The Final Reckoning (4 page)

Henning led them through the press gauntlet, the pair of them using their shoulders to carve a passage. Reporters threw questions at Henning even though they clearly had no idea who he was but he said nothing until they had reached the entrance of the makeshift tent that contained the dead man's body.

‘Tom, this is Jay Sherrill. The Commissioner tells me he is one of his elite, first grade detectives.’

‘First grade? That sounds junior.’ He couldn't help it: the guy looked about nineteen. Maybe early thirties, tops. Neatly pressed shirt; studious absence of a tie; sleek, hairless, handsome face. Tom could have drawn up a profile of Jay Sherrill then and there: one of the fast-track Ivy Leaguers favoured by all urban police forces these days. They were the young guns who spoke and dressed more like management consultants than cops. Had probably done a fortnight on the street and was
thereafter catapulted to the first rank of the force. Tom had read an article about men like this in the
New York Times
magazine, how they never wore uniform – they were ‘out of the bag’ in NYPD jargon – and how they did their own hours. They were the new officer class.

‘Young, sure. But with a ninety-six per cent conviction rate.’ The accent was posh Boston; he sounded like a Kennedy.

‘Ninety-six per cent, eh? Which one got away?’

‘The one with the best lawyer.’

Henning stepped in. ‘All right. As you know, Commissioner Riley and I have agreed that the UN and NYPD are going to work closely on this one. And that means you two fellows. Are we clear?’

‘We're clear,’ said Sherrill, making a pitch for the high ground of maturity. ‘Mr Byrne, I'm on my way to meet the head of security for this building. You're welcome to come with me.’

Tom dutifully followed, noting Henning's schoolmasterly gaze. He would behave himself. ‘Let's hope you're the first person he's spoken to,’ he offered, in a tone he hoped suggested a truce.

‘You worried he might have talked to the press?’

‘No, I'm worried he might have talked to someone in this building. It leaks.’ Tom was thinking of his own mission to London, what he would say to the family. He didn't need a whole lot of rumours reaching them before he did.

As they walked through the visitors' marquee,
now closed to the public, and into the eerily quiet foyer of the main building, Tom raised a palm in farewell to Henning, off to a meeting of the top brass. He realized what a pushover he had been. The Tom Byrne of more than a decade ago would have been appalled. But that Tom Byrne was long gone.

They rode in an empty elevator to the first floor. For Tom, being back in this building was at once instantly familiar and yet, after more than a year's absence, oddly nostalgic too – like coming back to your own city after a long trip abroad.

Harold Allen was waiting for them. Tom had never spoken to him before, but he recognized him. He'd once been the most senior African-American officer in the NYPD before he had famously sued his own force for racial discrimination. Once tipped as a future commissioner, he was now in charge of a mere corner of the city he might have led – and, thought Tom, even in this small patch he had managed to run headlong into a weapons-grade scandal. The anxiety was carved into his face. He showed his guests to a round table in the middle of the room, a few paces ahead of his own desk. Tom noticed the multiple framed NYPD citations for bravery on the wall.

Sherrill wasted no time on pleasantries. ‘As you can imagine, I've got a few questions for you, Mr Allen.’

‘Yeah, you and this whole goddamn building.’

Tom listened and took notes as Allen talked
through the sequence of events: the initial tip-off from the NYPD about the Russian; the recorded phone call from the hotel room to reception; his own instruction to his watch commanders to be on the lookout for a man fitting the description the police had provided; how that message had been passed onto the guards at the gate, including one Felipe Tavares; the confusion and finally the shooting. A tragic case of mistaken identity.

‘Where is Officer Tavares now?’

‘He's with one of the NYPD support officers.’

Tom's forehead crinkled into a question mark.

‘Getting counselling.’

‘Counselling? I see.’ That would look great in the
Daily News.
‘Minutes after they'd murdered a pensioner, the authorities sprang into action – pouring out tea and sympathy for the killer.’

‘Yes, Mr Byrne, counselling. I guess you've never been on the front line in law enforcement. Tavares is in a state of grave shock. He's a good man. Just came from him now.’

‘How's he bearing up?’ It was Sherrill, his voice softened.

‘Keeps moaning and repeating, “That could have been my father. That could have been my father”. He's in a bad way.’

‘Do we know how old the dead man was?’

