From Russia with Blood

vii

London—2003–4

The graying charcoal-suited ops boss had worked for Britain’s secret intelligence service since his early twenties. He had that in common with most of his graying charcoal-suited colleagues: they had almost all received the tap on the shoulder at Oxbridge and seen their whole adult lives swallowed up by the service. Spies had to blend in, which was why everyone he passed in the corridor was so uniformly faceless. It was a funny thing, to be handpicked to serve queen and country by virtue of being utterly unremarkable—but that was the nature of the job. And everyone inside the River House knew full well that they were unremarkable in appearance alone.

The headquarters of MI6 at 85 Albert Embankment housed some of the most capacious minds in the country. The men and women who worked there were entrusted with collecting and analyzing impossible quantities of information about the state of the world, helping the government advance British interests, and, most critically, guarding against threats to the nation. It was their job to know just about everything—and to find out about everything else.

The ops boss had done his time spying for Britain all over the world before returning to London to join the ranks of the desk jockeys. His new job involved overseeing the increasingly thorny business of intelligence capture on Russia, and he didn’t like the way things were going in Moscow. The problem was that no one in central government wanted to hear it.

In the aftermath of 9/11, ever more national security resources were being swallowed up by what he described privately as the “relentless maw” of counterterrorism, and the Russia desk was having to do more with less. Budgets were being slashed, country experts were being redeployed to monitor the Middle East, and ever fewer new recruits were Russophones as the building filled with speakers of Arabic, Urdu, and Pashto. Central government’s sole security focus was on protecting the public from a major Islamist attack on British soil, making it a constant battle to persuade Whitehall to spend serious money on gathering intelligence inside Russia. The ops boss couldn’t fault the focus on the clear and present danger posed by Al Qaeda, but he had his eye on the Moscow horizon, where he was sure a deadly storm was forming.

He and his colleagues had been gathering string on the Moscow bombings and observing Litvinenko’s work with keen interest. They were as sure as they could be, without intercepting an outright confession, that Putin had a hand in the attacks. That, along with the new president’s media crackdown, his assault on Russia’s young democratic mechanisms, and his brutal suppression of Chechen separatism added to the emerging picture of an alarmingly ruthless new autocracy. And it was all too clear to the ops boss that the global glad-handing of Putin was misconceived. The intelligence from sources close to the Kremlin indicated that the man inside had nothing but hatred for the West. He might be smiling and shaking hands today, but what was he plotting for tomorrow?

There was no doubt that Putin was using targeted assassination as a tactic to silence his critics at home, but what really worried the ops boss was the evidence that the Russian president was laying the groundwork for a wider campaign of killing. The intelligence from Britain’s dwindling listening posts and sources in Russia showed that Putin was personally overseeing a program to adapt Soviet-era weapons of mass destruction for use against individual enemies of the state.

Russia had promised to destroy its forty-thousand-ton arsenal of chemical and biological weapons in 1993, when it signed on to the Chemical Weapons Convention, but MI6 had known for years that the Kremlin was cheating on that promise. Attempts to use the stockpile in battlefield conditions had been abandoned after it turned out that airborne chemicals were too easily blown off course by the weather, making them hopelessly imprecise as weapons of war, while the bugs and germs in the biological arsenal didn’t take well to being propelled through the air and landing with a bang. But the Russia watchers had been studying the goings-on at a top-secret FSB lab outside Moscow, where it was clear that the government’s army of military scientists was moving quickly toward developing a suite of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons for use in targeted assassinations.

The use of elaborate poisons to liquidate enemies of the state had long been in the KGB playbook, but this new program the FSB was advancing under Putin’s aegis was much more sophisticated. The nerve agents, deadly germs, and radioactive poisons being refined in the lab were designed to kill without leaving a trace. They could be administered orally, in sprays, or in vapors to trigger fast-acting cancers, heart attacks, or multiple organ failure, allowing the FSB’s specialist hit squads to eliminate a target while making it look like the victim had simply succumbed to a sudden illness or died a natural death. It seemed unlikely that Putin would go to all that trouble just to do a bit of weeding in his own backyard. The Russian president must be preparing something big.

