Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [140]
“So what kind of work have you been doing?”
“Going places, writing reports. Russian events, for example. Or, say, details of parking, service elevators, and emergency exits in a department store. With Berezovsky, I was supposed to get friendly with one of you and report whatever I heard, that sort of thing.”
“So what do you want from us?”
“I don’t know. Can you help me with my asylum somehow?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Perhaps you should write your report to your embassy friends and hope for the best.” He was quite possibly genuine, but we had enough of our own problems.
Pavel reappeared a few weeks later, at yet more hearings, this time for Zakayev’s case. Sasha brought him to a sushi restaurant in Soho. He had a new assignment, he reported. His embassy contacts told him to buy a fountain pen, a particular model, and see whether he could get it through a metal detector in the Bow Street court. He also had to figure out where in the courthouse people were allowed to smoke: in the lavatory, in the stairwell, and so on.
Sasha became extremely excited.
“That’s binary!” he whispered, leaning toward us across the table. “They are setting up a binary attack. There are such binary poisons: you squirt some liquid on a person, say, using a pen, and it is harmless, but then you expose him to smoke, which is also harmless for everyone around, except the one who had that liquid on him. The man drops dead of heart failure. This is what it is!”
It sounded unreal.
“Look, Pavel,” I said, “this may be nothing, or it may be something. If you are telling the truth, and Sasha is right, then you may be part of a murder plot. If someone gets murdered, you’ll be in big trouble. We will have to report our conversation to the police. If I were you, I’d go to the police, too.”
He agreed. Would we help him find a lawyer?
We called George Menzies, Sasha’s solicitor, and asked him to meet us urgently in his office. It was almost midnight. Pavel repeated his story while Menzies took notes; he agreed to come in early the next week to review a formal statement for the police that Menzies would draft.
But he never showed up. On the day of their scheduled meeting, he called Menzies to say that he had suddenly been invited to the Immigration Office to discuss his asylum request. Sasha had already submitted his own statement about our Leicester Square conversation to the Special Branch of Scotland Yard.
In early September, Judge Workman told Boris’s lawyers that the extradition hearings would be moved from Bow Street to the Bel-marsh court, where high-security cases are usually heard, thanks to a request by the Metropolitan Police. They believed that there was a credible threat to Boris’s life. Then suddenly, on September 11, the Home Office granted Boris asylum without any explanation. The next day, Judge Workman threw out the extradition request, noting that it was now “quite pointless.”
We were stunned, and confused. Could it be that the police, alerted by Sasha and me, had checked out Pavel and corroborated his bizarre story?
“Can you believe it, that they would attack me with a chemical weapon?” marveled Boris. “Can you imagine the lunacy? Say I am Putin; I am trying to get me by legal means. I believe that I will succeed, otherwise why start? And at the same time, I am sending a hit squad into the court. Volodya must be really insane.”
“Boris,” I replied, “my wife is a psychologist. She says that it is wrong to forecast the other guy’s behavior by imagining yourself in his place. What sounds crazy to you may be pretty reasonable to him. He is KGB and you are not. That’s why we are here.”
“True. That’s why Sasha is so valuable. He looks at the world with their eyes. If he can imagine a plot, they could be planning it for real. I wonder what the Brits are thinking?”
I still didn’t know what to think. Yet ten days later, on September 21, the Sunday Times reported that there indeed was a plot. Citing “highly placed