From a Michael Schaffer Capital City column on politico.com headlined “Random Shooting or Kremlin Hit? The Mysterious 2007 Shooting That Transfixed D.C. Is Still Unsolved.”

The only thing he heard them say was “shoot him.”

There were two of them, Paul Joyal says, lying in wait in the shrubs outside his suburban Maryland home on the night of March 1, 2007. Days earlier, Joyal, a consultant and intelligence specialist with years of experience in the former Soviet Union, had appeared in a “Dateline NBC” episode about the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent widely believed to have been killed by the Russian government under Vladimir Putin.