The ops boss couldn’t help but feel that the concurrence of 9/11 with the flight of Berezovsky and his band of dissidents to Britain was deeply unfortunate timing. The UK had taken its eye off the ball just as all Russia’s troubles turned up on home soil. But every ill wind blows some good—and the arrival of a wave of politically hot Russians on the doorstep of the River House made sourcing a whole lot easier in these times of budgetary constraint.

Among the hottest of the new arrivals was Litvinenko. The defector not only had recent working knowledge of Russia’s all but impenetrable state security agency, he was also still being paid by Berezovsky to run sources and turn up new leads in Moscow. The Russia watchers wanted in on that action. So it was that, in mid-2003, Litvinenko received an approach from a graying man in a charcoal suit who wanted to know if he was prepared to help the country he now called home. The defector had already been thoroughly debriefed when he was accepted into Britain and granted political asylum, but now MI6 wanted to bring him into active service as a consultant on the connections between the Kremlin and organized crime.

Litvinenko leaped at the chance. His new handler introduced himself as Martin and gave him an encrypted phone. The pair began meeting regularly in locations as studiedly unremarkable as the basement café at Waterstones on Piccadilly. Once he had proved his worth, the defector was told he would receive a monthly stipend of £2,000—a tidy supplement to the income he got from his work for Berezovsky. And now he was no longer just a private sleuth pursuing an angry oligarch’s personal vendetta. Alexander Litvinenko was working for queen and country.

Berezovsky was enraged by the West’s refusal to publicly acknowledge the evidence his investigators had amassed against Putin. But Litvinenko’s new role at MI6 was encouraging, and even if the Kremlin did succeed in hiding the truth about the apartment bombings, the oligarch still had plenty of other schemes up his sleeve.

He had become a key financier of a project to transcribe a batch of secret recordings of Leonid Kuchma, the pro-Kremlin president of Ukraine, who had been caught on tape plotting various crimes, including the kidnapping and murder of a dissident journalist. Hundreds of Kuchma’s conversations had been clandestinely recorded by his former bodyguard and released publicly. The cassette scandal, as it came to be known, sparked waves of protest across Ukraine and laid the ground for the Orange Revolution, which would ultimately topple Putin’s pet government in Kiev. The tapes also contained damaging references to the Russian president’s links to major mafia groups, including the Tambov gang in St. Petersburg, and Berezovsky enlisted Litvinenko to help make sense of the materials.

That dovetailed very happily with the work the defector was doing for MI6. Litvinenko’s handlers had deployed him to assist their counterparts in various European intelligence agencies who were probing connections between the Kremlin and Russian organized crime gangs spreading their tentacles into the West. He began passing officials in Spain and Italy information he had gleaned from the Kuchma tapes—and from his own investigations—about Putin’s links to the mob.

Meanwhile, Zakayev was still digging for information on the Moscow bombings and theater siege. He established a war crimes commission to investigate the FSB’s involvement in the two terror attacks as well as in Russian human rights abuses throughout Chechnya, and he enlisted Litvinenko to help. The rebel leader and the FSB defector had both become admirers of Anna Politkovskaya since her handling of the Terkibaev story, and they persuaded her to help them dig for new evidence in Moscow and Grozny. The goal was to try to gather enough proof of Putin’s complicity in the attacks to bring a case at the International Criminal Court.

While those struggles continued, Berezovsky and Zakayev had another big fight with the Kremlin on their hands. The Russian government was ramping up its demands that both exiles be extradited to Moscow to face trial—Zakayev for his alleged role in the theater siege and Berezovsky on embezzlement charges. Recent events had left them in no doubt that resisting this request was a matter of life and death.

