Moscow Rules

Read the next instalment of MOSCOW RULES, a brand-new Marc Dane serial novella…

On a mission to fulfil a request for his employer on the streets of Moscow, Marc Dane finds himself dragged into a deadly scavenger hunt for a prize that could cause chaos in the wrong hands…

In Part 3, Marc was interrogated by FSB officer Melor Rykov, the protégé of the late spymaster Sergei Morozov, and he learned of “the ledger”, a notorious file of blackmail information that belonged to the dead man. Now everyone in Moscow wants the file, and Marc is caught in the middle of the hunt…

Read on for Part 4 of MOSCOW RULES; future chapters will be released via this blog, but if you’d like to get early access, sign up to the James Swallow Reader’s Club at this link or type your email address in the box at the bottom of this page.

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MOSCOW RULES part 4 – DO NOT LOOK BACK

The Moscow Meridian styled itself as a no-frills European-style hotel for short-stay business travellers, and from what Marc could see, that meant mostly Germans in conservative suits and groups of gaunt East Asians he guessed were from North Korea. The important thing was, the place was simple and clean, and the clientele kept to themselves, which made it a good fit for a covert operative on a flying visit.

At least, that was what it was supposed to have been. Marc’s train back west was leaving in under an hour, and if he was following the heavily-loaded advice of his new ‘friends’ in the Russian security services, he would be on it.

Or not. Marc rode the elevator to the fifth floor, mulling over his options, picking at the story about Sergei Morozov’s lost ledger packed with kompromat, trying to gauge where the truth really lay.

Am I being played, he wondered? It was a very real possibility, a very Moscow possibility.

On the Russians’ home turf, every foreign operative was a rat in the maze assembled by the KGB and maintained by their new iteration, the FSB. They would be watching, listening, looking for any inkling that he might know more than he had admitted to.

Right now, Melor Rykov believed he had the edge on the search for Morozov’s ledger, suspecting that some clue to its whereabouts was hidden in the vodka bottle the dead man had left behind for Marc’s employer. It would take a while for him to figure out he was mistaken, and Marc still had the gift tag from around the bottle’s neck. He tucked it in a back pocket as the lift halted at his floor with a metallic chime.

Marc opened the door to his room. Everything appeared to be as he had left it, but he knew that wasn’t so. Rykov knew his real name, and that meant that every element of Marc’s cover had been compromised. But he’d planned ahead for just such an eventuality.

Shedding the bulk garment that made him look ten pounds heavier, Marc showered off the temporary colourant in his hair and beard, getting back to his real profile. He let the tepid water sluice down him, watching thin streamers of dye collect around the drain as he thought about his next step.

He left the big overcoat where he’d thrown it and dressed in a lightweight SeV hoodie and ripstop trousers, all in dark colours, better to blend in and remain unobvious. Then, he took a cylindrical power bank charger from the depths of the travel bag lying on the bed, leaving the room and taking the stairs up two floors. Another room was situated there, one that had been booked separately under a different name through an innocuous shell company.

Marc flipped open his spyPhone – the nickname given to the new-model bi-folding smartphone carried by the members of his team – and activated a hidden app that duplicated the function of an electronic RFID keycard. He slipped into the empty suite, moving to the bathroom without turning on the lights.

The odds were, the FSB had his room on the 5^th floor wired for sound, but it was less likely they were aware about this fallback. Still, it paid to be doubly careful. Marc sat on the toilet seat and gave the power bank a twist. It came apart into two smaller devices, one extruding a small mesh antenna that spread open like a tiny umbrella. A light glowed on the base of the device, showing it was active, and Marc felt an unpleasant, itchy sensation in the roots of his molars. The antenna was a surveillance jammer, broadcasting a subsonic effect just below the limit of human hearing, enough to fog the pick-up of any listening devices that might be in range. Effectively, he had turned the marble-panelled bathroom into a silent void that couldn’t be eavesdropped upon – the only problem was, the almost-undetectable hum of the device made him feel like he had multiple toothaches.

He made a call to a memorized number, studying the gift tag by the light of his smartphone as the masked signal bounced around invisibly from satellite to satellite, before finally connecting to a concealed base station on an abandoned resort island thousands of miles away.

“Sol’s Fish Market,” said the laconic female voice that answered.

“Go secure.”

“Authenticator?”

“Reindeer Flotilla.” The random cypher words passed muster; a different combination could have signalled an emergency or a duress warning. With a click on the line, the other voice came back to him.

“Hey,” said Lucy Keyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the middle of your exfiltration right about now?”

“The situation has shifted.” He heard her sigh. “I know, I know. It’s never straight-forward, is it?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” she said. “Follow the rules. Don’t get caught up. And yet…” Lucy trailed off. “Do I have to get on a plane and come rescue your limey ass?”

“No,” he said, with a slightly hurt tone. “Well. Not yet.”

“The Russkies tried to intimidate you, I bet. That’s always their first play.” She guessed the broad strokes. Lucy had operated covertly inside the Russian Federation on numerous occasions, first in her career as a sniper-specialist for US Special Forces, and then in other capacities as a private security contractor for Ekko Solomon’s Rubicon Group. She knew the tactics employed by the FSB and their military intelligence counterparts in the GRU, but the Russians knew her too – hence the reason why she had reluctantly sat this one out.

“It’s more complicated than that,” he told her.

“I imagine it is. So fill me in.”

Marc worked his jaw, trying to ignore the gnawing ache, and launched in on a quick precis of his situation. He told her about the key Galina Morozova had slipped to him, the safehouse apartment and the men who came at him with guns.

“Oh yeah, those two charmers you spotted at the funeral.” Lucy had reviewed the encrypted video feed recorded by the micro-camera in Marc’s false spectacles. “We took a capture at this end of the faces you caught on view, Kara’s been processing them.” Kara Wei was the Rubicon team’s tame black-hat hacker on side, although ‘tame’ was a relative term where the slight, cat-like Chinese woman was concerned. “The older men in big coats we pegged pretty quick, it’s like a who’s-who of late Soviet-era tough guys. But those mercs? Their backgrounds have been well-scrubbed. Kara says she’ll get them, but it may take a while.”

