. The woman was clutching at her braid to save it from being blasted to pieces by the hurricane. Kaprisky didn’t have much hair left to protect, and probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.

As the four of them moved out of the wind and noise of the helicopter, Kaprisky apologised for turning up so unexpectedly. ‘I hope it’s not inconvenient. I would have called, but—’

‘Not at all,’ Ben replied. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’

Kaprisky’s lined face was as hard as concrete. ‘I need your help.’

Didn’t they all.

‘This isn’t a good place to talk,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s go back to the house.’

They climbed into the Land Rovers – Jeff, Tuesday and the four Belgians riding in the lead vehicle and Ben and the visitors following behind as they went bouncing and roaring over the meadows towards the main compound. Ben’s passengers were silent as he drove. He could feel their tension and wondered what this was about, but said nothing.

The old stone farmhouse, big and blocky and more than two hundred and fifty years old, was the central hub of Le Val, and the farmhouse kitchen was the central hub of the house. While Tuesday escorted the Belgians to the separate building used to accommodate trainees, Ben and Jeff led Auguste Kaprisky and his female companion inside. The kitchen was floored with original time-smoothed flagstones and lined with antique pine cupboards. The wine rack was always full, and there was always something delicious-smelling bubbling on the range courtesy of Marie-Claire, who lived in the nearby village and came in to cook for them. In the middle of the room was the pitted old pine table at which Ben, Jeff, Tuesday and a hundred Le Val trainees had spent countless hours talking, drinking, playing cards, planning strategies and (to Marie-Claire’s vociferous outrage) stripping and cleaning automatic weapons. It was all a far cry from the plush boardrooms out of which Kaprisky ran his multi-billion-euro empire, but the old man seemed too preoccupied to pay any notice to his surroundings.

They all sat around the table. Ben offered coffee, which was politely declined.

‘Now,’ Ben said, getting down to business. ‘What is it that brings you here, Auguste?’

The fair-haired woman still hadn’t been introduced, nor spoken a word. Kaprisky touched her hand. ‘This is my niece, Eloise. She speaks English, German and Dutch but very little French, having moved here relatively recently. I would like her to participate in this discussion, so may we switch to English for the remainder of the conversation?’

‘Of course,’ Ben said in English. Jeff looked much relieved.

Kaprisky made the usual introductions, in his rather stiff and formal way. Eloise offered a small smile and a limp handshake, and said very little.

‘Again, I must apologise for this intrusion,’ Kaprisky said. ‘My reason for being here is, as I said, that I – we – desperately need expert assistance with a matter of extreme urgency. I would have made contact to warn you in advance of our arrival, but what I’m about to reveal to you is, well, most delicate.’

Ben wasn’t surprised by the lack of communication. Kaprisky was an inveterate paranoid who worried neurotically about phone taps and email hacking. Ever since the attempt on his life, when a disgruntled business rival had lost his mind and assaulted Kaprisky’s home with an Uzi submachine gun, he’d spent untold fortunes turning his estate near Le Mans into a fortress within whose impenetrable walls the old man lived like a virtual recluse. When Jeff sometimes commented that Kaprisky was turning into Howard Hughes, he wasn’t joking. Only a serious emergency could have prompted the billionaire to leave his stronghold.

Kaprisky paused, spread his hands out on the table, seemed about to speak, then threw a covert sideways glance at Jeff.

‘Am I a third wheel here?’ Jeff said, catching his look. ‘No problem, I can make myself scarce.’

‘Whatever you’re about to tell me,’ Ben said to Kaprisky, ‘understand that I have no secrets from my business partner and you need have none either. I trust this man with my life.’

Kaprisky seemed satisfied with that. Eloise sat very still beside him, gazing at the table with a set frown wrinkling her brow.

‘I’m guessing this matter has to do with Eloise?’ Ben prompted.

Kaprisky nodded. ‘She is the only child of my late brother, Gustav. She is as dear to me as if she were my own daughter.’

Ben said, ‘Naturally.’ Then waited to hear what on earth this was about.

Talking as though his niece weren’t present in the room with them, Kaprisky went on, ‘Her full name is Eloise Petrova. Personally, I thought Eloise Kaprisky sounded far better, but in fact anything would have. The reason for this unfortunate change is that she married a Russian.’ Kaprisky spat that last word out as though his niece had married an alien slime creature. ‘Fortunately, she had the sense to split from him after a mere ten years. The divorce was an extremely acrimonious one. I will spare you the painful details.’

‘I’m sorry to hear of your family trouble,’ Ben said. Still wondering.

Kaprisky shook his head. ‘Not I. I have never tried to conceal my conviction that the marriage was a disaster from the start. Yuri Petrov is, has always been, and as far as I am concerned will always be, with no possibility of redemption whatsoever should he live for all eternity, the worst kind of pathetic excuse for a human being.’

‘So you don’t think much of the guy,’ Jeff interjected.

‘There is no man alive more unsuited to be a husband to my precious Eloise, or the father of her child. He is the most indolent, self-seeking, worthless piece of—’

‘We get the general idea,’ Ben said.

‘Forgive me,’ Kaprisky said, collecting himself and wiping flecks of spittle from his lips. ‘I get very worked up. It’s just that this haunts our lives, even two years after the marriage ended. Things were bad enough when this moron whisked Eloise off to live for a decade in Amsterdam, where he apparently had some kind of employment, the nature of which has never been clear to me—’

If that was a cue for Eloise to step in and say something, she didn’t respond to it. Her uncle carried on, ‘She then had to tie herself forever to him by having a child with him, despite all my warnings that she would come to bitterly regret it.’ Kaprisky halted mid-stream and grimaced. ‘I don’t mean the child herself. She brings nothing but joy and we love her dearly.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Ben said.

‘How I pleaded for her to see sense, but did she listen? No, no. Now she must deal with the fool every time they exchange custody of their daughter. To make matters even worse, the idiot has since returned to live in Russia.’ Land of the slime creatures, apparently.

‘What’s the girl’s name?’ Ben asked Kaprisky. There seemed little point in asking the mother, who still hadn’t offered a word to the conversation.

‘Valentina. She’s twelve.’ Kaprisky sighed. ‘As much as I despise her worthless father, I dote on that child. If anything should happen to her, I …’

Ben sensed the tone of desperation in his voice. Now, maybe, they were coming to the crux of the matter. ‘This is about Valentina, isn’t it? Is something wrong?’

Eloise Petrova went on staring vacantly at the tabletop. Kaprisky slowly nodded, his eyes filling up like dark pools of despair.

‘Yes, this is about Valentina. It appears that she and her father have disappeared. And we know why. The brute has kidnapped her.’

