Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

by Bill Browder

Perepilichnyy set down his drink and let out a sigh. “I think someone wants me dead.” “How do you know?” Vadim asked. “My family got a call from the anti-terrorism police in Moscow. They’d recently searched a hit man’s house in another investigation, and found a file on me.” “A hit man?” “Yeah. Some Chechen.” “How do you know this is even real? They’ve been trying to scare you for months.” “Because they had all kinds of details about me and my family and our lives in the UK. The only thing that gives me any comfort is that the home address they have for me is an old one.” “That doesn’t sound very comforting,” Vadim said. Afterward, it emerged that the hit man was Valid Lurakhmaev, a well-known Chechen assassin who went by the street name of “Validol”—the Russian translation for Valium—a not-too-subtle play on the idea that he was good at calming his victims by killing them.