It has been four years since I last saw Viktor Kalashnikov, always a lucid source of information for me on Russian geopolitics and the infighting within his old company, the KGB. Both he and his wife, Marina, were pictures then of good health — tall, sporty and bursting with energy.
When they turned up on my doorstep this week, they were haggard; clothes hanging loose, they were scratching their skin, their words slurred. Just a few of the symptoms of mercury poisoning, says their Berlin doctor, who appeared flabbergasted by reports on their blood values, below.
A London toxicologist called in