Allen got up and walked back to his desk. He was heavy, wide; probably had been fit enough as a young man, thought Tom, eyeing the commendations on the wall. But somehow he had let it
go. He returned with a single sheet of paper. ‘Seems like he was seventy-seven years old. Name of Gerald Merton. Place of birth, Kaunas, Lithuania.’

‘Lithuania? Not many Gerald Mertons there,’ said Sherrill, with a smile that conveyed he was pleased with himself. ‘Does it say when he went to England?’

‘Nope. Just the date and place of birth.’

‘What is that you're looking at, Mr Allen?’

‘This is a photocopy of his passport.’

‘His what?’ No softness now.

‘His passport. One of my men removed it from the pocket of the deceased, seconds after he was killed. Wanted to check his ID.’

‘I strongly hope you're joking.’

‘I'm afraid not, Mr Sherrill. We put it back, though.’

‘Have your men never heard about preserving a crime scene, about contamination of evidence? My God!’

‘Handling a homicide is not what we do here, Mr Sherrill. It's never happened before.’

Tom saw an opening. ‘Can I see that?’

Allen handed over the piece of paper, but with visible reluctance. That was par for the course at the UN; people were always clinging onto information, the only real currency in the building.

Tom stared at the copy of the photograph. It was grainy, but distinct enough to make out. The man was clearly old, but his face was not heavily
lined, nor thin and sagging. Tom thought of his own father in his final months, how the flesh had wasted away. This man's head was still firm and round, a hard, meaty ball with a close crop of white hair on each side. None on top. The eyes were unsmiling; tough. Tom's eye moved back to the place of birth:
Kaunas, Lithuania.
Under nationality, it stated boldly: British Citizen.

He passed it to Sherrill who scanned it for a few seconds and then said, ‘We'll need to have copies of all the paper you've got in this case.’

‘You got it.’

‘And I think we need to speak with Officer Tavares.’

‘That may be difficult. He's not in a state right now—’

‘Mr Allen, this is not a request.’

Allen's temples were twitching. ‘I'll see what I can do.’

Tom understood that the NYPD had made a priority of this case: the deployment of
summa cum laude
Sherrill proved that. He understood why they had done it, too: the politics of New York City meant that even a terror-attack-that-wasn't, since it involved an iconic target, had to get the full-dress treatment. Still, it was hard not to be impressed by seeing it in action.

By the time Sherrill had returned to the makeshift tent the corpse had already been zipped up in a body-bag and despatched to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The post-mortem would begin immediately: preliminary results would be in within a few hours. Sherrill gestured to one of the multiple police cars still idling outside UN Plaza, its driver clearly a personal chauffeur, urging Tom to get in and join him on the back seat. This, Tom guessed, was not how the NYPD investigated the average crackhead slaying in Brownsville. The journey was short, a quick zip
south along First Avenue, which had once been Tom's daily route home. The traffic was circulating again; people were out shopping. For them, the death at the UN had been a morning inconvenience that had now passed. Just past the Bellevue Hospital, Sherrill tapped on his driver's shoulder and leapt out when the car halted. ‘Ordinarily no one's allowed to witness an autopsy,’ he explained to Tom. ‘But I find a sheet of results doesn't give the full picture. And they don't say no to first-grade detectives.’

They waited only a few minutes at reception before a middle-aged woman in surgeon's scrubs appeared. When Sherrill introduced Tom she gave him an expression he translated as, ‘OK, Mr UN Lawyer. Prepare yourself for an eyeful…’

She opened a pair of double doors by punching a code into a keypad and led them down one corridor, then another. There was no smell of rotting flesh. Instead he saw fleetingly, through one half-opened door, the familiar paraphernalia of an office: zany decorations, including a stray thread of ribbon leading up to a sagging helium balloon; he heard a radio tuned to some Lite FM station. At last she walked them into what seemed to be a hospital ward. The odour of disinfectant was high.

‘All righty, let's put these on.’ She handed them both green surgical gowns and hats, pulled back a green curtain and there it was. A slab on a gurney, under a rough sheet.

She moved a pair of spectacles from her head and settled them on her nose. ‘Here's where I got to before I was so rudely interrupted,’ she said, pulling back the sheet.