“I do like to know the names of the people who take shots at me,” Marc said dryly. “I lost the camera glasses, though.”

“We know. I saw the hits you took, ow.”

“I’ll manage.” Marc rubbed his face, still tender from the punch-up hours before. “In the meantime, I’ve got something else.” He told her about the tag, scanning it with his phone as he spoke. “Can’t find anything like a microdot or mini-sim inside it, though. If it’s a clue, I’m coming up blank.”

“You sure you want to keep pulling on this loose thread?” Lucy’s tone shifted. She wanted to be there with him, he could tell. “If you do, you got no cover. Shit, it could even be some kind of entrapment, I wouldn’t put a play like that past Rykov.”

“The thought did occur to me,” he admitted. “But if so, it’s a hell of a dangle. You’ve seen Morozov’s file, the old geezer was a proper puppet-master. It tracks that he’d keep a load of dirt on his comrades and who knows who else, just in case he needed it.” In other circumstances, Marc might have been willing to let the Russians waste time and energy fruitlessly chasing this particular possibility, but he couldn’t let go of what Morozov’s widow had told him by the graveside.

Sergei said Solomon is the only one who should have it.

“Morozov didn’t want anybody else to get that ledger,” Marc went on. “Not even his own men. What does that tell us?”

Lucy was silent for a moment. “Solomon has a strict ethical code. One he’ll never break. So maybe the old man had a crisis of conscience in his twilight years, and he didn’t want to see what he’d gathered being used for the wrong reasons.”

Marc found himself wondering what the right reasons for blackmail might be, but that was a debate for another time. Job one was to secure the ledger, and deciding what to do with it came second. “Still got to figure out this tag,” he went on, re-reading the writing on it. “The message might be a cypher…” He yawned and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Bloody jammer is making it hard to think straight.”

“Rykov said Sergei was old-school, right?” Lucy prompted with a question. “I gotta wonder… How old? Microdots and cypher text, that’s real low-tech spycraft.”

“And the beauty is, you can’t hack it.” Marc held the gift tag under his nose and inhaled. There was a faint but distinctive odour embedded in the card. “Huh. Smells like it’s been in a chip shop.”

“You mean like grease and fat?”

“Yeah, just like that.” And then it came to him in a flash. “Ha! That crafty old sod!”

Thanks to Russia’s more permissive attitude toward smoking, Marc didn’t have to go far to find an ashtray and a box of matches on the suite’s desk. He took them back to the safe haven of the bathroom and struck a couple, building a tiny fire in the ceramic dish before wafting the tag over it. Immediately, as the heat permeated the thin cardboard, the upper surface began to turn a yellowish-brown. Slowly, two lines of text in Cyrillic letters revealed themselves as the writing hidden on it began to oxidize and darken.

“Invisible ink,” said Marc. When he had been in training at Fort Monkton after his recruitment into MI6, his instructors had told the story of history’s earliest espionage operations – among them, the first documented use of hidden writing as far back as the 4^th Century BC. “Morozov wrote a message in onion juice. He literally used the oldest trick in the book.”

“What have you got?”

“Another address.” Marc laboured over the translation. “And a pass phrase, possibly? It says: The world will be saved by beauty.”

“That’s a quote from Dostoevsky,” Lucy noted. Off Marc’s surprised silence she went on. “What? I’m better-read than you think.”

“Clearly. I just never saw you as the classics type.”

“I have depths. Deep depths.”

“Never doubted it.” He flushed the spent matches down the toilet and gathered his gear. “Look, I’m going to stay on this. Rykov will have someone waiting for me to leave the hotel for the station, and if I don’t behave as expected, they’ll come looking. So I’ve got to move. Time’s against me.”

“You’re taking a big risk, Dane,” she told him. “Are you certain it’s worth it?”

“There’s only one way to know,” he replied, and cut the call.

Marc returned to the other room long enough to put the big coat on over the rest of his clothes and gather up his bag, before taking the lift to the Meridian’s reception. As he rode the elevator, he searched for anything that looked like a tracer – and found one, a length of thin wire attached to a small plastic capsule little larger than an ice cube, secreted in an unused zip pocket. FSB-issue, he noted. If he’d needed confirmation they had been in his room, now he had it.

Turnabout is fair play, Marc decided, and on his way out he slipped the tracer into the pocket of a passing guest. Then he was back outside, making his way toward the pale, ornate frontage of the Leningradsky Station terminal on the other side of the square. He pulled his overcoat close as he crunched over islands of wet ice on the asphalt, and flickering blue lights drew his attention.

Two silver police cruisers were up on the kerb a hundred meters away, uniformed officers loitering around a dark blue Lada parked in a layby, fending off people who came too close. Marc recognized the vehicle – he’d seen it outside Novodevichy Cemetery earlier in the day, the man inside scrutinizing everybody who had come to Morozov’s funeral.

A third police car came to a sudden halt beside the others, disgorging a man who looked senior to the beat cops clustered by the Lada, and as Marc watched, the ranking officer shone a flashlight into the vehicle’s interior. The beam caught on a spray of wet red on the inside of the windscreen and Marc missed a step. From this distance, he could just about pick out the silhouette of a motionless figure slumped in the driver’s seat. The senior cop was on his radio now, talking animatedly.

Someone killed a watcher? The notion rolled through Marc’s mind, gathering momentum. No wonder those coppers are shitting bricks. And then an unpleasant corollary to that realization hit him. He was posted here to observe me. What if the FSB think I did that?

Marc jogged across the square, putting his back to the scene, concentrating on moving away, trying to look as ordinary as he could. He reached the entrance of the terminal building and joined the flow of commuters heading inside, but as the door before him opened, he caught a brief glimpse of someone coming up behind reflected in the glass.

A man in tactical trousers and a black bomber jacket, wearing heavy mil-spec boots and a cap, watching him with predatory intensity.

