From Russia with Blood

xvii

Down Street and Downing Street, London—May to July 2010

The slight blue-eyed man who arrived at Down Street on a warm summer day in 2010 approached the reception desk and explained, with a lisp, that he had come bearing a gift for Mr. Berezovsky. It was Rafael Filinov, a deceptively mousy Russian telecom tycoon with whom Boris and Badri had once done good business, and he was shown upstairs to the oligarch’s private office. Berezovsky knew perfectly well that Filinov kept close links to the FSB, but he was rarely one to turn away an old acquaintance, despite his protection officer’s best efforts, so he ushered the visitor ebulliently inside and closed the door. Filinov handed over the package. It came, he said, from a mutual friend in Moscow. Andrey Lugovoy sent his regards.

The oligarch eyed the delivery and decided this was the sort of moment that required an audience. He called his secretary and the old Logovaz director Yuli Dubov into the room before unwrapping the gift. Inside was a black T-shirt emblazoned with the logo for CSKA Moscow—the team he and Lugovoy had watched at Emirates Stadium on the night of Litvinenko’s poisoning. It might have been mistaken for a regular soccer shirt had it not been for the fact that the soccer ball at the center of the team emblem had been replaced with the international sign for radiation danger. POLONIUM-210, the lettering around the symbol read. TO BE CONTINUED. The message on the other side was no more subtle. Printed across the back were the words: NUCLEAR DEATH IS KNOCKING ON YOUR DOOR.

Berezovsky didn’t blanch. It was nice to know he hadn’t been forgotten in Moscow. He had already survived at least two assassination attempts in Britain, and he was fairly certain he was indestructible. He said goodbye to Filinov and dispatched his secretary to Scotland Yard to hand the incriminating garment to the police.

Lugovoy could well afford to be so bold. He knew the Kremlin would never give him up, and the UK was sure to drop its push to extradite him before the diplomatic toll got too high. “The more the British dig in their heels over this problem, the worse it will be for our relations with them,” he crowed to the Interfax news agency in one interview. And his calculations were correct.

Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, had arrived at Downing Street on May 11 eager to put all the unpleasantness of radioactive poison plots in the past. Promoting British energy interests in Moscow and pulling more Russian money into London were central parts of his plan to revive the country’s recession-stricken economy, so he was determined to restore friendly relations with the Kremlin. But on his very first day in office, the government had been confronted with fresh intelligence pointing to a new Russian assassination plot.

This time, the target was Akhmed Zakayev, and the would-be hit man was another friend turned foe: a onetime Chechen separatist soldier who lived near the rebel leader in Muswell Hill and paid regular visits to Osier Crescent. Spies suspected that the soldier had switched sides and was now working for the region’s pro-Russian regime as an assassin. He was believed to be responsible for the recent murder of another ex-soldier who was shot dead in Vienna after implicating the Russian government in torture. The assassin posed a “serious threat” to Zakayev’s life, the spies said. Immediate action was required.

The government did act quickly—but quietly. The home secretary moved to expel the soldier from the country as discreetly as possible, canceling his leave to remain while he was abroad on other business. But as soon as that fire was put out, another flare had gone up. Lugovoy’s flagrant threat to Berezovsky was a further headache the authorities could have done without.

When Cameron and Medvedev met at the G8 in Canada at the end of June, the encounter was followed by warm pronouncements from both leaders—and no one mentioned Litvinenko’s murder or the subsequent threats to Berezovsky and Zakayev. Cameron declared that the two countries shared “a lot of common ground” and called for a “stronger bilateral relationship,” dripping charm as he told the press pack he had promised to start following Medvedev on Twitter and was looking forward to regular phone calls with Moscow. The love-in continued when the two leaders met again in South Korea months later, and Cameron announced delightedly that he had accepted an invitation to visit Russia the following year.

From then on ministers fought with all their strength to keep a lid on the messy business of Russian murder. Citing the need to prioritize “international relations,” the government blocked efforts by Marina Litvinenko to secure a judge-led public inquiry into her husband’s death after attempts to extradite Lugovoy and Kovtun fizzled. And when other Kremlin adversaries died in Britain, the government used national security orders to prevent inquests from hearing all the evidence—starting that very summer, with the strange case of the spy in the bag.

