Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

But Rebecca had already been in a fragile state when they pulled into Henry Goldman's oversized driveway. Tom was in danger of forgetting that not yet forty-eight hours had passed since her elderly father – her only family in the world, by the looks of things – had been shot dead thousands of miles away and in circumstances that remained baffling. Her home had been the target of a violent robbery, and now an old friend of the family lay dead – hours after revealing the secret life of a shadowy, lethal organization in which both their fathers had been players. He might try to reassure her that Henry Goldman's death was surely a coincidence, that he probably got out of his car with chest pains, lacked the strength to close his own front door properly and staggered into his study, clutching at his heart, before falling to the floor. Tom could argue that they certainly needed more information before they jumped to any other conclusion. But he had succumbed to the same nauseous fear as she had the minute he saw the corpse. The old lawyer had surely been murdered – and she could be next.

Someone out there was hunting for information about the life and curious career of Gerald Merton. They had upended Rebecca's apartment looking for it and, surely, they had come after Henry Goldman for the same reason. After all, wasn't that why he and Rebecca had travelled to Canary Wharf and then Hampstead, because Goldman was one of the very few men alive with detailed knowledge of DIN? The question that rattled around Tom's mind now was whether these pursuers knew of Goldman's knowledge independently – or whether they had simply trailed after Rebecca. He now thought it likely they had been followed as early as yesterday morning, that the thieves had been able to break into her flat because they had monitored her movements and knew she was out.

‘I've worked one thing out,’ he said finally, breaking the exhausted silence that had held since they had left the police station. ‘The fire alarm.’

‘What about it?’

‘It wasn't a coincidence. The timing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It's an old tactic. The Trots did it all the time when I was a student. A meeting wasn't going their way, they'd just yank the fire alarm: meeting abandoned, live to fight another day.’

‘You're saying Henry Goldman pulled the fire alarm because he didn't like what we were asking?’ She was looking at him as if he were an especially slow child.

‘Not him.’

‘But no one else was in that meeting, Tom.’

‘No one else was in the room, I grant you that. But that doesn't mean no one was listening.’ He thought back to the notorious second resolution vote in the lead-up to the Iraq war, when the six waverers on the UN Security Council – the Swing Six, they were called – discovered they had all been bugged by the British and the Americans. ‘I don't know how they did it, but they did it.’

‘And who's they?’

‘I wish I knew.’

Tom's phone rang. At this time of night, it could only be New York. He looked down at the display: Henning.

‘Hi.’

‘You don't sound pleased to hear from me.’

‘Sorry. It's been a tough few hours.’ Tom closed his eyes in dread at the mere thought of Munchau discovering what had just happened: a UN representative in the custody of the Metropolitan Police in connection with a suspected homicide. It wasn't enough that the UN had been involved in the death of one old Jewish man, they had to be tangled up with another. He wondered how long he would be able to keep it quiet.

‘Well, maybe this will help. Your former colleagues here came up with a few names.’

‘What?’

‘You know, for your geriatric club? Seventy and over?’

‘Oh, that. Right.’ He had clean forgotten about it; that phone call to Henning, that hunch, felt like it happened years ago.

‘Stay focused, Tom.’

‘I'm sorry; with you now. What have you got?’

‘Well, it's preliminary research, but they say they'd be surprised if anyone else turns up.’

‘Go on.’ Now that he'd been forced to click his mind back into gear, he was excited. This could be the breakthrough they needed: one elderly German, a plausible target for DIN's last mission, and they would have this whole business explained.

‘Well, first, you won't be surprised to hear that there are none on the permanent UN staff. Retirement at age sixty, strictly enforced.’

‘Sure.’

‘But there are three visitors we've counted who are over seventy. All in town this week.’

Tom nodded, unseen; his pulse quickened.

‘The Chinese have brought a veteran interpreter, Li Gang. Legend has it he did Mao and Nixon, though I don't believe it. I mean, they-’

‘What about the other two?’

‘Well, the President of the State of Israel is here. He's eighty-four.’

‘And the other one?’

‘Foreign minister of Ivory Coast. Seventy-two. Been in the job on and off since the seventies apparently.’

‘Thanks, Henning.’

‘No use?’

‘It was only a hunch.’

Tom almost had to smile at the irony of it. He had noticed that before, how fate seemed to have a sense of humour. If you wanted to pick three people less likely to be Nazi war criminals you couldn't do much better than representatives of China, Ivory Coast and – just to put it beyond doubt – Israel. It was not just a dead-end. It was a dead-end sealed off with a bricked wall.

By now they had arrived at Kyverdale Road, home of the late Gerald Merton. Rebecca had insisted on it: if they couldn't find out whatever it was Goldman wanted to tell them from Goldman himself – and they couldn't – they would have to see if there was some clue, some hint, that her father had left behind.

As they pulled up and paid the fare, Tom wondered if this was the first time she had been back to her father's place since his death. He braced himself to see Rebecca hit by yet another emotional freight train: how much could one person endure?

He watched her produce a ring of keys, choose one and turn it in the lock. She did not linger in the hallway but strode up the thinly carpeted stairs. The smell was just as he expected: stale and musty. On the third floor, she made for the first door by the staircase. Tom noticed her hands trembling as she unlocked the door. As she switched on the main light, she gasped.

Tom peered past her. The place had been ransacked, worked over just as thoroughly as her own apartment. The cushions were slashed, the books strewn on the floor like casualties in a battlefield. Even the carpet had been rolled back to expose the dirty, dust-caked floorboards underneath. At least two now jutted out, as if they had been prised up, then banged roughly back into place. There were a couple of paintings on the walls, an abstract collage in the hallway and a sub-Chagall knock-off depicting what seemed to be a rabbinic violinist in the living room. Both were now badly askew.

Even with the light on, the place was cast in a stubborn gloom. Heavy brown curtains were drawn across the windows. Tom waded through the wreckage, trying to construct an image of how the place would have looked. The kitchen was small and off-white, the appliances museum pieces from the 1970s. There was a basic two-person table by the wall. Close by, also intact, was a catering pack of a dozen cartons of orange juice. Next to it sat a similarly cellophane-wrapped bulk load of baked bean tins. Gershon Matzkin had clearly never forgotten the lesson of the Kovno ghetto: always keep food, just in case.

There was a radio and a vase and several framed photos, the glass broken on almost all of them. He peered closely at one holiday snap, showing a tanned man, his shirt off, with his right arm around a woman and his left around a young girl, all seated at a table in an outdoor cafe in bright sunshine. The girl was about twelve and gawky, all elbows and bony shoulders. But the crystal green eyes were clear even then. The woman was dark-haired, too, but her eyes were unlike her daughter's, warmer and darker.