Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

There was a strange delay in how Tom absorbed what he was seeing. His brain seemed to know what it was about to take in even before his eye had glimpsed it. When Tom's gaze, at last, moved away from the truncheon and towards the young assailant's face, it was as if it was merely to confirm what some sixth sense of Tom's already understood. There was no mistaking it. The features were sharp, unambiguous. It did not matter how many years had passed, this was the same face. It was the same person.

Tom felt a shudder ripple through him. He kept staring at the picture, as if hoping that somehow the very act of his observation would change what he had seen. But it did not change. He was gazing at the boy who had become the man, even if the two appeared to be from two different historical eras, ancient and modern. They were two different species and yet, there could be no doubt, they were the same person.

And then he remembered: Rebecca.

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.

‘Tom, get away. This has nothing to do with you.’ Rebecca's tone was different, harder than he had ever heard before. And yet there was something else in the voice too. Not just anger, but anxiety. The muscles around her mouth seemed to be trembling.

‘Rebecca, just talk to me. What are you doing?’

‘I mean it, Tom.’ She was restraining herself, striving hard not to shout. ‘Just turn around and go away.’

Tom looked over at Paavo Viren, who stood frozen in his suit. For the first time, Tom could see that his face, usually a model of statesmanlike composure, was drawn, ashen.

‘Rebecca, I've seen the photographs. Remember Kadish.’

‘So you know?’

Only then did he realize, in a fleeting moment of self-awareness, that he had assumed she did not know. He had wanted her not to know. He had told himself that, despite the pages stashed in the fountain pen, she had never fully understood her father's message, that she had not looked at the photographs of George Kadish. He had, Tom understood now, clung to the belief that Rebecca had demanded to see the Secretary-General for the sole purpose of hearing an official apology for the mistaken killing of her father. Now he could see the truth. He nodded to Rebecca. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘I'm sorry, Tom. I'm really sorry.’

‘Why are you apolog-’ And then he stopped himself. ‘Oh I see. Now I see very well, Rebecca.’

‘It's not like that, Tom.’

‘Is that what this whole thing was about? Is that what I was to you: a ticket into this place?’

‘Don't, Tom.’

His brain seemed to overflow with a whole new set of understandings, arriving in waves, one after another. She had wanted to be rid of him at first, but then suddenly she had softened, pleading with him for his help. He had thought that was simply because she was frightened by the break-in. Now he realized she had seen his potential: with Tom at her side, she had a chance of penetrating the heart of the United Nations, reaching the Secretary-General himself – with the chance to complete her father's unfinished business.

He remembered their kiss: it had come once he told her that he not only understood what her father and DIN had done, but that he agreed with it. Given everything that had happened to them, they were right: they weren't going to get justice any other way. Perhaps that was the moment she let down her guard, seeing Tom as a kindred spirit, a comrade in the struggle for vengeance. Or maybe it was more calculating than that. Maybe she had concluded that to rely absolutely on Tom to get her inside UN Plaza, she would first have to cloud his judgement…