Pimlico, London—August 2010

The heating was on full blast when police broke down the door of the British spy’s grace-and-favor apartment in Pimlico, just over the bridge from the River House. Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton wrinkled his nose and pushed inside. It was a sweltering day in August, and the temperature in the flat was unbearable—but otherwise the place was in perfect order. Too perfect, thought Sutton.

The apartment had been locked from the outside, and there was no sign of a break-in. Nothing was out of place, except a mobile phone, laptop, and several SIM cards laid out neatly on the table and a large red North Face sports bag that had been placed carefully inside the bathtub. Padlocked inside was the body of Gareth Williams.

The thirty-one-year-old spy had been dead for ten days. His body had decomposed so badly in the heat that it would prove impossible to determine how he had perished. There were no fingerprints or DNA traces on the rim of the bathtub, the bag’s zipper, or the padlock, which had been fastened from the outside. The key was underneath his body, inside the bag.

Williams was an elite code breaker from Britain’s Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), a mathematical genius who had been sent up to the River House to help the spies at MI6 crack a difficult international case. He hadn’t shown up to work for more than a week, but his colleagues at MI6 had failed to raise the alarm. It was only after his sister called GCHQ to ask why he wasn’t answering the phone that the spies notified the police, who went to the secret service flat where he was staying in Pimlico and found his body.

Sutton, a senior homicide detective at Scotland Yard, had received a call from his commanding officer that afternoon to tell him that a British code breaker had been found murdered. The link to British intelligence would mean that the force’s counterterrorism team would be crawling all over the case, his boss said, but it belonged to homicide. So he’d better get down to the scene and show them who was in charge.

Sutton was a murder cop to his core, the sort who read whodunits on his breaks from solving real-life murders, and he shared his commanding officer’s suspicion of Britain’s shadowy security and intelligence agencies. In his view, his security-cleared colleagues in the counterterrorism unit were too close to the spies who gave them the top-secret briefings that couldn’t be shared with the rest of the force. He didn’t want them hanging around trying to find out what the homicide cops knew—and what they didn’t.

When Sutton got to the scene, sure enough, there was Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt from counterterrorism. Hyatt had been a minor celebrity in police circles ever since catching the job of interviewing Litvinenko on his deathbed, but Sutton didn’t have much time for that sort of fanfare.

“We’re taking this on,” Sutton told him brusquely. “It’s a murder.”

His hackles went up as soon as he got inside the flat. It looked to him like someone had staged the crime scene—wiping the place down to eradicate DNA and fingerprints, removing incriminating evidence, and leaving out the phones, laptop, and SIM cards as decoys for the police to find easily. Why, he wanted to know, had the spies delayed telling the police that Williams had gone missing? Even after Williams’s sister raised concerns, his employers waited five hours before they notified Scotland Yard. Had someone been in to sweep the apartment for anything that would compromise national security before calling the police? Sutton didn’t have the bandwidth to take the case himself, but he handed it over to a younger colleague, DCI Jackie Sebire, and told her not to let the spies push her around.

Sebire was a shrewd detective, but Williams’s highly secretive work created obstacles for her investigation from the outset. MI6 was pushing the theory that Williams had not in fact been murdered but rather had been asphyxiated by accident in a sex game gone wrong, and the media was briefed that the spy had been visiting bondage websites and drag clubs, had a wig collection, and kept a £15,000 collection of women’s designer clothing.

The murder detectives pressed on, but they were barred from speaking to Williams’s colleagues at MI6 and from reviewing key evidence, instead being forced to rely on counterterrorism officers to conduct the inquiries and pass along anonymized notes. An iPhone found in the spy’s apartment had been restored to factory settings, and the discovery of nine computer memory sticks in Williams’s MI6 locker was kept secret—Sebire only learned about the find more than eighteen months later when it emerged in questioning at the coroner’s inquest into the spy’s cause of death. But by then, homicide had already given up and shut down its case.

