Moscow Rules

Hugo. Carter had pleaded with the French to keep the guest list short. They had not. The chief of the DST, the French internal security service, was there, along with his counterpart from the more glamorous DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service. There was a senior man from the Police Nationale and his overlord from the Ministry of the Interior. There was a mysterious figure from military intelligence and, in a troubling sign that politics might play a role in French decision making, there was the president’s national security adviser, who had to be dragged to the gathering against his will from his chateau in the Loire Valley. And then there were the nameless bureaucrats, functionaries, factotums, note-takers, and food tasters who came and went with hushed abandon. Each one, Carter knew, represented a potential leak. He recalled Gabriel’s warnings about an ever-widening circle of knowledge and wondered how long they had until Ivan learned of the plot against him.

The setting was intensely formal, the furnishings preposterously French. The talks themselves were conducted in a vast mirrored dining room, at a table the size of an aircraft carrier. Carter sat alone on one flank, behind a little brass nameplate that read THOMAS APPLEBY, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION-a mere formality since he was known to the French and was held by them in considerable regard despite the many sins of his service. The opening notes were cordial, as Carter anticipated they would be. He raised a glass of rather good French wine to the renewal of Franco-American cooperation. He endured a rather tedious briefing about what Paris knew of Ivan’s activities in the former French colonies of sub-Saharan Africa. And he suffered through a rather odious lecture by the national security adviser over the failure of Washington to do anything about Ivan until now. He was tempted to lash back-tempted to chastise his newfound allies for pouring their own weapons into the most combustible corners of the planet-but he knew discretion was the better part of valor. And so he nodded at the appropriate times and conceded the appropriate points, all the while waiting for his opportunity to seize the initiative.

It came after dinner, when they retired to the cool of the garden for coffee and the inevitable cigarette. There were moments at any such gathering when the participants ceased to be citizens of their own land and instead banded together as only brothers of the secret world can do. This, Carter knew, was one of those moments. And so with only the faint murmur of distant traffic to disturb the stately silence, he quietly placed Gabriel’s demands before them-though Gabriel’s name, like Ivan’s and Elena’s, was not uttered in the insecurity of the open air. The French were appalled, of course, and insulted, which is the role the French play best. Carter cajoled and Carter pleaded. Carter flattered and Carter appealed to their better angels. And last, Carter played Gabriel’s trump card. It worked, just as Gabriel had known it would, and by dawn they had a draft agreement ready for signature. They called it the Treaty of Paris. Adrian Carter would later think of it as one of his finest hours.

36 SAINT-TROPEZ, FRANCE

The village of Saint-Tropez lies at the far western end of the Cote d’Azur, at the base of the French departement known as the Var. It was nothing but a sleepy fishing port when, in 1956, it was the setting for a film called And God Created Woman, starring Brigitte Bardot. Nearly overnight, Saint-Tropez became one of the most popular resorts in the world, an exclusive playground for the fashionable, the elite, and other assorted euro millionaires. Though it had fallen from grace in the eighties and nineties, it had seen a revival of late. The actors and rock stars had returned, along with the models and the rich playboys who pursued them. Even Bardot herself had started coming back again. Much to the horror of the French and longtime habitues, it had also been discovered by newly rich invaders from the East: the Russians.

The town itself is surprisingly small. Its two primary features are the Old Port, which in summer is filled with luxury yachts instead of fishing boats, and the Place Carnot, a large, dusty esplanade that once each week hosts a bustling outdoor market and where local men still pass summer days playing petanque and drinking pastis. The streets betweenthe port and the square are little more than medieval passageways. In the height of summer, they are jammed with tourists and pedestrians, which makes driving in the centre ville of Saint-Tropez nearly impossible. Just outside the town center lies a labyrinth of towering hedgerows and narrow lanes, leading to some of the world’s most popular beaches and expensive homes.

