A Very Expensive Poison (9 page)

Earlier that morning – at 11.49 – Lugovoi had called Litvinenko from Gatwick Airport. He confirmed they were meeting that afternoon at the intelligence firm Erinys, Titon’s sister company at 25 Grosvenor Street. They would be discussing a potentially lucrative new line of business regarding the energy giant Gazprom. Lugovoi and Kovtun travelled by train to central London. They
checked into the Best Western Hotel on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of Soho.

The first rule of spycraft is not to draw attention to yourself. In Lugovoi and Kovtun’s case the reality was comically, even ludicrously, different. From the moment they stepped onto UK soil, Lugovoi and Kovtun attracted attention wherever they went. It wasn’t just that they were assassins: the problem was they
looked
like assassins, a pair of stage villains from FSB Casting.

The two Russians walked through the main entrance of the Best Western Hotel. Its Yugoslav-born manager, Goran Krgo, was on duty. Lugovoi did the talking, he recalled. Their rooms weren’t ready until 2 p.m, so he suggested they go and have lunch in a café nearby. The two guests didn’t have much luggage, which was unusual, he said.

When they came back, Lugovoi’s room – 107 – was ready. Lugovoi and Kovtun went upstairs. They emerged twenty minutes later, having swapped their casual clothes for ‘business’ attire. Their appearance prompted hotel staff to chuckle. Kovtun was wearing a silvery metallic polyester-type suit and Lugovoi was kitted out in checks. They had matched their shiny outfits with colourful shirts and ties. They wore chunky jewellery.

According to Krgo, the two men resembled stereotypical Eastern European gangsters. ‘I remember these guests quite vividly. We were laughing. The girl who worked behind the desk was amused by the dress code … and making general comments.’ Krgo added: ‘The colours didn’t match, the suits were either too big or too
small, they just didn’t look like people who are used to wearing suits. They looked like – I think the expression is like a donkey with a saddle.’

At 3 p.m. Litvinenko met Lugovoi and Kovtun in Grosvenor Street. It was the first time Litvinenko had ever met Kovtun. Lugovoi introduced him as an old childhood friend with whom he was now in business. Kovtun said little. Litvinenko didn’t warm to him particularly, but nonetheless Kovtun must have seemed as if he might be another useful Russian contact he could tap for information. After all, if he was Lugovoi’s friend, he could trust him, surely?

The three Russians entered number 25 together – through its grand entrance with two white Doric columns – and took the lift to the fourth floor. Waiting for them there was Tim Reilly, the Russian-speaking head of Erinys; he shook their hands and led them inside.

Erinys and Titon International shared a boardroom. It wasn’t exactly sumptuous but had a few old-school establishment touches: an oak dining table covered in a green baize cloth; leather-upholstered chairs; a map of the world (nodding to Erinys’s ambitions). Tea and coffee sat on the sideboard. A bay window looked out onto the street.

Attew had previously introduced Litvinenko to Reilly as someone who might be useful to Russian-facing clients. Reilly warmed to Litvinenko. He thought him gregarious, dynamic and full of energy, but also prone to flash off in too many different directions. (Reilly attributed Litvinenko’s ‘lack of mental discipline’ to his background in the Soviet Union, where contacts
were everything and analytical detail irrelevant. He said also that Litvinenko was learning and adapting to life in the west.)

For Reilly, the meeting was about a possible security contract with Gazprom. He shook hands with the Russians and showed them into the boardroom. Lugovoi arrived with shopping bags. The meeting began in typically English style, with talk of the sunny weather. Then Lugovoi steered the conversation round to tea. He suggested they all drink some, joking that the English had cups of tea all the time. Reilly declined and told them he’d just drunk water from the cooler. Lugovoi was weirdly persistent.

‘They kept on saying to me – don’t you want any [tea], won’t you have any?’ Reilly recalled.

Reilly served cups of tea to his three guests. He sat to the right of Litvinenko, who was at the head of the table with his back facing the bay window; immediately across the table from Reilly was Lugovoi. Kovtun sat to Lugovoi’s left. He said nothing. Lugovoi had visited Erinys two or three times before. ‘He was professional enough, smartly dressed, quite keen to impress, quite self-assured,’ Reilly said – a classic
Novy Russky
, or new Russian on the make, in his view.

‘We would call it nouveau riche, so they would have all the accoutrements of the western world and then there would be an odd, you know, shiny tie or something like that,’ he added. ‘It was quite funny. It sounds awful, but you could spot this straightaway. He was capable, he was reasonably intelligent.’