Chapter 6

Now Ben understood why Kaprisky had brought this to him.

For several years after he’d quit the military, Ben had operated as a freelance ‘crisis response consultant’ specialising in the area of what was known as ‘K&R’. The acronym stood for ‘Kidnap and Ransom’. The fast-growing industry of misery, terror and death perpetrated by cruel men against the innocent and the vulnerable. It was the most innocent and vulnerable victims of them all – kidnapped kids – whom Ben had most tried to help. The taking of a child, whether to extort money from the frantic family or for myriad other reasons, was the thing he despised the most. He’d have despised it, and its perpetrators, even if he hadn’t gone through the anguish and horror of losing his nine-year-old sister to human traffickers when he was a teenager, and the catastrophic family breakdown that had followed.

Nothing he’d done in his entire Special Forces career had driven him the way he’d been driven to find those lost children, bring them home safe and punish the men who’d snatched them from their families. To this day he could remember the names and faces of every single kid he’d rescued. He often thought about them, what they were doing now that they were older, what life was like for them, whether they ever still had nightmares about being taken and held prisoner. For him, the memories of children locked in damp, filthy basements, imprisoned in cages, chained to beds, blindfolded in the dark, often drugged, too often abused in other ways, would never fade. Thinking about it now, he felt his fists clench tight.

‘I haven’t been involved in that for a long time,’ he said to Kaprisky. ‘I’m not even going to ask who you’ve been talking to. It’s not exactly public knowledge what I used to do.’

‘I have many connections, my young friend. And there are many people in this world, whose names you and I both know, who still regard you as their saviour. Rest assured they are extremely discreet to whom they divulge such information, but they will never forget what you did to reunite families torn apart by monsters.’

Ben looked at Eloise, who still hadn’t said a word since they were introduced, then back at her uncle. ‘And that’s what you believe Valentina’s father is, a monster?’

Kaprisky said, ‘Parents have been known to kidnap their own children, have they not?’

Ben had indeed known several cases of that happening. It was usually done to harm the other partner in some way, the ultimate expression of a catastrophically fragmented relationship. That variety of kidnapper seldom chained their own kids up in basements or deliberately harmed them – although it wasn’t unknown to happen; but there was nonetheless a serious risk of harm coming to the kids as the ring closed around the offending parent and they became increasingly desperate to get away. More than one had ended up endangering their child’s life in a high-speed car chase or a volatile armed standoff with bullets flying in all directions.

That was why, in Ben’s experience, the often heavy-handed tactics of official law enforcement frequently did as much damage as good. Many of the stricken families who had come to him for help in the past had heard the horror stories and decided to forgo police involvement in favour of more unorthodox, yet far more effective, methods. Ben had no problem with bullets flying, but he liked them to be properly aimed where they were meant to go: into the kidnappers themselves, and preferably not into their hostages.

‘Have you reported this to the authorities?’ In his K&R rescue days it was always the first question he’d asked prospective clients, bracing himself for the reply.

Kaprisky shook his head. ‘Informing the police would, I agree, be the first and most obvious recourse. However, as you know, I value my privacy, and also that of what little family I have left. For that reason I would prefer not to have my niece’s private affairs disclosed to strangers.’ He paused. ‘I am also a highly cautious man, who has learned never to step on ground without having first made certain it was safe to walk on. It takes only the minimum of research to reveal that, if the many tragic reports of ineptly mishandled cases are true, involving the forces of conventional law and order in such instances is all too often the worst error one could possibly make.’

‘That’s your choice,’ Ben said.

‘And so, that option must remain the very last resort, not the first. I would do anything to keep this in the family, so to speak, if at all possible. I consider that I owe you my life, Major Hope. That is as good as a blood connection for me. And that, as you have surmised, is why I am here.’

Ben hated being called by his military rank, but the old man got some kick out of authority titles and nothing would dissuade him of the habit of addressing Ben that way. ‘I’m honoured, Auguste. But I’ll only tell you what the police would have told you. Genuine kidnap cases are mercifully rare. There could be other possible reasons to eliminate before we start jumping to radical conclusions. Why don’t you run through exactly what happened? From the beginning.’

Kaprisky knitted his long, bony fingers in front of him on the table. He licked his lips, as though they’d gone dry. ‘May I trouble you for a glass of wine? My nerves are shattered.’

‘Of course.’ Ben stood, grabbed four glasses from the cupboard and a bottle of Chante Clair, Le Val’s current house red, from the rack. He pulled the cork, poured out the glasses and sat down. ‘You won’t mind if I smoke?’

Kaprisky took a long drink of wine. Eloise didn’t touch hers. Jeff knocked his down at a gulp and refilled it. Ben lit a Gauloise and leaned back in his chair.

‘As I said,’ Kaprisky went on, ‘Valentina’s father now resides in Russia. Moscow, to be precise. Since the divorce Eloise and Valentina have come to live on the estate at Le Mans, where they are very happy and Valentina is home-schooled by the finest private tutors money can buy. The unsavoury custody terms of the divorce settlement are that she spend a week with her worthless father every two months, which we have been honouring except in winter when it was too cold. As you know, I have my own personal jet on permanent standby not far from home.’

‘Indeed I do,’ Ben said. The previous year, Ben’s grown-up son Jude had got into serious trouble off the east coast of Africa that had required a very rapid intervention by Ben, Jeff and Tuesday. Kaprisky had provided the Gulfstream G650 as emergency transport, without which Jude would be dead now.

‘So, whenever it has been his time to have her,’ Kaprisky continued, ‘we put Valentina on the Gulfstream and fly her over, where he is supposed to meet her at the private terminal at the airport, to drive her to the dive of an apartment he keeps in some squalid part of the city. She normally stays for five days. At the end of each interminable visit, the process reverses and she flies home to us. In this way, the poor girl has been passed back and forth like the ball in a game of long-distance tennis. Scarcely the most satisfactory arrangement, but we have endured – until now.

‘Four days ago, at what should have been the end of her most recent trip to Moscow, Valentina failed to come home. The pilot called us to say that neither she nor her father showed up at the airport. I eventually had him fly the empty plane back to Le Mans. We have been frantically trying to contact them ever since, without success.’

Jeff knocked down another gulp of wine and made a frown that rippled his brow into corrugated creases. ‘So, Yuri just decided a week with his kid wasn’t long enough, or what?’

Kaprisky snorted derisively. ‘I suspect a far less wholesome motivation than fatherly attachment is at work here.’

‘Four days,’ Ben said, more to himself than Kaprisky. His mind was spinning through a hundred possibilities. On the one hand, a four-day absence wasn’t that long. On the other, a lot of very bad things could happen in less time.

