The Final Reckoning (5 page)

They never did say welcome home. Tom always imagined they did, or that at least one day they would, but they never did. The immigration officer on the dawn shift at Heathrow had simply glanced down at the passport picture, glanced back up, and then nodded him through.

You couldn't blame him. For all he knew, Tom might have been back after a two-day trip. No big deal. He wasn't to know that this was always an unsettling moment for an Englishman who had made his home in New York since his late twenties. Whenever he came back Tom felt the same curious mix: the familiarity of a native and the bemusement of a stranger.

The country had changed so much. When he had left London the city had been in the doldrums of a recession, the place still creaking from a postwar period it had never really left behind. But now London seemed to crackle with energy. Every time he came back, Tom noticed the skyline was
filled with new buildings or cranes putting up new buildings. You only had to look at the shop-fronts, the hoardings, the street cafés to smell the money. The contrast with New York used to be sharp: in Manhattan the skyscrapers were taller, the restaurants better, the shops open for longer. Now the two places looked more alike than ever.

But the biggest change was the people. There were Russian billionaires in Park Lane, Latvian cleaners in Islington and Poles everywhere. He had seen a black British comedian on cable TV lament that these days if you saw a white person in London, you could no longer assume they spoke English.

He took the Heathrow Express into town with one thought still preoccupying him: why was the Russian's number on Gerald Merton's mobile phone?

First, Tom had wondered if the old man had been the victim of a very skilful and cunning case of identity theft. Perhaps terrorists had spotted him, then deliberately dressed like him in order to confuse their pursuers. Maybe, at some point, they had even used – and then returned to him – his mobile phone, knowing that anyone listening in, or tailing them, would be led to the dead end of an aged British tourist.

But it all seemed a stretch. The simplest explanation was that Gerald Merton had indeed phoned the Russian arms dealer himself and gone to see him on Monday, just as the Feds said he had. There were not two men in black, just one.

The very thought made Tom smile. It meant that his old friend Henning Munchau might not be in such deep trouble after all. If Tom could prove that the UN had not shot an entirely innocent man they could put aside the sackcloth and ashes. Henning would be off the hook; Tom would have done all that had been asked of him and more. His debt to Henning would be discharged and there might even be a cash bonus in it for him.

Sure, it was unusual: a suspected terrorist aged seventy-seven. But, hey, these guys were crazy. Children had been used as suicide bombers, women, too, even pregnant ones. Why couldn't Gerald Merton have been the first pensioner accelerating his entry to paradise? He might not have been wearing an explosive belt when he was shot, but Tom could argue that Merton's stroll to the UN had been a reconnaissance mission, timing the walk from the Tudor Hotel to UN Plaza to see what obstacles he encountered, work out how far he could get before he was stopped. He was probably planning to return the very next day, strapped into a bomb supplied by the Russian.

Motive would be the big problem. Most likely Merton had been promised a cash payment for the family he would leave behind. After all, what cause could this old man have believed in so passionately that he was ready to wreak havoc in the headquarters of the United Nations?

Tom reached for his notebook, looking again at
the bare details he had gleaned from Allen. A date of birth as far into the past as Tom's dead father's. Place of birth: Kaunas, Lithuania.

Maybe that was the key fact. He'd read magazine stories about the rise and rise of the Eastern European mafia for years now. This ‘Gerald Merton’ could have been one of them, recently arrived in the UK and either an elderly godfather himself or, more likely, a jobbing assassin paid to whack somebody at the UN.

Still, the UN would need more evidence than a single number on a mobile phone to justify the gunning down of an elderly man. And the place to get it was London.

The TV screen on the train announced that Paddington was approaching. He remembered from his last visit the giant screens at railway stations, usually carrying a twenty-four-hour news channel. There were screens on the sides of buses now, even at bus stops. Cameras on every corner too, many more in London than you'd ever get away with in New York. George Orwell got more right than he realized.

At Paddington he took a cab. There was no time to check in to the hotel or catch some sleep, however tempting. He needed to see Merton's daughter as soon as possible, before the entire membership of the Amalgamated Union of Lefty Lawyers and America Bashers had descended on her doorstep, offering to put her father's face onto
posters in every student bedroom in the land. He could imagine their excitement at the prospect. The protests against the Met's shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes had been lively enough, but in that case the target had only been the humble Metropolitan Police. So long as they could make New York, and therefore America, the bad guy, the death of Gerald Merton offered much richer pickings. Tom knew these people, he knew how their minds worked. He knew only too well.

He was just a short distance away now from Merton's daughter's address, watching as people closed their front doors and headed for work. Most of the buildings were old Georgian houses divided into flats. He had imagined her living in a tidy suburban semi, with a husband and at least a couple of kids. But this was not that kind of neighbourhood. He was in Clerkenwell, the residential pocket just east of the sleaze and grime of King's Cross.