After making tea, Reilly – fortuitously for the would-be assassins – disappeared off to the loo.

We don’t know how the polonium was deployed. The forensic evidence suggests that either Lugovoi or Kovtun slipped it into Litvinenko’s cup of tea or water. Litvinenko failed to notice, or was otherwise distracted. For the next thirty minutes, the tea or glass of water sat in front of him, a little to his left – an invisible nuclear murder weapon.

The conversation was of Gazprom. Lugovoi and Kovtun must have been barely listening: for them, the only question was, would Litvinenko drink?

Litvinenko didn’t drink. The plan – pre-mediated, for sure, but possibly improvised in its execution – failed. One can only imagine what must have been going through Lugovoi’s and Kovtun’s minds when the meeting broke up, his drink untouched.

When nuclear scientists examined the Erinys table they found it was ‘heaving’ with radioactive contamination, in Reilly’s damning words. It appeared there had been substantial spillage. Reilly wondered whether he too had been an intended target. One spot in front of where Litvinenko had been sitting showed ‘full-scale deflection’. This meant an off-the-scale reading of more than 10,000 counts per second. Other parts of the baize had readings of 2,300 counts per second. One chair – where either Lugovoi or Kovtun had been sitting – registered at 7,000 counts per second.

The Russians would later claim that it was Litvinenko who had got hold of the radioactive polonium. They claimed that he had poisoned them, during this, their first
significant encounter in Mayfair. All subsequent traces, they said, could be explained by this initial radioactive contact. It was a version they would repeat to Russian state media, which transmitted it as true.

This was a whopping lie, and easily disproved. Scotland Yard reconstructed Litvinenko’s journey from his home to Green Park using his Oyster Card. He had travelled on the number 43 bus, getting on at Friern Barnet, then taking the tube into central London from Highgate Station. The bus – vehicle registration LRO2 BCX – was found and tested for contamination. There wasn’t any.

Lugovoi and Kovtun, by contrast, left a lurid nuclear stain wherever they went, including in their hotel rooms, well before their first meeting with Litvinenko. After leaving Erinys, Litvinenko took the pair to his favourite branch of Itsu in Piccadilly Circus, close to the Ritz Hotel. They sat downstairs. Polonium was found here too. The visitors farewelled Litvinenko and returned to the Best Western Hotel.

Phone records show that at 19.55 Lugovoi made a phone call. He rang a woman identified only as ‘female A’. Lugovoi’s intentions were amorous. He had met female A on a previous visit, detectives established, and was keen to meet her again. Despite his best efforts, she turned him down.

Rebuffed, Lugovoi went out for dinner with Kovtun. At 8.30 p.m. they met Alexander Shadrin, the boss of Continental Petroleum Limited, which had formally invited them to London. CPL had won exploration licences to two oil fields in western Siberia. The firm
had sought Lugovoi’s help after a gang tried to grab the oilfields – a ubiquitous criminal practice in Russia involving corrupt judges and bureaucrats, and known as ‘raiding’.

Improbably, Lugovoi had helped to secure rulings from provincial Siberian courts in CPL’s favour. For a far-away foreign investor to win victory over local crooks was a miracle. Apparently, Lugovoi had powerful friends. The judgment appeared to have more to do with Lugovoi’s elaborate cover story than with justice. The FSB may have arranged the ruling in order to help Lugovoi and Kovtun secure British visas for their many trips to London.

CPL’s office was at 58 Grosvenor Street, immediately across the road from Erinys and Titon, in a Georgian townhouse. The company was respectable. It even had aristocratic connections. Chairman of the board was the Honourable Charles Balfour, an old Etonian. It was Balfour who had written a letter to the British embassy in Moscow supporting Kovtun’s visa application.

Viewed with hindsight, this was not Balfour’s finest moment. He listed his interests in
Debrett’s
, the British toffs’ handbook, as ‘gardening, shooting, fishing, and bee-keeping’. He is descended from the Conservative prime minister and foreign secretary Arthur Balfour; his brother is the current earl.

The Russians had dinner with Shadrin at Pescatori, a family-run Italian fish restaurant in Dover Street. Lugovoi enjoyed the finer things in life. The bill shows the party ordered oysters, a grilled lobster, two tuna steaks (very
rare), with grappa and espresso to finish. According to Shadrin, Lugovoi talked of his bottling plant in Russia. He insisted on picking up the £214.20 bill. He told Shadrin that since he was ‘pitching for business’, he would get the tab. Radiation was found here too: at their table, on cushions, in the gents’.