‘But I have not been sitting idly waiting,’ Kaprisky replied. ‘No sooner had the aircraft returned without Valentina than we were ready to refuel and fly straight back there, with a team of my best men aboard. One of them, Andriy Vasilchuk, grew up in the Ukraine and speaks some Russian. I additionally employed a Moscow private investigation firm to assist the team in their enquiries. Their instructions were to go immediately to Petrov’s apartment and commence the search for him and Valentina.’

‘And they didn’t find them there, obviously.’

‘Not only that, but on questioning neighbours in his apartment block, it transpires that nobody there had glimpsed any sign of Petrov, nor of the child, for days before he should have delivered her to the airport.’

Kaprisky let out a long breath through his nose, leaned forward and fixed Ben intently with his piercing eyes. ‘I am no expert and would always defer to your superior judgement in these matters. But, to me, this situation bears all the suspicious hallmarks of an abduction. Please tell me if you can think of any other possible explanation.’

Ben was thinking hard. He said nothing as Kaprisky went on staring at him with such intensity that the old man was almost trembling.

Just then, Eloise spoke up for the first time since she’d sat down. Despite a marked German accent, her English was perfect. ‘There’s more you need to know. My uncle hasn’t mentioned the fact that, before this happened, I had been investigating my legal options to restrict Yuri’s right of parental access.’

Ben narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Why? Are you suggesting—?’

She flinched visibly at the notion. ‘Abuse? No, nothing of that sort.’

Kaprisky gave another snort, as if to say, ‘Who knows what that creep might be capable of?’ His niece shot him a look and went on: ‘What it is, Monsieur Hope, is that on several occasions when Valentina was sent to visit her father, he failed to show up at the other end to collect her, and she had to be flown back home without having even seen him. No apologies from my ex-husband, no attempt to explain, not even a call. Finally, after two missed visits in a row, I lost my temper and sent him a message.’

Ben could see where this was leading. ‘You threatened him.’

‘I had consulted my lawyers earlier that day, who were confident we could make a case against Yuri on grounds of neglect. I told him straight out that I had had enough of his behaviour, that I would be putting things in motion and that Valentina’s next visit to him would be her last.’ Eloise shook her head. Her eyes clouded and she dabbed at one of them with a knuckle, smearing her mascara. ‘I was so angry with him. I didn’t realise what I’d done. This is all my fault.’

‘Absolute rubbish,’ Kaprisky said. ‘The blame lies entirely with that reckless imbecile. You did the right thing, my dear. How many times have you complained to me of that man’s unreliability, his complete lack of responsibility, the way he pours so much vodka down his throat that he reeks of the stuff from morning until night … Need one say more?’

Eloise gave a tiny nod, her eyes still misted up with tears. ‘It’s true, he does drink far too much. I’ve tried quizzing Valentina about it, but she doesn’t say anything, and I think it’s to protect him. The fact is that he was never emotionally stable, and I think he’s got worse and worse since the divorce.’

‘As well as being a pathological liar,’ Kaprisky added angrily. ‘All those years in Amsterdam, when he was supposedly employed in some aspect of the computer business, I always thought the whole thing suspiciously vague. I was long convinced that he was leading a double life of some kind. God only knows what that man was up to, and no doubt still is. In a debauched, morally bankrupt drug addicts’ haven like Amsterdam, of all places?’

‘I’m past caring what he does,’ Eloise said bitterly. ‘Let him live how he pleases. He can destroy himself for all I care. But not with my Valentina.’ She turned to Ben, eyes brimming. ‘Do you not see? If I hadn’t threatened him he wouldn’t have taken her. I made him panic. I made this happen. And now there’s no telling what could happen next. I might never see my little girl again. Am I not right?’

Ben was beginning to think she was. Which meant the worst fears of uncle and niece might very well be justified. All the indicators were pointing unpleasantly towards this being a classic parental kidnapping.

It seemed unlikely that Yuri Petrov would intentionally harm his daughter. But he would be fully intent on not being found. That was the tricky part.

‘Please,’ Kaprisky said. ‘Will you help us?’

Ben said nothing for a long time. He stubbed out the butt of his Gauloise. He could feel the three pairs of eyes on him: Jeff’s as well as Kaprisky and Eloise. Finally Ben asked, ‘Do you still have men watching the apartment?’

Kaprisky nodded. ‘If Petrov had returned there at any time since his disappearance, I would know about it. I also have some connections at government level, who would have notified me if Petrov had attempted to leave the country. As far as we know, he is still in Russia.’

‘Russia’s a fairly large place,’ Ben said. ‘Any way to narrow that down a little?’

‘I am afraid not, no. We have no idea where he could have taken her. They could be travelling even as we speak.’

‘Then you have a problem,’ Ben said. ‘A bigger one than you perhaps realise. This isn’t about scouring a few known haunts, talking to his drinking cronies and sniffing out a borrowed apartment or some cheap rental where he might be lying low somewhere in the same city. Instead, you’re telling me Yuri and Valentina are a moving target anywhere within over six million square miles of the biggest country in the world. Dozens of major cities to choose from. Massive mountain ranges. Forests the size of England. The longest rivers on the planet. A coastline that stretches from the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. A lone operator couldn’t cover that much ground in months, maybe years. Only the Russian authorities would have the resources and manpower to launch a nationwide manhunt on this scale. I don’t even speak the language.’

‘If it’s a question of money—’

‘It’s not,’ Ben said.

‘I would spare no expense to find her. None whatsoever. My own resources are vast.’

‘I know that, Auguste.’

‘I am begging you, Major.’

‘Ben.’

‘I implore you, Ben. Go to Russia and find Valentina. Bring her back. There is nobody else I trust to carry out this job. My own men are amateurs by comparison to you.’

Everyone was staring at Ben. He lit another cigarette and took a long, slow drag. He washed that down with a long, slow drink of the red wine. Then he set down his glass. Gave a deep sigh. Looked straight into the eyes of the two desperate people sitting across the table from him. And said:

‘I’m sorry. I think the two of you should waste no more time in reporting this to the police. For all their faults, they’re the only ones who can help you right now. It’s out of my league.’

Chapter 7

The octogenarian billionaire and his niece said little as they left the farmhouse, looking even grimmer in his case, and more inconsolably distraught in hers, than when they’d first arrived. Ben drove them back to the meadow where their helicopter was still waiting, the pilot patiently absorbed in the sports news. By the time the Land Rover rolled up next to the stationary aircraft Eloise had started gently sobbing. Kaprisky had uttered not a word, nor Ben. There seemed nothing more to say.