In the hills above the coast are a number of villages perches, where it is almost possible to imagine Saint-Tropez does not exist. One such village is Gassin. Small and quaint, it is known mainly for its ancient windmills-the Moulins de Paillas-and for its stunning views of the distant sea. A mile or so beyond the windmills is an old stone farm-house with pale blue shutters and a large swimming pool. The local rental agency described it as a steal at thirty thousand euros a week; a man with a German passport and money to burn took it for the remainder of the summer. He then informed the agent he wanted no cooks, no maid service, no gardeners, and no interruptions of any kind. He claimed to be a filmmaker at work on an important project. When the agent asked the man what type of film it would be, he mumbled something about a period piece and showed the agent to the door.

The other members of the filmmaker’s “crew” trickled into the villa like scouts returning to base after a long time behind enemy lines. They traveled under false names and with false passports in their pockets, but all had one thing in common. They had sailed under Gabriel’s star before and leapt at the chance to do so again-even if the journey was to take place in August, when most would have preferred to be on holiday with their families.

First came Gabriel’s two Russian speakers, Eli Lavon and Mikhail Abramov. Next it was a man with short black hair and pockmarked cheeks named Yaakov Rossman, a battle-hardened case officer and agent-runner from the Arab Affairs Department of Shin Bet. Then Yossi Gavish, a tall, balding intellectual from the Office’s Research division who had read classics at Oxford and still spoke Hebrew with a pronounced British accent.

Finally, this rather motley, all-male troupe was graced by the presence of two women. The first had sandstone-colored hair and child-bearing hips: Rimona Stern, an army major who served in Israel ’s crack military intelligence service and who also happened to be Shamron’s niece by marriage. The second was dark-haired and carried herself with the quiet air of early widowhood: Dina Sarid, a veritable encyclopedia of terrorism from the Office’s History division who could recite the time, place, and casualty count of every act of violence ever committed against the State of Israel. Dina knew the horrors of terrorism personally. She had been standing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square in October 1994 when a Hamas terrorist detonated his suicide belt aboard a Number 5 bus. Twenty-one people were killed, including Dina’s mother and two of her sisters. Dina herself had been seriously wounded and still walked with a slight limp.

For the next several days, the lives of Gabriel and his team stood in stark contrast to those of the man and woman they were pursuing. While Ivan and Elena Kharkov entertained wildly at their palace on the Baie de Cavalaire, Gabriel and his team rented three cars and several motor scooters of different makes and colors. And while Ivan and Elena Kharkov lunched elegantly in the Old Port, Gabriel and his team took delivery of a large consignment of weaponry, listening devices, cameras, and secure communications gear. And while Elena and Ivan Kharkov cruised the waters of the Golfe de Saint-Tropez aboard October, Ivan’s 263-foot motor yacht, Gabriel and his team hid miniature cameras with secure transmitters near the gates of Villa Soleil. And while Ivan and Elena dined lavishly at Villa Romana, a hedonistic and scandalously expensive restaurant adored by Russians, Gabriel and his team dined at home and plotted a meeting they hoped to conduct at the earliest date.

The first step toward creating the circumstances of that meeting occurred when Mikhail climbed into a red Audi convertible with a new American passport in his pocket and drove to the Cote d’Azur International Airport in Nice. There, he met an attractive young American woman arriving on a flight from London Heathrow: Sarah Crawford of Washington, D.C., lately of the Havermore estate, Gloucestershire, England. Two hours later, they checked into their suite at the Chateau de la Messardiere, a luxury five-star hotel located a few minutes from the centre ville. The bellman who showed the young couple to an ocean-view room reported to his colleagues that they could barely keep their hands off one another. The next morning, while the guests were partaking of a buffet breakfast, the chambermaids found their king-size bed in a shambles.

They drifted through the same world but along distinctly parallel planes. When Elena and the children chose to remain cloistered at the Villa Soleil, Sarah and her lover would spend the day poolside at the Messardiere-or “the Mess,” as they referred to it privately. And when Elena and the children chose to spend the day frolicking in the gentle surf of Tahiti Beach, Sarah and her lover would be stretched out on the sands of the Plage de Pampelonne