The coroner went on to deliver a devastating verdict for MI6 and Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command. Dr. Fiona Wilcox dismissed the theory that the spy had suffocated in a sex game and condemned the leaks to the media about his private life as a possible attempt “by some third party to manipulate a section of the evidence.” She ruled that Williams’s death was “unnatural and likely to have been criminally mediated,” blaming the spies and counterterrorism cops for obfuscation and failures in the handling of the evidence that made it impossible to determine exactly how he had been killed.

Throughout the inquest, Williams’s work remained a closely guarded secret. Britain’s foreign secretary at the time, William Hague, had signed a public-interest immunity order preventing any information about his MI6 duties from being disclosed on national security grounds. But locked away inside those sealed files were the keys to the code breaker’s last puzzle.

Williams had been working on Russia. He had just qualified for operational deployment, and in the months before his death he had been traveling regularly to the Fort Meade headquarters of the US National Security Agency (NSA), in Maryland, where he was helping to crack complex financial webs used by Kremlin-linked mafia groups to move illicit money around the globe. His work was so sensitive that he had been given security clearance to visit the NSA’s facility in the Utah desert, which is classified as “above top secret.”

The US State Department demanded that nothing about Williams’s joint operations with American intelligence agencies be made public, so the British government intervened to keep the details of his work out of the police file, which was handed over to the inquest. Publicly, at least, the code breaker’s death would remain an enigma. But while MI6 was standing in the way of Scotland Yard’s investigation, spreading the theory that Williams had died as a result of what the men in gray called his “unusual sexual proclivities,” the Americans sent a file of deeply alarming information to the River House. Intelligence coming in from US sources and listening posts suggested Williams was the victim of another Russian hit on British soil.

London—2010–12

Berezovsky was pouring his energies into a brand-new passion. The legal battles he was waging on many fronts had kindled a sudden fixation on the virtues of British justice, and he had taken to waxing lyrical about the rule of law and the place of courts in a civilized country. So rhapsodic had he become that, even when his estranged wife extracted a record divorce settlement of up to £220 million in the London courts, thus demolishing the lion’s share of his remaining wealth, he hailed the outcome as further evidence of the unflinching rigor of Lady Justice.

For all the high-flung rhetoric, the truth was that Berezovsky had nowhere else to turn. With Patarkatsishvili gone and his fortune in tatters, all that remained was to go through the British legal system to try to claw back every penny he could from his partner’s family as well as from former friends he felt had betrayed him. He was firing off lawsuits in all directions, and his litigious zeal was fueled by two big early wins.

First, the oligarch took on the Russian government by proxy. He went after a man named Vladimir Terluk, who had appeared in a Kremlin-controlled TV broadcast accusing Berezovsky of Litvinenko’s murder. The motive, Terluk said, was to stop Litvinenko from revealing that he had helped Berezovsky obtain political asylum in Britain through fraud. He claimed the pair had conspired to fabricate the plot to kill the oligarch with a poison-tipped pen, which had finally persuaded the authorities to grant him safe haven, and he claimed to know this because Litvinenko had tried to enlist him—Terluk—to help them. Berezovsky was sure Terluk was an FSB stooge, and he issued a claim for libel at Britain’s Royal Courts of Justice.

The proceedings were chaotic. Terluk represented himself, but in a twist of events described by one high court judge as “extraordinary,” a team of Russian state prosecutors turned up en masse during the trial, in February of 2010, and came to his aid. The four officials from the prosecutor general’s office in Moscow positioned themselves around Terluk in the courtroom, requested a set of earphones so they could follow the simultaneous translation of the hearing, and repeatedly intervened despite not being party to the proceedings. They passed Terluk notes and documents, prepared applications for him, and tried to submit papers privately to the judge. At one point, one of their mobile phones rang loudly in court.

“That must be Mr. Putin on the line,” Berezovsky’s QC quipped.

When the Russian prosecutors asked to cross-examine Berezovsky, the judge told them that was a step too far. He ruled that Terluk’s claims were false and “calculated to put at risk Berezovsky’s refugee status and leave to remain in the United Kingdom,” awarding the oligarch £150,000 in damages.