Ben stood and watched as they climbed aboard. Kaprisky managed a brief wave as if to say, ‘No hard feelings’, but it wasn’t entirely convincing. The pilot pulled his switches and twiddled his controls, the turbine fired up and grew in pitch as the rotors began to spin, slowly, then faster, until they began to snatch at the air and the chopper danced and skipped on the ground. Then it rose upward, its downblast flattening the grass. The sunlight glinted along the KAPRISKY CORP company logo on its side as it spun around in the direction from which it had come, and sped off. Ben stayed where he was until it was just a red dot over the green hills of Normandy. He trudged back to the Land Rover, hauled himself up behind the wheel and drove back to the house.

The yard was deserted, no sign of Jeff or Tuesday or any of the trainees. Walking towards the farmhouse’s door Ben heard the sound of running paws approaching, and turned to see Storm bounding towards him. Storm was a large German shepherd, black and tan with streaks of gold and silver across his shoulders and a thick mane that made him look like a wolf. He was Ben’s favourite of the guard dogs that helped to protect Le Val’s widening borders from intruders, and the feeling was mutual. He and Ben enjoyed a particular kind of entente. If Storm ever got annoyed at the way his master kept disappearing for periods of time, he never seemed to hold it against him. The dog licked his hand and looked up at Ben with amber eyes so full of intelligence that it would have been quite unsurprising if he’d broken into speech like a person. He frowned at his favourite human, seeing something wasn’t right. Storm didn’t miss much.

‘Yeah, buddy, it turned out to be a pretty rotten day,’ Ben said, smoothing his soft fur. ‘Coming inside? I wouldn’t mind the company.’

The shepherd bounded up the steps to the front door after him, and the two of them made their way into the kitchen. Still no sign of Jeff anywhere. The wine bottle, now half-empty, had been put back on the side and the four glasses were upside-down on the draining board by the sink. Jeff was gradually becoming more domesticated thanks to the influence of Chantal, though in this case Ben could have saved him the trouble of washing up. He grabbed one of the glasses and filled it back up with wine, slumped in his chair at the top of the table and began working on finishing the bottle with Storm lying glumly at his feet, having given up trying to cheer his master’s spirits.

The bottle was empty by the time Jeff reappeared soon afterwards. Ben knew from his footsteps in the flagstone-floored passage and the telltale banging open of the kitchen door that his old friend and business partner wasn’t in the best of moods either. Jeff stalked into the room, saw Ben sitting there, stood with his arms folded and gave him one of his patented hard glares.

‘Something on your mind, Jeff?’

Jeff glared a little longer, then said, ‘Out of your league?’

Ben stiffened. Knowing a fight was coming. Jeff wasn’t a man to hold back with his opinions, nor to back down in an argument.

‘That’s right,’ Ben said. ‘I’ve already explained why.’

If Ben had declared he was becoming transgender and henceforth wished to be known as Lolita, Jeff wouldn’t have been looking at him with any more incredulity. ‘Bullshit. What’s the real reason? You getting old? Tired out? Not up to it any more?’

‘I belong here now,’ Ben said. ‘You and I have a business to run, remember? We’ve got bookings coming in every day, more classes than we can handle and a waiting list as long as your arm, we’re expanding all the time, mortgaged up to our eyeballs; and in case you’ve forgotten, we’re in the middle of looking for a second location to grow the business even more.’

That idea had been on the cards for a few months. They’d looked at a couple of rural properties in the south of France, though no commitments had so far been made.

‘To hell with the business,’ Jeff spat.

‘Oh, to hell with the business?’

‘You heard the old man. You saw the look on that woman’s face. They need help, and fast.’

‘He’s not going to hurt her.’

‘He’s not going to give her back, either,’ Jeff said.

‘Kaprisky can easily find someone else to do the job.’

Jeff shook his head. ‘Kaprisky’s going to hit the panic button, is what Kaprisky’s going to do. He’s liable to either bring in the bloody A Team, a bunch of trigger-happy numbskulls who think they’re Dolph Lundgren. Or even worse, he’ll take your advice and call the authorities. Either way he’s going to drive Petrov even deeper underground, or something bad will happen.’

‘That’s the risk,’ Ben agreed. ‘But even if I still worked in K&R, which I don’t, I can’t be in two places at once. If I said yes to Kaprisky, there’s no telling how long I could be away hunting for this guy.’

‘I can draft in a couple of temporary replacements to cover for you. I could call Boonzie. He knows a million guys out there who’d come in at short notice.’

‘I didn’t realise I was so replaceable.’

‘We’ll muddle through somehow.’ Jeff unfolded his arms, reached out and spun a chair out from the table and sat down, leaning towards Ben on his elbows and giving him an earnest, penetrating stare. ‘Seriously. This is what you do, mate.’

‘Did. We’ve moved on, Jeff. I’ve moved on. I’m retired from all that.’

‘Start talking like that, pretty soon you’ll be gathering moss in front of the fire with your fucking carpet slippers on, and a briar pipe in your gob, listening to Bing Crosby albums.’

‘That’ll be the day,’ Ben said.

‘Want my opinion?’

‘Do I have any choice?’

‘Nope. My opinion is that if you don’t find this Petrov guy and bring that girl home, you’ll never forgive yourself. I’ve never known you to turn down a chance to help someone who needed it, and I’m buggered if I’m going to stand by and watch you do it now. If you’re afraid of failing, you just need to look in the mirror, ’cause the guy looking back at you doesn’t do failure. And don’t you dare try to put this on me by talking about the sodding business.’

‘I have responsibilities,’ Ben said.

‘Too right, you do.’

‘I’ve already spent far too long away from home, running around the world doing too much crazy stuff.’

Jeff shrugged. ‘You know what they say. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ Jeff always had an appropriately hackneyed saying to hand.

‘Maybe they do. But I wouldn’t want you thinking I was the kind of bloke who’d just up and run off towards trouble at the first beat of the drum.’

Jeff craned his neck closer over the table, and his eyes bulged. ‘Mate, I already know that’s exactly who you are. So get the bloody hell out there and find that little girl and bring her home to her mother. Because you know you want to.’

And so it came to pass that, two hours later, Ben Hope was sitting behind the wheel of his silver twin-turbo Alpina B7 with his old green army haversack on the passenger seat next to him, Miles’ Bitches Brew blasting on his speakers and a 180-kilometre-an-hour wind streaming in the windows as he tore southwards on the motorway towards Le Mans.

Persuasive, that Jeff Dekker. And incredibly perceptive, for all his rough edges. He could read Ben’s mind as if his skull were made of glass. As usual, he was dead right. Because despite all his protests and refusals, Ben had known all along he wanted to do this. He was back in the saddle. Back doing what he did best. And the thought of a missing child was the only thing that could take the smile off his face.

