The first time George heard Pia’s theory, he thought she had lost it for sure. She said she believed that Rothman and Yamamoto were murdered using a radioactive agent, polonium-210, that was masked by the salmonella bacteria they had also been given. George had sarcastically asked which James Bond movie she’d gotten that from, but Pia was, as ever, deadly serious.

“George, it’s actually happened before so it’s a copycat crime. Someone was actually murdered in this fashion. Truly. The man’s name was Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian. He was killed in London in 2006. Don’t you remember? It was all over the news.”

“I don’t remember,” George admitted.

Pia waved George over to the desk so he could see several of the newspaper stories she had found online, then she filled him in on the basics of the case.

“Litvinenko was in the KGB, then the FSB, which is what replaced it. He fled Russia and was given political asylum in England. He wrote a couple of books that were critical of the Russian president, Putin. You’d think he would have been super-careful, knowing what he did. He meets these guys, ex-KGB like him, in a London hotel bar for tea. Within hours he’s sick and hospitalized. After several days he’s diagnosed with radiation poisoning, which is later figured out to be polonium-210. He gets progressively worse, since there was not a lot the doctors could do, and dies about three weeks later.”

“Three weeks. That’s a lot longer than Rothman and Yamamoto.”

“Yeah, I know. But polonium’s effects are dose-related. We don’t know how much polonium was used and when Rothman and Yamamoto were poisoned.”

We don’t know if they were poisoned, thought George, but he kept it to himself. Pia was on a roll.

“So the Brits investigate and find out about the bar and the tea, and there was radiation all over the place, especially in the teapot. Ultimately it was proven that he died from deliberate poisoning. They did an autopsy and the pathologists had to wear hazmat suits. Litvinenko’s GI tract was very hot, to use your word. The guy had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin.”

“Okay, I can see why one spy might use something like this to kill another spy, but why use it on doctors? If you want to kill them, why go to all that trouble? Why not just shoot them?”