It was a cold and rainy night in London. Inside the bleak hospital, armed police officers stood guard over a dying man. "The bastards got me," he breathed, "but they won't get everybody." His friend, tears streaming down his cheeks, listened intently as Alexander breathed his last defiant accusations fired in the direction of the Kremlin. Not long thereafter, he was gone –- another name crossed off a list.

This is not a trailer for the latest Bond movie, nor is it the opening paragraph to the latest Tom Clancy novel. It is the story of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Soviet spy who was poisoned by unknown killers –- and it reads like a real-life spy thriller.

The scene above -- as described by Litvinenko to The Times of London -- took place at London's University College Hospital a few days before Litvinenko succumbed to a mysterious and lethal poison that has toxicologists baffled and the public up in arms. His friend was Andrei Nekrasov, a Russian film-maker who had been visiting his ex-KGB friend every day of the week. They believe the Kremlin is responsible for Litvinenko's inexplicable and untimely death.

"Sasha was a good-looking, physically strong and courageous man," Nekrasov told The Times. But standing at Litvinenko's hospital bed for the first time, "the figure who greeted me looked like a survivor from the Nazi concentration camps." The poison had destroyed his vital organs over a period of several weeks, and there was nothing doctors could do to prevent it. On Tuesday, Litvinenko suffered a heart attack and was put on life support. He died from heart failure at 9:21 p.m. local time on Thursday.

"It was sadistic, slow murder," Nekrasov said. "It was perpetrated by somebody incredibly cruel, incredibly heartless." So far, doctors are at a loss as to what could have caused the slow death. They have ruled out several previous theories, including thallium, radioactive poisoning and three objects that showed up on an x-ray but turned out to be remnants of a chemical used to treat thallium or caesium poisoning.

In an interview with The Times given just hours before his demise, Litvinenko said "this is what it takes to prove one has been telling the truth." He was referring to allegations he made in his book, "The FSB Blows Up Russia," in which he accuses Russian security agencies of orchestrating a series of apartment block bombings in Moscow in 1999 that helped propel Vladimir Putin -- a KGB veteran -- into the presidency.

Nekrasov claims that "in the politics of Russia today, what we're witnessing is a kind of murderous spree by a serial killer also known as the state." Moscow denies the charges. "A person's death is always a tragedy," said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in Helsinki, Finland, where Russian President Vladimir Putin was attending a summit with European Union leaders on Friday. "But the accusations against the Kremlin are so incredible, so silly, that the President cannot comment." Meanwhile, the anti-terrorist unit at Scotland Yard is leading the investigation into the former dissident's "unexplained death," which is likely to become a murder inquiry.

Litvinenko believed he was administered a poison by a Kremlin operative on Nov. 1. On that day, Litvinenko had met with an unnamed Russian contact and Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB-colleague and bodyguard to former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar. Lugovoi told The Times he was not involved in the poisoning, and was prepared to travel to London to prove it.

Litvinenko had also met with Italian security expert Mario Scaramella at a sushi dinner in Picadilly on the same day to discuss the case of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist and outspoken critic of the Kremlin who was murdered in Moscow on Oct. 7. Scaramella, who has since gone into hiding in Rome, said he had shown Litvinenko an e-mail naming Politkovskaya's killers, as well as a list of other targets that included Litvinenko himself.

Several hours after the meeting, Litvinenko complained of feeling sick and was admitted to Barnet General Hospital. On Nov. 17, he was transferred to University College Hospital and placed under armed guard as his condition deteriorated.

Litvinenko began serving in the counterintelligence agencies of the Soviet KGB in 1988 and later, after the collapse of the USSR, in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). He specialized in counter-terrorist activities and infiltration of organized crime, and quickly rose through the ranks. By 1997, he was Senior Operational Officer and Deputy Head of Section 7 of the Department for the Analysis of Criminal Organizations, one of the FSB's most secret branches.

But in 1998, he dissented, claiming that his superiors had ordered the liquidation of Boris Berezovsky, a Russian businessman and government official who was close to Boris Yeltsin. Litvinenko was subsequently dismissed from the FSB and arrested twice before he fled first to Turkey and later to the United Kingdom. Litvinenko was granted political asylum in the UK, and received British citizenship on the day he attended the service at Westminster Abbey for his friend Anna Politkovskaya.

"We discussed the likelihood of another killing. Sasha warned me not to go back to Russia because it was too dangerous," Nekrasov said. "Very sadly he turned out to be the next victim, attacked in the perceived safety of Central London."