Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

It took Tom no more than a second to understand what he was looking at. As he rolled them flat, the size of the pages, the faint lines, were instantly familiar. And the handwriting was unmistakable.

Tom scanned the words.

I received the list of names and worked my way through them methodically. I could not get to them all at once. Some of these men lived very far away; they had hidden themselves well. Each mission required papers, a fresh passport, money and a cover story. In San Sebastián, Spain, I pretended to be a tourist. I followed Joschka Dorfman, a senior SS officer at Treblinka, for days before I had a chance to ‘meet’ him away from his wife. She came back from a shopping trip and found that he had not taken an afternoon nap as he had promised. Instead he was hanging from the ceiling of their hotel room…

Tom's head began to pound. So these were the missing pages torn from Gershon Matzkin's notebook. They had not been missing at all. Rebecca had had them all the time. She had known all along the truth of her father's life. She had known about DIN.

Of course she had. What had Julian Goldman said when Rebecca had introduced them? ‘You have never seen a father and a daughter who were closer. Even when it was just the two of them, they were a family. A two-person family.’ They were a pair, the Mertons; they worked together. But Tom had been so blinded by sympathy, by warmth towards her, by his desire for her, that he had not seen the obvious. Whatever it was Gerald Merton had been up to, Rebecca Merton had been his confidante and accomplice.

But she had also sat there in Henry Goldman's office, stunned by the story the lawyer had revealed as much as Tom had. Hadn't she? A memory, brief and fleeting, came to him. He had wondered about it at the time, but the moment had passed. It was when they had argued, back in her flat, straight after the Goldman meeting. She complained that the old lawyer had been droning on, ‘telling us what we already knew’. What we already knew.

Had the whole thing been a charade, one long act? She must have decided it from the very start, tearing the key pages from her father's notebook long before Tom had shoved it in his bag. She had probably done it the instant she heard her father had died.

But he had discovered the truth anyway, he had learned about DIN and their work of vengeance, seeing the evidence for himself, stashed away in the box at Julian Goldman's office. They had gone straight there after the envelope arrived.

Of course. No wonder he had never been able to work out who had sent over that faded, crumbling list of names. It was the piece of the puzzle that could never fit. The person who had sent that letter – delivering it by hand, in an envelope that was not stamped – had surely been none other than Rebecca Merton herself.

He pictured her, sealing the envelope, then presenting it as if it had come from out of the blue. How clever she had been, standing out of sight, alternately hiding or disclosing the crucial clues that would unlock the mystery of her father. She clearly had wanted to put Tom on the path towards DIN – without ever revealing how much she knew.

But why? Why lead them both on such a pointless charade, pretending not to know what she knew perfectly well?

He thought back to the meeting with Sid Steiner, the almost absurd lengths they had gone to, first to find him and then to dredge up his memories. Rebecca had seemed no less baffled than Tom had been, desperate to know what Sid knew. She had been the same during the last visit to her father's flat, the secret papers hidden in the Aleph painting apparently as much of a revelation to her as they had been to him. Could all of that have been a sham? Or was this more complicated than that: had Rebecca known part of the strange, murderous life-story of Gershon Matzkin – but not all of it?

Tom rubbed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate. He looked back at the hand-written pages in front of him. Sure enough, at least on the basis of this skim-read, Gershon seemed to be recounting only his work as an unofficial executioner of individuals – hunting down specific, named men who had once, just a few years earlier, been part of the Nazi killing machine. There was no reference to the bakery at Nuremberg and none to the water plot. Tom looked hard for the name of the man whom they had met just a few hours earlier, the Israeli president. What if Rebecca had, after all, harboured the crucial evidence Tom had promised when bargaining for their safety, evidence whose existence he had conjured from nowhere for the sake of a bluff? What if such evidence existed right here, rolled up in the barrel of her own fountain pen? But there was no sign of the Israeli's name. The man who was now the president of Israel, along with Plan A and Plan B, was unmentioned in the journal of Gershon Matzkin.

The ink on the last sheet was thicker and fresher and the handwriting spidered across the page. It was obvious that these lines had been added long after the rest of the journal had been completed. Gershon now wrote in the unsteady hand of an old man.

DIN's work finished many, many years ago. For nearly forty years, none of us has taken on any more of this duty. We tried to remove Mengele, but as you know, we failed. We came close, but not close enough.

Rebecca, I promised myself – for your sake and for the sake of our family – that I would stop. And I kept my promise to you. For all these years, I have only been a normal, loving father to you. I have certainly tried.

But a long time ago, I made another promise, a promise to a young woman just as full of life and of beauty as you are today. I never thought I would have the chance to honour my word to her. I thought it was too late.

Now I have the chance and I cannot let it pass. This is why I am going to New York. If you want to understand, you must do as I say – and remember Kadish.

A new wave of electricity flooded into Tom's brain; he felt as if his neural circuits were about to crash. He tried to process this latest surge of information. It meant that Rebecca had known not only that her father had been an assassin for DIN, but that this had been his purpose in New York. The meeting with the Russian, the gun secreted away in the bathroom at the Tudor Hotel: they were indeed all they had seemed. Gerald Merton, seventy-six-year-old Gerald Merton, had come to New York to kill. And his daughter, who had carried this information stashed in her fountain pen, had known that all along. Her number had been on his phone: he might even have been updating her on his progress. No wonder she had not wanted to call the police after the break-in; no wonder she had barely mentioned pressing a full legal case for compensation against the United Nations. She didn't want anyone probing too deeply into a story she knew only too well.

Now Tom was convinced: Rebecca Merton knew whom her father had come here to kill. But who was it?

Could it have been the Israeli president? Had the aged politician, whose antennae had doubtless become finely tuned after so long, intuited Gershon's intentions correctly? Maybe this was the ‘chance’ Gerald thought he had to seize, the visit of the President to New York.

But it made no sense. The Israeli had been visible and in public life for years and years. And Gershon Matzkin was a first-class hitman: if he had wanted to get his revenge for the betrayal of Aron, he would have had countless chances – plenty of them easier than targeting a head of state in the security-saturated environment of the United Nations.

Besides, this passage in the notebook did not, surely, relate to Aron. It spoke instead of a promise to ‘another young woman’. Was it Rosa, his benighted first love and early comrade in DIN? But there was no specific connection between her and the Israeli that had to be avenged, at least none that the old politician had hinted at. And he hadn't seemed to hold anything back.