The Moscow Cipher

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 (#ue105cd42-113a-5e86-a4b2-f124c0f01acf)

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?’