The threats started arriving almost as soon as the exiles got settled in Britain. Litvinenko was the first to receive an ominous phone call. It came from a former URPO comrade who had been instructed to pass on a message: Litvinenko must come back to Russia at once, or die.

“If you don’t return yourself then you’ll either be brought back in a body bag or you’ll be pushed under the train,” the man said.

Litvinenko kept his cool. “This is a very nice offer,” he replied, “but I refuse it.”

The next warning had come via Trepashkin. After meeting a source with high-level FSB links in Moscow shortly after the release of Blowing Up Russia, the investigator had emailed Litvinenko in haste. “He stated that you are ‘sentenced’ to extrajudicial elimination,” Trepashkin cautioned, “meaning that you definitely will be killed after publication of your last book.”

The warnings continued, but Litvinenko wasn’t too worried. He had successfully petitioned the Home Office to grant his whole family political asylum within months of arriving in London, and that meant he could never be extradited to Russia, no matter how much that enraged his former colleagues. He told his friends he had never felt as safe as he did on British soil.

It was Berezovsky’s turn next. A month after he held the press conference announcing Litvinenko’s findings about the apartment bombings, in March of 2002, he received the first in a series of poison-pen letters from Russia. The missive was signed with the pseudonym Petr Petrovich, and it gave London’s Highgate Cemetery as its return address. It included a little-known quotation from the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne—“There is no place on earth where death cannot find us”—and warned: “Try to understand that everything you have been doing recently is a pulse of death, a heartbeat of death for you and your next of kin.”

Berezovsky responded flippantly, sending the letter and a reply addressed directly to Putin to Kommersant, the paper he had once owned back in Moscow. “The preciosity of your letter makes it absolutely obvious that you, kind sir, have become seriously addicted to Mister Hexogen,” he jibed at the Russian president, in a reference to the chemical explosives used in the Moscow bombings. “Hex corrupts not less than—I would dare to say, even more than—coke and cash. It is time to get cured.” The paper’s new editors declined to run the risk of publishing either the original threat or Berezovsky’s taunting response—but thereafter a steady stream of menacing letters from Russia kept landing on the oligarch’s doormat.

“Petr Petrovich encourages his clients to imagine vivid scenarios of their own death: the sensations, the pain, the panic, the helplessness, the grief of loved ones,” one threatened. “As Vladimir Putin said: ‘Oligarchs spend all their lives preparing, preparing, preparing…only to meet death unprepared.’”

Berezovsky was initially unruffled by what he saw as a barrage of empty threats from the Kremlin. He was narcissistic enough to half believe he was immortal, and he had developed an ardor for the British justice system that verged on obsession, so he was convinced that the courts would shield him from the summons to stand trial back in Moscow. As long as he remained in Britain, he was sure he was safe. Not even Putin would be so brazen as to start whacking his enemies on the turf of another foreign power.

But then the oligarch’s security detail received a tip—a live plot to kill Berezovsky was being set in motion in Russia. And this wasn’t going to be any conventional hit: the plan was to poison him in Britain using one of the radioactive substances being developed at the FSB’s lab outside Moscow. The tip came from a well-placed source with serious FSB contacts, and while it was impossible to verify, the threat was far too dangerous to be ignored. The oligarch’s security team obtained a Geiger counter and began sweeping ahead to check for radiation every time he entered his car, home, or office.

And it was then, just after Berezovsky had publicly accused the FSB of involvement in the Moscow theater siege, and while preparations for Putin’s state visit gathered pace in Whitehall, that the security he enjoyed in Britain began to unravel. His application for political asylum, submitted soon after his arrival in the country on the basis that his life was at risk in Russia, was rejected by the Home Office in March of 2003. And the following week, the oligarch was arrested.

