The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

Tom hurtled out of the office, heading first for the lifts then, thinking better of it, shouldering his way into the fire escape: taking the stairs reduced the risk of a collision with someone he knew.

He ran down the stairs as fast as he could, clutching the banister so that he could vault the final three or even four steps, leaping into the air and pounding onto successive landings. He emerged from the fire escape on the third floor, disappearing as invisibly as he could into the throng. He couldn't afford to run; too noticeable. Instead he walked at his briskest pace, past the gifts of Maoist kitsch from the People's Republic, past the glass case displaying a traditional Thai logboat. He took the stairs to the second floor, ignoring the memorial exhibit of molten bottles and charred coins salvaged from Hiroshima. One more flight down and he was, at last, by the ceiling-high stained-glass Chagall window with its pale moons, eerie blues and desperate mothers clinging to their swaddled babies. The Peace Window, they called it, even though it had always struck Tom as reeking of the sadness of war.

He stopped, breathing heavily. There were no tourists milling around; he was alone. Only a hunch had brought him here. Rebecca had asked Henning if the meeting could be somewhere quiet, somewhere that was not ‘grand’. If he knew Henning, and he did, the German would have brought her to this place.

They called it the meditation chapel. It was a plain dark room. There were no religious symbols, no holy texts, no books or artworks at all. It was meant to be ‘multi-faith’, even if that meant it was essentially an empty space. There were benches to sit on but they were rarely used. Tom had come here once or twice, including late at night after a particularly terrible session in his office, wading through eye-witness testimonies. But most UN staff could work in the place for twenty years and not even know it was there.

Not Henning though. He had been one of those adamant that the entrance to the area should become a memorial for those who had fallen serving the UN. There was a plaque for Count Bernadotte, the diplomat assassinated in Jerusalem, as well as the torn flag of the United Nations mission, bombed in Baghdad in 2003. To Henning at least, the meditation chapel meant something. Besides, he probably calculated that this location would give the UN some precious moral high ground for its meeting with Rebecca.

Tom tried to steady himself. He didn't know what he was going to find. He wanted to think, to work out what he would say or do, but there was no time. He walked through the partitioned walls – there was no door – and he knew he had been right.

They were both there, Rebecca and him. No one else, just as Henning had promised. No aides, no advisers – precisely as Tom had requested. Him and her alone, facing each other.

The change in the light meant they both turned around as Tom walked forward. Tom could see that Rebecca was aghast – with surprise, with confusion, he couldn't tell – but his gaze did not linger. It was not her he wanted to examine.

Instead he peered hard at the features of the man. Tom had never worked with him; his appointment had come long after Tom had fled for the corporate hills. But his face had become familiar in the last few weeks, at least to those who followed the politics of this place. It had been in the papers, on TV. The high forehead, the combed back, silver-grey hair, the wide mouth and firm, sharp nose. He was tall, too, elegant in a dark, tailored suit and perfectly knotted tie.

But it was not the similarity of the real man to the TV likeness that Tom was trying to make out. Rather he was comparing the face before him with the image he had seen just five minutes earlier on the computer screen. Was there room for doubt? Even in this gloom, Tom was sure there was not. He would have been ready to swear under oath that the man he was looking at and the teenage Fascist thug of Kovno's Ninth Fort were one and the same man. He knew that the eager participant in the massacre of the Jews of that town, a minor but murderous accomplice in the greatest crime of the twentieth century, was standing before him as the Secretary-General of the United Nations.