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.’
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
