The Moscow Cipher Read online

Both Grisha and Yuri fixed eyes on it. Their faces showed all kinds of mixed emotions, as if their minds were torn between terror of whatever it signified to them, and a kind of awestruck reverence.

  ‘That, my dumb-ass friend,’ Grisha said, ‘is O бъеkt 428. Otherwise known as Object 428, the legendary lost first-generation psychotronic weapon prototype of the Special Projects Division of GRU Generalogo Shtaba, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet Union. Its date of manufacture is classified, but we now know it to have been 1955. Way ahead of its time, like totally revolutionary. Its experimental and possible deployment history, also classified. As was the codename of the research project that gave birth to it.’ Grisha gave it its Russian name. ‘O перaция кукольныӣ мaстер. Translation, Operation Puppet Master.’

  ‘Pretty lousy tradecraft for the operational codename to hint at its purpose,’ Yuri said. ‘I suppose they thought it sounded cool.’

  Grisha went on, ‘None of these facts would have ever been known, except for intelligence leaks after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The official version was, and remains, that neither Operation Puppet Master nor its brainchild ever existed. The real version is that Object 428 disappeared from a secret GRU laboratory in Moscow in early 1957, causing a huge panic for the Kremlin and a bunch of officials to be sent to the Siberian salt mines as punishment. Object 428 was never seen again. Until now.’

  ‘Tell him about the microfilm,’ Yuri said.

  Grisha nodded. ‘Oh, yeah. Our other little piece of evidence. Only the entire set of original blueprints for Object 428, along with all of the plans, research notes, secret case studies, the whole deal. It’s copied onto the flash drive that’s inside the tin.’

  Ben was slowly piecing together the strands of all this, and still just as unsure whether he should believe a single word. ‘So it was the British SIS agent, Ingram, who stole this material from the lab?’

  ‘There was a network of agents dedicated to obtaining and smuggling it across to the West,’ Yuri said, picking up the baton from Grisha. ‘Nobody knows for sure how many, or what their identities or exact roles might have been. The agents themselves were probably kept much in the dark, for the usual reasons of the espionage community. They must have known little about their mission objective, even, because no one could be sure that the very existence of Object 428 was anything more than a wild rumour.’

  ‘Kind of like Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction at the time of the Iraq War,’ Grisha muttered. ‘Except that story really was made up.’

  ‘However they succeeded in getting hold of Object 428,’ Yuri said, ‘we’ll never know. My guess is that they had contacts inside the lab. Maybe someone managed to smuggle it out, perhaps substituting a fake copy in its place. But they did succeed. Getting it out of the USSR was an even more dangerous part of the mission. The KGB were everywhere, nobody could be trusted and the risks were enormous. Ingram planned on passing it to a fellow agent by means of a dead drop, creating a chain of links to smuggle it out of the country.’

  ‘And the cipher?’ Ben asked.

  ‘All it said was “Operation Puppet Master is real”,’ Yuri replied. ‘As though they couldn’t believe themselves that it was true. Along with that message Ingram encoded the location of the dead drop, which was where I found it, undisturbed after all those years. The chain had been broken. It’s pretty certain that Ingram wasn’t the only operative who paid with his life when the mission fell apart.’

  ‘Of course,’ Grisha grunted, ‘if the SIS had managed to get their hands on Object 428, nothing would have changed. They weren’t trying to unmask the evils of the Soviet regime, they just wanted the technology for themselves. Our wonderful mind controllers were years ahead of theirs. It took decades for the West to catch up.’

  ‘So our boys are still producing these little gadgets, is that what you’re claiming?’ Ben said.

  ‘No way, man,’ Grisha snorted. ‘This is prehistoric technology compared to what they’re using now. Object 428 is the great-grandfather of today’s mind-control devices.’

  ‘But if you exposed the great-grandfather to the public eye, it would still cause quite a stir,’ Ben said. ‘At least, that’s the idea, correct?’

  ‘You bet your ass it would,’ Grisha said.

  ‘I’ve come this far,’ Yuri said. ‘I risked my life, and my daughter’s, for this thing. There’s no going back for me now, you understand?’

