Moscow Rules

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 perchés, 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 Côte 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,