Terluk appealed that judgment and tried to introduce new evidence from Andrey Lugovoy implicating Berezovsky in Litvinenko’s murder. The assassin’s testimony was supported by a statement from a senior Moscow prosecutor, Vadim Yalovitsky. The judge threw out the appeal, describing Lugovoy’s evidence as “not sensibly capable of belief” and lambasting the Russian prosecutors for their attempts to meddle in the British legal system.

The oligarch’s next victory came in his lawsuit against Ruslan Fomichev over interest the financier refused to pay on a $50 million loan that had been frozen by Swiss prosecutors as soon as it entered his accounts. Fomichev fought hard to avoid disclosing details of his dealings with his former boss, and his lawyers argued that testifying could expose him to danger. “Those who cooperated with Mr. Berezovsky and even his former and remaining friends are actively prosecuted in different jurisdictions,” they wrote in one submission. “Some of them died, and not all by a natural death.” But the judge gave Fomichev short shrift, ordering him to pay up in a stinging ruling that described him as an “untruthful” witness.

Those victories had not yielded anything close to the sort of windfalls Berezovsky needed to restore his fortune, but they provided vindication and whetted his appetite for the bigger fights to come. He was gearing up for a major battle with Roman Abramovich, and his war with Patarkatsishvili’s family raged on.

Disputes had also broken out over the New World Value Fund, the trust originally used by Stephen Curtis to hold the payments from Abramovich to Boris and Badri. Berezovsky was battling Patarkatsishvili’s family over the spoils, while Fomichev was determined to get his cut, and efforts were being made to chisel Curtis’s family out of his share. Scot Young had sniffed the chance to make a quick buck. The fixer was back in town, and he stepped in to broker a peace deal that involved carving up parts of the fund among some of the warring parties, making sure to line up a healthy commission for his labors.

Young had done everything he could to claw his way out of the swamp since getting back from Berlin. He had resumed scouting deals for Berezovsky as well as working for a shadowy group of Monaco-based Russians funneling money into Britain through London properties, foreign exchange trades, priceless works of art, and glitzy Mayfair restaurants. He could no longer front for the deals himself now that he was bankrupt, but he could still set them up and cream off a tidy cash commission. The superfixer was getting back into business—but the mystery of his missing fortune was no closer to being solved. And he was more terrified than ever.

Sasha and Scarlet had grown into smart young women in their late teens with all the cut-glass polish of the finest private schooling, and they were starting to ask difficult questions. They remembered a time when they owned fifteen ponies and the tooth fairy never left less than a crisp £50 note, but now they’d been yanked out of the exclusive all-girls Francis Holland School with more than £30,000 in unpaid fees and were living in straitened circumstances with their mother in a poky flat in Pimlico.

The divorce courts had decreed that their father should pay Michelle £27,500 a month for their maintenance, but the money never materialized. Meanwhile, he seemed able to maintain an extraordinary lifestyle for himself, turning up to see them in an array of fast cars and hopping between breathtakingly beautiful apartments in the most exclusive enclaves of London. But he insisted he was living on the largesse of his friends, and when they asked him about where all his money had really gone, all he would tell them was: “It’s complicated.”

The girls were furious with their father for tangling their family up in his web of lies, and they told him they couldn’t take much more humiliation after his bankruptcy forced them out of school. Still, they couldn’t help but carry on loving him. Sasha was fifteen now and the spitting image of her father: the same wide puppy-dog eyes; the same impish grin. Even if her dad had let them all down, he was somehow still the person who made her feel safest. She could tell him anything that went through her head, and he never judged her. She thought he was invincible.

Scarlet was two years older and a little less wide-eyed. She was tall and slender, with long black hair, china-white skin, and intense green eyes, and she’d taken to modeling to supplement the family’s finances as well as shooting for top marks in her final exams. But she still found time to text her dad several times a day, and he showered her with affectionate messages in return. “Love u v much,” he would text her. “Dont let anything or anybody get u down! U r to good for that. U daBEST.”

