The Final Reckoning Read Online Free PDF

Americans will do with this? Can you imagine tomorrow's
New York Post?
“Now the UN kills geriatrics on the streets of New York”.’
    ‘Picked the right week to do it.’
    ‘Oh yeah, when we've only got every world leader from the King of Prussia downwards here. Not exactly the start Viren wanted, is it? Imagine, the new Secretary-General spending his first General Assembly on his knees apologizing.’
    ‘He knows?’
    ‘That's where I called you from. For the last hour, we've been in the Situation Center with his Chef de Cabinet, all the USGs. Secretary-General wasn't there: he was getting his dick sucked at some society breakfast. The building's in complete lockdown. USGs are the only ones allowed out.’
    ‘What are you going to do?’
    ‘Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about.’
    ‘Oh no.’
    ‘Hear me out, Tom. I know you said you'd never work for us again. I understand that.’
    ‘Good. So you'll understand me when I say, “Nice to see you, Henning but I've got to go”.’
    ‘But this is not working for the UN.’
    ‘Who is it for, then?’
    ‘It's for me. Consider it a personal favour. I think I have the right to ask for that.’
    Tom examined Henning's face. It was the one argument to which he had no response, the same unarguable fact which had made him desert the pleasures of Miranda/Marina and come straight here. It was true: Tom owed him everything. ‘What do you need?’
    ‘Turns out the one good thing about this situation is that the dead guy was British.’
    ‘Why's that good?’
    ‘Because the Brits are the only ones who won't go ape about the Yanks murdering one of your citizens. Inside America, it'll be the pinko faggot UN who fucked up. Everywhere else, it'll be America who gets the blame. Trigger-happy cowboys, all that. Not the British government, though. Your boys will bend over and bite it.’
    Tom would have liked to argue, but he couldn't. He remembered the campaign to get British citizens released from Guantánamo. The British government had barely raised a peep in protest, lest it offend the Americans.
    ‘So? Was it an American who pulled the trigger?’
    ‘No. Portuguese. Name of Tavares.’
    Tom digested this. ‘So what do you need me to do?’ He envisaged the complex documentation that would have to be filed on the occasion of a homicide on the international territory of the UN. He could see the jurisdictional issues looming. Who would do the investigation? The NYPD or the UN Security Force itself? Who would be in charge? Henning's answer surprised him.
    ‘First, I need you to shadow the NYPD guys on the case. They'll have seen the body by now: they'll know we screwed up. I need you over their shoulder. Just for this first day: I stuck my balls out, made a big deal of it, so I can't send out some novice to do it. It would make us look like pricks. Get a sense of what they're doing, then hand it over.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘Then I need you to close this thing down, Tom. Make it go away. This is just too much of an embarrassment. We can't have the grieving family on television holding up pictures of Grandpa, wanting to send the bloody Secretary-General or fuck knows who else to jail. You need to go to England, find the family and do whatever it takes to make it go away. Put on the English accent, do the whole thing.’
    ‘I don't need to put on an English accent.’
    ‘Even better. Play the charming Brit and offer a gushing apology, massive compensation package, whatever they want. But no grandstanding, OK?No photo-ops with the Secretary-General or any of that bullshit. He's new. We can't have him associated with this.’
    Tom took a drag of his own cigarette. He could see the politics clearly enough: his departure had left no Brits in the Office of the Legal Counsel. Plus it probably helped to have an outside lawyer do this: arms' length, so that the UN itself would be less tainted by whatever shabbiness Tom would have to resort to in order to get a