Once Upon a Time in Russia

by Ben Mezrich

  Berezovsky had also been pouring money into his quest to cause problems for Putin, funding any project that came to him that seemed like something to cause pain for the Russian government. From what Litvinenko had heard, the Oligarch had also been pushing his partner Badri more and more into Georgian politics, berating him, some would say, into sticking his neck out in the treacherous political landscape of the breakaway republic—even prodding him to run for president, a role the man didn’t seem particularly suited to, given his calm, controlled, quiet demeanor, his penchant for staying out of the dramatic limelight and behind the scenes. As Berezovsky knew better than most, politics was an expensive hobby, and since he and Badri appeared to share elements of their bankroll, it was going to be another massive drain on the Oligarch’s bottom line.

  These growing financial issues would be particularly galling to Berezovsky, especially considering that just a year and a half earlier, Roman Abramovich, his continued obsession, had sold a controlling stake in Sibneft for what had been reported to be a valuation of eighteen billion dollars. The Oligarch had to watch how high his former protégé was rising, while he himself was still battling away in the same war that he’d been fighting for most of the decade.

  In any event, Litvinenko needed to refocus again on his Russian contacts, the men he’d met earlier in the hotel in Soho. The afternoon was almost gone, so Litvinenko hurried his pace, already late for the rendezvous.

  • • •

  Leather banquettes, dark wood tones, subtle lighting, an old-world bar that stretched along one wall from one end to the other, lit by the reflected glow of dozens of bottles of aging scotch, brandy, cognac, a veritable metropolis of liquor—the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair was much more Litvinenko’s speed, he thought to himself as he followed Lugovoy out of the hotel lobby and into the dark atmosphere of the bar. The other two Russians were already at the table, drinks in front of them. Litvinenko took an empty seat between Lugovoy and the other man that he had met that morning at the hotel—another former agent, he believed, though he wasn’t sure if he had ever met the man before that day. Lugovoy had already told them in the lobby that their meeting would be brief—really just a toast to their continued relationship, and the possibility that they would be working together in the future. The meeting had to be rushed because the other men were headed to a football game, at Emirates Stadium, which would already be filling up with the faithful. Funny, Litvinenko thought to himself, that Berezovsky would be at the same game, though Litvinenko didn’t think there was any connection. These men still went back and forth to Moscow, and presumably were now in good graces with the government there. They had made their money and contacts, no doubt in the same gray edge where Litvinenko plied his trade.

  The meeting did indeed go quickly; the conversation remained light and amiable, they didn’t get too deep into business, and then Litvinenko was on his way. Because of the late hour, he had arranged a ride home with one of his closest friends in London, an exile—and former terrorist leader, according to the Kremlin—a man named Akhmed Zakayev.

  Funny how life worked. In a former life, they had been on two sides locked in a battle marked by bombings, assassinations, murder. Now they were carpooling through the narrow streets of London.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  * * *

  November 2, 2006, 2 a.m.,

  Muswell Hill, London

  A FLECK OF SILVERY DUST, no bigger than a grain of sand, suspended in a microscopic gel. Spinning, twirling, pirouetting within a viscous bolus of saliva. Mouth, to pharynx, to esophagus, dragged ever downward by the twin engines of muscle fiber and gravity. A fleck, a tiny microgram of material that, in even smaller quantities, existed all over nature—in plants and soil and even human cells—but in this form, at this weight, could only have been created and processed in a handful of highly sophisticated laboratories. A molecule, at this weight, was so incredibly rare that only three nations had the ability to manufacture it. So spectacularly uncommon, it wasn’t discovered until the nineteenth century, by a woman made famous by discovering rare and uncommon elements, who still had found herself so intrigued by this particular particle, she’d named it after the country of her birth.

  A silvery, infinitesimally small flake, twisting, dancing, bouncing against the esophageal walls—and as it went, spewing a constant exhaust of even smaller flakes, that grew together into a billowing, angry, atomic cloud: alpha particles, overexcited helium nuclei, obscenely swollen by a pair of neutrons and a pair of protons. Each too big and heavy to pass through anything thicker than a sheet of paper—and yet, within the confines of a human body, releasing a cloud of devastating power, anywhere from two hundred fifty thousand to a million times more deadly than hydrogen cyanide, destroying every cell it touched. First, the stratified squamous cells of the esophagus; the merest glance of the alpha particles turned these cells inside out, tearing through their fragile walls, causing them to implode. Then on down, into the stomach, spreading out across the mucosa and into the gastric pits; ripping into the individual cells and rending them apart, causing large gashes of inflammation, boring into each cell’s center, bombarding the fragile DNA within until the strands weakened, bowed, then shattered.

  On it went—through the dying stomach lining, through the ruptured intestinal walls, into the bloodstream, hijacking the platelets and white blood cells to traverse the highways and byways of the circulatory system, spreading to each and every organ, one by one: the kidneys, the liver, the spleen. Finding the lymphatic nodes, the lungs, the skin, the hair, the bone marrow, and eventually, the heart.

  One fleck of silvery dust, churning like the meltdown of a nuclear reactor through the body of the man as he slept next to his ballroom dancer, in the quiet suburb of North London.

