Death of a Dissident (58 page)

On Thursday, November 16, we had a strategy meeting with Boris and Lord Tim Bell, his media adviser. By then Boris and I were both convinced that Sasha had been poisoned. We were not sure about the
why
, but there was no doubt regarding the
who:
Who else other than Kontora would want to harm Sasha? We wanted to alert the media.

Tim Bell was extremely concerned.

“Boris,” he said, “you have cast yourself as the archenemy of Putin: politically, personally, and ideologically. Reasonable people believe that you are on the good side in this crusade, even though they may question your motives. For the public at large, this is all pretty irrelevant because it’s all about politics in a faraway land. But this time, the situation is very different. A crime has been committed on
British soil, an attempted murder. The story will reach many people, who will react intuitively. The problem is, most people will not
want
to believe it was Putin. People are instinctively averse to the idea of governments or presidents ordering murders. The more it seems obvious, the deeper they will go into denial. You will be going against the tide, and you are the anti-Putin. If people don’t want to think it was Putin, then they’ll think it must be you. The louder you say it was him, the more this will happen.”

By the end of the day on Friday the 17th the toxicology report came in. It was official: Sasha had been poisoned with thallium, Marina told me on the phone from the hospital. She sounded relieved, in one sense. At least they knew what it was. They were starting him on an antidote.

At that point, all hell broke loose. An armed police squad arrived at Barnet just as Sasha was being readied for transfer to the University College Hospital (UCH) in Euston, the top medical facility in Britain. Before he was discharged, Marina had the good sense to get a medical summary of Sasha’s case written up by the attending physician. I had it sent by messenger to Boris’s office, where we were holding council, and we immediately faxed it to New York. By then our émigré network in America was helping us seek the world’s leading authority on thallium poisoning.

In the meantime, another police squad converged on the house of Akhmed Zakayev in Muswell Hill.

“They took Tolik away,” Zakayev reported on the phone. While Marina was at the hospital, Tolik stayed with the Zakayevs after school.

“You won’t believe it,” he said. “Eight cops in three cars said they had orders to take him. They terrified my grandchildren. ‘Why did they arrest Tolik?’ they asked.”

I rushed to UCH only to discover that the ambulance, escorted by police, had beaten me there. The doors on Sasha’s floor were locked. Through a window I could see two policemen at the end of a corridor. As I gestured to attract their attention, two solemn-looking gentlemen
in suits emerged from the elevator. They were obviously there to visit the same patient.

“May I inquire who you are?” one of them asked.

“And who are you?”

He gave me his card and wrote down my numbers. He and his companion were from the Scotland Yard antiterrorist unit. They asked me to give them a day to question Sasha. I tried to call Marina, but she was nowhere to be found. There was nothing more I could do. I went out for a drink.

As I settled in at a nearby pub, Zakayev called: “They are holding Marina.”

“What?”

“She called me from a hospital phone. They have taken her cell phone away, and would not let her see Sasha, or leave. Tolik’s cell phone is off, too. When the police took him, they told me they were bringing him to Marina, but they didn’t follow through. I am on my way to the hospital,” he said.

We got to Sasha’s floor at about the same time. A uniformed officer appeared.

“We want to see Mrs. Litvinenko.”

“She can’t see you right now.”

“Is she in custody?”

“No, she is not, but she can’t see you.”

Cops are cops everywhere, I thought. There is only one way of dealing with them.

“Well, if she is not here in five minutes, we are calling the press to say that you have arrested her.”

“Please wait while I call my superior.”

Two minutes later, the antiterrorist detective appeared, the one I had met earlier. He was obviously the boss around here.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “They’ve overdone it a bit. They’re the local police and they don’t know what’s going on. They were told to secure the witnesses.”

“Why are you holding the kid?”

“He was at a police station, and they are bringing him back to Mr. Zakayev’s house right now. I apologize again.”

A moment later they brought Marina. “Thank you for rescuing me, boys,” she said. “They just returned my phone.” She was shaken, but trying to smile. It was past midnight. Zakayev drove her home.

On Saturday morning I picked up Professor Henry on my way to UCH. Thallium, he explained as we drove, “is tasteless, colorless, odorless. It takes about a gram to kill you. For the first ten days or so it looks like a typical case of food poisoning. Hair begins to fall out only after two weeks, which gives the assailant ample time to get away. It’s a poisoner’s ideal weapon,” he said.

In the hospital he gave the young doctor a lecture about thallium: “The body tries to get rid of it by excreting it into the gut, but it is quickly reabsorbed. The antidote works by capturing it in the intestines.”

They were giving Sasha dark blue pills of “Prussian Blue,” an antidote dye. The large pills were extremely painful to swallow given the state of his mouth. But he was a brave soldier. He immediately appreciated Henry’s authority. “I know you’ll get me out of this, Professor,” he said.

