Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [149]
Sasha produced impressive references from the security companies he had been working with. Over the year they met two or three times. No real business had come of it, but the prospects seemed great. His last meeting with Lugovoy was on November 1, in the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel on Piccadilly, two hours after he went out with Mario Scaramella. Lugovoy was with another Russian, Sasha said, whom Sasha had not met before. “He had the eyes of a killer,” he said. He knew the type.
The next morning, I went to the hospital with Boris, who like myself had initially discounted Sasha’s illness as a stomach bug. Sasha was visibly worse. His hair had started falling out; he pulled a pinchful to demonstrate. He was suffering tremendously from an apparent inflammation of his gastrointestinal tract, all the way from his mouth, which was so painful he could barely talk or swallow, to his bowels. It was as if his insides had been burned by an unknown irritant. The doctors had started him on painkillers. They still did not know the cause of it all.
I contacted Prof. John Henry, the renowned toxicologist at St. Mary’s Hospital, who had gained considerable fame, in the Russian universe at least, in 2004 when he diagnosed the poisoning of Viktor Yuschenko simply by looking at his face on TV. It was the substance called dioxin, he said, and indeed, some time later, lab analyses confirmed it.
I described the symptoms to Professor Henry over the telephone.
“Hair loss is a hallmark of thallium,” he said. “But bone marrow malfunction sounds strange. Does he have muscle weakness?”
Thallium, a heavy metal, had been banned in the United Kingdom but was readily available as a rat poison in grocery stores throughout the Middle East. It acts by slowly destroying the outer shield of nerve cells. Survivors may have long-term neurological problems. A nurse in Qatar made headlines in the 1970s when, after reading Agatha Christie’s novel The Pale Horse, she recognized a case of thallium poisoning that had baffled doctors. Thallium poisoning was the basis of a conspiracy theory swirling around the death of Yasir Arafat. Some say the CIA planned to embarrass Fidel Castro by sneaking thallium into his shoes, hoping it would cause his beard, eyebrows, and pubic hair to fall out.
On the strength of these stories and Professor Henry’s guess, I finally persuaded a reporter, David Leppard from the Sunday Times, to see Sasha at the hospital. Leppard had been willing to listen to outlandish theories in the past; he was the one who broke the story of Pavel, the fountain-pen man. He realized, of course, that without objective confirmation of poison there was no story, but he came just in case the toxicology report proved foul play; then, by press time, he would have an exclusive for the Sunday paper. He interviewed Sasha in Barnet Hospital on Thursday evening.
Moscow, November 15: Speaking at the Duma, Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika announces a cooperation agreement with the British Crown Prosecution Service. He indicates that investigators probing the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya will explore the theory that the journalist’s killers might be linked with certain persons in London.
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