#But the show pretty explicitly establishes that Yassen did not know that John was a double agent until Julia told him in s3e7

[truly-sincerely]

Eagle Strike vs Russian Roulette FIGHT

Horowitz isn't just a pantser, he's a pantser with bad memory. When he wrote Stormbreaker he had no idea who Yassen Gregorovich was. He was just Alex's cool, sexy, mysterious nemesis who spends the whole book voguing in designer jeans.

He doesn't become interesting until Eagle Strike (where he's still not allowed to do anything really awful) and Snakehead (where he's finally allowed to kill four and a half MI6 agents).

If you don't know, the prologue and epilogue of Russian Roulette tells Stormbreaker from Yassen's POV. According to the timeline established therein, Yassen did not kill Ian Rider. He couldn't have. He was in Hong Kong when Ian Rider died. It also completely erases Snakehead along with several other terrible writing sins that I will not get into here.

So this is just a long way of saying that I can't use anything from RR in my book timeline without tainting the whole timeline irreparably. Thank you for your understanding.