When a commercial airliner is blown out of the sky off the East Coast, the CIA scrambles to find the perpetrators. A body is discovered near the crash site with three bullets to the face: the calling card of a shadowy international assassin.

Six months after the blood-soaked conclusion of Moscow Rules, Allon is in Umbria, trying to resume his honeymoon with his new wife, Chiara, when a colleague pays him a shocking visit. The man who saved Allon's life in Moscow and was then resettled in England has vanished without a trace. British intelligence is sure he was a double agent all along, and they blame Allon for planting him.

The violent death of a journalist leads Gabriel Allon to Russia. Here he finds that in terms of spycraft, the stakes are the highest they've ever been. He's playing by Moscow Rules now. A Moscow where a new generation of Stalinists is plotting to challenge the global dominance of the United States. One such man is Ivan Kharkov, a former KGB colonel who built a global investment empire on the rubble of the Soviet Union. Kharkov is an arms dealer - and he is about to deliver sophisticated weapons to al-Qaeda.

"In wartime," Winston Churchill wrote, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." For Britain's counterintelligence operations, this meant finding the unlikeliest agents imaginable - including a history professor named Alfred Vicary.

In the new thriller from the New York Times best-selling author of The Secret Servant, the death of a journalist leads Gabriel Allon to Russia, where he finds that, in terms of spy craft, even he has something to learn. He's playing by Moscow rules now.

Gabriel is summoned once more by his masters to undertake what appears to be a routine assignment: travel to Amsterdam to purge the archives of a murdered Dutch terrorism analyst who also happened to be an asset of Israeli intelligence. But once in Amsterdam, Gabriel soon discovers a conspiracy of terror festering in the city's Islamic underground.

When an al-Qaeda suspect is killed in London, photographs on his computer lead Israeli intelligence to suspect that al-Qaeda is planning its most audacious attack so far. To former spy Gabriel Allon, there is something terribly familiar about the information, something horrifyingly close. But even he does not realise how close. Urgently, he throws himself into the hunt, but there simply may not be enough of anything - enough time, enough facts, enough luck.

Allon is recovering from his grueling showdown with a Palestinian master terrorist, when terrorism comes to find him once again. An al-Qaeda suspect is killed in London, and photographs are found on his computer - photographs that lead Israeli intelligence to suspect that al-Qaeda is planning one of its most audacious attacks ever, straight at the heart of the Vatican.

Now Allon is back in Venice, when a terrible explosion in Rome leads to a disturbing personal revelation: the existence of a dossier in terrorist hands that strips away his secrets, lays bare his history.

Israeli art restorer and occasional secret agent Gabriel Allon has a problem. He finds a prominent Swiss banker dead in front of his Raphael, and he's the prime suspect. After some diplomatic intervention, Allon is freed. However, the banker's daughter tells him that her father's French Impressionist paintings, acquired under dubious circumstances during WWII, have been stolen by the murderers. Once Allon knows about the wartime misdeeds, he is pursued by a shadowy killer known only as "the Englishman."