Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [152]
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.
But his body would. Alpha radiation in the environment is harmless; it cannot get past skin. If an alpha-emitting substance is ingested, however—that is, swallowed or inhaled—it spreads quickly throughout the body, to all organs and tissues, gets inside every cell, and attacks from within. The low energy of alpha radiation, like a short-range weapon, is more than sufficient to cause havoc inside the living cell. It attacks the DNA in the nucleus, shredding it into fragments. The cell dies. Particularly vulnerable are rapidly dividing cells, such as in the lining of the intestines, in the bone marrow, and those in the hair roots; hence Sasha’s symptoms.
On Monday Professor Henry called me: “I checked my books. Thallium is a gamma-emitter. They would have detected it in the hospital. But they should keep looking for alpha-emitters. I will have to talk to Scotland Yard.”
The first question Sasha asked me on Monday morning was about the press. Had they finally understood? Did they get it right—that he was poisoned by Kontora? He was still fighting his war, and he wanted to make the most of it.
“Sasha, there are ten TV cameras and fifty reporters outside. But as you know, one look is worth ten thousand words. To get the most impact I need a picture of you, the way you look,” I said apologetically.