Scotland Yard detectives brought both Berezovsky and Yuli Dubov in for questioning on behalf of Moscow prosecutors seeking their extradition over alleged embezzlement at Logovaz. Both men insisted the fraud charges were politically motivated, and they were allowed to leave police custody on £200,000 bail paid by Stephen Curtis and Berezovsky’s PR man, Tim Bell, but they were booked to appear at Bow Street magistrates’ court for an extradition hearing in early April. Suddenly the threats in those poison-pen letters felt far more real.

If the judge decided to extradite Berezovsky the following month, the oligarch would be left entirely at the mercy of the Kremlin. He was in no doubt that Putin wanted him dead—but to have any hope of remaining in Britain, Berezovsky needed to prove it. His lawyers were hurriedly preparing an appeal against the refusal to grant him asylum, but they had told him the sheaf of threatening letters was worthless without proof of who sent them. He needed to get his hands on hard evidence linking the threats directly to the Russian state. But how?

The oligarch was turning this problem over in his head one morning, when the large figure of Yuri Felshtinsky lumbered into view.

“I received a letter from FSB threatening to kill me,” Berezovsky told the historian. “Do you want to read it?”

“Of course!” Felshtinsky took the letter in his big hands, and a look of recognition arched his eyebrows as he scanned its contents. “Boris,” he said emphatically. “I have read this letter before.”

“This is impossible,” Berezovsky said sharply. But the historian was adamant. The same letter, he said, had been shown to him by Oleg Kalugin, a prominent KGB general who had moved to the United States and was now living under CIA protection in Washington. The letter received by Kalugin the previous December was strikingly similar—it referred to Petr Petrovich and included the same quotation from Montaigne—the main difference being the return address, which this time was a large public cemetery in Washington rather than London.

Berezovsky got straight on the phone to his lawyers. The fact that another enemy of the Russian state had received a nearly identical threat was, surely, evidence that both letters emanated from the Kremlin’s security apparatus. His lawyer instructed an expert to examine the contents of all the letters both Berezovsky and Kalugin had received in order to map their similarities and see what could be deduced about their provenance. And then, on the eve of his court date, Berezovsky received fresh intelligence from Moscow.

The oligarch’s security detail had been tipped off that the FSB had sent an assassin to kill Berezovsky when he turned up for the extradition hearing. A hired hit man was to be stationed next to the aisle in the public gallery at Bow Street magistrates’ court, ready to strike when Berezovsky entered. His lethal weapon was a poison-tipped fountain pen.

The information was specific enough to be passed to Scotland Yard, which sent plainclothes detectives down to the courtroom on the morning of the hearing. The officers waited until the public gallery was full before discreetly apprehending the would-be assassin, who was removed from the building and later deported.

Buoyed by this eleventh-hour vindication, the oligarch swept into court in an immaculate black suit and purple silk tie, flanked by his army of bodyguards. “He lives in fear of assassination by those loyal to the Russian government,” the oligarch’s lawyer told the court, describing the case brought by Moscow prosecutors as a politically motivated “sham.” Judge Timothy Workman agreed to let Berezovsky out on bail once more while his asylum appeal was processed.

The oligarch left court elated and donned a Vladimir Putin mask to barrel through the hordes of journalists outside. His motorcade swept toward the Méridien hotel in Piccadilly, where he held one of his press conferences with a live satellite link to Moscow. He was under strict instructions from Scotland Yard not to mention the foiled murder plot at Bow Street, but he could barely suppress his glee as he told the packed room that he was grateful to live in a country with a “truly independent” judicial system, a country where the extradition request against him had “zero” chance of succeeding.

Berezovsky’s lawyers, meanwhile, now had evidence of a live assassination plot to bolster his asylum appeal. They also sent the Home Office a statement from the expert they had hired to examine the menacing letters—a US-based KGB defector named Yuri Shvets, who had trained with Putin at the state security academy in Leningrad. Shvets asserted that, in his professional opinion, the missives constituted “a clear warning that if Berezovsky does not stop challenging the Russian regime and the FSB in particular, he will be killed, even if he resides in a foreign state.” He continued: “Given [the] almost pathological importance given to Boris Berezovsky by the Russian leadership and security services it is not far-fetched to say that he can be easily assassinated in Britain.”