As the cab turned into her street he saw immediately which house was hers. People were emerging from a front door with baleful expressions: making an early morning condolence call. He paid the driver, jumped out and headed in their direction. As he came closer, they looked up at him with the nodding half-smile of acknowledgement that strangers reserve for each other on these occasions. He didn't need to press the buzzer: the door was open.

He hadn't quite planned for the presence of
other people. From the hallway he could hear voices on the stairs, saying goodbye. He headed up.

For a second, he was confused. In front of him were two women in an embrace, one of them sobbing loudly, the other, taller woman, offering comfort. Yet he felt certain that this calm, tearless woman was the daughter of Gerald Merton. It was her eyes that confirmed it. They were as striking as the ones that had stared back at him on the mortuary slab in New York less than twenty-four hours earlier.

‘Hello,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘I'm so sorry to come unannounced like this. My name is Tom Byrne and I'm from the United Nations.’

She fixed the extraordinary eyes upon him, then said in a clear and penetrating voice. ‘I think you'd better leave.’

Taken aback, it took Tom several seconds to realize that she was not speaking to him, but to her departing guests.

‘You call us if you need anything, Rebecca,’ said the husband, who Tom guessed was roughly her age, in his early thirties. The wife tried to say something too, but the eyes welled again and she shook her head in defeat.

Throughout Tom kept his gaze on Rebecca, who was standing tall and straight-backed in this wobbling, sobbing huddle. Everything about her was striking, nothing was moderate. Her hair was a deep, dark black; her nose was not short or button-neat, like the
Vogue
and
Elle
girls he dated in New York. Instead it was strong and, somehow, proud. Most arresting were those eyes of clearest green: not the same colour as her father's, but with the same shining brilliance. They seemed to burn not with the grief he had been expecting but with something altogether
more controlled. He found that he could not look away from her.

‘You can come in here,’ she said.

He followed her into a room whose clutter he rapidly tried to interpret. The polished wood floors, the battered, and tiny, TV in the corner were predictable enough: urban bohemian. The books surprised him. Not the first couple of shelves of fiction, contemporary novels alongside Flaubert, Eliot and Hardy, but the rest: they seemed to be journals of some kind. He took a glance at the rest of the flat. No sign yet of another person. No sign of a man.

She sat down in a plain wooden chair, gesturing for him to take the more comfortable couch opposite.

He was about to speak when a phone rang: hers, a mobile. She looked at the display and answered it without hesitation.

‘Not at all: I said you could call. What's happening?’ She began nodding as she received what appeared to be a staccato burst of information. ‘She's hypotensive now, you say? Despite good gram-negative coverage? Poor girl, this is the last thing she needs. Remember, she's been treated for AML. I'd make sure she's on Vancomycin and call intensive care to let them know she may need pressors. And, Dr Haining? Keep me posted.’

Tom looked back at the shelves, packed with what he could now see was an apparently full set of the
Journal of Paediatric Oncology.
He waited for
her to close the clamshell phone and began, his opening line now duly revised. ‘Dr Merton. You know why I'm here. I've flown into New York this morning because of a grave mistake.’

‘London. You're in London.’ She showed him a brief glimpse of a smile. It was crooked, the teeth sharp between full lips. He worried that he was staring. He could feel his pulse quicken.

‘Sorry. London. Yes.’ He tried to collect himself, to handle this like any other meeting.
Remember your objectives: placate this woman without anything resembling an admission of liability.
‘The Secretary-General of the United Nations asked me to come here as soon as this tragedy occurred to convey his personal sorrow and regret at what happened to your father. He speaks for the entire—’

‘You can save the speech.’ She was staring right at him, her eyes dry. ‘I don't need a speech.’

He had planned on her breaking down, needing comfort and solace. Or else hurling abuse at him in a righteous fury. This was not in the plan. ‘There's no speech.’ Tom lifted his hands away from his briefcase.

‘Good, because I don't want a string of platitudes. I want answers.’

‘OK’

‘Let's start with this. How on earth could any police force in the world not recognize a seventy-seven year old man when it saw one?’

‘Well, identification is one of the key issues that—’

‘And what the hell happened to shooting in the legs? Even I know that when police want to immobilize a suspect they shoot in the legs.’

‘Standard procedure in the case of a suspected suicide bomber is to shoot at the head—’

‘Suicide bomber? Fuck you!’

He paused, shocked by the obscenity, the silence filling the air. ‘Listen–’

‘Fuck you.’ Quieter this time.

‘I understand that you—’

‘Have you ever come across a seventy-seven year old suicide bomber, Mr Byrne?’

