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