Young wooed his daughters with eye-popping treats to make it all feel temporarily better, including VIP concert tickets, or the time he showed up with £5,000 worth of Topshop gift certificates from his friend the retail tycoon Sir Philip Green. He regularly took them out for pizza at a beloved Italian restaurant in South Kensington, and he was always there when he said he’d be to give them bear hugs and make them laugh by goofing around. When he wasn’t with them he called every day to ask how they were, what was happening at school, and how they were getting on with their homework.

But in the past couple of years, the calls had started to get darker. The girls had been home alone one evening in 2008 when their father phoned breathlessly to tell them he was being followed and he thought they were all in danger. He begged them to get to a safe place immediately but warned them that people might be watching their house. The next time the girls saw him, he told them everything was fine and shrugged off their questions, distracting them with his usual tomfoolery.

The following year, Young called the police at 3:00 a.m. to beg for protection. The officers who came to his flat noted in their report that he “believed he was going to be assassinated by gangsters and the Russian mafia.” They said he hadn’t slept in three days and “had not eaten or had anything to drink all day except for a Scotch egg” because “he was concerned he was going to be poisoned.” He requested armed protection and asked that MI5 and MI6 be informed. Instead, police determined “there was no information to corroborate his allegations of his life being in danger” and referred him for psychiatric tests.

Doctors concluded that Young was “paranoid, with a manic flavor” and had a “complex delusional belief system.” They committed him under the Mental Health Act and moved him to St. Charles Hospital, where the medical team noted that he appeared “sweaty, suspicious, and restless”—attempting at times to kiss other patients and expose himself. He accused nurses of being “in the league of the KGB” and tried to kick down the ward doors to escape.

Young had been scheduled to attend a divorce hearing with Michelle a few days later, facing jail if he failed to disclose documentary evidence of his losses. But doctors at St. Charles Hospital wrote to the judge that he was mentally unfit to attend. Michelle was furious, asking that Young be jailed for his recalcitrance, but the judge granted his wish and delayed the hearing. The next day, doctors noted a “significant improvement”: Young was exhibiting “no psychotic features,” though he still maintained—calmly now—that his fears had been justified. While he was there, Sasha got another call from her father to say that someone had been following him and to beg her again to get herself and her sister to safety. He confided that he had deliberately engineered his committal because he believed the hospital was the safest place for him to hide.

Young’s fears multiplied when two of his friends died in rapid succession. Paul Castle and Robbie Curtis were an inseparable pair of roguish, high-rolling property dealers who dined with Young and Berezovsky often at Cipriani, their favorite Italian restaurant in London. Castle played polo with Prince Charles and was known by friends for “spending more money than God” on Champagne, while Curtis had made a fortune on luxury rentals in the early 2000s and liked to boast that he had once dated the model Caprice. Like Young, the two tycoons had recently suffered a dramatic financial collapse, and their friends had heard they’d run into trouble doing risky deals with gangsters linked to the Russian mafia.

Castle was the first to go. One morning in November of 2010, the fifty-four-year-old took tea at the Grosvenor Hotel, as was his habit, before turning up at his Mayfair offices in apparently good spirits. But then, friends heard, enforcers for a Russian-linked crime gang burst in, threatened him, and forced him to hand over a valuable collection of luxury watches. Castle walked straight out of his office and into the Bond Street tube station, where he was captured on CCTV diving with his arms outstretched into the path of an oncoming train. After his death, his friends told the press anonymously that he had been driven over the edge by “very, very nasty people” connected to the Russian mafia who had threatened to kill him slowly and painfully if he did not end his own life. The coroner deemed his death a suicide.

Curtis was devastated by Castle’s death—and scared out of his wits. He told friends that he had gotten himself into trouble with the same Russian-linked organized crime gang that Castle was said to have crossed. Criminals had already thrown him out a window once before, he said, and he was so petrified that he sought protection from a London-based crime group just before his death.

“I need to make sure nothing happens to me,” he said he’d told the gangsters. “Sorry, but it’s too late,” came the reply. “A hit has already been taken out on you.”

Almost exactly two years after Castle’s death, Curtis walked onto the platform at the Kingsbury tube station and tumbled in front of a train.

