The book begins with the story of how Napoleon Bonaparte found himself in the house of Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, the Duke of Richelieu and governor of Odessa, in 1807. A brief liaison with the duke’s 19-year-old Italian servant girl, Luisa Ravelli, resulted in the birth of a son. The bombing of Odessa by an Anglo-French squadron in 1854 and the landing of French troops in Odessa in 1918 had the objective of finding that illegitimate son.The protagonist of the book, Yevgeny Rivilis, is Bonaparte’s great-great-grandson and a Russian emigre who landed in New York in August 1996. His personal drama is compounded by the fact that his ex-wife, Sophia, from whom he is not formally divorced, proves to be the mistress of one of the terrorist leaders… This fact explains the additional interest that the security services have in him…Part two of the book recounts the cooperation and opposition between the FBI and the FSB, one of the successors to the KGB. The security services’ clandestine operations culminate in murders. Both sides suffer losses. An FBI agent and an FSB agent operating under diplomatic cover are victims of the secret war in New York. Sometime later two related murders occur: the killing in Moscow of Yuri Shchekochikhin, an opposition journalist and a member of the State Duma (July, 2003), and the slaying of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the vice-president of Ichkeria in Doha, Qatar (February, 2004). Both events are indirectly linked to Sophia.The story unfolds in New York, Washington, Las Vegas, Paris, Copenhagen, Baghdad and Damascus.
