The Final Reckoning (2 page)

The next moment was one Felipe Tavares would replay over and over until his last breath, usually in slow-motion. For the rest of his life, it would be the last image he would see at night and the first when he woke up each morning. It would sear itself behind his eyelids. At the centre of it were the faces of those two men. They were aghast, not just frightened but shocked by what they had seen. One of them shouted the single word:
No!

Felipe was certain what had happened. The man in black had obviously undone his coat, revealing the explosive vest underneath. The two men, on the other side of the railings, had seen that he was about to blow himself up. The sound of that cry, the look of horror on the dreadlocked man's face, coursed through Felipe, sending a charge of electricity
down his right arm and into his finger. He squeezed the trigger once, twice, and watched the man collapse at the knees, falling slowly, even gracefully, like a chimney stack detonated from below.

Felipe couldn't move. He was fixed to the spot, his arms locked into position, still aiming at the man now lying in a heap no more than five yards before him.

He heard nothing for a while. Not the echo of the gunshots. Not the cries, as the crowd scattered like pigeons. Not the alarm that had been set off inside the UN building.

The first voice he heard was that of a fellow officer, who had dashed out of the marquee at the sound of gunfire. She now stood over the corpse, repeating the same word over and over, ‘No. No. No.’

Unsteadily, dumbly, Felipe walked over to the pile of black clothes now ringed by a spreading puddle of blood. And, in an instant, he understood. There, at his feet, was not the body of a suicide bomber. There was no explosive vest filling that jacket. All it had contained was the flesh and bone of a man, now broken and unmoving. Felipe could even see why he had been wearing a heavy coat in September. He understood it all and the horror of it made his knees buckle.

Felipe Tavares, and the growing crowd of security officers now circling him, were all looking at the same thing.

The corpse of a white-haired and very old man.

There was a moment, lasting perhaps two beats, of silence and then the noise erupted. There were screams of course – a man first, yelping in a language few around him understood – and then the cries of three women who had been posing for a photograph by the Pop Art sculpture of a gun, its barrel twisted into a knot. They had fallen to the ground, their larynxes temporarily stopped in fright, but now their fear pealed as loud as church bells. Soon there was crying, shouting and the sound, just audible, of a man contemplating the shard of human bone that had landed at his feet, murmuring in his own tongue, ‘Good God’.

Some in the marquee began to panic; one sounded the fire alarm. The rest remembered the drill they had practised. They abandoned their posts at the scanning machines, rushing to stand like sentries at the doors of each entrance, their pistols brandished. The United Nations headquarters was going into lockdown.

Felipe Tavares was now flanked by two colleagues, guiding him away from the corpse which lay, still uncovered and untouched, on the ground. Tavares was talking feverishly, babbling about the men he had seen at the gate, describing the horror on their faces – but when his fellow officers looked, they could see no one.

The noise soon got much louder. Less than ninety seconds after the shooting, the first of forty NYPD squad cars converged on UN Plaza, their lights flashing, their sirens wailing: this was the ‘surge’ they had practised nearly a dozen times since 9/11, the full might of the New York Police Department rapidly converging on a single spot. Several cars disgorged SWAT teams, the men, their flesh buttressed in Kevlar, armed with assault rifles, charging forward like GIs storming a Normandy beach. Soon they ringed the entire UN perimeter, their guns trained on the terrified men and women within.

First Avenue was free of traffic now, thanks to the NYPD officers armed with 50mm machine guns who had sealed the road from both north and south, 30th Street all the way to 59th. The UN headquarters now sat in the centre of a ‘sterile zone’ thirty blocks long. Since First Avenue was a main artery for the eastern half of Manhattan, New York City was about to seize up.

In the air, four NYPD Agusta A119 helicopters equipped with high-resolution, thermal-imaging ‘super-spy’ cameras now hovered, together policing
an impromptu no-fly zone over the entire area. At the same time, on the East River, police launches took off from their bases in Throgs Neck, Brooklyn and along the Queens shoreline. No one would be able to enter or escape the United Nations compound by air or by water.

Not much later, the NYPD's Chief of Detectives arrived with his own lights and sirens. To his pleasure, he had got there ahead of Charles ‘Chuck’ Riley, the Police Commissioner, whose motorcade and motorcycle outriders pulled up a few moments later. Both nodded with satisfaction as they observed a lockdown utterly complete. As their aides would brief reporters for the rest of the day, there had been a suspected terror attack on one of the city's ‘high value targets’ and New York had responded ‘with swift and deadly force’.

But as they stepped out of their cars and shook hands with each other, the two men instantly saw the nature of their problem. They could approach the now-locked steel gate of the UN but go no further. They had reached the limit of the NYPD's authority, the very boundary of United States sovereignty. They were able to look into the eyes of the two men on the door, one a policeman from Montenegro, the other from Belgium. The Commissioner was sure he could see their hands trembling.