Chapter 8

The home and reclusive sanctuary of Auguste Kaprisky was a seventeenth-century castle that had formerly belonged to the Rothschild dynasty. The security cordon its current owner had built around himself made entry into his private world something like accessing the Pentagon. If Ben hadn’t called from the road and left a message with Kaprisky’s PA to say he was coming, the armed guards on the gate probably wouldn’t have let him in at all.

Once inside the perimeter, Ben drove for almost twenty minutes through the vastness of the chateau’s landscaped grounds, past rolling green paddocks where magnificent Arab horses grazed and cantered; past hectares of carefully tended orchards and vines, and along the shores of a perfectly blue glass-smooth lake with boathouses and a jetty where a moored sail cruiser rocked gently in the late afternoon breeze.

Just as it seemed the grounds might go on forever, the fantastical chateau with its baroque architecture and columns and turrets rose up in front of him like a mirage. A classical fountain with a bronze statue of the goddess Diana the huntress dominated the circular courtyard, spouting jets of water that made rainbows in the air. Ben drove around it and crunched to a halt on the gravel, next to a row of cars. Most men of Kaprisky’s wealth would own a collection of the world’s most expensive supercars, but Ben happened to know that his personal vehicle was the battered, ancient Renault 4 parked nearest the house. He was a strange fish, that Auguste Kaprisky, with his own peculiar sense of priorities. It was rumoured that he put artificial flowers on his wife’s grave, so that he wouldn’t have to replace them too frequently.

As Ben climbed out of the Alpina a pair of plain-clothes security guys appeared from nowhere and zeroed in on him. Neither was concerned about trying to hide the weapon strapped under his jacket, which their body language made clear they were ready to pull out at the first sign of trouble. They both had the fast eye and alert manner of ex-military men whose skillset had been bumped up to the next level. Ben knew how well trained they were, because he’d been the one who trained them: hence the failure of the attempt on their boss’s life; hence Kaprisky’s eternal debt of gratitude to all at Le Val, and to Ben in particular.

‘Easy, boys,’ Ben said to the pair. ‘I’m expected.’

Recognising him, the guards smiled, nodded and backed down. One of them spoke into a radio. Seconds later the grand entrance of the chateau opened, and a butler in a black waistcoat and white gloves appeared in the doorway to welcome Ben as he climbed the balustraded stone steps. The butler was a small, gaunt man with oiled-back hair, who looked like Peter Cushing. He led Ben through a vast marble hallway that made their footsteps echo all the way to the frescoed dome of the ceiling. The Greek statues lining the walls were probably not plaster copies, Ben thought. The butler stopped at a door that King Kong could have walked through without ducking his head, knocked twice and then ushered Ben inside without a word.

Kaprisky was pacing by one of the tall windows at the far end of the magnificent salon, overlooking an endless sweep of formal gardens. The billionaire looked twenty years older than he had a few hours ago. Even from a distance the stress of the situation was visibly etched all over his face in deep worry lines. When he saw Ben he came rushing to welcome him with a pumping handshake and tears of gratitude.

‘I was unsure what to make of your phone message. Dare I presume that you have changed your mind?’

‘It was wrong of me to disappoint you, Auguste,’ Ben said. ‘I’m here now. Let’s get your little girl back.’

‘I’m so thankful. I have no words.’

‘Any developments since we talked?’

Kaprisky shook his head gravely. ‘We have heard nothing. The situation is unchanged, except that with every passing moment that brute could be getting further away with Valentina.’

The salon door burst open. Eloise. She was wearing a different dress from earlier, and had a matching handbag the size of a postage stamp hanging from one shoulder. Her face was mottled from crying, but lit up with sudden joy at the sight of Ben standing there with her uncle. She rushed into the room and hugged Ben so violently that she almost head-butted him in the face and he felt her ribs flexing against his chest. ‘Dupont told me we had a visitor. I didn’t want to believe it was really you. Thank you. Thank you.’

Ben said she was welcome and managed to detach himself from her death-grip without breaking any of her fingers.

‘Now, let us make the arrangements,’ Kaprisky said. ‘Before we begin, we must talk about money.’

‘You can keep your money, Auguste. That’s not the reason I changed my mind.’

‘Nonetheless, money is the oil that will make the machine run smoothly and enable a happy outcome to this dreadful crisis. You will have every possible resource at your disposal. Anything whatsoever you may require, you only have to ask.’ Kaprisky darted a hand inside his jacket, came out with a tatty old wallet and produced from it a shiny new credit card with the Kaprisky Corp logo emblazoned on its front.

‘This is your expense account. It will work in any country or currency in the world. The limit is set at five million euros per week, but that can be extended with one phone call. Please make free use of it. You will of course be provided with an additional sum of cash in Russian rubles, for your convenience.’

Ben took the card. Five million a week. Unbelievable.

‘One more matter. You indicated that your lack of familiarity with the Russian language was a concern; that will no longer be an issue. I am arranging for an assistant to accompany you at all times, to act as guide, interpreter, whatever you require. They will be entirely at your service.’

Ben wished now that he hadn’t made a big deal of it. The last thing he really needed was a tag-along slowing him down. ‘Who’s that, your man Andriy Vasilchuk?’

Kaprisky shook his head. ‘His skill is security, not detection. In any case my men will be standing down from the moment you depart for Moscow. Your guide will be the same local private investigator who assisted us previously, a partner in Moscow’s most highly reputed detective agency. As you know, I must always have the best.’

Kaprisky allowed himself an uncharacteristic dry smile that showed his grey teeth, then glanced down at his watch. He seemed to delight in wearing the cheapest plastic Casio digital going. ‘For the sake of expediency, we should delay as little as possible. When can you leave?’

‘Are we forgetting the small matter of a travel visa?’ Ben said. ‘As far as I’m aware, EU citizens still can’t go just waltzing in and out of Russia without the right papers.’

Kaprisky gave a dismissive little wave of his hand, like brushing off a mosquito. ‘Forget such piffling technicalities. It is already, as you British would say, sorted.’

‘In that case,’ Ben said, ‘I’m ready to leave right this minute. I’m assuming the jet’s standing by to take off at a moment’s notice.’ Kaprisky kept the aircraft at Le Mans-Arnage airport, just a few minutes’ drive from the estate.

‘Naturally. You will be familiar with your flight crew, I think, from your journey to Africa.’

There weren’t many things Ben wanted to remember from that particular escapade, but he’d never forgotten the stalwart service of Kaprisky’s chief pilot Adrien Leroy and his Number Two, Noël Marchand.