  ‘Here you go. It’s all yours.’ Ben reached out a cupped hand and dropped the little metal pill into Yuri’s eager palms. ‘There’s only one problem with your story, gentlemen,’ he said after a pause for reflection. ‘It’s all pure conjecture. Not a single hard fact or detail. That little gadget could easily be a fake, and so could this microfilm you claim to have. Why should anyone believe a word of what you just told me?’

  ‘Then let me tell you another story,’ Grisha said.

  ‘Will it change my mind?’

  ‘Only if you’re alive, man. With ears to hear with, and a brain to think with.’

  ‘Then try me.’

  Chapter 28

  The tale that now unfolded was the peculiar case history of a person Ben had no reason for ever having heard of before, a Czech national named Jan Wolker. It was one that dated back many years, to before Ben had been born. With nothing else to do except try to understand why Yuri Petrov had risked everything to escape to this isolated hiding place, Ben listened.

  Back in the troubled days of the late sixties when revolution had been in the air across much of the world, few parts of Europe had been in as much turmoil as Czechoslovakia, a country deep in the shadow of the looming might of its neighbouring USSR and its then president Leonid Brezhnev. The so-called Prague Spring had been a short-lived period of protest against what the Czechs angrily regarded as dictatorial Soviet domination. In the spirit of the times, nationalistic reform campaigners had kicked up strong protests in the hope of freeing their country from the shackles of Russian might. Jan Wolker had been a prominent member of the movement. If things had worked out differently, he might have become a Czech hero.

  They hadn’t. When Brezhnev’s response to the troublemakers was to roll the tanks into Prague in August 1968 and crush the protests with an iron fist, the reformers were scattered and many went into hiding, Wolker among them. He tried to get on with his life, keeping under the radar. He was forced to re-emerge, however, when in March of 1969 medical surgery was needed to address his worsening stomach ulcer condition. And it was during what should have been a fairly routine operation that all his problems really began.

  Wolker left hospital feeling fine, and happy that his ulcer had been fixed after plaguing him so long. Within a few weeks, though, he began to experience strange symptoms: altered thought patterns, loss of memory, impaired capacity for logic; as well as physical symptoms like visual disturbances, somnambulism and peculiar changes to his heart rhythms. It all seemed to be coming from inside his head, though he could find no possible explanation.

  The symptoms continued and in fact worsened. Wolker began to believe he could hear sounds similar to radio frequencies emanating from inside his skull, which he found deeply disturbing. The conviction began to dawn on him that something bizarre had happened to him in the hospital, while under the general anaesthetic. The effects of the drugs on his brain? When the symptoms continued he consulted the doctors who’d performed the operation only to be assured that nothing was wrong, and he’d soon settle back to normal.

  Refusing to accept such a brush-off, Wolker sought a second opinion and visited the Prague clinic of a Dr Miloš Brodský who carried out an X-ray of his skull. To both men’s shock, Brodský detected the presence of a foreign body inside Wolker’s head. The small object was apparently cylindrical in shape, definitely of artificial manufacture, measuring about 7mm in length by 4mm in width. Described unequivocally by Brodský as ‘an intracranial implant’, it was situated slightly anterior to the frontal bone, in
a part of the brain that suggested it had been inserted via the nostril with no need to drill or cut into the skull itself: hence, no marks of the procedure showed externally.

  Wolker panicked and demanded the thing be removed. An extremely perplexed Brodský urged caution for the moment, promising to write a full report which he planned to take to the highest level of the medical authorities.

  When Wolker heard nothing after a few more weeks, he returned to Brodský in late May 1969 – only to find the doctor had changed his story, denied all knowledge of the conversations they’d had, and was no longer prepared to make a report, claiming that the X-rays of Wolker’s brain were completely normal. Sure enough, the suspicious X-ray photographs clearly showing the presence of the object seemed to have vanished from the files, replaced with images of a perfectly healthy and unimplanted brain. The men argued. Wolker stormed out of the clinic, threatening all manner of legal action. But there was little he could do, and his worsening symptoms were making it hard to think straight. He began to drink heavily and would bang his head against the wall to switch off the thing in his head, to no avail. Nightmares, suicidal thoughts and terrifyingly violent urges began to take him over.

