Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

‘He's not guilty.’

‘Well, he might- No, no, you're right. He's not guilty.’ Tom shook his head. Not for the first time in the last few months, he was filled with admiration for his partner in the Kingsland Law Centre. Julian Goldman had endured conversations like this with Lionel and the rest every working day for the last seven or eight years.

‘Do you fancy a cup of tea, Lionel?’

‘That would be nice, Mr Byrne.’

‘It's Tom.’

‘That's a nice name, Mr Byrne.’

Tom was grateful for the chance to retreat to the back corridor and what was laughingly referred to as the ‘kitchen’. No wonder Lequasia was to be found here so often: it was the only hiding place.

As he waited for the kettle to boil he smiled at the absurdity of it. There had been a documentary about Orson Welles on TV the night before: it showed the onetime cinema wunderkind grinning as he confessed that he had started at the top – and worked his way down.

It hadn't been quite like that for Tom. But little more than two years ago he had been one of the top international lawyers in the world, in the inner circle of the Legal Counsel of the United Nations. And now he was here, in a Hackney legal aid practice where the carpet came in thin squares and the client base consisted of the dispossessed and the unhinged, ‘the migrated and the medicated’ as Julian put it. He was earning around a fifth of his previous UN salary, if that wasn't too generous an estimate – and a much, much smaller fraction of what the Fantonis had been ready to pay him for just a few weeks' work.

When he first met Goldman Jr, Tom had assumed he was a naive young man who would soon learn the ways of the world. But it had been Julian who had taught Tom a lesson: that even if Justice with a capital J was elusive, you could still remedy a thousand little injustices every day – one asylum applicant, or one plastic-bag carrying mutterer, at a time.

It felt much longer than a year; so much had happened. These days Tom struggled even to remember those few, crazed hours in New York. Sometimes he wondered if he had imagined it; his memory of the scene in the meditation chapel particularly so murky. His recollection tended to begin with the immediate aftermath.

Rebecca had not been wrong: the poison had been instantly effective. By the time Henning Munchau and Jay Sherrill were at the Secretary-General's side, he was dead: Tom had killed him before their very eyes.

Tom had had to adopt an almost unnatural calm to explain what had happened. Luckily, there was no time for deception: he had to tell it straight – and he did.

Henning proved himself all over again that day, not only as a good friend but as a first-class lawyer. He methodically ingested all that Tom was telling him, visibly organizing the information he was hearing, even its wildest elements, without losing his steady focus. He summoned two United Nations security officers into the chapel and told them to clear the lobby. The pretext was easy: another security alert. They removed Viren's body – and Henning began to draft a statement.

As Legal Counsel, he insisted there would be no cover-up. The deputy secretary general held a press conference, announcing that Paavo Viren had been killed by former UN lawyer Tom Byrne, the latter acting entirely in self-defence. Viren had lashed out violently at Byrne and his female companion after they had confronted him with evidence of a grave secret, one that an internal UN investigation had now confirmed. Legal Counsel Dr Henning Munchau and NYPD Detective Jay Sherrill had witnessed the killing.

The New York police held Tom and Rebecca for a day, before releasing them under caution. Tom testified that even though the syringe and poison was Rebecca's, she had not intended to kill Viren; she had merely been threatening him, in a bid to elicit the truth. The District Attorney rapidly concluded there was little mileage in prosecuting the daughter of a Holocaust survivor for the death of a man who, posthumously and overnight, and thanks to archive photographs reproduced on newspaper front pages, on the internet and screened endlessly on twenty-four-hour TV news, had become the number one hate figure in New York and around the world. Besides, the DA added for the second time in a week, since the killing had taken place on UN soil, no crime had been committed under either New York or US law.

In Finland, there was a call for a national day of atonement, so great was their shame in having allowed a war criminal to have sullied their collective good name. In Lithuania, a few thousand ultra-nationalists marched in Vilnius with banners displaying Viren's face, including – incredibly, as far as Tom was concerned – pictures of him as a young man, posing in his black blazer in Kovno. It turned out that Rebecca had been right on this too. There were lots of photographs of the Wolf and they had not been difficult to find.

In Israel, there was a brief flurry of controversy when it emerged that the country's aged president had used his influence to broker the fateful meeting between Rebecca Merton and the Secretary-General. The President said he had simply responded to a request for help from the daughter of a brave survivor of the Holocaust. He was as shocked by the turn of events as everyone else. Truly shocked.

A few weeks later Tom saw an article in Time magazine alleging that not everyone had been so surprised by the Viren revelations.

Sources in the Intelligence Division of the New York Police Department claim division chief Stephen Lake had picked up chatter about ‘gaps’ in the UN boss's resume. Lake had reportedly kept these leads to himself, in a bid to have future leverage over the UN supremo. ‘If you can blackmail the Secretary-General of the United Nations, that's some pretty serious power,’ one NYPD Intel insider told TIME, speaking on condition of anonymity. Lake's own position is now said to be hanging by a thread, with NYPD Commissioner Chuck Riley ‘livid’ that elements within his own force did not share such sensitive information with the international community prior to Viren's appointment.

Tom only half-followed these developments. Once the police had granted their release, he accepted Henning's offer of a hot shower and a bed for the night: Rebecca in the spare room, him on the couch. He had assumed he would fall into a deep, exhausted sleep. But it had not come. Instead his mind had raced.

He had imagined the Israeli president nodding with satisfaction as he watched the TV news in his Manhattan hotel room. In a single day the old man had had both iron confirmation that Gershon Matzkin had not, after all, come to New York to confront him over his betrayal of DIN – and a chance, at long last, to expiate the guilt he had carried for more than six decades. A chance he had seized with both hands.

Accordingly, Tom detected more than a hint of embarrassment in ‘Richard’, the man who had drugged and dragged them to New York, when they met up with him a week later, as arranged. He had barely been able to make eye contact as he relieved Tom and Rebecca of the papers they had prepared for him, including an extra postcard which featured a cryptic sentence, pencilled in Yiddish. If the president studied it, deciphering the faded markings, he would find the Biblical verse that alluded to his own name. That should be enough, they reasoned, to persuade the aged politician that what could damage him was now in his own hands.

Tom felt a vibration in his pocket. It took a second or two to snap out of his reverie and realize it was his phone. He looked at the display and then looked at it again, just to be sure: Rebecca.

She had only been back in London for a month, after spending most of the last year travelling. She had needed to clear her head, she said. She had been all around Europe and Latin America with a brief stint in South Africa. For a while, Tom had wondered if she was retracing her father's footsteps, a morbid revisiting of his travels as an assassin. But Rebecca insisted it was nothing of the sort: she had been volunteering as a doctor in most of those places. By way of proof, she told him she had gone nowhere near San Sebastián.