Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [120]
Equipped with a copy of the Herald Tribune, Felshtinsky went to meet the contact. Sasha watched from a distance in case of trouble.
“If you are ready, let’s go. I’ve got a car,” said the man in the green baseball cap, a middle-aged Chechen, after they exchanged code words.
“Go where?” inquired Felshtinsky.
“Pankisi Gorge.”
“No, I can’t. Why don’t you bring him here?”
“Impossible, the place is filled with FSB. The Gorge is the only place where they don’t go. We’ve got to go there.”
After twenty minutes of arguing, it became clear that a face-to-face meeting with Gochiyayev was impossible. Felshtinsky brought the man to a hotel—not the one where they were staying—where Sasha had rented a room for cash, expecting this kind of contingency. Sasha knocked on the door almost as soon as they entered the room.
“How many cars do you have?” he asked the Chechen.
“One.”
“We have one, too,” said Sasha. “And I have counted five loitering around. That means that there are at least three from Kontora.”
“You see?” said the Chechen. “I told you, the Gorge is the only safe place.”
They gave the Chechen a tape recorder, a video camera, and a questionnaire for Gochiyayev that Sasha had prepared. They agreed to meet the next day, when the Chechen would bring Gochiyayev’s statement.
The Chechen called Felshtinsky’s cell phone three hours later. “I am at home,” he said, “but I had company—as far as they could go. You watch out. See you tomorrow.”
The meeting never took place. Instead, at six in the morning, the security man appeared.
“You are going home,” he declared. “First plane. Leaves in two hours. We cannot guarantee anything, the way things are developing.”
They were rushed to the airport in a convoy of Jeeps. A dozen guards surrounded them as they entered the terminal.
“My people will be on the plane until you get off in Frankfurt,” their bodyguard said. “From then on you are on your own.”
As Felshtinsky and Sasha later learned, the previous night in Tbilisi the car that was assigned to them had been ambushed. The driver was killed.
The Chechen go-between resurfaced two weeks later via e-mail. The tape and the questionnaire were ready, he wrote. He wanted to keep the equipment for further use. He told them how to get in touch with a contact in Paris to get the material.
Tbilisi, Georgia, July 16: Adam Dekkushev, another of the suspects in the 1999 bombings, is extradited to Russia following his arrest by Georgian authorities. Upon arrival in Moscow he is transferred to Lefortovo prison.
On July 25, Felshtinsky and Litvinenko reported their findings to the Public Commission, an unofficial body set up by Yushenkov after the Duma voted down his motion to formally investigate the matter. That is, the report was virtual: the Commission gathered in Moscow with the press present; the two sleuths were in London, talking by video link. By then, the Commission had acquired a new chairman, the widely respected human rights activist and Duma deputy Sergei Kovalyov, with Yushenkov as his deputy. In the twenty-member group there were five Duma members, including the MP-journalist Yuri Schekochihin. That was about all the parliamentary support Yushenkov could muster after two years of the Kremlin’s artful use of carrots and sticks with the legislature. Mikhail Trepashkin was present as an adviser.
That Felshtinsky and Litvinenko were able to find the man who was Number One on the FSB’s Most Wanted list was by itself a slap at Kontora. The substance of Gochiyayev’s testimony as related by Sasha kept everyone in Moscow spellbound for nearly two hours.
First, Sasha said, there was no doubt that the man who sent the testimony was indeed Gochiyayev. This was confirmed by a top British forensic expert who compared the witness’s photographs with the one on the FSB Web site.