In September of 2003, the home secretary, David Blunkett, granted Berezovsky political asylum. The Russian government reacted furiously to the move, accusing Britain of trampling the rule of law and refusing to drop its extradition proceedings against the oligarch.

Scotland Yard had privately informed Judge Workman that continuing to hold hearings at Bow Street posed a risk to Berezovsky’s life. He threw out the extradition request—ruling that the government’s decision to grant Berezovsky asylum made the proceedings moot.

Zakayev’s extradition case came up before the same judge a few weeks later. The Russian government had by then racked up thirteen charges against the rebel leader, including murder and kidnapping. But the state’s case began to unravel when a key witness flipped and told the court he had been tortured into signing a statement implicating Zakayev. The judge rejected the extradition request on the grounds that it was politically motivated and that Zakayev would be at risk of inhumane treatment in Russia. “I have come to the inevitable conclusion that if the authorities are prepared to resort to torturing witnesses, there is a substantial risk that Mr. Zakayev himself would be subject to torture,” Judge Workman said. “It would be unjust and oppressive to return Mr. Zakayev to stand his trial in Russia.” Hailing the ruling as a “small victory,” the rebel leader used his moment in the spotlight to tell journalists he would not rest until Putin stood trial at the International Criminal Court for atrocities against the Chechen people.

The Kremlin lashed out at the court’s decision. A spokesperson said the ruling reflected “the politics of double standards known from the period of the Cold War,” accusing the British government of harboring extremists and threatening to roll back counterterrorism cooperation with London. Diplomats scrambled to explain that the government held no sway over the courts, but that was not a notion Putin readily understood.

Russia’s three most prominent antagonists in Britain were now beyond the reach of prosecutors in Moscow. If the Kremlin wanted to put a stop to their relentless provocations, extrajudicial measures were the only remaining option.

Stephen Moss had become increasingly uneasy about his work for Berezovsky as the oligarch’s attacks on the Kremlin grew more vociferous. The lawyer got more withdrawn as the date for the final Sibneft payment approached, and when friends asked what was troubling him, he confided that he was afraid. He wouldn’t say why, but he thought his life might be in danger.

Moss left the country with his wife and young children for a welcome holiday in Italy while Berezovsky was fighting extradition. He came home shortly after the case against the oligarch was thrown out by Judge Workman and seemed more relaxed as he enjoyed an afternoon at the races in Surrey with a small group of friends. Three days later, he was dead.

The news that Moss had been killed by a sudden heart attack at the age of forty-six caused alarm in Berezovsky’s circle. The lawyer’s friends suspected that he had been whacked, and their fears deepened when they heard that Moss’s home had been broken into soon after his death. The intruders didn’t touch any of the family’s valuables, they heard, but they had taken the lawyer’s computers. And just as he was trying to figure out what secrets might have been stored on his partner’s hard drives, Stephen Curtis started receiving menacing phone calls from Russia.

“Curtis, where are you?” said a man with a thick Russian accent in one voice mail. “We are here. We are behind you. We follow you.” The messages kept coming, no matter how often Curtis changed his number. He hired a team of bodyguards and had a panic room installed inside his Dorset castle. The lawyer had more reason than most in Berezovsky’s circle to watch his back: he was now deeply embroiled in the perilous business affairs of a second oligarch who had found himself on the wrong side of Putin.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the owner of the $15 billion oil giant Yukos, which made him the richest man in Russia, and his arrest in October of 2003 had proved that no one was too big to be brought down by the Kremlin. The oil baron’s career-ending mistake had been to challenge Putin over government corruption at a public meeting, resulting in his imprisonment on spurious fraud charges in a Siberian labor camp, where he would remain for a decade. It then fell to Curtis, Khodorkovsky’s longtime lawyer, to try to save Yukos as its owner fumed behind bars.