‘Flight time to Moscow will be three hours and eleven minutes,’ Kaprisky said. ‘It will be evening by the time you arrive, and so my chef will be at your disposal to provide whatever you wish to eat. You will land at Vnukovo International Airport, twenty-eight kilometres southwest of the city. Your assistant will be there to meet you on landing, with a car to take you to your hotel. I hope you will be satisfied with the accommodation.’

‘Just the basics, Auguste,’ Ben said.

‘Oh, it is nothing remotely fancy, I assure you. But then, a man of your experience is used to the rougher side of life.’

‘Just a couple of things before I go,’ Ben said. ‘First, I’d like a photo of Valentina.’

Eloise unsnapped the tiny handbag, dug inside and pulled out a glossy print. ‘This one is very recent.’ It showed a pretty dark-haired child with lots of light and joy in her sparkling hazel eyes, pictured by the lake. Eloise said, ‘There are more pictures in her room. Would you like to see it?’

Ben said yes, anything was useful. With her uncle in tow, Eloise led Ben quickly from the salon, through the gleaming labyrinth of marble and priceless rugs and furniture, and up a grand staircase to a bedroom on the first floor. Valentina’s room was the size of a luxury penthouse apartment, with its own bathroom and dressing room and a walk-in wardrobe fit for Marie Antoinette. Everything was pink, from the silk on the walls to the canopy of the Cadillac-sized four-poster bed to the teddy bears clustered on the pillows, and the pillows themselves. There were books everywhere, a precarious stack of them piled on a pink bedside cabinet: Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, a collection of short stories by the same author, Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin and a volume of poetry by Mikhail Lermontov. Ben wondered how many twelve-year-old girls were so heavily into Russian literary classics.

Eloise saw him looking at the books and explained, ‘She adores reading. And her goal is to become completely fluent in Russian before her father’s fortieth birthday next April, so she can surprise him.’ Eloise let out a deep, shuddering sigh and screwed her eyes shut, shaking her head in anguish. ‘What has he done? What has he done?’

‘She’s a clever kid,’ Ben said, to keep it light.

‘A little genius,’ Kaprisky weighed in, voice heavy with emotion. ‘She already speaks Dutch, German and English and has come on greatly with her French since moving here. Naturally, she is also proficient in mathematics, and developing a strong interest in science. She could be anything she wanted. She is such a talented actress, too. She does the most incredible impressions of people.’

‘But most of all she loves animals,’ Eloise said. ‘She wants to be a vet when she grows up.’

Which made sense, judging by the pictures on the walls. Every inch of available space was crammed with framed photographs of a variety of dogs and cats and horses. Kaprisky held back tears as he told Ben what a keen little photographer his grandniece was, among her many talents, constantly snapping shots of animals everywhere she went. Other framed pictures that hadn’t been taken by Valentina featured her hugging various puppies, kittens and ponies, each time with the same dazzling smile on her face.

Eloise couldn’t look at the pictures of her daughter without bursting into tears once again. Wiping her eyes she went to a little pink chair and picked up a little pink gilet jacket that was neatly hung over its back. She caressed the material with a sob. ‘She has another one exactly the same as this, which she was wearing when she left. Tailor-made especially for her. Pink is her favourite colour, as you might have noticed.’

‘That’s all good to know,’ Ben said. ‘What about her father?’

Eloise looked confused. ‘No, he hates pink.’

Kaprisky’s mouth gave a twitch. ‘Please forgive my niece,’ he said in French so that Eloise wouldn’t understand. ‘With such parents I can’t begin to imagine where her daughter gets her intelligence from.’

Ben smiled patiently and said to Eloise, ‘I mean do you have a photo of him?’

Eloise went from confused to blank, then her cheeks flushed. ‘No, but I think Valentina keeps one in her bedside drawer.’

She hurried over to look. While she was rooting through all the usual paraphernalia that twelve-year-old girls keep in their bedside drawers, even academically brilliant multilingual genius ones, Ben added, ‘It’d also be useful to know all you can tell me about your ex-husband.’

Eloise looked up with a frown. ‘Like what?’

‘Like who his friends are, where he hangs out, habits, hobbies and interests. I realise details of current girlfriends might be difficult, but the more information I have, the more it could help provide a clue to his present whereabouts.’

She chewed her lower lip and shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you. Even before Yuri moved back to Russia, I couldn’t have given you the name of a single friend, or anyone he kept company with. He has no interests, no hobbies I know of, no activities outside of his work. Only his religion. He’s Catholic, and attends church quite often.’

‘That’s handy information,’ Ben said. As long as he could stake out every Catholic church in Russia on the off-chance of Yuri wandering inside to worship. There couldn’t be more than a few thousand of them. He asked her, ‘Would you happen to have his mobile number? That could be useful to me, as well.’

‘I haven’t spoken to Yuri by phone in a long time,’ Eloise said, still rooting around in the bedside drawers. ‘Not that I would want to, because it would only end in arguments. All I have is an email address. From what Valentina says, he’s changed phones a dozen times since I last had a number for him. Ah, here it is.’ She pulled out the photo she’d been looking for. It was obvious she didn’t want to look at it, and quickly passed it to Ben with barely a glance.

The picture was an old family snap of when Eloise and Yuri were still together. Valentina was much younger and smaller, with gaps where her baby teeth had fallen out. Eloise had a different hairstyle, and looked rosy and happy. Yuri Petrov stood with his arm around his wife’s shoulders, smiling broadly. He had lots of shaggy jet black hair, a broad, craggy but not ugly face, a solid jaw and pronounced cheekbones. His eyes were dark and not as stupid-looking as Ben might have expected, given Kaprisky’s account of him.

‘He has a bit more weight around the middle now,’ Eloise said. ‘And Valentina says his hair is longer, and he grew a beard.’

‘What a deadbeat,’ Kaprisky muttered in the background.

‘Can I keep this?’ Ben asked.

She shuddered. ‘Please, take it out of my sight. I don’t want to see his face ever again.’

Chapter 9

The Kaprisky staffer who drove Ben to the Aéroport Le Mans-Arnage appeared to be an ex-racing driver of some kind, with special dispensation from the French police to deliver his passenger to their destination as fast as possible, irrespective of public safety. By the time the black Mercedes S-Class had screeched to a halt at the private terminal, the Gulfstream G650 had already taxied out of the huge Kaprisky Corp hangar and was on the runway approach, fuelled and prepped for takeoff, its lights twinkling in the falling dusk.

Ben was greeted on the tarmac by a sombre Adrien Leroy and Noël Marchand. ‘Every time we meet,’ Leroy said as he shook Ben’s hand, ‘it’s in unfortunate circumstances. I can’t believe this is happening. Poor kid. Everyone adores her.’