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Continuing MOSCOW RULES, a brand-new Marc Dane serial novella…

On a mission to fulfil a request for his employer on the streets of Moscow, Marc Dane finds himself dragged into a deadly scavenger hunt for a prize that could cause chaos in the wrong hands…

In Part 2, after receiving a mysterious key from the widow of notorious KGB spymaster Sergei Morozov, Marc discovered a hidden compartment in a decrepit safehouse and fought off a pair of brutal mercenaries intent on taking what he found within. But as he escaped, Marc realized he may be in more trouble than he knows…

Read on for Part 3 of MOSCOW RULES; future chapters will be released via this blog, but if you’d like to get early access, sign up to the James Swallow Reader’s Club at this link or type your email address in the box at the bottom of this page.

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MOSCOW RULES part 3 – EVERYONE IS POTENTIALLY UNDER OPPOSITION CONTROL

The cab – a world-weary Skoda Octavia in grimy canary yellow – continued to pick up speed, racing away from the destination Marc had requested. The driver didn’t seem to notice he had a passenger in the back, and after calling out to him, the Englishman’s jaw set in annoyance and he planted a knee in the back of the man’s seat, raising his voice. Muscovites had a tendency to treat any foreigners like they were idiots, and Marc had no time for it.

“Hey!” He leaned forward. “Where the hell are we going? You listening to me, mate? I said Komsomolskaya Square, not the scenic route-”

As they reached an intersection the cabbie stood abruptly on the brakes, with enough force that Marc was reeled back hard by his seatbelt, his breath gushing out of him in a whoosh. He saw a black Mercedes rolling to a halt alongside the taxi, clocking the tinted windows and the way it lay low on its shocks – a telltale sign it carried the additional weight of bullet-proofing.

So this wasn’t the everyday fleecing of some hapless tourist. This was an entirely different game. Regretting his decision to ditch the guns he’d taken from the thugs in Morozov’s safehouse, Marc disengaged the seatbelt and pulled on the nearest door handle, but it resolutely refused to open.

The cab driver sat rigidly like an automaton, staring directly forward out of the windscreen as two men got out of the Merc and climbed into the taxi. One, hatchet-faced and heavy in a grey field jacket and matching Cossack hat, lumbered his bulk into the passenger seat in front of Marc, glaring at him as if he was responsible for doing the guy some great misdeed. The second man was older and slower about things, a patrician type wearing a greatcoat that pooled around him as he slipped into the back next to Marc. He settled, gave a nod, and the cab took off again like a rocket, veering into the busy flow of Moscow’s rush hour traffic.

Marc had an inkling about the man in the greatcoat, and played it. “You were at the funeral.” He spoke in English, waiting to see what came back from the bait he cast, but the older man seemed to be in no hurry to reply.

The cab barrelled along at an unpleasantly swift pace, the driver threading it through gaps between lorries and across intersections against the lights, apparently to the complete disinterest of local cops loitering by the slip-roads. The silence inside the car lengthened, and Marc dredged up his mental map of the city.

Where are we going? He found himself wondering if their destination would be some dingy unmarked building in the middle of nowhere, a place where the sound of the pistol shot that killed him might go unremarked. Another statistic, a luckless British tourist who had a misadventure in a city he didn’t know. Was that how this was going to play out? Marc’s grip tightened on the string bag holding the vodka bottle Sergei Morozov had bequeathed to his boss.

The traffic around them evened out as the cab joined vehicles on the MKAD ring road that circled Moscow’s outer perimeter, and the ride became smoother, the windscreen wipers swishing back and forth to bat away the sleety snowfall; then without preamble, the man in the great coat shifted in his seat so he could look Marc up and down.

“Marcus Dahl,” he said, quoting the name on Marc’s expensively-forged Norwegian passport, and the way he did so made it clear he knew the identity was a cover. “We have not met. I am Melor Rykov.” He nodded toward the big guy in the front. “This is my associate, Gurik.” Marc thought about playing dumb, but before he could frame a reply, Rykov continued on. “Does my name spark any recollection with you?”

It did. In the files of MI6, Melor Rykov was a known player, codenamed METRIC by Western intelligence services, a highly-placed officer in Russia’s FSB – the agency that had grown out of the corpse of that rightly-feared Cold War enemy, the KGB. Rykov rated a few mentions in the redacted brief document Marc had read on Sergei Morozov – years before Morozov had been quietly encouraged to quit the espionage life and retire, Rykov was the deceased spymaster’s protégé.

Which means I need to tread carefully, Marc thought. “What is this about?” he asked, glancing at the driver, who was still studiously ignoring them.

“Don’t concern yourself with him, he’s deaf,” Rykov said airily.

“Oh.” That detail didn’t do anything to calm Marc’s racing pulse.

“The flowers you left were very beautiful. A fine gesture,” said Rykov, with a genuine nod. “Sergei always spoke of your employer with great admiration.”

“The feeling was mutual.” Marc decided to play things straight, at least for the moment, and chanced another conversational lure. “I understand his passing was…quick.”

“A small mercy.” Rykov grimaced, then gave Marc another look. “Sergei had many enemies. If you represented one of them, we would not be having this conversation.” He left the implied threat where it lay. “Some believe my old mentor was murdered, of course.” Rykov said it matter-of-factly. “Perhaps you know why.”

Marc shook his head. “You’re mistaken. I was just here to deliver the flowers. Pay some respects.”

“Is that why you were at the apartment in Golovinsky District?” Gurik spoke for the first time, his thick accent crushing the vowels of his English. “What did you steal from there?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Marc shot back. “Your blokes tossed it looking for something, yeah?”

“Those were not our men,” Rykov noted. He let out a long, low sigh, glancing out of the window as the city sped past them. “It is not like the old days. Resources have grown thin, you understand? So many men are raking off their take before our funding gets to the field. For every bullet I have, two have been stolen to sell on the black market.” He shook his head. “Once upon a time, I could have rolled you into the basement of the Lubyanka and put you to the question. Learned everything you know, da? But these days, I am reduced to driving in circles around the ring road with those I wish to converse with. Too many ears elsewhere.”

Marc suppressed a shiver. The Lubyanka was the KGB’s notorious headquarters down on the former Dzerzhinsky Square, where countless numbers of spies, dissidents and others who earned the ire of the Russian State had been ‘disappeared’.

“Tell me what you know about the ledger, Mr. Dane.” Rykov didn’t look back at him as he spoke.