The Kremlin had frozen all shares in the oil giant and hit it with crippling backdated tax bills, threatening to wipe out almost all its value with a single stroke. Curtis had joined forces with one of the company’s cofounders, Yuri Golubev, who had come to London after Khodorkovsky’s arrest, and the two men were fighting a rear-guard action to defend Yukos against the Russian government’s attacks.

At the same time, Curtis was helping Fomichev plow the $1.3 billion Boris and Badri had received from Roman Abramovich into a bewildering network of offshore funds and investments—keeping the details in his photographic memory to avoid a paper trail. He was making more money than ever out of his Russian clients and had acquired Scot Young’s habit of splashing tens of thousands of pounds a night on vintage Champagne and private lap dances in the VIP rooms of exclusive London nightclubs. But his ballooning wealth went hand in hand with suffocating levels of stress.

Curtis’s nerves—and his manners—were fraying. No longer the jovial, easygoing northerner who had first joined Berezovsky’s circle, he had become increasingly irritable and imperious as the pressure mounted and the threatening messages grew more frequent. And in January of 2004, a bizarre incident served to compound his fears.

On a bracing January night in the picturesque Hertfordshire village of Furneux Pelham, an eighty-three-year-old Second World War veteran named Lieutenant Colonel Robert Workman opened the door of his clapboard cottage to a mystery caller. The man on the doorstep was carrying a sawed-off shotgun, and he fired a single shot at point-blank range. The villagers were all warmly ensconced for the night in their timber-framed cottages, so the colonel’s corpse lay undiscovered until morning. By the time he was found, the killer had long since dissolved into the darkness.

The assassination in the sleepiest recesses of the home counties was a mystery that remained unsolved and perplexed the villagers of Furneux Pelham for almost a decade. No one could understand who could possibly have had a motive to murder the elderly veteran. But as Hertfordshire police struggled to make sense of the crime, they made a connection. Lieutenant Colonel Workman shared his surname with a man who made a much more likely target: the extradition judge who had recently enraged the Kremlin by refusing to send Berezovsky and Zakayev back to Moscow. Judge Workman, who lived in the nearby home county of Berkshire, was warned by detectives that he might have been the intended victim of the hit.

When Berezovsky heard of the killing, he was certain that the Kremlin had made a bungled attempt to exact its revenge on the judge who had granted him and Zakayev safe haven in Britain. After all, members of the judiciary in Russia who refused to bend to Putin’s will might very well find themselves on the wrong end of a sawed-off shotgun: that was how the president had his enemies convicted of spurious crimes with such ease. If this was a state-sponsored hit, it clearly wasn’t a sophisticated one, but perhaps some local hoodlum had been hired for the job and got his wires crossed. “Close connection between the FSB and the Russian organized crime is a fact,” the ex-KGB man Shvets had written in his expert statement in support of Berezovsky’s asylum application. “A low-level FSB officer can instruct a professional criminal to kill anybody in the UK, and it will be done without any paper trail.”

Years later, the veteran’s killer was finally caught. It was a local ratcatcher named Christopher Docherty-Puncheon, who was serving time for another murder when he told his cell mate that it was he who had shot Lieutenant Colonel Workman. He was a hired gun, he said, and had killed the colonel for cash. Docherty-Puncheon was convicted of the murder in November of 2012—but he never revealed who had paid him.

Berezovsky’s circle was rattled by the killing. Curtis, who was receiving menacing phone calls with ever greater frequency and was certain that his car was being followed, was now petrified. By February of 2004, he was sufficiently scared to approach Britain’s National Criminal Intelligence Service and offer to become an informant in return for government protection. He was assigned a handler and met the official twice to discuss what he knew about the activities of his Russian clients in London. But his fears were not allayed. At the end of the month, Curtis told a friend: “If anything happens to me in the next few weeks, it will not be an accident.”