‘How well do you know Petrov?’ Ben asked. With so few clues to go on, he needed to fish for all the scraps he could get.

Leroy shook his head, barely able to contain his anger. ‘I’ve seldom even laid eyes on the bastard. He’s never there to collect her. But I’ll tell you, if I do ever see him again I’ll smash his teeth down his throat.’

So much for fishing. Leroy went off to attend to his pilot duties as Ben boarded the jet.

The plane’s luxurious interior offered a choice of nineteen empty plush leather passenger armchairs, all with marble-topped tables and a thousand gadgets to play with. Waiting for him on one of the seats was a designer travel bag containing his visa documentation and half a million rubles in large denominations, which equated to about six thousand euros for walking-around money. Kaprisky had thought of everything. Ben transferred the cash into his old green haversack and settled in a window seat.

Soon the jet was in the air. A ridiculously pretty Korean flight attendant with a smart uniform and glossy black hair appeared from the galley, sauntered brightly down the aisle towards her sole passenger and asked him in a California accent if he wanted dinner. ‘We have a full à la carte menu. The butter poached lobster, caught fresh this morning, is one of Mr Kaprisky’s favourites.’

‘You can prepare me anything I want?’ Ben said.

She beamed at him. ‘Absolutely whatever you desire. Your wish is my command.’

‘Great. I’ll have a ham sandwich. Thin bread, white or brown, I don’t care, light on the butter, just a smear of mustard. That’s it.’

Her smile wavered. ‘Can I offer you a glass of champagne with that? The Krug Private Cuvée is the finest in the world.’

‘No, but you can bring me a triple measure of single malt scotch, no ice, no water. And an ashtray, please.’

Now she was looking at him as if he’d just run over her cat. ‘I’m sorry, smoking is strictly disallowed on board.’

‘Whatever I desire, eh?’ Ben muttered to himself when she’d stalked off to convey his order to the chef. The whisky and the sandwich duly arrived. The chef hadn’t been able to resist putting on a fancy herb garnish, as though it were beneath him to serve up anything so plain and unadorned. Ben ate quickly, savoured the drink slowly, then set his Omega diver’s watch for the hour’s time difference between France and Russia, closed his eyes and let the plane carry him through the night.

Two hours later, Ben opened his eyes and saw the huge sprawling lit-up expanse of Moscow far below as the Gulfstream overflew the city on its approach to Vnukovo International Airport. Ben gazed down at the glittering lights and wondered where among all that he was going to find little Valentina Petrova and her father.

Kaprisky’s ETA proved startlingly accurate. The jet hit the runway at Vnukovo precisely three hours and eleven minutes after takeoff. Five minutes after that, they’d taxied to the business aviation terminal and the Korean stewardess returned, all smiles again, to say Ben was clear to disembark.

Moments later he was stepping down the gangway into the balmy summer night to set foot, for the first time in his life, on Russian soil. If Ben had stuck coloured pushpins in a world map showing all the places he’d travelled in his time, some countries would have been bristling with them and only a very few untouched. Should this prove to be his one and only visit to the Russian Federation, he could only pray that he would return home successful, and not empty-handed.

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.

Chapter 10

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.

Old man Kaprisky must have been blabbing about him, Ben thought. He replied, ‘I thought we were going to discuss our plans for tomorrow, not indulge in idle chit-chat about me.’

‘It is important for me to know something about the colleague I am to be working with. Are you saying it is not true?’

This wasn’t Ben’s favourite topic for discussion, but he could see she wasn’t going to let it go. ‘Technically, no, seeing as I’ve been retired for a long time. Prior to that, yes, it’s true, I did serve in UK Special Forces, 22 SAS if you really want to know, and that I did reach the rank of major by the time I quit. But I no longer go by that title. Do those details satisfy your curiosity?’

‘So I should not call you Major?’

‘If you have to call me anything, call me Ben. That’s my name.’

‘I prefer a more formal address.’ She scrutinised his face for a moment, then added, ‘You are much too young to be retired.’

‘I didn’t say I stopped working.’

‘Looking for missing people, is that the work you do now?’

‘I’ve done a lot of K and R missions over the years. That’s short for kidnap and ransom. But I’m sure you could deduce that, detective.’

She smiled. ‘It seems an unusual career change for a retired soldier to become a person finder.’

‘There are a lot of people in the world who go missing because someone stole them, usually for money, sometimes for other reasons. I wanted to do something about that, because I know how much pain and suffering it causes to the victims and their families.’

She watched him for a moment, looking deep into his eyes as if she could see unspoken secrets there. ‘You have suffered from it too.’

‘When I was in my teens, my younger sister was kidnapped by human traffickers in Morocco. The police never found her.’

‘You never saw her again?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘But it explains why you do this,’ Tatyana said. She paused, sipping delicately from her drink without taking those vivid eyes off him. ‘Is there a Mrs Hope?’ she asked, switching tracks.

The question brought more memories to Ben’s mind. There had been a Mrs Hope, once upon a time, all too briefly. The vision of Leigh’s face flashed through his thoughts for a moment. And Roberta’s, and Brooke’s, accompanied by the same mixture of emotions those reminiscences always rekindled. The best times, the worst times. He didn’t share his deeper feelings, as a rule, and he wasn’t particularly inclined to discuss the current state of his personal life.

‘Is there a Mr Nikolaev?’ he countered.

‘I asked you first.’

‘Not currently.’

‘What about a girlfriend?’ she asked him, leaning forward to plant both elbows on the table and curling one side of her lips in a teasing smile. ‘Come now, I am sure you have many of those.’

Ben wasn’t going to be drawn into mentioning Sandrine Lacombe. Not that she could have been considered a girlfriend, exactly. They’d met by chance a few months ago, back home in France. A few dates since then, hints of mutual attraction, no commitments made, nothing serious. He had the impression she’d been hurt before, as he had. It might grow into something; it might not. Either way it was no business of Tatyana Nikolaeva’s, and he made no reply.

She frowned as a thought struck her. ‘You are not goluboi – what is the English expression – a sodomite?’

‘We in the West tend to use slightly more progressive terms nowadays.’

‘But you are not one of them?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m not one of them.’

She took a sip of her drink and looked relieved.

‘Shall we get down to business?’ he said.

‘Of course.’

‘Tell me what we know about Yuri Petrov.’

Tatyana replied that, in fact, they knew remarkably little. He didn’t appear on the voter register and finding an address for him had been quite a challenge for her investigation firm. The easy part had been checking for a criminal record, which had come up blank – he had never been charged with anything in Russia, at any rate.

‘Employment?’