  ‘This is all on record?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Hold on,’ Grisha said. ‘It gets wilder.’

  On June 8th 1969 there was an assassination attempt against a man named Elmar Gödel, another prominent Czech activist who had been very vocal against the Soviets and complicit in setting fire to a Russian tank during the invasion of Prague. Wolker and Gödel had been close friends back in 1968, before things had turned bad.

  On the night in June 1969 that Gödel was shot twice in the stomach at his home, witnesses reported seeing a man answering Wolker’s description fleeing from the scene clutching a pistol. Wolker awoke in a ditch the next morning, fully dressed, his clothes dirty and torn, and a loaded revolver in his pocket that he was certain he’d never seen before, with two chambers fired. He had no recollection of having been anywhere near Gödel’s home the previous night, nor of having seen or even spoken to him for several months prior to that. He later stated that he would never, in a thousand years, have dreamed of harming anyone, let alone his old friend Elmar.

  Tipped off that the police were coming to arrest him, Wolker fled Czechoslovakia. He was able to get to Frankfurt, Germany, where, now convinced that the thing inside his head was making him do things against his will and without his conscious knowledge, he found a sympathetic surgeon called Stefan Mandelbrot who was prepared to surgically remove it.

  The device was removed on September 13 1969, six months after it had been implanted and just three and a half months since the Czech doctor, Brodský, had strongly denied the existence of any foreign object inside Wolker’s head. Dr Mandelbrot confirmed the description from the original X-rays, stating that the device was 7mm by 4mm in size, metallic and of unknown origin, like nothing he’d ever seen before. On examination, it appeared to be some kind of high-frequency electromagnetic transponder, or a miniature radio receiver. There was no power cell; the device seemed to run on phantom power from the radio frequencies entering the host’s brain, operating between 17 and 24 kHz.

  Unlike Brodský, Mandelbrot was willing to go on the record and do whatever it took to expose the bizarre conspiracy by which his patient had been violated. In the meantime, still wanted by the police back home, Wolker next tried to escape to the safety of Switzerland. En route he contacted a German journalist named Heinz Krüger who was a writer for the magazine Stern. Wolker told Krüger the whole story, said he could prove it and promised to get in touch again when he made it to Zürich. Krüger was to travel there to meet him, whereupon Wolker was going to show him the device that had been removed from his skull, along with photographs of it being removed and a verifying letter from his physician Dr Mandelbrot. An excited Krüger planned on blowing the whole story wide open with a sensational feature in Stern.

  ‘But things didn’t work out that way,’ Grisha said. ‘Wolker got arrested before he reached the Swiss border and was whisked back to Czechoslovakia to face trial for the attempted murder of his dear old pal Elmar Gödel. Remarkable East-West collusion for the time, don’t you think?’

  Somewhere between his imprisonment and deportation back to Prague, the brain implant, the key piece of evidence that would have proved Wolker’s story true, mysteriously vanished, never to resurface again or be mentioned in any report. Meanwhile, within hours of Wolker’s arrest, Dr Stefan Mandelbrot was cycling home through the streets of Frankfurt when he was mown down by a six-wheeler truck and killed instantly. Any and all evidence of the operation he had performed on Wolker, including any copies of his letter and photographs of the device, was removed from his office. The nurse who had assisted with the operation was suddenly transferred to another hospital, and disappeared shortly thereafter.

  ‘When Heinz Krüger decided to go ahead and write the story anyway,’ Grisha said, ‘his editors fired him from the magazine without explanation. Over the next few months he researched and wrote a book called Minds in Chains: The Tyranny of Tomorrow, which you won’t find anywhere now. He was found drowned in his swimming pool in August 1971.’

  Elmar Gödel had passed away in 2013 at the age of eighty-five, maintaining to his dying day that his friend Jan Wolker would never have tried to murder him. No matter what witnesses or forensics might say, poor Jan had somehow been set up to take the fall for a crime he did not commit.