Young was in no doubt that both his friends had been deliberately driven to suicide, and he was so rattled that he refused to discuss them on the phone because he was convinced that his calls were being monitored. Two years later, another member of the Cipriani dining club—the British entrepreneur and former Tears for Fears manager Johnny Elichaoff—would throw himself to his death from the roof of a London shopping center after losing all his money in a catastrophic oil deal.

The police treated all three cases as straightforward suicides and did nothing to investigate evidence of mafia intimidation. But the spies in the River House had suspicions that the deaths could be linked to Russia and secretly asked the United States for information. Word came back from Langley that Castle, Curtis, and Elichaoff were all named in American intelligence files documenting suspected Russian assassinations in Britain. The US spies believed the deaths could be evidence of a “suicide cluster” engineered through manipulation, intimidation, or mind-altering drugs. And there were concerns on both sides of the Atlantic about another attempted hit in London that year.

German Gorbuntsov was a Russian banker who fled to London in 2010 after accusing businessmen linked to the Kremlin and the Russian mafia of ordering a botched assassination attempt in Moscow. By March of 2012, the forty-five-year-old was on the cusp of applying for political asylum in Britain, and he had arranged to meet Russian investigators in London to provide evidence backing up his allegations the same month. Gorbuntsov arrived home at his apartment in London’s Canary Wharf one night in a black cab and stepped out into the darkness without seeing the thin, hooded figure waiting in the shadows. The hit man opened fire, shooting the banker four times using a pistol with a silencer before fleeing into a maze of alleyways.

Gorbuntsov narrowly survived. He lay in a coma, guarded by twenty armed police officers, for several weeks before regaining consciousness and accusing his enemies of ordering his killing. The shooting was viewed as a watershed moment for the Russian mafia in London. There had been an explosion of Russian organized crime in the capital over the previous decade, and the country’s gangs were known for their violence, but until then the mobsters had largely refrained from opening fire in plain sight on the streets of the city. Scotland Yard had been lashed by crippling budget cuts as the recession set in, and its resources for tackling organized crime at the top level were dangerously depleted. If the Moscow mafia was sufficiently emboldened to conduct its “wet work” right out in the open, the police had nothing like the capacity they would need to respond.

By then Young had given up on asking the police for protection and instead turned to an old associate in the London underworld for help. It had been twenty years since he’d started out doing odd jobs for London’s most feared organized crime family, but he’d stayed close enough to Patrick Adams for the gang boss to send Scarlet and Sasha presents on their birthdays. The pair met for a long drink at a pub called the Barley Mow in Mayfair on a wintry afternoon in 2012, and afterward Young told his friends that “nothing would happen” because he was being “looked after.” But what he didn’t know, as the pair stood outside the pub saying their goodbyes in the dying evening light, was that they were being watched.

Determined to find her ex-husband’s missing money, Michelle had hired a team of private eyes to track his every move, and a surveillance crew was tailing him around London on foot, in vans, and on motorcycles. The spies had already filmed Young doing deals in an array of exclusive West End bars and restaurants, visiting London’s finest five-star hotels, and partying at Boujis with his new girlfriend, the model and reality TV star Noelle Reno. On another wintry day in 2012, they followed him to a meeting at the five-star Dorchester Hotel, a favorite haunt, where he disappeared upstairs and then came back down shaking and looking deathly pale. Later, Young would tell his friends that he’d been dangled out a high window in a room at the hotel by “heavies” working for the Russian mafia.

He hightailed it back to his flat only to be photographed reemerging with arms full of bags, suits, and shirts. Then he decamped to the nearby Columbia Hotel—a tired two-star establishment far out of keeping with his expensive tastes—where he checked in with cash using an alias. Michelle’s spies followed him there and eavesdropped on his room by slipping a microphone under his door on a wire. In one phone call taped by the surveillance team, Young discussed handing over “the paperwork” to an individual in Russia and told an unknown caller that Berezovsky was “keeping his head down.” He called Sasha, too, telling her again that he was scared and begging her to get herself, her sister, and their mother somewhere safe.

And that was when, out of the blue, Michelle was approached by a man with a message from Moscow. The Russian government wanted to see her.