  • • •

  Sometime between midnight and dawn, Litvinenko suddenly came awake, as a knifelike pain tore through his lower abdomen. He hunched forward into a fetal ball, then rolled carefully out of bed, trying not to wake Marina. They had gone to bed fairly late, having enjoyed their favorite meal together, a chicken dish he’d mastered as a bachelor during his agency training. It was a meal he could prepare in his sleep; he doubted he’d undercooked anything in a way that might be causing him such a fierce bout of gastric distress.

  As he stumbled into the bathroom and leaned over the open toilet, his thoughts shifted through his day—the morning at the Soho hotel, the sushi bar on Piccadilly, Berezovsky’s office, the Pine Bar at the Mayfair. Could it have been the sushi? He didn’t drink alcohol, but he believed he’d had a sip of green tea with Lugovoy and the other Russians, really just to be polite. Hardly the sort of thing that could be causing the intense cramping and searing pain he was now experiencing.

  He leaned forward, and it felt like his insides were coming out. Again and again, he retched into the toilet, until he could hear Marina stirring in the bedroom. Food poisoning—it had to be. Although he’d had food poisoning before, he didn’t remember it feeling this severe. It was like being on fire on the inside, a bizarre, unsettling sensation. He retched again, the muscles of his stomach snarling into a vicious knot beneath his skin. An awful, horrible feeling; but he reminded himself he’d been through worse. Hell, he’d spent most of a year in one of the most soul-crushing prisons in the world. He could handle a piece of bad sushi.

  “Are you okay, Sasha?” he heard from the bedroom.

  He coughed up a speck of bile, then exhaled, forcing a smile.

  “I’ll live. But I might be in here a while.”

  Then his stomach convulsed again, and he leaned back over the toilet, his insides still swirling with that strange intensity, the likes of which he’d never felt before.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  * * *

  November 23, 2006, 9:21 p.m.

  University College Hospital, London, Quarantine Unit, ICU

  WHEN ALEXANDER LITVINENKO’S HEART seized for the final time, ending three devastating weeks of a slow, h
orrific deterioration, he was certain he knew why he was about to die, and believed he finally understood what was about to kill him, even though the exact sequence of events that had led to his death would remain one of the greatest stories of the decade.

  Although he had been first admitted to Barnet General Hospital in London on November 4, two days after he’d fallen ill, it wasn’t until a week later that doctors began to suspect he’d been poisoned. By November 13, specialists had tested samples of his urine, blood, hair, and skin, and were convinced he was suffering from an immense dose of thallium—a tasteless, odorless heavy metal, deadly in even small doses—but sometimes treatable, if discovered soon enough. He was immediately given the antidote—Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment used in certain paints, that also had the unique property of being able to trap thallium in the small intestine, limiting the amount of damage it could do to the human body.

  Two days later, despite the Prussian blue, Litvinenko was in critical condition. His formerly athletic body had become nearly skeletal, his hair had fallen out, he was unable to stand, and he was in such pain that he was unable to swallow or take any food. On November 17, he was moved to University College Hospital, and a major police investigation began; specialists from all over Britain were called in, and tissue, urine, and blood samples were sent to labs all over the world. Three days later, he was placed in intensive care, and his gathered friends, family, and colleagues distributed photos of him—his decimated, bedridden form, barely more than a corpse—to the international press.

  It wasn’t until yesterday, November 22, that his samples had finally made their way to the British Atomic Weapons Establishment—a military lab specializing in combating nuclear terrorism. Twenty four hours later—at 7:30 p.m. on the 23rd, less than two hours ago—the true method of poisoning had finally been discovered: polonium 210—a radioactive material, that, though found in minute amounts in nature, could not be manufactured in significant amounts except with the use of a nuclear reactor.

  The implications of such a bizarre murder weapon were immense and made Litvinenko instantly famous, perhaps the first case of nuclear assassination. Strange, he might have thought to himself, had his body and brain not been racked by the horrors of an internal atomic meltdown, how a bit player, a member of the chorus, had suddenly exploded into the forefront, not through anything he’d done in life, but in the way he was going to die.

  As Scotland Yard’s investigation went into full swing—a high-tech mouse hunt involving dozens of police officers, scientists, and antiterrorism agents. It became instantly evident that the method of the murder, though probably designed to be a silent, unstoppable killer, since polonium 210 is an isotope with a half-life that should have been short enough for all traces to disappear from Litvinenko’s body within a month’s time—would also yield clues backward, maybe to the killers themselves—because the dose had been so great, the material so difficult to control, and the effects so sudden, that the trail of radiation would likely be detectable—maybe even all the way back to its source.

