The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER NINE

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.’