Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

‘We had a fierce argument. We never stopped having it, from then until his dying day. I said I would alert the authorities. I was a newly qualified lawyer, an officer of the court. It was my duty.’ Tears began to appear in his right eye. ‘But I never did. I should have told the police what I knew, that my father was involved in a criminal gang.’

‘But they were hardly murderers,’ Tom said quietly. ‘They were ensuring that a grave crime did not go unpunished.’

Goldman looked at him anew. ‘I confess I am amazed to hear a man like yourself speak in such a manner, Mr Byrne.’

Tom could feel the veins on his neck begin to throb. His anger was rising: he would have to repress it. I'm sorry. But ‘I'm just thinking of what you said a moment ago. That the men behind this monumental crime got off scot-free.’

‘Mr Byrne, as you should well know, I was merely doing the job of an advocate, putting the case for DIN as best I could, so that you might understand it.’ The steel shutters were down again now, the moment of communion with the spirit of his dead father vanished. ‘The right course of action was the law. That was the course these men should have pursued.’

‘Except the law often leads nowhere. We both know that, if we're honest, don't we, Mr Goldman?’ Tom could hear a tremor in his own voice. ‘And isn't that because, when all's said and done, there's no such thing as “the law”? We like to imagine some wonderfully impartial, blind goddess of justice – but that's no more real than fairies at the bottom of the garden, is it?’

‘Tom-’

‘No, Rebecca, I know about this at first hand.’ His temperature was rising, unwelcome memories surfacing. ‘We think there's law. But the truth is, there's only politics. And politics never finds it convenient to pursue the guilty.’

‘Tom, really-’

‘I'm sorry, but it's true. The bigger the crime, the less convenient it is. When there's a clash of “reconciliation” and justice – and there's always a clash – reconciliation wins out every time. I've seen it again and again.’ There was that crack in his voice again, he could hear it. ‘So, inappropriate though it might be for a lawyer to say this, I have some sympathy for what this group, what DIN, were feeling. They had seen their whole families wiped out. Of course they wanted to hunt down those responsible. The law had let them walk free. I do wonder if, on this point, Mr Goldman, your father got it right and you got it wrong.’

Goldman was about to respond, when Rebecca stood up. Glaring at Tom she cried, ‘That's enough.’ Her eyes were burning. The unspoken reminder that she had just lost her father shamed them both into silence.

In the calm, she turned to Goldman and asked in a manner that conveyed both patience now exhausted and the desire for a brief, straight answer to a straight question, ‘Is there anything else at all, any other element in the DIN story, that you haven't told us? Some secret perhaps which someone, somewhere, might not want to come out?’

Tom, his pulse still throbbing, could see that Goldman was weighing his answer. As he leaned forward, about to speak, the air was filled with the brain-splitting sound of an alarm: not some distant siren, but one coming from inside the building.

Jay Sherrill would have admitted it to no one, not even his mother – her least of all – but today he was feeling his inexperience. Ever since his meeting with the Commissioner he had had the novel sensation of a conundrum that might exceed even his expensively educated powers of understanding. If it were simply a matter of logic, he was confident that no problem could defeat him. But this required something more than deductive reasoning, more than what Chuck Riley would doubtless call, adopting his best Boss Hogg accent, ‘book-learnin'.’

At least Sherrill had reached the stage of knowing what he did not know. And this knowledge, he concluded, was not taught at Harvard or anywhere else. It was acquired over years, accreted like the lichen on an ancient stone. It was what the older men in the New York Police Department, those he could regard with condescension in every other context, already had and what he, unavoidably, lacked. It was the advantage of dumb chronology, years on the clock. He would have it eventually but right now he was defeated by it.

He had followed the Commissioner's cue and made contact with the NYPD Intelligence Division. He had asked to see those involved in the surveillance operation of Gerald Merton. He had heard nothing back. He called again, adding this time that his need was urgent since it related to an ongoing criminal investigation designated as the highest possible priority by the Commissioner himself. No one returned his call.

He had weighed his options, including alerting Riley to this foot-dragging by a section of his own force, but ruled that out: what could look worse than a Harvard boy running to Daddy because the tough kids wouldn't play with him? It would get around, confirming every prejudice he already knew existed against him.

And then, this morning at 8.30am, the call had come. The head of the Intelligence Division, Stephen Lake, would see him at 10am. It made no sense. Sherrill had made a request at the operational level; he wanted to see an officer – or did Intel Division call them agents? – from the field, at most a unit commander, but someone involved in the hands-on work of monitoring the Russian and subsequently tailing Merton. That request had apparently been refused. Instead he was due to see the man at the very top.

This too he would not have admitted to anyone, but he was nervous. Lake had been top brass at the Central Intelligence Agency, a wholly political appointment made by the city after 9/11, when New York decided it could no longer rely on the federal authorities and had better make its own arrangements. Sherrill had done an archive search of the New York Times website that morning, reading up on the Intel Division and on Lake. Already it had up to a thousand officers at its disposal, a force within the forty-thousand-strong force of the NYPD itself. By comparison, the FBI, with just ten thousand agents to cover the entire United States, looked like minnows. The Feds resented them, of course; and the Times had reported a slew of complaints from civil liberties groups complaining that the Intel Division was not catching foreign terrorists but watching domestic political activists, bugging the phone calls and surveilling the homes of US citizens. It only added to the unfamiliar sensation now brewing inside Jay Sherrill, that he was badly out of his depth.

He knew how to interview cops, knew their foibles, their vanities, their sentimental weaknesses. But Lake had never been a cop. He was more like a politician, a veteran player of the Washington game. Why on earth had he taken this meeting? What message was he sending?

Sherrill had ten more minutes to wrestle with that question, sitting in the waiting area of the office of the man formally titled Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence. He knew this manoeuvre all too well: keep a man waiting, remind him who comes where in the hierarchy. Jay Sherrill's response in this situation – a refusal to flick through any of the papers or magazines on the table in the reception area in favour of simply staring straight ahead – sent a message of his own: ‘You are wasting my time and I resent it.’

At last a grey-faced secretary gestured for Sherrill to come forward. He went through two successive doors, before being shown into an office which he instantly assessed as being slightly larger than the Commissioner's.

Lake was short by alpha male standards, five ten at most. His silver-grey hair was cut close and his eyes were chilly. He rose slightly out of his chair to acknowledge the detective's arrival, extended a hand, then began speaking even before Jay had sat down.