A waiter appeared and placed a plate of steak haché avec pomme frites in front of each child. Elena instructed Sarah and Mikhail to have a look at the menu and was opening her own when her mobile phone began to chime. She drew it from her handbag and looked at the display screen before lifting the cover. The conversation that followed was brief and conducted in Russian. When it was over, she closed the phone with a snap and placed it carefully on the table before her. Then she looked at Sarah and treated her to another smile filled with false light.

“Ivan was planning to take his yacht out to sea this afternoon but he’s decided to join us for lunch instead. He’s just over in the harbor. He’ll be here in a minute or two.”

“How lovely,” said Sarah.

Elena closed her menu and shot a glance at the bodyguards. “Yes,” she said. “Ivan can be very thoughtful when he wants to be.”

38 SAINT-TROPEZ, FRANCE

The "arrival,"” as it would become known in the lexicon of the operation, took place precisely forty-seven seconds after Elena laid her mobile phone upon the white tablecloth. Though Ivan had been standing just three hundred yards away at the moment he placed the call, he came by armored Mercedes rather than on foot, lest one of his enemies was lurking amid the sea of humanity shuffling listlessly along the quays of the Old Port. The car roared into the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville at high speed and stopped abruptly a few feet from Grand Joseph’s entrance. Ivan waited in the backseat another fifteen seconds, long enough to ignite a murmur of intense speculation inside the restaurant as to his identity, nationality, and profession. Then he emerged in an aggressive blur, like a prizefighter charging from his corner to finish off a hapless opponent. Once inside the restaurant, he paused again in the entranceway, this time to survey the room and to allow the room to survey him in return. He wore loose-fitting trousers of black linen and a shirt of luminous white cotton. His iron hair shone with a fresh coat of oil, and around his thick left wrist was a gold watch the size of a sundial. It glittered like plundered treasure as he strode over to the table.

He did not sit down immediately; instead, he stood for a moment at Elena’s back and placed his huge hands proprietarily around the base of her neck. The faces of Nikolai and Anna brightened with the unexpected appearance of their father, and Ivan’s face softened momentarily in response. He said something to them in Russian that made the children both burst into laughter and caused Mikhail to smile. Ivan appeared to make a mental note of this. Then his gaze flashed over the table like a searchlight over an open field, before coming to rest on Sarah. The last time Ivan had seen her, she had been cloaked in Gabriel’s dowdy clothing. Now she wore a thin peach-colored sundress that hung from her body in a way that created the impression of veiled nudity. Ivan admired her unabashedly, as though he were contemplating adding her to his collection. Sarah extended her hand, more as a defense mechanism than a sign of friendship, but Ivan ignored it and kissed her cheek instead. His sandpaper skin smelled of coconut butter and another woman.

“ Saint-Tropez obviously agrees with you, Sarah. Is this your first time here?”

“Actually, I’ve been coming to Saint-Tropez since I was a little girl.”

“You have an uncle here, too?”

“Ivan!” snapped Elena.

“No uncles.” Sarah smiled. “Just a longtime love affair with the South of France.”

Ivan frowned. He didn’t like to be reminded of the fact that anyone, especially a young Western woman, had ever been anywhere or done anything before him.

“Why didn’t you mention you were coming here last month? We could have made arrangements to get together.”

“I didn’t realize you spent time here.”

“Really? It was in all the papers. My home used to be owned by a member of the British royal family. When I acquired it, the London papers went into something of a frenzy.”

“I somehow missed it.”

Once again, Sarah was struck by the flat quality of Ivan’s English. It was like being addressed by an announcer on the English-language service of Radio Moscow. He glanced at Mikhail, then looked at Sarah again.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” he asked.

Mikhail rose and held out his hand. “My name is Michael Danilov. Sarah and I work together in Washington.”

Ivan took the proffered hand and gave it a bone-crushing squeeze. “Michael? What kind of name is that for a Russian?”

“The kind that makes me sound less like a boy from Moscow and more like an American.”

“To hell with the Americans,” Ivan declared.

“I’m afraid you’re in the presence of one.”

“Perhaps we can do something to change that. I assume your real name is Mikhail?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then Mikhail you shall be, at least for the remainder of the afternoon. ” He seized the arm of a passing waiter. “More wine for the women, please. And a bottle of vodka for me and my new friend, Mikhail.”

He enthroned himself on the luminous white banquette, with Sarah to his right and Mikhail directly opposite. With his left hand, he was pouring icy vodka into Mikhail’s glass as though it were truth serum. His right arm was flung along the back of the banquette. The fine cotton of his shirt was brushing against Sarah’s bare shoulders.

“So you and Sarah are friends?” he asked Mikhail.

“Yes, we are.”

“What kind of friends?”

Once again Elena objected to Ivan’s forwardness and once again Ivan ignored her. Mikhail stoically drained his glass of vodka and, with a sly Russian nod of the head, implied that he and Sarah were very good friends indeed.

“You came to Saint-Tropez together?” Ivan asked, refilling the empty glass.

“Yes.”

“You’re staying together?”

“We are,” Mikhail answered. Then Elena added helpfully: “At the Château de la Messardière.”

“You like it there? The staff is looking after you?”

“It’s lovely.”

“You should come stay with us at Villa Soleil. We have a guesthouse. Actually, we have three guesthouses, but who’s counting?”

You’re counting, Sarah thought, but she said politely: “That’s very kind of you to make such a generous offer, Mr. Kharkov, but we really couldn’t impose. Besides, we paid for our room in advance.”

“It’s only money,” Ivan said with the dismissive tone of a man who has far too much of it. He tried to pour more vodka into Mikhail’s glass, but Mikhail covered it with his hand.

“I’ve had quite enough, thanks. Two’s my limit.”

Ivan acted as though he had not heard him and doled out a third. The interrogation resumed.

“I assume you live in Washington, too?”

“A few blocks from the Capitol.”

“Do you and Sarah live together?”

“Ivan!”

“No, Mr. Kharkov. We only work together.”

“And where is that?”

“At the Dillard Center for Democracy. It’s a nonprofit group that attempts to promote democracy around the world. Sarah runs our sub-Saharan Africa initiative. I do the computers.”

“I believe I’ve heard of this organization. You poked your nose into the affairs of Russia a few years ago.”

“We have a very active program in Eastern Europe,” Sarah said. “But our Russia initiative was closed down by your president. He wasn’t terribly fond of us.”

“He was right to close you down. Why is it you Americans feel the need to push democracy down the throats of the rest of the world?”

“You don’t believe in democracy, Mr. Kharkov?”

“Democracy is fine for those who wish to be democratic, Sarah. But there are some countries that simply don’t want democracy. And there are others where the ground has not been sufficiently fertilized for democracy to take root. Iraq is a fine example. You went into Iraq in the name of establishing a democracy in the heart of the Muslim world, a noble goal, but the people were not ready for it.”