Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [158]
One of the polonium trails uncovered was left by Sasha. On the morning of November 1, 2006, he was clean. Detectives discovered a ticket in his pocket that led them to the bus that he took to Central London that day. No traces of polonium were found on the bus.
At about 6 p.m. Akhmed Zakayev picked him up from Boris’s Mayfair office to bring him home to Muswell Hill. After that trip, Zakayev’s Mercedes was rendered unusable by the tremendous amount of radioactivity Sasha left on the front seat.
Apparently the poisoning occurred in the Millennium Hotel bar, at around 5 p.m. Investigators found the teapot that was laced with the poison, which in turn contaminated the kitchen, including the dish-washing machine. The concentration of polonium at the hotel bar was apparently the highest of all, and it was airborne—indicating that the powder had been slipped into the pot of tea—because seven workers in the bar and several patrons tested positive for polonium.
Between the Millennium bar and the time Zakayev picked him up, Sasha stopped at Boris’s office, where he used the fax machine. Accordingly, some radioactivity was found on the machine.
Everything that he touched after returning home was heavily contaminated. The amount of radioactivity shed during the first three days of his illness—that is, before he was taken to the hospital—was enormous. According to an early estimate, it would cost more than £100,000 ($200,000) to clean the house to make it safe to reinhabit. Six months later, Marina and Tolik were still unable to return home.
Of all the people who were in contact with Sasha, Marina was the most exposed, since she cared for him and cleaned up during the three days of extensive vomiting. She tested positive for ingesting polonium—thankfully, not enough to cause an immediate health hazard. Remarkably, her levels were not even high enough to leave their own secondary trail. This is significant because it suggests that anyone who did leave a radioactive polonium trail did not pick up the poison from Sasha. Most likely, such a person was in direct contact with polonium himself. Tolik, who stayed in the same house for three days but had much less physical contact with his father, has not been contaminated at all.
Apart from Sasha, only two people left polonium trails: Andrei Lugovoy and his associate, Dmitry Kovtun, Lugovoy’s school friend and army buddy and a veteran of GRU army intelligence in his own right. Kovtun accompanied Lugovoy to two meetings with Sasha, on October 16 and November 1.
The levels and spread of radioactivity they left behind suggest that they handled polonium directly, rather than ingesting it, because there were significant traces of radioactivity. The body dilutes polonium before excreting it in sweat; the amounts that would have had to be ingested to produce traces equal to those of Lugovoy and Kovtun would almost certainly be lethal.
When Scotland Yard releases its computer-aided simulations of radioactivity spread, it will be possible to say exactly where and how the poison was handled before it ended in Sasha’s teapot. What can be said at this point is that Lugovoy and Kovtun were shedding radioactivity before Sasha was exposed on November 1. For example, Lugovoy contaminated the leather sofa in Boris’s study when he visited him on October 31. On his