Inside, on the thirty-fourth floor, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs
heard the fire alarm before he heard anything else. Henning Munchau leapt to his feet. He checked his outer office: nobody there, too early. He called down to front desk security but the phone just rang and rang. He checked his window, wondering for a moment if he was about to see a 747 steaming through the air, larger and lower than it should be, about to pierce the glass skin of the UN headquarters, killing the eight thousand people who worked within as well as a good number of the world's heads of government.

It was only then that his deputy, a Brazilian, rushed in, the blood absent from his face. He struggled to speak, and not just because he was out of breath. ‘Henning, I think you need to come right away.’

Eighteen minutes after Felipe Tavares had fired his fatal shot, Henning Munchau was standing close to the lifeless body that had still not been touched, save for the waterproof cape placed over it. The rain was still coming down.

At his side stood the Under-Secretary-General for Safety and Security, stunned into silence. Both had just received an instant briefing, giving them the roughest outline of what had happened. Munchau saw the discotheque of lights that now ringed the UN compound and the small army of NYPD men that surrounded it and felt like the inhabitant of a medieval castle on the first day of a siege.

And now he could see, standing on the other side of the railings, a face he recognized, one rarely off the front page of the city papers, the man they called ‘The Commish’. This was one legal conference that would have to take place outside, on foot and in the rain.

‘Commissioner, I am Henning Munchau, chief lawyer of the United Nations.’

‘Good to meet ya, Henning,’ the Commissioner said, his face and tone conveying nothing of the sort. ‘We appear to have a situation.’

‘We do.’

‘We cannot enter these premises and respond to this incident unless you formally request that we do so.’ The language was officialese, the accent down-home Southern.

‘Looks like you've already responded in quite a big way, Commissioner.’ Though German, Munchau spoke his eerily fluent English with a hint of Australian, both accent and idiom, the legacy, so UN legend had it, of his service in the UN mission in East Timor.

Riley shrugged. ‘We cannot enter the compound without your consent. And I'm assuming you don't have the resources to handle a terrorist incident.’

Henning tried to hide his relief. It meant the NYPD had not yet heard about the dead man. That would give him time.

‘You're quite right,’ Munchau said, struck by the strangeness of speaking through metal railings in the rain, like an outdoor prison visit. He envied
the Commissioner his umbrella. ‘But I think we need to agree some terms.’

The policeman smiled wanly. ‘Go ahead.’

‘The NYPD come in but only at the request and at the discretion of the United Nations.’

‘No discretion. Once you let us in, it's our investigation. All or nothing.’

‘Fine, but none of this.’ He gestured towards the SWAT teams, their guns cocked. ‘This is not the UN way. This is not Kabul.’ Munchau saw Riley bristle, so he went further. ‘This is not Baghdad.’

‘OK, minimal show of force.’

‘I'm talking one or two armed men only, to accompany your detectives.’

‘Done.’

‘And your investigation to be shadowed at all times by a representative of the UN.’

‘A representative?’

‘A lawyer. From my team.’

‘A lawyer? For Christ's—’

‘Those are the conditions.’

Munchau saw the Commissioner weigh it up, knowing he could hardly refuse. A suspected terror attack in New York, the NYPD had to be involved. ‘The Commish’ couldn't go on television saying that the department was sitting this one out, whatever the explanation. Munchau knew that: Riley would want to be on the air within the hour, reassuring New Yorkers that he had it all under control.

Now a black limo pulled up, with a whole new battalion of lights and sirens. Behind it were two satellite TV trucks, clearly given special permission to come through. The Mayor had arrived.

‘OK,’ the Commissioner said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘I accept.’

Munchau offered his hand through the railings and the policeman took it hurriedly. Munchau nodded to the UN guard on the gate, who fumbled with the lock until it opened.

Watching the TV reporter heading his way, Munchau made a point of raising his voice to declare, ‘Mr Commissioner, welcome to the United Nations.’

It took time for the Chef de Cabinet of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to convene this meeting. Besides Munchau and his counterpart in Security, the UN's most senior officials, the rest of the elite quintet of USGs – Under-Secretaries-General – had been on their way to the building when the shooting happened. (The UN high command tended to work late, but did not start especially early.) Thanks to the shutdown of First Avenue, none reached UN Plaza much before ten a.m.

Now, at last, they were gathered in the Situation Center. The more cynical folk in the building always cracked a smile at that name. Built in the aftermath of 9/11, this heavily armoured, lavishly equipped and top secret meeting place was clearly modelled on the legendary Situation Room of the White House. But of course the UN could not be seen to be aping the Americans: the United States' many enemies in the UN would not tolerate that. Nor could the Americans be allowed to believe
that the UN Secretary-General was getting ideas above his station, imagining himself a match for the President of the United States. So the UN would have no Sit Room, but a Sit Center, which made all the difference.