So much for Marcus Dahl, then, thought Marc. “I don’t know anything about any ledger,” he said, and it was the truth. “If it’s something to do with Morozov or those merc dickheads who shot at me, it’s not my business.”

Gurik gave a gruff snort of amusement. “Not your business,” he echoed testily. “How often have you and Ekko Solomon’s band of vigilantes interfered in Russian affairs? What gives you that right, eh? We keep our own house in order!”

 “My comrade’s point is well made,” said the older man. “It was you who killed Pytor Glovkonin, was it not?” Rykov’s gaze settled on Marc and bored into him.

For years, working alongside Ekko Solomon, Lucy Keyes, Assim Kader and the rest of his team, Marc Dane had dedicated himself to finding and destroying the clandestine power-brokers known as the Combine – the money-men behind dozens of terrorist atrocities and staged disasters, an amoral group who saw chaos as a means to make profit. Pytor Glovkonin had been one of those men. The worst of them.

It had cost a lot, including the lives of too many good friends along the way, but in the end Marc and the others ended it. They burned the Combine’s secret network to the ground, and Glovkonin along with it.

Marc remembered the sound of a rifle discharging, and the round he’d put into Glovkonin’s thigh after the billionaire oligarch had tried to murder Marc and his friends. He thought about everything Glovkonin had taken from him, every vicious plot and act of destruction the man had funded, and what that venial, amoral bastard would have done if he had succeeded in his schemes. Marc didn’t feel one iota of guilt about pulling that trigger, and Rykov saw it in his eyes.

“I didn’t kill him,” Marc clarified. “His greed did. That and the blood loss.”

“A vile and soulless man,” noted Rykov. “The world is better off without Glovkonin and his co-conspirators. But it was not your place to deal with him. He was Russian. He was our responsibility.”

“He was Combine,” said Marc, pressing the point. “And those men were only loyal to money.”

“Before you embarked on your great crusade,” sneered Gurik, “did you stop to think what your blundering would leave in its wake? The Combine held the leashes of dozens of hostile actors… Renegade military contractors, terrorists and criminal groups! Without their control, those factions are more dangerous than they have ever been. You turned one enemy into one hundred.”

Marc couldn’t deny there was some truth to that, but he refused to accept that the alternative would have been any better. “The Combine let thousands of innocent people die – Russian citizens included – just to make their stock price rise a few percent. They got what they deserved.” He shot a look back at Rykov. “Is that what this is really about?”

“The past is a distraction.” Rykov shook his head. “My focus is the present. The ledger,” he repeated. “You must know the story.”

“I really don’t,” said Marc. He was starting to lose patience. “How about you stop treating me like a fucking chump and just come out with it, yeah? Save us all some time?”

Rykov grimaced at Marc’s profanity. “What has happened to English politeness?”

“All that public school shit went out with the Cambridge Five,” Marc snapped. “I prefer directness.”

Rykov sighed again. “Sergei Morozov was elderly when he died, in a game where spies rarely live long enough to see their pension. My mentor survived because his enemies and allies alike were afraid of him. Afraid of what he knew about them.”

“Kompromat,” growled Gurik. “You understand this word?”

“Blackmail files,” said Marc, with a nod. “A KGB classic. Gather compromising intelligence on a target of interest, then use that to gain leverage over them.”

“Paupers and princes, politicians and presidents… Russia has always known the value of their secrets. And Sergei knew where the bodies are buried.” Rykov chuckled dryly at his own comment. “To be clear, I am not using a euphemism when I say this.”

Marc fit the pieces together. “Your old boss had dirt on everyone, that’s what kept him alive. But as long as no-one touched him, he let it lie.”

“But then the old fool died. Unexpectedly.” Gurik chewed his lip. “We were not prepared.”

“You don’t know where it is.” Marc studied Rykov carefully, as the understanding came to him. “Bloody hell. No wonder you’re nervous. Whoever has that kompromat could name their price… Or ruin a lot of lives.”

Rykov spread his hands. “You see now the seriousness of the situation. So I ask again, what do you know? What did Galina give you?”

“A key for the safehouse.” There was little point in hiding that any more. Marc held up the string bag. “Morozov left a parting gift for my boss-”

He barely got the words out before Gurik lunged at him and ripped the bag from Marc’s hands. The big man gave the vodka bottle a shake, and over Marc’s protestations, he wound down the taxi’s window and emptied the bottle’s contents out on to the slush-caked highway racing past them.

Rykov gave a sniff. “Our technicians will examine the cap and the labels. Sergei was fond of, shall we say, classical tradecraft techniques? Microdots and the like.”

Marc sighed, and the cab gave a sudden lurch as it left the ring road for city streets again. “What a waste. I thought Russians appreciated good vodka.”

“Buy another bottle at the train station,” Gurik said briskly, as the taxi crossed on to the avenue where Marc’s hotel was situated. “Pack your bag and check out, Englishman.” Then he grew an unpleasant smirk. “As you said before, this is not your business.”

When the cab halted, Marc found his door was working once again, and he climbed out, back into the snow and the cold. Rykov peered up at him, favouring him with a wan smile. “I think, Mr. Dane, for the good of all, it would be best if you and I did not meet again. Da svidania.”

The taxi took off from the kerb at a rate of knots, splashing slush, and Marc watched the yellow Skoda disappear into the haze. With evening drawing in, the temperature was dropping fast, but the chill around him wasn’t just from the snow. Moscow wanted him gone, he could feel it like he was a splinter in the city’s skin.

As he walked toward the hotel’s reception, Marc’s gloved hand found an object still in his pocket, the cardboard gift tag that had been around the neck of the vodka bottle. He brought it out, pulling off one glove to run a finger over the writing on the card. Drink some for me.

There was something off about the tag. It felt oily to the touch.

Sergei Morozov was fond of classical tradecraft techniques. Rykov’s comment echoed in his mind.

“I should go.” Marc spoke aloud, the thought escaping in a puff of exhaled breath. But the more he considered it, the more he realized he wasn’t ready to leave just yet. The story of the dead man’s ledger, like it or not, had put a hook in him.

And if anything, being shot at and briefly kidnapped sharpened his resolve. Anyone who expected anything different of Marc Dane didn’t know him at all.

