Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

In a cab on the way back to his apartment – it would take just a couple of minutes to pack a bag before dashing off for the airport – Tom made the last call he needed, as arranged, to get briefed by Harold Allen on the details he would need in London.

‘How are things, Harold?’

‘Not great, Tom, I'll be straight with you.’ He sounded rough, like a man whose career is flashing before his eyes.

‘Have the family now been notified?’

‘USG made the call nearly an hour ago.’

‘Widow?’

‘No widow. Just one daughter apparently. I'll email the co-ordinates.’

‘Press?’

‘They haven't got the name yet. Just confirmation of a Caucasian male.’

‘Has his age been announced?’

Allen sighed. ‘Not yet.’

Tom felt sorry for the guy. Depending on how nuclear the media went on this, Allen was shaping up to be the obvious fall-guy. Just senior enough to be culpable, but not so senior his sacrifice would actually cost the high command. Tom knew the battle cry always raised when trouble hit the UN: ‘Deputy heads must roll!’

He offered some bland words of reassurance and hung up. As he looked out of the window at the late-afternoon mothers pushing buggies, picking up their kids from day-care, he wondered who he should phone. No need to speak to the Fantonis: BlackBerry and cellphone contact would be fine for them, no matter where he was. He thought of the guys from his five-a-side team, all Brits, most of them former City boys trousering a squillion a week on Wall Street. He should tell them he'd be missing the Wednesday game. Otherwise, he had no one else to call.

The afternoon traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway was heavy. Tom pushed back into the worn, fake-leather seat of the cab and closed his eyes. He reached into his pocket to check his passport when he felt the hard cover of his notebook. He probably ought to call Sherrill, tell him that the family had just been informed, which meant the press would soon get the dead man's name.

He flicked through the pages looking for the detective's number but instead came across the scribbled note he had made at the medical examiner's office.

Now, in his other hand, he fired up his BlackBerry. A message from Allen's office, as promised. A name, a London address and two phone numbers, the second clearly recognizable as a mobile. Rebecca Merton, it said. Tom glanced at the long UK number he had seen on the phone in the Ziploc bag. Sure enough, they matched. Gerald Merton's last telephone call had been to his daughter.

Without thinking, Tom tapped out the digits of the second number he had found on the dead man's cellphone, beginning 1-917. The number sat there, lighting up the display for several seconds. He knew that he ought to leave this to Sherrill; that the NYPD would, as a matter of routine, check out the numbers on the victim's phone. There was no reason for Tom to do it himself. Tom looked out of the window, weighed it up – and then pushed the little green button to activate the call.

It would probably just be the number for a taxi service the old guy had used to collect him from the airport. Or perhaps some relative he had been planning to visit.

Tom put the phone to his ear, hearing it connect and then the long tone of a first ring. A silence and then one more ring. And then a male voice.

At first Tom assumed it was a wrong number. Either the old man had dialled it incorrectly or Tom had scrawled the digits down too fast, both eminently possible. He was about to apologize for his mistake when instinct silenced him. He heard the voice again, first speaking to someone else, as if winding up another conversation, then calling out hello, hello – and a shudder passed through him, making even his scalp turn cold.

It wasn't the accent, though that was what had first alerted him, nor even that tell-tale half sentence Tom had heard, spoken in a language Tom had studied back in his university days. No, it was the tone, the brusque hardness. Tom disconnected before saying a word and held the phone tight in his hand. With relief, he remembered that these new BlackBerries came with an automatic block on Caller ID. That man would not be calling back.

A quick call to Allen – and from him to a friend in the NYPD Intelligence Division who took pity on a former comrade clearly in the wringer – confirmed Tom's hunch. He had Allen read out the number his NYPD source had passed on twice over. When Allen asked why Tom needed it, he deployed an old party trick, speaking a few apparently broken words, and then hung up. It would sound to Allen as if Tom had disappeared into a tunnel and lost signal.

The choked roads gave Tom Byrne some time as the car crawled the final few miles to John F Kennedy Airport. He knew he should relay his discovery to Jay Sherrill immediately, but he hesitated. He wanted to think this through. Besides, Sherrill would get there soon enough; just a matter of dialling the number they had both written down.

If he did that he would hear what Tom had heard. He would be able to confirm that the man whose number had been in the late Gerald Merton's telephone was the arms supplier the New York Police Department had branded long ago as ‘the Russian’.

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.