The following week, on March 3, 2004, he boarded his brand-new six-seater Agusta helicopter at Battersea Heliport on a clear spring evening and climbed into the London skies, bound for his Dorset castle. By the time the aircraft was on the approach to Bournemouth Airport, half an hour later, a light rain was falling. As the pilot radioed air traffic control for permission to land, the helicopter suddenly plunged sharply to the left, falling four hundred feet. The pilot struggled to regain control, but the Agusta nose-dived as the engine lost power, sending a thirty-foot fireball into the air as it smashed headlong into a field. Both Curtis and his thirty-four-year-old pilot were killed instantly.

Local police quickly determined that there was nothing for them to investigate. The inquest, a routine judicial inquiry to determine the cause of death, ruled that the crash was an accident—though the coroner acknowledged that the case had “all the ingredients for an espionage thriller.” But despite the public insistence that Curtis’s death was nonsuspicious, the Russia watchers in the River House were on the case.

The spies at MI6 were gathering intelligence suggesting that both Curtis and Moss might have been assassinated, and they asked for help from their partners in the United States. Such requests are sent by telex through security-cleared officials at the US embassy in London, and the responses come via the same route. US spy agencies confirmed that they had information linking both deaths to Russia stored in their classified databases, and they were happy to share it with their counterparts in London. The intelligence suggesting Russian involvement in the fatalities was considered “strong,” the American spies said—particularly in relation to Curtis.

The problem was that the information came from the same web of sources and listening posts that were providing such a crucial portal into the development of a chemical and biological poison at the lab outside Moscow, and it was impossible to use it without risking blowing the whole network. That would nix any chance the spies had of staying ahead of Putin’s long-term strategy—and so the information stayed locked away.

Berezovsky and his entourage turned out in force for the lawyer’s funeral in Dorset. Horses in feather-plumed headdresses pulled a black carriage containing the coffin, adorned with a bouquet of white flowers spelling DADDY and preceded by a phalanx of footmen in tails and top hats. Curtis had been well prepared for this moment. He had planned every detail, right down to the fireworks that exploded over the bay as the Union Jack fluttered from the tower of his castle overhead.

Berezovsky was devastated by the death of his lawyer. “He was killed,” he told Dubov, his black eyes glinting with anger. “I know it was an assassination.” Dubov was more circumspect. In his experience, Berezovsky was always 100 percent sure about the first idea that came into his head. But he couldn’t say he trusted the line taken by the British authorities much, either. The faintest suggestion of Russian involvement would completely destroy the already frayed diplomatic relationship, just as the British government scrambled to mend fences with Moscow in the wake of the extradition row. It seemed likely that no one would ever know for sure how Moss and Curtis had really died.

Less than a fortnight after the helicopter crash at Bournemouth, Putin swept to reelection with 71.9 percent of the vote. Tony Blair got straight on the phone to the Russian president to express his warmest congratulations on the landslide victory, brushing aside the election observers’ allegations of ballot stuffing and bias in the state media, and publicly restating his commitment to fostering ever closer ties with the Kremlin.

It was a chilling time for Scot Young, who hastily canceled an order for an Agusta six-seater helicopter—the exact model in which Curtis had perished. The death of the two lawyers had shattered the fragile pretense he’d been maintaining for Michelle’s sake that being Berezovsky’s bagman in Britain was anything other than a deeply risky business, and the marriage was feeling the strain. But the fixer’s financial moves were typically unsentimental.

He set about helping the oligarchs cut Curtis’s family out of his share of the New World Value Fund, which held the proceeds of the payments the lawyer had helped them funnel onshore from Abramovich, and then he dived headfirst into an array of new deals with Berezovsky. Playing in the big leagues was always going to be a dangerous game—but when the stakes were this high and the winnings this big, it was impossible to walk away.