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Today’s blog features the second part of MOSCOW RULES, a brand-new Marc Dane story…

On a mission to fulfil a request for his employer on the streets of Moscow, Marc Dane finds himself dragged into a deadly scavenger hunt for a prize that could cause chaos in the wrong hands…

In Part 1, Marc attended the funeral of notorious KGB spymaster Sergei Morozov – but what seemed like a simple matter of laying some flowers on a grave took a mysterious turn when the dead man’s widow slipped him a key and a secret message…

Read on for Part 2 of MOSCOW RULES; future chapters will be released via this blog, but if you’d like to get early access, sign up to the James Swallow Reader’s Club at this link or type your email address in the box at the bottom of this page.

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MOSCOW RULES Part 2: NEVER GO AGAINST YOUR GUT

The journey took a couple of hours, as Marc criss-crossed the city in taxis, moving northwest, deliberately advancing in a semi-random pattern. He described a stair-step path over the Moscow streets, making Timiryazevskiy Park his apparent objective to throw off any followers. It was a simple matter to lose himself among the tightly-packed stands of birches bordering the park’s footpaths, doubling back to hail one last ride to take him where he actually wanted to go.

Content that he had thoroughly ‘washed’ his route, Marc headed to the address hidden in the key fob. He paid the cab driver a healthy tip and exited into Golovinsky District; it was largely residential, avenues lined with skeletal trees screening lines of five-storey apartments, and brutalist tower blocks rising into the snowy sky.

           

It was strange how much it reminded Marc of where he grew up. Change the signs in Cyrillic to English, swap the worn-out Lada kopeikas for worn-out Ford Escorts, and it could have been the South London council estate where he’d spent his teens. It made him feel homesick and relieved all at once. When Marc escaped the estate to join the Navy, getting free of the drag that would have pulled him into a life of petty crime, he’d never looked back. The military life had led him into MI6 and all that had followed, but there would always be a bit of him that lived in a place like this, no matter how far away he got.

He circled the building he was looking for, scoping out entrances, searching for anything that might be surveillance – but Marc saw nothing, just shabby rows of lock-up garages and narrow open courtyards heavy with layers of dirty snow. He followed a middle-aged woman walking a dog, letting her buzz herself back in through the security door, and briskly pushed past before she could get a good look at him.

The mortice key on the fob Galina Morozova gave him fitted the lock of an apartment on the top floor. The elegant pensioner had completed the brush pass with the skill of a consummate professional, and Marc wondered how much of her husband’s clandestine life she’d been party to, over the years. It was an old school move, but then Morozova’s spouse was the epitome of the archetypical Cold War spook – and in an age where technology infiltrated every aspect of the clandestine world, going back to crude, analogue-era tradecraft was a smart play.

The door showed no signs of forced entry, and Marc turned the key, easing it open. He wondered what awaited him – some safehouse the old Russian kept hidden in case his enemies ever remembered him? – but then he saw the mess in the narrow entrance hall.

Marc took a step back from the threshold and pushed the door all the way open with one gloved hand. He saw waist-high bookshelves stripped of their contents and little piles of yellowing old paperbacks left where they’d been dropped, torn down pictures in broken frames and even the plastic facias of plug sockets hanging half-out of the walls. A naked light fitting in the ceiling had suffered a similar fate, and the damage looked recent, and methodical.

His other hand drifted unconsciously to the small of his back. Under different circumstances, he would have been carrying a Glock semi-automatic pistol there in a paddle holster. But Marc had no weapon to defend himself today, if whomever had done this was still lurking inside.

Turn around and walk away. The voice in his head was unequivocal. Too many variables here. Too many unknowns. He should have been back at his hotel, preparing to exfiltrate. With the flowers laid and the respects paid at Sergei Morozov’s funeral, Marc had completed the task he’d been given.

Or have I?

Instinct warred with curiosity. The spymaster’s widow wouldn’t have sent him here without good cause, but was it in Marc’s interest or was it to serve someone else’s agenda?

Despite his misgivings, curiosity got the upper hand. At length, he took a step over the threshold, and carefully closed the door behind him. Inside, the apartment smelled like old bachelor – the whiff of stale beer and cooked food, a bit of wet dog and second-hand bookshop smell in the mix. He could hear the low burble of a television in a neighbouring apartment, but otherwise it was quiet. The radiators were stone cold, and the hot tap in the cramped kitchenette delivered only spurts of freezing water. Marc picked his way from room to room – hall to kitchen, kitchen to lounge, lounge to bedroom, bedroom to bathroom – avoiding every heap of debris where they lay. Nothing had been overlooked, from the contents of the cutlery drawers to the clothes in the careworn wardrobe. He pulled at a mound of rumpled shirts on the bed, finding nothing but cheap and serviceable labels.

Not the kind of thing I’d expect a man like Morozov to wear, he thought. But then, maybe that was the point. The old spy had been granted a nicely-appointed dacha from a grateful nation, in which to spend his twilight years, not a pokey little one-bedroom flat like this. Maybe this place is so unremarkable because he wanted somewhere off the grid. And given the state of disarray, it was clear that someone else had turned it over in search of something that had value. Again, Marc thought about the armed men filming Morozov’s funeral. Was this mess their handiwork?

He went back to the lounge, returning an upturned chair to its correct position, and sat. There was no television, the only modern elements visible a Chinese-made DAB radio and a wireless landline telephone. Books appeared to have been the only form of entertainment available, all of them scattered over the threadbare carpet. Marc’s gaze drifted to the empty shelves. Part of the lacquered wood backing was splintered along a join, as if a failed attempt had been made to prise it apart.

He moved closer, running his gloved fingers over the damage. There was a false panel there, metal covered with a layer of stained wood. On the floor, a bent steak knife from the kitchen lay discarded.

Marc played out the situation in his head. Somebody gets in here, trashes the place looking for…whatever…but they don’t reckon on finding a hidden safe. Don’t have the kit to open it.

On the one hand, that could look like the work of opportunist thieves. On the other, it might be cover for something else.

One thing was certain. Marc threw a look toward the hallway. They’ll be back, he thought. I should go.