  The minute the specialists, garbed in protective suits, their radiation detection equipment at the ready, began following Litvinenko’s reconstructed movements of the day before he’d first become ill—November 1—they’d discovered an incredible road map of varyingly powerful alpha particles running like glowing silver veins across the city of London—and beyond. Beginning at the Pine Bar, where seven employees of the hotel would test positive for polonium, to the seat where Litvinenko had been sitting, even to the painting that had hung behind him on the wall—and from there, backward. Polonium had been found in the bus he had taken that day, as well as at 7 Down Street, in Berezovksy’s office. Traces had been found in the sushi bar on Piccadilly, in the hotel room where he had met Lugovoy that morning. Then even further back, to multiple cities across Europe, as well as on two British Airways flights. The trail went cold, as the investigators followed it back to Moscow, where the Russian authorities shut them down, insisting that the plot had more to do with British Intelligence, which they believed had their own connections with Litvinenko and a reason to smear the Russian state, than with a pair of former FSB agents who were involved in the dark goings-on in Litvinenko’s shadowy world.

  In the end, as the investigation moved toward an international standoff that would still rage on years later, Litvinenko was forced to resolve himself to focus on the things he felt sure of rather than the things that might forever remain a mystery.

  To that end, before he was too weak to communicate, he made a final, deathbed statement, to tell the world exactly what he believed had happened, at whose orders, and why. And then he said good-bye to his wife the ballroom dancer, told her he loved her, and closed his eyes.

  • • •

  On November 24, 2006, Alex Goldfarb, a friend and colleague of Litvinenko, who had helped him emigrate to London, and also a close associate of Boris Berezovsky, stood outside the front entrance of University College Hospital, and read Litvinenko’s final statement. After thanking the British police, the British government, and the British people, and reiterating his love for his wife and son, the words turned immediately dark—dipping deep into the shadows where he had made his home:

  “As I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death. I may be able to give him the slip, but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like. I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition. You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty, or any civilized value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women. You may succeed in silencing one man—but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  * * *

  December 1, 2006,

  Highgate Cemetery, London

  THE RAIN WAS COMING down in sheets, gusts of icy wind swirling between the high metal bars of the gates leading into the ancient cemetery—but still Berezovsky found himself lingering just outside the entrance, mostly hidden in the shadows of the oversize umbrella held low above his head by his Israeli bodyguard. His eyes burned from too many tears shed over the past few hours; the short ceremony at Regent’s Park Mosque, earlier that day, had been a sad, if confusing, affair. There was some dispute as to whether the ceremony should have taken place in a mosque at all. Whether Litvinenko had actually converted to Islam before his death, as some close to him contended, or whether he was simply voicing his solidarity with the Chechens, whom he considered his allies in his consuming battle with the Russian government, was the subject of some dispute. To add further complications, the mosque had refused to allow the dead ex-agent’s body to be brought inside, because of the danger of radioactive contamination.

  Everything about the murder, the tragic, torturous death, even this funeral—at the same cemetery where Karl Marx was buried, attended by a crowd that included a former separatist leader, a handful of ex-FSB agents, agitators of all stripes and colors—seemed simply incredible. When Berezovsky had learned the method of the young man’s death—polonium poisoning?—he was shocked. Such an unbelievable way to kill someone. Perhaps it had really been Lugovoy and the other Russian, who were now back in Moscow, denying any involvement—and in fact, facing their own health battles from radioactive poisoning, whether as a result of being near Litvinenko when he was poisoned—or because they themselves had indeed been involved in the poisoning. There was always the possibility that perhaps some other contact or enemy of Litvinenko had done it, since, to be fair, the man lived in a world full of dangerous men, brimming with rogue agents, counterspies, Mafia figures, arms dealers, God knew who else. Whoever was responsible, it was a terrifying act.


  As the investigation grew more heated, day by day, Berezovksy had told the officers from Scotland Yard who interrogated him that he didn’t know who had killed his young friend. Though Litvinenko’s statement had made it clear who he had thought was to blame, there were almost too many potential suspects. Even Berezovksy himself had come under suspicion, because of the traces of polonium found in his office.

  Of course, he had denied any involvement. But even though he’d reluctantly let the officers question him and search 7 Down Street, he hadn’t spoken to the press at all—keeping uncharacteristically silent. The truth was, this murder had come at a difficult and chaotic moment in his life. His financial issues were growing, but despite that, he was spending like a man with a limitless supply. He had also spent enormous sums of money and long periods of time in planning and supporting Badri’s growing role in Georgian politics—despite his friend’s reluctance. Really, Badri was a brother in Berezovsky’s eyes; they had grown so close over the years. Although Badri seemed more interested in repairing their relationship with Putin and Russia’s government, and finding a status quo that didn’t involve them constantly being surrounded by bodyguards, Berezovsky had refused to let the man rest on his laurels, watching as their enemies continued to flourish.

  Like Roman Abramovich, Berezovsky thought to himself, as the wind kicked a spray of thick droplets across his cheeks, which seemed to be growing more sallow every passing day. His former subordinate had risen to incredible heights, after selling a controlling portion of Sibneft for thirteen billion dollars, making him one of the richest men in the world—and perhaps the richest man in Russia. The number was ten times what Abramovich had paid Berezovsky and Badri at the Megève heliport. If they had split the company down the middle, Berezovsky would have received another five billion dollars—perhaps more. With that kind of money, he could have funded a dozen revolutions against Putin—and still had money left over to pay for his upcoming divorce.