Notes
Macabre Monday Mercs! Let’s say for a second that you were paid a tidy sum to… oh, make somebody go away. As in forever. But you know, make it look like an accident or, I don’t know, an “illness.” Real natural… How clever could you get with this assignment?
For a little inspiration, I’ll tell you about the assassination of Georgi Markov, who was killed by one of my favorite plants, Ricinus communis. I’ve talked about this plant before, the castor bean plant, the oil of which is used commonly and is completely safe. The seeds, however, can be processed to obtain the very deadly poison ricin. Ricin was first weaponized by the KGB during the Cold War and, fun fact, my high school art teacher’s brother was arrested in Vegas for manufacturing ricin.🤷♀️
Ricin works by inhibiting a cell’s ability to produce protein, which then kills the cell. It can take up to five days for a victim to slowly die as the poison works through their body killing off cells. Which brings us back to Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident during the Cold War who had defected to Britain, where he continued to criticize the communist government of his homeland.
In September, 1978 Markov was waiting for a bus when he felt a sharp pain in his thigh, immediately followed by the man standing next to him dropping an umbrella, picking it up, and jumping in a taxi. Three days later, Markov was dead.
Authorities later found a 1.52mm platinum pellet in Markov’s thigh, that’s about the size of a pinhead, for reference. There were two holes in the pellet that went about halfway through it and met in an x. This pellet baffled authorities until another Bulgarian dissident, Vladimir Kostov, fell ill and was found with a similar pellet in his shoulder. Kostov, however, survived and the pellet found in his body helped authorities understand what had happened.
The pellet was full of ricin and each of the holes had been plugged with wax. The heat of Markov’s thigh had melted the wax, allowing the poison to leak out of the pellet. In Kostov’s case, the muscles in the shoulder hadn’t been warm enough to fully melt the wax and only some poison had escaped.
It wasn’t until after the fall of communism that a stash of umbrella guns capable of firing the tiny pellet were found during a raid in Bulgaria and the method of delivery was finally discovered. Who shot Markov and Kostov? Well that remains a mystery.
What do you say? Could you cook up a plan this clever?
I bet the menacing, mercenary writers below could, check them out and see for yourself.