But then his fingertip traced over a void in the panel. A hole cut in the wood, just big enough to fit a tiny key – like the kind you’d use to open a pair of handcuffs or a jewellery box.

The second key on the fob fitted perfectly, and turned with a well-oiled click. The splintered panel popped open, revealing a steel-lined fireproof inner behind it.

He wasn’t sure what to expect inside – spools of microfilm or faded old files stolen from KGB headquarters? – but certainly not a sealed bottle of Krystall vodka. With a half-smile, Marc picked it up, examining the perfect clarity of the liquor within. The bottle sported a high-grade special label, meaning it was from batches made expressly for ranking members of the politburo. A cardboard gift tag hung around its neck.

The tag had a message, in the same patient handwriting as the address in the key fob. Solomon, my old friend, it read, drink some for me.

“Huh.” Marc absently pocketed the tag and weighed the bottle in his hand. Vodka this rare was probably worth a few month’s rent on a flat like this, but still he was sorely tempted to crack the seal and take a swig.

It was then he realized that the TV in the apartment next door had gone quiet. In the moment of silence that followed, Marc caught the sound of a creaking floorboard.

He turned to find a figure filling the doorway leading out of the cramped lounge. It was one of the men from the funeral, one of the mercenaries. Marc kept the vodka bottle held down low.

The mercenary didn’t seem surprised to see him. “G’de eto?” he demanded, the question coming out in a breathy smoker’s snarl.

“You what, mate?” Marc played dumb, played for time.

“Where is it?” translated the thug, his scowl growing.

“Where’s what?” Marc moved slightly, aiming himself toward the kitchen. He wondered if the merc’s buddy from the cemetery was about. It worried him that he hadn’t heard the big man entering until it was too late.

“Where is…” Clearly, English wasn’t the merc’s first language, and he frowned as he struggled for the right word. “Where is book?”

Marc gestured at the mess of old hardbacks and dog-eared pulps lying around the room. “Take your pick.”

The merc’s expression told the tale; he’d had enough of Marc’s bullshit, and his hand darted inside his jacket, going for the gun concealed there. But he telegraphed the move, and Marc took advantage, shortening the distance between them in one step, swinging up the vodka bottle like a club. The merc wasn’t expecting him to react that fast, and the heavy glass bottle cracked the man across the cheek without breaking.

The merc’s hand jerked and the gun went off before it cleared the holster, punching a round through the material of his jacket and into the floorboards. Marc hit him again on the back-swing, the bottle still intact, and the big man staggered back, finally fumbling the gun into the open. Marc recognized the black-and-silver shape of a Soratnik pistol, a Russian knock-off of the Czech-made CZ-75; there were enough rounds in the magazine to make life very unpleasant for anyone on the wrong end of it.

He twisted away, diving toward the kitchen, as the merc snapped off two quick shots in succession, the flat bang of the shots rebounding off the walls. Both rounds missed, one shattering a window with a peal of smashed glass, and then Marc broke line of sight, skidding across the worn-smooth linoleum floor of the tiny kitchenette. The small table in the middle of the room was light enough for him to turn it over with a kick, and he shoved it toward the doorway, half-blocking the entrance as the merc came storming after him. Another bullet hummed through the air, embedding itself in the aging refrigerator behind Marc. From the flat next door, the rumble of the TV abruptly returned, only now it was at full volume to smother the sound of gunfire.

Marc rushed for the other doorway leading into the hall, but the merc anticipated, meeting him there, slamming him into the bathroom with a bull-charge. Marc lost his grip on the bottle and it rolled away, falling back through a thin wooden folding door and into the tiny bathroom. Barely big enough for a phone booth-sized shower, a corner sink and a toilet, it was too small to accommodate two people on good terms, let alone a pair intent on doing harm to one another.

The close confines meant the gun was momentarily out of play, and with both his hands now free, Marc clapped them against the sides of the merc’s bald head with enough force to rupture his eardrums. The bigger man yowled and tried to throw a punch, but he didn’t have the room for a wind-up. Instead, he landed a blow in the gut that made his opponent gag and retch.

Undeterred, Marc grabbed at the mirrored door of a hanging medicine cabinet and the whole thing came off the wall in a crunch of plaster, crashing down onto the merc. The mirror broke across his face and the contents of the cabinet bombarded him. He lost his footing, slipping on the lip of the shower, and collapsed, dragging Marc down atop him. Both men fought for the gun, but the thickset merc was at the mercy of gravity, and his head struck the toilet cistern hard enough to put a crack in the porcelain.

The merc’s eyes rolled back and a low gasp escaped him. He fell still and Marc scrambled clear, panting with adrenaline. Gingerly, he reached down to touch a finger to the other man’s neck. There was a pulse, but it was thready.

Marc made quick work of searching his adversary, taking the man’s Soratnik and a spare magazine. He found a smartphone on him, and dumped it in the toilet’s bowl, but kept the roll of cash from his other pocket.

“Yevgeny?” A hesitant voice called out from the hallway, and Marc heard boots shuffling over debris.

He checked the Soratnik, then swung out into the corridor, surprising the second merc he’d seen at the funeral that afternoon. “Yevgeny’s having a kip,” Marc told him, aiming the pistol at the man’s head. “Gun and phone. Now.”

The other merc swore under his breath, and gave a reluctant nod. “Okay.” He removed his pistol by the barrel and set it down on the floor, along with his cell phone, careful not to make any sudden moves. “This is just a job,” he added. “Nothing personal.”

“Oh yeah,” Marc said agreeably. “We’re all professionals here, aren’t we?” He directed the second man into the bathroom. “So you know if you follow me, I’ll shoot you dead, right?”

Marc wasn’t really planning to kill the man in cold blood, but his threat was good enough to give Yevgeny’s partner pause. Scooping up the second gun and handset, Marc backed out of the apartment, pausing just long enough to dump the bottle of vodka in a string shopping bag to dangle from his wrist.

He descended the stairs at a sprint, bursting back out into the wintry daylight, exhaling puffs of cold white vapour as he went. The other phone went into a waste bin, and after a moment of consideration, Marc dumped the guns as well. He came into Russia unarmed and he knew he would only get out the same way. Clutching the string bag close, he walked quickly to the main road and waved down a taxi.

