Who Swallowed a Frog
Navalny
The syringe was small enough to palm, which was the point. The agent held it between two gloved fingers under the fluorescent lights of the service corridor, turning it slowly, watching the liquid catch the light. Colorless. Almost elegant in its simplicity. He had read the briefing twice, which was once more than usual. Epibatidine. Synthesized from the skin secretions of Epipedobates tricolor, a frog no larger than a man’s thumbnail that lived in the cloud forests of Ecuador and Peru. Two hundred times more potent than morphine as an analgesic. Fatal in microgram quantities. The briefing had included that detail with what felt like pride.
He tucked the syringe into the inner pocket of his orderly’s smock and pushed through the double doors into Block 6.
IK-6 Melekhovo was not the worst of the penal colonies, but it had been chosen for its particular qualities: remote, underfunded, staffed by men who understood the value of not seeing things. The agent had arrived three days earlier with transfer papers that nobody questioned. He mopped floors. He delivered meals. He watched.
Navalny was thinner than the photographs suggested. The years in the system had carved away the softness of the opposition politician and left something harder, more angular. He still smiled at the guards, which the agent found either admirable or delusional. Perhaps both. He exercised in his cell each morning, a routine of push-ups and stretches performed with the discipline of a man who understood that his body was the last territory he controlled.
The agent waited until the evening meal. He had been assigned to deliver trays to the isolation wing, a duty that required passing through three locked doors and two camera dead zones. The second dead zone lasted eleven seconds. He had timed it.
Navalny looked up when the slot opened. His eyes were clear, focused, the eyes of a man who had long ago accepted that any meal, any handshake, any draft of air through a vent could be the vector. He had survived Novichok. He knew what his government was capable of.
“Thank you,” Navalny said, reaching for the tray.
The agent’s free hand moved. The needle found the space between the knuckles, a sharp sting that could have been a splinter from the tray’s rough edge. Navalny flinched, looked down at his hand, then up at the agent’s face.
Something passed between them. Recognition, not of identity, but of category. Navalny had seen this species of man before.
“Ah,” Navalny said. Just that. A single syllable that contained the full weight of unsurprise.
The agent withdrew the tray, closed the slot, and walked back down the corridor. Behind him, the epibatidine was already binding to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, flooding the nervous system with signals it could not process. Seizures would begin within minutes. The pain would be extraordinary.
He did not look back.
The toxicology report arrived in Vilnius before the body did.
Dr. Karolina Zebrauskas read it at her desk in the Lithuanian State Forensic Medicine Service, her coffee growing cold beside her. She read it again. Then she called her director, who called the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who called NATO liaison.
Epibatidine. Not a weapons-grade nerve agent. Not polonium or thallium or any of the familiar signatures of Russian state assassination. A frog toxin. South American. So exotic, so unmistakable, so theatrically specific that it could only have been chosen to be found.
The Russians had released the body with unusual speed, waiving the customary delays and bureaucratic obstructions that typically accompanied the death of a political prisoner. They had even provided their own autopsy report, which listed the cause of death as cardiac arrest, which was technically true in the same way that drowning could be called respiratory failure.
They wanted the world to find the poison. That was the message. We can reach into the jungle for new ways to kill. We can be creative. We are not constrained by your categories or your expectations. We did this, and we want you to know we did this, and there is nothing you will do about it.
Yulia Navalnaya stood in the receiving room of the Vilnius mortuary with her children beside her. Daria, twenty-three now, held her mother’s arm. Zakhar, nineteen, stood slightly apart, his jaw set in an expression that Yulia recognized from her husband’s face during press conferences when the questions turned hostile.
A Lithuanian official was explaining the process. The words arrived at a great distance, muffled and formal. Release protocols. Documentation. Diplomatic considerations.
“When,” Yulia said, cutting through the procedure.
The official paused. “The transfer is complete. You may see him now, if you wish.”
Yulia looked at her daughter, then her son. Zakhar gave a single nod.
The official opened the inner door. Cold air pressed outward, carrying the sterile mineral smell of refrigeration. Yulia stepped forward. Her children followed.
The body lay under a white sheet on a steel table in the center of the room. Yulia crossed the distance and placed her hand on the sheet, feeling the shape beneath it, the rigid topography of a person who was no longer a person. She did not pull the sheet back. She did not need to.
She stood there for a long time, her hand resting on the fabric, while her children flanked her in silence. Outside, a February wind moved across the Baltic rooftops, and somewhere in Moscow, men in offices were already measuring the silence, gauging whether the message had landed.
It had.