We needed to become poison experts—and fast. We both knew about the infamous KGB Poison Factory, which for decades had developed novel, vicious, and mysterious ways of killing Russia’s enemies. The poisons they developed were often tested on prisoners in the Russian gulag before being deployed in the field. Favorites included ricin, dioxin, thallium, hydrogen cyanide, polonium (which had been used in London to kill Alexander Litvinenko), and even rare venoms extracted from jellyfish. We had to determine whether any of these—or something else—had been used on Vladimir.