The body was on its side, a vast hulk of pale white flesh like the underside of a fish, though now tinged with green. Was that the light reflecting off the curtains? Tom couldn't tell. Strangely, his eye found the unbroken flesh first. The wound, the torn opening in the back, ringed by frayed threads of red, he only saw later, and when he saw it he could not look away. It was the depth of it that appalled him, the deep, red depth of it.

‘… consistent with severe trauma to the trunk, shattered shoulder blade, ruptured lung and exploded right ventricle…’

Tom was not listening. His eye was still gazing into the crimson gash, now congealed. It had the broken, rough edges of a hole in a plaster wall, as if a fist had punched right through it.

‘Let me turn him over for you.’

The two men had been standing opposite the pathologist, with the body between them and her. Now, they moved around so that they were alongside her. There was no smell yet, but the sight was powerful enough. Tom felt a hint of nausea.

‘You can see the exit hole here. Which means you'll have to be looking for a bullet.’

Tom focused on the dead man's face. The passport photograph must have been recent; the same full, roundness of head was still visible, hard as a
billiard ball. He moved his hand forward, contemplating a touch.

‘Don't!’

He looked up at the pathologist, who was holding two latexed hands up in the air. ‘You don't have gloves.’

Tom gestured his retreat and took the opportunity to ask a question. ‘Can I see his eyes?’

She stepped closer and, with no hesitation, pulled back one eyelid, then another, as roughly as if she were checking on a roasting chicken.

For that brief second, the inert lump of dead flesh, a butcher's product, was transformed back into a man. The eyes seemed to look directly at Tom's own. If they were saying something, Tom had missed it. The moment was too short.

‘I'm sorry, can I see his eyes again?’

‘Pretty striking, huh?’

Tom hadn't noticed it the first time but now, as she pulled back both lids, pinning them with her latex thumbs and holding the position, he saw immediately what she meant. They were a bright, piercing blue.

‘He was strong, wasn't he?’ Tom pointed at the thickness of the dead man's upper arms. When his father had hit his seventies his arms had thinned, the skin eventually flapping loosely. But this corpse still had biceps.

‘You bet. Look at this.’ She pulled back the rest of the sheet revealing a flaccid penis, its foreskin drooping limply, before prodding the man's thick
thighs: the butcher's shop again. ‘That's some serious muscle.’

‘And that's unusual for a man this age?’

‘Highly. Must have been some kind of fitness freak.’

‘What about that?’ It was Sherrill, anxious not to be forgotten – and to remind Tom who was in charge here. He was gesturing at a patch of metal bandaged to the dead man's left leg like a footballer's shin pad.

‘That appears to be some kind of support. It's unusual. When plates are used in reconstructive surgery, they're inserted under the skin. This is obviously temporary. Maybe it was used as a splint after a muscle strain. Odd to use metal though. It will probably become clearer once we see the deceased's medical records.’

‘What about that?’ Sherrill asked pointing at the lifeless left foot. There was a big toe, another one next to it and then a space where the other three should have been.

‘I hadn't got to that yet,’ the doctor said, with a welcome implication that he was ahead of her – and Sherrill. She moved to the end of the gurney, so that she could examine the foot from above. ‘These are old wounds,’ she said. ‘Maybe an industrial accident as a much younger man.’

‘Can you tell how old they are?’

‘Put it this way, I don't imagine this playing much of a role in your investigation. I would estimate these wounds are no less than sixty years old.’

Sherrill resumed with a battery of technical questions, most of which seemed to centre on ballistics. He and the pathologist were now trading in a technical dialect Tom didn't speak, all calibres and contusions, and that was when he noticed, lying casually on the top of a small cabinet of drawers, several clear, ziplocked plastic bags, the kind airport security hand out for valuables. One of these contained a plain white plastic card that looked like a hotel room key, another a clunky, outdated mobile phone. These had to be the possessions of the deceased, removed from his pockets prior to the post-mortem and carefully bagged up. Tom remembered Sherrill's scolding of the security chief over the passport.

As casually as he could, Tom picked up the first plastic bag. Sure enough, the card inside bore the imprint of the Tudor Hotel, suggesting once again that this poor old buffer was no suicide bomber: he probably planned to go back to his room after
his ‘mission’ to UN Plaza, no doubt to have a nice cup of tea and a lie-down. There was Merton's passport, a few dollar bills, a crumpled tourist information leaflet, probably taken from the hotel lobby:
Getting to Know… UN Plaza.