“Komsomolskaya Square, please,” he told the driver, and the cab lumbered away from the kerb, picking up speed. The square was home to his hotel and the ornate Leningradsky terminal railway station, and from there it would be relatively straightforward for Marc to get a train into Finland or Estonia.

He caught sight of himself in the cab’s rearview mirror and winced, reaching up to wipe a trickle of blood from a cut lip. Part of his coat’s lapel had been torn in the brawl, and he was missing his camera glasses and the pads from his cheeks. Marc looked as if he had lost an argument, but he was still in one piece.

Then he noticed that the taxi wasn’t heading toward Komsomolskaya Square at all. It was accelerating eastward, in the opposite direction.

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When I first launched this website five years ago, I kicked off with the release of a free-to-download digital serial novel called ROUGH AIR (find it here), a story in my action thriller series featuring reluctant hero and ex-MI6 officer Marc Dane – now I’m doing it again with MOSCOW RULES, a ten-part original story that follows on from the events of my novel OUTLAW. To read more about my inspiration for this story, click here.

Marc Dane is on a mission to fulfil a request for his employer Ekko Solomon – the elderly Sergei Morozov, once a notorious KGB spymaster and now a retired Hero of the Soviet Union – has died unexpectedly, and Solomon dispatches Marc to pay his respects to this old adversary. But on the streets of Moscow, nothing is as it seems, and Marc quickly finds himself dragged into a deadly scavenger hunt for a prize that could cause chaos in the wrong hands…

Read on for Part 1 of MOSCOW RULES; future chapters will be released via my blog here, but if you’d like to get early access, sign up at this link or type your email address in the box at the bottom of this page.

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MOSCOW RULES part 1 – ASSUME NOTHING

The flakes of sleet falling from the low clouds resembled the petals of some strange pale flower, downy and feather-like, settling around the Englishman as he passed through the great red gateway of Novodevichy Cemetery.

Moscow’s steady snowfall flattened the air as it came down, smothering not just the graves and the headstones, but the sounds from the streets beyond. It threw a dreamy veil over the hard angles of slab-like office blocks, and the gilded domes inside the walls of the necropolis.

It wasn’t quite up to a blizzard yet, but it also wasn’t enough to dull the grim, brutalist reality of the city. No amount of scattershot gentrification could conceal the old Soviet bones; blunt concrete architecture glowered behind radiant advertising panels, gold and glass spread like ivy over retrofitted frontages, but it was all a thin layer atop the grey. A painted smile on a grimacing face.

Marc Dane picked his way through the cemetery’s maze of memorials, making sure to avoid the more famous burial plots where clusters of tourists congregated to take sombre selfies. Novodevichy was the final resting place of many of Moscow’s great and good, among them former leaders like Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, along with dozens of famous Russian philosophers, actors, authors and scientific luminaries. Even beneath the heavy snow, it had the sense of a well-kept park, but that didn’t make Marc feel any more comfortable about being there.

 Holding a spray of wrapped flowers in the crook of one arm, he pulled his long, heavy coat closer around his shoulders. His gloved hands pushed deep into its pockets, the thick collar turned up against the cutting, bone-deep chill of the Muscovite winter. Marc was warm and clammy in the coat, a combination of its dark mass and the so-called ‘bulk garment’ he wore under his shirt; the latter was part of a disguise, designed to broaden out his whipcord-thin body silhouette and make him appear heavier. Matched with subtle pads in his cheeks, a black wash over his usually dirty-blond hair and an untrimmed beard, Marc topped off the camouflage with a pair of nondescript eyeglasses. Together, the whole ensemble put ten years on him, aging Marc up into his late forties. So far the cover had worked well enough to get him across the Russian border and into the capital, but with every step closer to his destination, his trepidation increased.

Icy cold crawled along his spine despite the snug layers of his clothing. Coming to Moscow alone, unarmed, and without backup was the height of jeopardy for someone in Marc’s line of work – and yet he had done so without question at the behest of a friend.

I need you to be my proxy. He recalled the seriousness with which Ekko Solomon had made his request. This is a matter of honour for me. It is something that I can only ask of a man whom I trust implicitly.

Of course, Marc had said yes. He owed much to the African, and it never entered his mind to refuse. Once, Marc Dane had been on the run from his own nation, a former MI6 field officer accused of betraying his oath and killing his team-mates. Solomon had helped Marc break apart that lie, helped him find the traitors who framed him and, eventually, bring them a measure of retribution.

Marc gained a renewed purpose during that mission, becoming part of the Rubicon group, a team of second-chancers Solomon assembled to work for a greater good. Outside the structures of conventional covert agencies and state governments, acting in the margins and the shadows, they pushed back wherever they could. We have no nation but justice, as Solomon said.

So on the surface of it, taking the older man’s place at a funeral service in order to pay his respects seemed a small ask in return. But like most things in the clandestine world he moved through, Marc’s task was freighted with levels of unseen complexity.

The last time he’d been in Moscow was three years earlier, at the ragged end of a pursuit that had taken Marc into the corridors of a conspiracy wrapped around the world. That grim night’s work concluded with a trigger he pulled, and the man who ruined his life bleeding out into the rain and the mud. He’d never been a killer, but to some that wouldn’t matter.

Hence, the work with the disguise and his fake Norwegian passport that had cost plenty to source. All just to lay a few flowers on a new grave, in a city run by people who would have happily buried Marc Dane right next to the man being memorialized.

Up ahead, he saw the loose knot of mourners gathered around the plot he was looking for, as a priest concluded the rites. A small group, most of them elderly grey men in equally grey overcoats, each of whom were very deliberately ignoring one another. Each man had a shadow, thickset pit-bulls on two legs sporting black sunglasses and airs of menace. Marc surmised they would be ex-military or secret police, trained to do violence at a single word of command. He gave them a wide berth and circled around, silently approaching as the pallbearers gently lowered the deceased’s coffin into the cold, dark earth.

Sergei Morozov was dead. A few were here to say their farewells to the former KGB spymaster, lamenting the passing of a venerated comrade or shedding a tear for someone they had loved. But most of this small gathering had come to make sure, to be certain this old adversary was truly gone from the world.