Afterwards, Lugovoi claimed that he and Kovtun strolled around Soho for one and a half hours. They dropped into a bar, Dar Marrakesh in the Trocadero Centre, where Lugovoi smoked a £9 shisa pipe on the terrace. It was 11 p.m., a balmy night. Scotland Yard later retrieved Lugovoi’s pipe. It was easy to spot: the handle gave off a ghostly alpha radiation glow.

Back at home in Muswell Hill, Litvinenko felt mildly unwell. He threw up, just once. His vomiting spasm was due to exposure to radiation – just from being
near
the poison. Litvinenko thought little of this episode. He had unwittingly survived his first encounter with polonium and an attempt to kill him.

At 1 a.m. the would-be killers returned to the Best Western Hotel. At some point that day or the next Lugovoi handled polonium in the privacy of his room, 107. He appears to have transferred it here from one container to another. And to have disposed of it down the bathroom sink.

We know this because Lugovoi’s plughole showed exceptionally high alpha radiation readings of 1,500 counts per second. There are lower readings elsewhere in the bathroom, and in the bedroom next door. Kovtun’s room, 306, is also heavily contaminated. There are 1,500
cps on a chair and coat-hanger, with lower readings from a radiator and phone directory.

The two Russians had booked into the Best Western for two nights, with Lugovoi paying in advance. The next day, 17 October, they abruptly checked out and took a taxi to the Parkes Hotel in Beaufort Gardens, Knightsbridge. Lugovoi explained the switch by saying he ‘didn’t like the condition of the rooms’. The real reason, most probably, was to distance himself from the poison, which he had efficiently tipped down the bathroom u-bend.

The Parkes Hotel was the scene of two encounters, both blackly comic. Front office manager Giuliana Rondini was on duty that afternoon. At 2 p.m. two guests walked in: Lugovoi, wearing a beige or brown casual-type jacket with a zip at the front, and Kovtun, in a grey jacket and black round-necked T-shirt. They told her they had moved hotels because their previous one was ‘overbooked’. Rondini checked them into the hotel’s last available rooms, 23 and 25.

The Russians returned to the lobby ten minutes later. Lugovoi asked Rondini where she was from. When she replied Sardinia he said he’d been there, to the capital Cagliari. They chatted. She asked if they needed a restaurant for the evening. Lugovoi then made a request. Was there was somewhere fun for later where he and Kovtun ‘might meet some girls’?

Rondini was used to dealing tactfully with these kinds of delicate enquiries from lonesome international travellers. She recommended a place just across the street –
1 Beaufort Gardens. ‘It was well known with girls. It was a brothel,’ Rondini said.

Failing that, she suggested an Italian restaurant, Pizza Pomodoro, in Beauchamp Place. Rondini said: ‘It was a place where you could go and have a pizza but also have fun and pick up girls. Pizza with extras, I would say.’

Meanwhile, a regular Australian guest staying at the hotel spotted Kovtun and Lugovoi in the lift. She told Andrea Furlani, who worked at reception, that they had struck her as strange.

She asked them: ‘Where are you from?’

Lugovoi replied in English: ‘Russia.’

She then said in tones of ice-breaking amusement: ‘Are you guys from the KGB?’

The two Russians started backwards. They looked horror-struck. Neither of them responded. The lift continued its descent in awkward silence. Later that day the Australian saw Kovtun and Lugovoi again in the hotel lobby and said a friendly hello. They ignored her. The pair must have been confused. Was this an uncomfortable coincidence? Was the Australian a spy? A British agent? Fuck!

At 6 p.m. Lugovoi and Kovtun met Litvinenko again outside the Oxford Street branch of Nike. They visited the offices of RISC Management. Daniel Quirke, one of RISC’s investigators, took them into the fifth-floor boardroom.

According to Litvinenko, Kovtun produced a small minidisc. Quirke fetched his laptop. There was a beep. Kovtun inserted the disc and typed in a four-digit access code. This program, apparently, enabled Kovtun to pick
a telephone number in Russia and to listen in. He played two audio files. The room was filled with the sound of Russian voices; the quality was crisp and clean.

Quirke was surprised. It appeared Lugovoi and Kovtun were keen to monetise information collected by eavesdropping, by selling it potentially to British clients. The legal dimension didn’t feature. ‘When he [Quirke] saw it, his eyes started out of his head,’ Litvinenko said. Kovtun, it appeared, had good technical skills.’ He took out his own computer and demonstrated it himself. Andrei [Lugovoi] doesn’t know how to use this kind of stuff,’ Litvinenko added.