The Moscow Cipher. Scott Mariani

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