Marc had seen a SIS file on Morozov, and even that heavily-redacted document made for compelling reading. A product of the bad old days of the Soviet Union, Morozov had been a consummate Cold Warrior, whose record resembled the byzantine machinations of a character from a le Carré novel. Pretty much every major KGB and FSB operation over the last five decades had the man’s fingerprints on it somewhere. A legendary figure in the ‘Great Game’, rumour had it that even being retired for two decades hadn’t stopped Morozov from keeping his hand in, right up until the very end.

That end being, in a rather prosaic fashion, a fatal meeting with a public tram in full view of a dozen eye-witnesses. Given the identity of the victim, the first assumption was one of foul play, but it gradually became clear that the opposite was more likely. The simple fact was, fate and time had caught up with an old and infirm man, who slipped on wet cobbles and into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Morozov had been a force to be reckoned with in his day, but he had outlived the majority of his enemies and those who still remained left him in the dust of the past. His was a sad, ordinary death for someone who escaped dozens of assassination attempts throughout his younger years.

At least, that was the narrative everyone had agreed upon. In a country where disinformation was as common as the snowfall, it was hard to be certain of any truth.

Marc maintained a respectful distance from the proceedings, allowing the scrutiny of the men in sunglasses to pass over him, keeping his head down. He saw an aged, elegant woman weeping delicately into a silken handkerchief, recognizing the dead man’s wife.

Galina Morozova; photos of her were in the file, among them a shot from when she was competing in the fencing competition at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, where she and Sergei had first met. Decades later, Galina still possessed the same willowy grace she had in her youth, and her sorrow seemed heartfelt. Marc looked away, feeling like an intruder on someone else’s genuine grief. Morozov had been a ruthless and implacable enemy, with no shortage of blood on his hands, but as Solomon had explained, he had also been a man of honour who never failed to keep his word. Rare qualities in this era, he noted.

As global tides of politics and ideology shifted, there were times when Solomon’s and Morozov’s interests aligned, where adversaries found common ground to oppose greater threats. As Solomon put it, the two aging warriors had come to respect one another – and in the end, after having lost so much to the endless grinding conflict of the ‘dark world’ of espionage, theirs was the closest thing to real friendship Sergei Morozov had.

Marc’s Russian was serviceable enough to know that the priest was winding up the proceedings, and he glanced around, double-checking lines of sight and possible escape routes should the situation become unpleasant. He didn’t expect anything so déclassé as to see guns coming out at a funeral, but at the same time he was well aware of what the local security services were capable of.

And on a second look, he noticed a couple of figures he hadn’t seen before, observing events from a few plots away. Another pair of former military types, but unlike the bodyguards, these two didn’t care to conceal it. They dressed like military contractors, in heavy boots and tactical trousers festooned with pockets, with matching black bomber jackets and watch caps. One of them held something in their hand, a small ruggedized digital camera trained on the funeral, recording every moment of the ceremony. Marc turned away before the lens moved in his direction, keeping the other mourners between him and the watchers. He was also recording the event, but more discreetly, through a micro-camera cell embedded in the bridge of his fake spectacles.

Those two are mercenaries. He had no doubt of it, and their presence raised questions. But paid by whom? And why?

In the past, men like those soldiers of fortune would have been circumspect and unobtrusive, but in today’s Russia, alight with a constant torrent of firebrand rhetoric and mired in conflict with the Ukraine, had a markedly different tone.

It’s the wild west over there now. Marc recalled the comment his partner Lucy Keyes made, before he set off. Watch your ass, Dane. Moscow has its own set of rules, and if you break ‘em, you’re gone.

The priest gave his final blessing, and one by one the assembled mourners filed past the grave to put down wreaths or peer in to check the coffin was still lying there. Marc picked his moment, and laid his flowers – a simple spray of white roses and calla lilies – before giving Morozov’s shiny black headstone a curt nod.

“It is a fine memorial.” It took him a second to realize the comment was in English, not Russian, and he turned to find Galina standing behind him. She smiled at Marc as if she were pleased to see him, even though they were strangers.

He resisted the urge to scratch nervously at his beard, in case he dislodged the pads that fattened out his cheeks. “Yes,” he agreed, at length. “Quite lovely.”

Galina came closer. “It is very rare for anyone less than a national hero to be buried in Novodevichy these days.” She looked down into the open grave at the oaken coffin. “It speaks to Sergei’s reputation that they found a place for him. I imagine he would be amused by that.”

Marc was stuck for the right thing to say, so he went for the clearest, simplest statement. “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am. Ekko Solomon sends his respects.”

“Oh.” Galina moved suddenly, and Marc found himself enveloped in her embrace. “Thank you.” Gingerly, he reciprocated, and the old woman’s voice dropped to a breathy whisper. “Sergei said he is the only one who should have it.”

“Pardon me?”

“Byt’ ostorozhnym.” Galina was already disengaging, and as she stepped back Marc felt a slight weight in his pocket. The woman had slipped something into his coat. Dabbing at her eyes, she took the hand of a female friend and walked away, off along the path.

Making the action as casual as he could, Marc put his hands back in his coat and departed, deliberately taking the route that led him in the opposite direction to the men with the camera. He felt for the object Galina had deposited; a metal ring with a plastic fob and two keys attached.

Making sure he wasn’t being observed, Marc stepped into the lee of a tall obelisk and pulled out the keys to study them. One was tiny, like the kind you’d use to open a pair of handcuffs or a jewellery box, but the other was for a commonplace mortice lock. The fob had a folded card insert, and he opened it, finding an address written in a careful, precise hand.

Had Solomon known Morozov’s wife would give this to him? Was it part of the mission, or something else? He put the keys in an inner pocket and considered his options.

He was thinking about what it could mean when he heard the soft crunch of snow under heavy boots. Marc chanced a look around the obelisk, and there were the two mercs approaching, looking this way and that, like they were searching for someone. Each had one hand inside their jacket, reaching for the blocky lump of a pistol concealed beneath.

He knew enough Russian to be able to translate Galina’s last words to him: be careful.

Without looking back, Marc pulled up the collar of his coat and made for the cemetery’s exit as the snowfall thickened.

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