  ‘Which begs the question,’ Grisha said. ‘If someone hijacked your mind, took over your body and made it perform terrible acts that you would never have carried out of your own volition, can anyone say you were guilty of the crime?’

  Ben had no answer for that one.

  ‘Here’s another question: did the powers that be really want Gödel dead back in 1970? If so, why didn’t they try again and finish the job? Maybe the answer is that killing him wasn’t their aim; rather, maybe all they wanted to do was retest the effectiveness of their mind-control technology, using a couple of expendables as their lab rats.’

  ‘If you can manipulate a man’s mind to kill his own friend,’ Yuri said, ‘you can turn anyone against anyone. The whole thing could have been just a sick experiment.’

  ‘What about Wolker?’ Ben asked.

  Grisha replied, ‘He spent the next year in Pankrák Prison, in Prague. When he kept on protesting his innocence and raved on about the implant that had been put inside his brain, prison doctors declared that he was insane, psychotic, paranoid and in need of psychiatric treatment. He was transferred to a mental asylum, where a course of drug and electroshock therapy was begun. Within a week of his admission, a staff member accidentally turned up the patient’s voltage too high and induced a fatal heart attack. That was the end of Jan Wolker.’

  ‘But it’s not the end of the story,’ Yuri said, clutching the metal pill in his fist. ‘Not now that we have this.’

  ‘So you want to continue where Heinz Krüger left off, is that it?’ Ben said. ‘Use your Freedom Network to blow the whole story back open to the world media? Hope that major news outlets will pick it up or that it goes viral on the internet?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’ Grisha said.

  ‘That’s what needs to happen,’ Yuri echoed.

  ‘And then what?’ Ben asked them both. ‘The story gets buried in a ton of conspiracy hokum that only a handful of weirdos will look at. Your sole market would consist of the kind of people who believe that there’s a monster in Loch Ness and that alien lizards are walking among us. Is that what you call being taken seriously?’

  ‘Hey, watch what you say about the alien lizards,’ Grisha rumbled, pointing. ‘Maybe they are.’

  ‘I rest my case,’ Ben said, shaking his head. ‘But let’s say what you’ve told me tonight is true. Let’s say it’s even a tenth true. You break this story just like Krüger tried to do, and a month later, a year later, however long it takes for Bezukhov or whoever to find you two clowns, the pair of you w
ill end up floating face down in whatever you’ve got around here that might pass for a swimming pool. A slurry pit, maybe. Those things will dissolve a dead body as fast as feeding it to pigs.’

  ‘I was hoping for a little more understanding,’ Yuri said, flustered. ‘Don’t you see how important this is? We have the decrypted cipher, we have the name of the operation, we have the device itself. It’s dynamite.’

  ‘And dynamite is liable to get you blown up,’ Ben said. ‘All the more reason why I need to get Valentina out of here and home safe. That’s the job I came here to do.’

  ‘Haven’t you been listening to a word?’ Yuri yelled. ‘You won’t make it!’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ Ben replied calmly. ‘Whatever you’ve got yourself mixed up in, it’s not my business. And you shouldn’t have brought the kid into it either.’

  ‘I didn’t plan it that way,’ Yuri protested, waving his arms in frustration. ‘If I’d known they were going to try to kill me, would I have let my daughter be exposed to danger? Do you think I’m nuts?’

  ‘Nuts, maybe,’ Ben said. ‘Stupid, definitely.’

  ‘Don’t blame me, blame Eloise. That bitch forced my hand with her legal bullshit about terminating my parental rights. This could be the last time I see Valentina until she’s grown up.’

  ‘If what you say is true, Yuri, you might not live to see her next birthday. But that’s your problem. I’m taking her home to her mother.’

  Yuri glowered at him. Ben saw his eyes flick across to the table, where the firearms lay. Assessing whether he could get to them before Ben did. Calculating his chances. Gambling on a wing and a prayer.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Ben said. ‘This is no time for foolish and desperate measures. This is a time for you to sit nice and easy and consider what’s best for Valentina.’

  ‘To let her drive off into the night with you? I don’t even know you.’

  ‘Call Kaprisky,’ Ben said. ‘He’ll confirm who and what I am, and my qualifications for the job.’