Sherrill's stream of technicalia was still flowing when a head popped round the door, summoning the pathologist outside. Tom seized the moment to beckon the detective over and show him the bag containing the phone. Through the plastic he reached for the power button, then brought up the last set of numbers dialled, recognizing the familiar 011-44 of a British number and then, below that, a New York cellphone, beginning 1-917. Instantly Sherrill pulled out a notebook and scribbled down both numbers. Tom did the same. He was about to bring up the Received Calls list, and then take a look at the messages, when a ‘Battery Empty’ sign flashed up and the screen went blank.

Sherrill waited for the pathologist to return, peppered her with a few more questions before making arrangements for a full set of results to be couriered over to him later that afternoon. Then he and Tom went back to the UN, to the security department on the first floor where, on a couch and armed with a cup of sweet tea, sat a pale and trembling Felipe Tavares.

Despite himself, Tom had to admit, Sherrill was a class act. He spoke to the Portuguese officer quietly and patiently, asking him to run through the events of that morning, nodding throughout,
punctuating the conversation with ‘of course’ and ‘naturally’, as if they were simply chatting, cop to cop. Unsaid, but hinted at, was the assumption that if Sherrill had his way no police officer was going to be in trouble simply for doing his job. All Felipe – can I call you Felipe? – had to do was tell Jay everything that happened.

The part of the narrative that interested Sherrill most seemed to be the moment Tavares had received the alert from the Watch Commander supplying the description of the potential terror suspect: black coat, woollen hat and the rest. Sherrill pressed the officer for an exact time; Tavares protested that he had not checked his watch. What about the precise wording? Felipe said it was difficult to remember; the rain had been coming down so hard he had struggled to hear properly. Other officers must have heard it too: it was a ‘broadcast’ message to all those on duty. ‘That's right,’ said Sherrill. ‘I'll be checking with them, too.’

The detective did his best to sound casual asking what was clearly, at least to Tom's legal ears, the key question. It came once Felipe described the moment he pulled the trigger.

‘At that instant, did you reasonably believe your life was in danger?’

‘Yes. I thought he was suicide bomber. Not just my life in danger. Everyone's life.’

‘And you thought that because you saw some kind of bomb?’

‘No! I told you already. I thought it because of the message we had, the warning about a man who look like this. And because of the faces of those men I saw. The way they looked so shocked, and the black man screaming “No!” like he was desperate.’

‘And you now think they were screaming because they could see the man was, in fact, very old. Not a terrorist at all. They were shouting “No!” not to him, but to you, urging you not to shoot.’

Felipe Tavares' head sank onto his chest. Quietly he replied, ‘Yes.’

‘Yet that black man, and the man with him, when you looked later, you say there was no sign of them?’

‘No sign.’

‘Isn't that a little strange? Two men watching what happens close enough to see the old man's face, involved enough to urge you not to shoot, just vanishing into thin air?’

‘It is strange, sir. But that what happen.’

Tom watched carefully. He noticed that Sherrill was writing nothing down. The detective continued.

‘And, just to conclude, Felipe, you have no idea why the Watch Commander gave his warning then? At that particular time?’

‘No. I just heard the message and then I saw the man they describe.’ Tavares looked down at his feet again. ‘Well, I thought I saw the man.’

Tom could see the cogs in Sherrill's mind
turning, as if he was getting what he needed. Quite what that was, Tom had not yet worked out.

By now he had done what Henning had requested: he had overseen day one of the investigation. It was time to say his goodbyes if he was to make the overnight flight to London. Tom briefed the lawyer Munchau had chosen to take his place at Sherrill's side – a Greek woman specializing in human rights – and then introduced her to Sherrill. To Tom's surprise, the detective did not shake him off, but promised to keep him up to date, to let him know whatever the forensics guys and the medical examiner turned up. He took Tom's cellphone number then insisted Tom take his – at which point the nature of Sherrill's collegiate generosity made itself apparent. With no men of his own in London, he wanted Tom to pass on whatever he discovered about the victim.

In a cab on the way back to his apartment – it would take just a couple of minutes to pack a bag before dashing off for the airport – Tom made the last call he needed, as arranged, to get briefed by Harold Allen on the details he would need in London.