‘Look. Perhaps it would help if I walked you through the events of Monday morning, as best we know them.’ He didn't even sound like himself, resorting to the plodding legalspeak he hated. He was finding it hard to concentrate; every time he so much as looked at this woman, he felt he was being shoved off his stride.

‘OK. So my Dad's on a little retirement vacation and decides to be a tourist and visit the UN. Then what happened?’

Tom reached into his bag for the sheaf of papers he had brought, the timelines and FBI reports he and Sherrill had got from Allen so that he would be able to maintain at least the pretence of full disclosure. He had seen enough of these cases over the years to know that it was that above all – the lack of openness, the sense that the authorities were concealing the truth – that always enraged the grieving families. He had planned to give
Rebecca Merton every detail, show her the precise sequence of events, each split-second decision, until she would, despite her loss, have to concede that it was a tragic but innocent mistake and that the UN security team had been in an impossible position: how could they risk a suicide bomber killing tens, scores of innocents? They had taken one life in the sincere belief that they were saving many more. That was what he needed her to accept.

‘Don't start giving me some presentation, Mr Byrne. I don't want you trying to bury me in papers, blinding me with science. I'm a doctor, I know that trick.’

‘All right.’ Tom put the papers back and leant forward in his chair. ‘Tell me how we can help.’

‘I want an apology.’

‘Of course the United Nations feel the deepest—’

‘Not from you. From the boss. I want a face-to-face meeting with the Secretary-General. I want him to look me in the eye and admit what the United Nations has done. This was not some minor slip-up; this was killing my father. For no reason. And that means a full apology, in person, from the man at the top.’

Tom remembered Henning's sole condition: no grandstanding, no photo-ops. ‘Look, a tragedy happened yesterday. We know that. And the United Nations wants to show that it recognizes the scale of that tragedy. We'd like to make a
gesture, to establish a fund available to you for whatever purpose seems appropriate. It could be a memorial—’

‘Sorry, I think I misheard you. What did you say?’ There was a second flash of that crooked smile.

‘I said that the UN is willing to acknowledge the life of Gerald Merton with a one-off payment.’ He immediately regretted
one-off.

‘Christ.’ She shook her head, the full lips slowly colouring a deep red, as if her rage was filling them with blood. ‘Maybe the headbangers are right after all. So the UN's not just anti-Israel, it's anti-Semitic as well.’

Tom frowned. ‘I'm sorry?’

‘You'd better be more than sorry, Mr Byrne. Is this really what you think of us? That you can buy us off with blood money?’

‘I don't underst—’

‘You think this is what Jews are like? That we'd let you kill our parents so long as the price is right?’

‘I had no idea—’

‘That's right. You have no idea at all.’

Her mobile rang again. He was trying to digest what she had just said, but as she stood up, all he could focus on was her shape. She was slim, but not skinny. He could see that even in thrown-on jeans and a loose black top, she had the figure not of the anorexic dolls you saw in Manhattan but of a real woman.

‘Hi Nick. How's she doing? How's her chest X-ray look? That's not good.’ She began nodding, murmuring her assent to the voice on the phone. ‘Sounds like she's developing ARDS. That's what I'd worry about with strep,
viridans sepsis.
All right, tell the parents I'll call them soon. They've been through the wringer: they need to hear a familiar voice. Thanks, Nick.’

He was trying not to stare, but it was an unequal struggle. The intensity of this woman seemed to be burning up all the oxygen in the room. There was a strange butterfly sensation in his chest, as if his heart was trembling. He told himself it was coffee or lack of sleep or jet lag. But still he couldn't look away.

So Gerald Merton was Jewish. Tom had never even considered it. Everything had thrown him off course, the name, the passport –
Place of birth: Kaunas, Lithuania –
and especially the corpse. Tom Byrne knew what a circumcised penis looked like and Merton's was not it.

She finished the call and turned to him. ‘I have to go: there's an emergency at the hospital.’

‘I'm sorry to hear that.’

‘Yeah, sure you are. Anyway, I don't think we have anything more to talk about, do you?’ She turned around and disappeared into the kitchen, where he could hear the jangle of car keys being scooped up.

He turned to the pile of unused documents next to him on the couch and began pushing them
back into his case when he saw it: a small, black notebook on a side table. For a moment he thought it must be his own Moleskine. But as he looked closer he could see it was thicker. It was hers. On impulse, he shoved it into his bag. He would say he'd taken it by mistake: that way he'd have an excuse to come back.

He stood up and followed Rebecca Merton down the stairs and out of her front door.

‘Here's my card,’ he said, successfully repressing his surprise that she took it. ‘If you think of anything more you'd like to discuss, call me.’

She studied it for a moment, then looked back up, those emerald-clear eyes boring into him. ‘So you're not even a UN lawyer. You're the hired help. The guy they brought in to do their dirty work. Goodbye, Mr Byrne. I don't think we'll be seeing each other again.’