She shook her head. ‘Whatever he does for a living, he is getting paid only in cash. His bank account is almost empty and shows no activity within the last twelve months.’

Which, as far as it went, seemed to fit with Kaprisky’s portrait of the man as a low-life ne’er-do-well, possibly involved in all sorts of petty criminal dealings for which he hadn’t yet been caught. Ben couldn’t be sure until he knew more. ‘First thing I need to do is check out his apartment.’

‘He is not there,’ Tatyana said. ‘I assumed you had been informed of this.’

‘Tell me what you found.’

Tatyana seemed mildly irritated by having to repeat the same information she’d already told Kaprisky. ‘It is all in my report. I accompanied the team to the address, where we found the door locked and the apartment empty.’

‘Did you look inside?’

‘Breaking and entering was not our purpose.’

‘If it’s an apartment block, there must be a caretaker or a concierge. You could have got the key from them.’

‘Only the police have authority to demand access to a private property.’

‘Okay,’ Ben said. ‘So if you didn’t get to look inside, how could you be so sure the apartment was empty?’

‘Petrov had been seen leaving, and not returned. I spoke to neighbours, who reported having not seen him for several days.’

‘All the same,’ Ben said, ‘I’d like to see the place for myself, first thing in the morning. I’ll need you to meet me here at eight o’clock on the dot.’

Tatyana seemed not to object. ‘Any other instructions for me?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘None, other than try to keep up. I’m using to working alone, which means I go at my own pace and push hard. I don’t believe this man intends to harm the little girl, but I don’t intend to let him hold her hostage any longer than absolutely necessary. Fall behind, I won’t wait for you, okay?’

‘I am a professional,’ Tatyana replied coolly. ‘You do not have to worry about me.’

‘Glad to hear it. The last thing to discuss is transport. Do you have a car, or are we using Kaprisky’s? Because if so, I’d like to ditch that big lunk of a driver.’

‘Car is a terrible way to travel in this city,’ Tatyana said breezily. ‘From early in the morning until late in the afternoon, Moscow is solid with traffic. It is worse than Los Angeles. But the public transport system is best in the world. That is what we will use instead.’

Ben wasn’t sure about that idea. For the first time since he’d met her, Tatyana Nikolaeva smiled with enough warmth to melt away the icy severity of her face.

‘I am a MOCКBИЧКА. A Muscovite. Trust me, Major Hope.’

Chapter 11

Ben rose early, out of old habit. As sunrise broke over Red Square and bathed his balcony in a flood of golds and magentas, he ticked off a hundred press-ups in sets of twenty-five, followed by the same routine for sit-ups. It wasn’t much of a morning’s exercise session for him; maybe he could go for a ten-mile run later, or abseil up and down the towers of the Kremlin just for the hell of it. He brewed up a pot of espresso on his coffee machine, the one luxury of his suite that meant anything to him, then walked through onto the balcony to consume it, along with the first Gauloise of the day, and watch the city rumble into life below.

After a pummelling in the cavernous marble shower room, he was back downstairs at three minutes to eight to meet Tatyana. She was three inches shorter in the flat shoes she was wearing in anticipation of walking about the city, and had exchanged yesterday’s charcoal business suit for a double-breasted navy affair with heavy epaulettes a little reminiscent of Russian military dress uniform.

‘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”?’

She didn’t look, but two small vertical lines appeared above her nose and her blue eyes narrowed. ‘Who are they?’ she whispered back. ‘Why would this be happening?’

‘Perhaps I should go and ask them,’ Ben said. ‘What do you think?’

‘I am sure you are just imagining it,’ Tatyana said. ‘You are … what is the word?’

‘Paranoid,’ he said. ‘Maybe. All the same, don’t turn around and look for them. They don’t know I’m onto them, not yet.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Make a phone call, for starters.’

‘And then?’

‘Maybe we ought to confront them, shoot them, dump their bodies on the track and then make a run for it before the cops arrive,’ he said. ‘Have you got a gun on you?’

Tatyana frowned. ‘You are not serious.’

Ben had Auguste Kaprisky on his list of speed-dial contacts. Two taps, a couple of bleeps and a few moments’ wait, and the old man’s crackly voice came on the line. Hurtling through a tunnel deep beneath Moscow, and the signal from 1500 miles away was crystal clear. The benefits of superior Russian technology.

Ben spoke softly, in French. ‘Auguste, I thought you said your guys were off the job.’

‘They are,’ Kaprisky replied, sounding taken aback.

‘Positive about that? I seem to have picked up some company here.’

‘I can assure you, it has nothing to do with me. Are you quite certain you are not—?’

‘Imagining things? Thanks, Auguste. Talk later.’ Ben ended the call. It was hard to know whether to believe Kaprisky. The wily old fox could be hedging his bets by keeping an eye on him. Maybe you didn’t get to become a billionaire by being too trusting.

Tatyana was looking at him, an eyebrow raised. ‘Well?’

Ben thought about all the places in a subway system he could lure the two goons. Men’s toilets were always a good place for an impromptu roughing-up and forced interrogation of the ‘Who are you working for?’ variety. If indeed Kaprisky had sent them, the old man might not be happy to have Ben knock his hirelings around. If however they were someone else’s guys, the use of forceful tactics could be stirring up a hornet’s nest that Ben preferred to leave alone, for now. He decided he could worry later about who they were. For the moment, his priority was to give them the slip so he could get on with the job he’d come here to do.

‘Next stop is ours,’ he said to Tatyana.

‘But we are not halfway there yet.’

‘I fancy a little fresh air, don’t you?’

The next station they arrived at was even more ridiculously opulent than the last. As Ben stepped off the train, followed by a confused Tatyana, he saw the two goons filter among the throng of disembarking passengers and drift along in their wake. Ben moved faster, forcing Tatyana to trot to keep up. The goons kept following, keeping their distance like before but moving with greater urgency. If they were working as part of a bigger surveillance team, it was time to put their organisation to the test.

Back up at street level, Ben saw they were still deep in the heart of the city. Traffic was heavy and pedestrians crowded the pavements. At a nearby taxi stand a line of yellow Ladas was waiting. Ben hustled over to the car at the head of the queue and got in the back seat. Tatyana piled in after him.

‘Speak English?’ Ben asked the driver.

‘Sure.’

‘Just drive. And step on it.’ Ben thrust a sheaf of rubles through the gap between the seats, where they disappeared instantly into the driver’s clutches.

‘Twenty years I waited for someone to say that,’ the driver said, gunning his engine with a grin. As the little Lada took off into the traffic, Ben turned to glance out of the window and caught a momentary glimpse of the two goons running out of the subway station and looking around in a panic for their disappearing targets. Then they were lost among the crowds.

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