‘How are things, Harold?’

‘Not great, Tom, I'll be straight with you.’ He sounded rough, like a man whose career is flashing before his eyes.

‘Have the family now been notified?’

‘USG made the call nearly an hour ago.’

‘Widow?’

‘No widow. Just one daughter apparently. I'll email the co-ordinates.’

‘Press?’

‘They haven't got the name yet. Just confirmation of a Caucasian male.’

‘Has his age been announced?’

Allen sighed. ‘Not yet.’

Tom felt sorry for the guy. Depending on how nuclear the media went on this, Allen was shaping up to be the obvious fall-guy. Just senior enough to be culpable, but not so senior his sacrifice would actually cost the high command. Tom knew the battle cry always raised when trouble hit the UN: ‘Deputy heads must roll!’

He offered some bland words of reassurance and hung up. As he looked out of the window at the late-afternoon mothers pushing buggies, picking up their kids from day-care, he wondered who he should phone. No need to speak to the Fantonis: BlackBerry and cellphone contact would be fine for them, no matter where he was. He thought of the guys from his five-a-side team, all Brits, most of them former City boys trousering a squillion a week on Wall Street. He should tell them he'd be missing the Wednesday game. Otherwise, he had no one else to call.

The afternoon traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway was heavy. Tom pushed back into the worn, fake-leather seat of the cab and closed his eyes. He reached into his pocket to check his
passport when he felt the hard cover of his notebook. He probably ought to call Sherrill, tell him that the family had just been informed, which meant the press would soon get the dead man's name.

He flicked through the pages looking for the detective's number but instead came across the scribbled note he had made at the medical examiner's office.

Now, in his other hand, he fired up his BlackBerry. A message from Allen's office, as promised. A name, a London address and two phone numbers, the second clearly recognizable as a mobile. Rebecca Merton, it said. Tom glanced at the long UK number he had seen on the phone in the Ziploc bag. Sure enough, they matched. Gerald Merton's last telephone call had been to his daughter.

Without thinking, Tom tapped out the digits of the second number he had found on the dead man's cellphone, beginning 1-917. The number sat there, lighting up the display for several seconds. He knew that he ought to leave this to Sherrill; that the NYPD would, as a matter of routine, check out the numbers on the victim's phone. There was no reason for Tom to do it himself. Tom looked out of the window, weighed it up – and then pushed the little green button to activate the call.

It would probably just be the number for a taxi service the old guy had used to collect him from
the airport. Or perhaps some relative he had been planning to visit.

Tom put the phone to his ear, hearing it connect and then the long tone of a first ring. A silence and then one more ring. And then a male voice.

At first Tom assumed it was a wrong number. Either the old man had dialled it incorrectly or Tom had scrawled the digits down too fast, both eminently possible. He was about to apologize for his mistake when instinct silenced him. He heard the voice again, first speaking to someone else, as if winding up another conversation, then calling out
hello, hello
– and a shudder passed through him, making even his scalp turn cold.

It wasn't the accent, though that was what had first alerted him, nor even that tell-tale half sentence Tom had heard, spoken in a language Tom had studied back in his university days. No, it was the tone, the brusque hardness. Tom disconnected before saying a word and held the phone tight in his hand. With relief, he remembered that these new BlackBerries came with an automatic block on Caller ID. That man would not be calling back.

A quick call to Allen – and from him to a friend in the NYPD Intelligence Division who took pity on a former comrade clearly in the wringer – confirmed Tom's hunch. He had Allen read out the number his NYPD source had passed on twice over. When Allen asked why Tom needed it, he deployed an old party trick, speaking a few apparently
broken words, and then hung up. It would sound to Allen as if Tom had disappeared into a tunnel and lost signal.

The choked roads gave Tom Byrne some time as the car crawled the final few miles to John F Kennedy Airport. He knew he should relay his discovery to Jay Sherrill immediately, but he hesitated. He wanted to think this through. Besides, Sherrill would get there soon enough; just a matter of dialling the number they had both written down.

If he did that he would hear what Tom had heard. He would be able to confirm that the man whose number had been in the late Gerald Merton's telephone was the arms supplier the New York Police Department had branded long ago as ‘the Russian’.