“You are doing well,” Henry said, cheering him up. “Let me see how strong you are. Squeeze my hand. Oh, you are strong!”

“I could still do push-ups if not for these tubes,” Sasha said, pleased.

But when we left the room, Henry looked perplexed.

“It looks very strange. They are treating him for thallium, but with thallium he should’ve lost his muscle strength, and he has not.”

I showed him the toxicology report from Barnet Hospital.

“See,” he said, “it says here that the level of thallium is elevated, but only ‘three times over the norm.’ This is too low to account for his symptoms.”

On Sunday the papers broke the story: “Russian Spy Poisoned in London. Anti-terrorist Police Investigate.”

“Sasha is not a spy,” protested Marina. “He never spied. Why do they call him a spy?”

“This is the least of our concerns right now,” I said.

We were sitting in the UCH cafeteria downstairs. Sasha had just been transferred to intensive care “as a precaution,” the doctors explained. They were now giving him a fifty-fifty chance of survival.

Marina was wearing dark glasses. There was a crowd of reporters outside, but they could not get to her. The hospital had deployed extra security to keep them at a distance. Ever since the
Sunday Times
hit the stands, the press had been chasing her, forcing her to use the back entrance to the hospital. Reporters were seeking out her address at Muswell Hill. Scotland Yard assigned two officers to her, who hung around just in case of a problem.

She did not want to speak to the press yet. “You know me,” she said to Zakayev and me. “This is your game. I want to stay out of this as long as possible.”

In truth, I was just getting to know Marina. I would remember our conversation later, after Sasha’s death, when she decided she was ready to face the media. She did it with force and grace, in spite of her aversion to the limelight, as an obligation to Sasha, like a settler’s wife who puts aside her laundry and picks up her fallen man’s rifle to defend her home.

While he was at the hospital, however, Marina managed the disaster quietly, maintaining the household routine, keeping Tolik’s schedule, holding her emotions at bay, with only the redness of her eyes betraying her lonely anguish. I saw her several times a day, but she never showed any sign of despair nor gave any cause for worry.

Later, she explained to me how she managed to live through those weeks.

“The truth is, I never believed that he would die. Not when they said fifty-fifty, not later, even up to the very end. If I had admitted that he could die, I would have broken down. But I kept telling myself it was just another crisis, the third in our marriage. The first was when he was in prison, the second when we were running away in Turkey. I used the coping skills that I had learned before. It was like being caught in a stream: you swim along hoping for the best and doing what you minimally have to do. You keep your head above water.”

Upstairs on the ICU floor, armed police were standing guard. Besides Marina, only Zakayev, Boris, and I were allowed into Sasha’s room. We had to clear any other visitors he wanted to see. But we did not see much of him. Most of his time was taken up by the antiterrorist detectives; by late Sunday they had spent probably twenty hours with him. They were obviously rushing against time to get as much out of him as possible.

On Monday morning, Professor Henry visited again. When he emerged from a conference with the attending physician his expression was dark.

“This is not thallium,” he said. “His bone marrow function is totally gone, while his muscles are strong—if it were thallium it would have been just the opposite. They now handle him as if he had an overdose of a chemotherapeutic drug, even though he didn’t. The point is, at this stage the cause does not really matter. They are more concerned with the effects, such as sudden organ failure. He is getting weaker.”

“But they found thallium at Barnet.”

“That’s the mystery. He has definitely gotten a little bit of thallium,
plus
something else …” Suddenly he interrupted himself. “Or, wait a minute. Perhaps it was radioactive thallium.”

You had to be a scientist to follow Professor Henry’s train of thought. A small amount of a highly radioactive variety of thallium, that is, an isotope, would not cause any
chemical
damage to Sasha’s body, such as muscle weakness. However, it would create heavy
radiation
damage, such as bone marrow destruction and hair loss. This was exactly what happened to a KGB defector by the name of Nikolai Khokhlov in 1957, whose tea was laced with radioactive thallium by Soviet agents.

“But they have checked Sasha for radioactivity and found nothing, haven’t they?”

“They did. Twice. But hospitals are geared to deal only with gamma radiation. If it was alpha radiation they wouldn’t pick it up. And I must confess that I do not remember my physics: whether thallium emits alpha or gamma rays.”

There are two kinds of radiation: high-energy, penetrating radiation
called gamma rays, and low-energy radiation, such as alpha emission, which does not penetrate even a sheet of paper, not to mention human skin. In medical school they teach only about gamma radiation: people get exposed to it in places like Hiroshima or Chernobyl. Doctors also use gamma rays in isotope diagnostics when they inject a small amount of a gamma-emitter into a patient, and then register the emissions in a scanning chamber to detect cancer cells. But there is no place for alpha radiation in medicine, and no equipment to detect it in hospitals. Even if Sasha were packed with an alpha emitter, no common medical device would notice it.