Moscow—February 2012

The snow was lying twenty inches thick on the ground when the Aeroflot jet touched down at Sheremetyevo Airport on a bitter February morning. Michelle and her lawyer swept through arrivals and climbed into a car sent by the man who had arranged their visit: Howard Hill, a London-based private investigator who boasted of a direct line to the Russian government.

Hill had approached Michelle to suggest a trade: she would give evidence of Young’s business dealings with Berezovsky to prosecutors gunning for the oligarch in Moscow, and they in turn would tell her what they knew about her ex-husband’s missing fortune.

Right off the bat, the private detective provided what he said was FSB intelligence connecting Young and Berezovsky to a variety of lucrative sports deals in Brazil, Ukraine, and Britain, including a stadium development for the 2014 Winter Olympics, to be held in Sochi, Russia. And he set up a call with attorneys for Aeroflot, who told Michelle’s lawyer that Young was believed to have helped hide hundreds of millions of dollars that the oligarch had siphoned off from the state airline while it was under his control. If she wanted to know more, Hill told Michelle, then she would have to come up with something to trade.

By then, Young had been forced to answer questions in court about Project Moscow, and files relating to the deal had been found on a hard drive seized by order of the judge. The ruse to funnel Berezovsky’s money into the development had been unearthed, and Michelle’s lawyer instructed an assistant to copy the documents for the trip to Russia. Then the two women got on the plane to Moscow.

Their car pulled up alongside a nondescript gray building close to the Kremlin, and they were ushered through a side entrance. Inside, they were greeted by a huge snaggletoothed man with a bristling black mustache who introduced himself as Vadim Yalovitsky.

Russia’s deputy prosecutor general was a loyal and trusted servant of the Kremlin. He had been given the important task of thwarting the Scotland Yard detectives who flew to Moscow to investigate Litvinenko’s death in 2007 by restricting their access to Dmitri Kovtun, and he had led the team that rushed to the aid of Vladimir Terluk in Berezovsky’s lawsuit, as well as providing a written statement in support of Andrey Lugovoy’s evidence. Now he was looking for a new way to come after Russia’s most hated oligarch.

Yalovitsky told Michelle straight up that the prosecutor general’s office had information about her ex-husband that it would be prepared to trade. There was, however, a hitch: the investigator who had those files had been taken to the hospital, so they wouldn’t be able to see them that day. But he said that shouldn’t prevent her from turning over the hard drives she had brought with her. She declined, telling him she would only hand over her own evidence when she saw what the Russian state had to offer in return.

The next day, after the group enjoyed an extravagant dinner with prosecutors and government officials, Hill emailed Michelle’s lawyer to say he’d met a senior member of the FSB who said the security agency had “substantial files” on Young. Discussions continued after the party returned to London about arranging a second meeting with Yalovitsky.

Hill circled back periodically, conveying requests from the prosecutor for evidence linking Young to Berezovsky and for the fixer’s photo and passport details so the authorities could check his visits to the country. Michelle’s lawyer obliged by supplying Young’s date of birth and a selection of pictures. And then, all of a sudden, the door slammed shut. Hill reported that the prosecutor’s office was no longer prepared to cooperate.

Michelle was no closer to finding the missing billions she was hunting, but what she did now know was that her ex-husband had somehow found his way into the sights of the Russian state. And by 2012, the FSB wasn’t the only intelligence agency taking an interest in Young.

The fixer’s activities had by then attracted such concern that his communications were being tapped by spies at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters. The intelligence gleaned from listening in on his calls was so sensitive that some of it was marked top secret—the highest classification level, reserved only for information that would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security if it became public.

US spies were monitoring individuals connected to Britain’s rapidly shrinking community of Russian runaways—and Young was central to that web. As the men around Berezovsky and his fixer dropped dead, the challenge was to determine whether they had been targeted by the Kremlin, murdered by Russian mafia figures, or deliberately driven to suicide—and the spies couldn’t rule out the possibility that some of the deaths on their radar were entirely unconnected to Russia. But as 2012 drew to a close, US intelligence systems lit up with evidence of another high-profile death on British soil. And this time, there was no such ambiguity about who was behind the hit.