At its heart was a solid, polished table, each place around it equipped discreetly with the sockets and switches that made all forms of communication, including simultaneous translation, possible. Facing the table was a wall fitted with state-of-the-art video conferencing facilities: half a dozen wide plasma screens that could be hooked up rapidly by satellite, across secure links, to UN missions around the globe. The Secretary-General was never on the road for less than a third of the year, but the existence of the Sit Center meant that he did not always have to leave New York if he wanted face-to-face talks with his own people. Above all, it was there for when disaster struck.

There had been no need for video links this time: the danger was right here in New York. The Chef de Cabinet, Finnish like his boss, began by explaining that the building remained in partial lockdown, with authorized access and egress only. No one would be let in or out without the express permission of the Legal Counsel. That had been agreed with the New York Police Department who wished to interview every witness, even if that meant interviewing the entire UN workforce.

The Chef de Cabinet went on to confirm that
the Secretary-General himself had not been inside UN Plaza at the time. He had been at a breakfast at the Four Seasons held in his honour and was now heading over through horrendous traffic. He had told his audience that he had made a deliberate decision to continue with his planned engagement, that to do otherwise would be ‘to hand a victory to those who seek to disrupt our way of life’. Apparently that had elicited an ovation, but it made Henning Munchau wince. Not only because it felt like a crude pander to New Yorkers, echoing their own post-9/11 rhetoric of defiance, and not only because he reckoned it would have been smarter politics for the new Secretary-General to have stood with his own people as they appeared to come under attack, but largely because the SG had now opened up a gap between public perception of the morning's incident – a terrorist outrage, bravely thwarted – and what Henning knew to be the reality.

The Chef de Cabinet explained that technicians were trying to connect the SG via speakerphone.

‘In the meantime, I suggest we establish what we know and work out some options that we can present to the Secretary-General. Can I start with you, Henri?’

The Under-Secretary responsible for the security of UN personnel across the globe glanced down at the note he had hastily written when being briefed by the Watch Commander, translating from his own handwritten French.

‘We understand that a man was shot at 8.51 a.m. today by a member of the UN's Security and Safety Force in front of the main visitors' entrance between 45th and 46th Streets. He had been monitored by a team from the NYPD Intelligence Division who had been in liaison with ourselves and they had cause to believe he posed an imminent danger to the United Nations. That information was passed to the Watch Commander and he passed it onto the guards on duty, including the officer who fired his weapon, believing the man to be a suicide bomber.’

‘And the man is dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what else do we know? Is the building in any danger?’

‘The lockdown procedure was followed perfectly. The building is now secure. We have no reason to believe this was the start of a series of attacks.’

‘And why is that?’

Henri Barr hesitated. He looked over at Henning, who gave a small nod. ‘Because we strongly suspect that the man killed does not match the profile put together by the NYPD.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’ It was the USG for humanitarian affairs, a white South African ex-communist who had made his name in the anti-apartheid movement. His bullshit detector was famously robust.

‘It means that the man who was shot was old.’

‘Old?’

‘Yes, he was a very old man.’ Barr lost oxygen at the end of the sentence and gulped. ‘But his clothes fitted the description and they seemed to be the clothes of a suicide bomber.’

‘Oh come on. He was
dressed
like a suicide bomber and that's why we killed him?’

The Chef de Cabinet stepped in. This was no time for grandstanding or arguments, though he could feel the adrenalin rising in the room. ‘When you say “old”, Henri, what do you mean?’

‘We estimate maybe seventy, perhaps more.’

‘Did he even look Muslim?’ It was the question that several of them had wanted to ask but had not dared. But Anjhut Banerjee, the Indian Under-Secretary for Peacekeeping, had none of their inhibitions.

‘No,’ said Barr, looking down at his notes. ‘It seems not.’

‘Good God,’ Banerjee said, falling back into her chair. ‘You do know what this means, don't you?’ she said, looking directly at the Chef de Cabinet. ‘I was in London when the police shot some Brazilian electrician on a train because they thought he looked like a suicide bomber. Completely innocent man.’ She exhaled sharply, shorthand for ‘You have no idea the shit that is coming our way’.

‘What is our vulnerability, Henning?’ The Chef de Cabinet looking towards the lawyer.

‘You mean our liability?’

‘Yes.’

‘We can look into that, but I don't think we should get too hung up on compensation claims and the like. That's not the nature of the problem.’ He paused, forcing the man at the head of the table to press him.

‘What is the nature of the problem, then?’ ‘Same as with most legal problems in this place. It's not legal. It's political.’

‘So what do you suggest we do about it?’

‘I think I know exactly what needs to be done. And, better still, I know just the man to do it.’