Extraordinary Rendition (17 page)

“I volunteered. There were other ways we could have let you know.”

“And you could have let me know this was under way, Sandy.”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference, Byron.”

“Why not?”

“Because you wouldn’t have done anything about it to stop it. You could have avoided this. You knew this was going to happen.”

“I did? We’ve had partners who were drug addicts, tax cheats, even a pedophile. Every one of them had the option of resigning, and every one did.”

“Byron, those of us who know you know you would never resign.”

“Am I going to be given the reasons?”

“You know the reasons, Byron. You never got permission to do the work for Ali Hussein. You never even asked for permission. You stopped doing work for firm clients. You made public statements without first notifying the executive committee.”

Byron said, “And I have a right to do all those things.”

“Do you think so, Byron? Life’s complicated. You have a right to have sex with any woman you choose, but you should have understood that in the real world in which we now live you didn’t have a right to fuck a law student who came to work for the firm for the summer. The PC world now sees that as
taking cruel advantage of the vulnerable, not as a sport and a pastime.”

Byron tore a piece of bread. “She went back to school and made it clear she wouldn’t come to work for the firm. Nothing happened while she was drawing a paycheck. And she’s more than thirty.”

“Byron, you know the rules. This one is pretty basic—at the Jewish firms they have an expression that gets to the heart of this rule—‘You don’t shit where you eat.’”

“Let’s cut this out, Sandy. We’ve known each other for too long. You and all your minions, for all your liberal talk, don’t want to be anywhere near an Islamic terrorist. You have too many clients who don’t want to have a law firm with a partner who represents a Guantanamo Bay prisoner. This has nothing to do with my being with Christina Rosario. Jesus, even Bill Clinton survived Monica Lewinsky and the cigar.”

“I’m not sure where we’re going with all this, Byron. Even as we speak a press release is being circulated saying that you and the firm reached a mutual agreement that you needed to devote your full-time efforts to the representation of Mr. Hussein. The press release also recites the long list of corporate clients the firm has represented for years and says that we continue to be a prominent, business-oriented law firm. There’s a statement from me wishing you well in this new phase of your career and citing your many contributions to the welfare of the firm’s clients.”

“You know what, Sandy? No reporter will pick up a statement from yet another big law firm. What the reporters want are statements from me. Any reporter who reads your press release will call me immediately.”

“You need to think through another issue, Byron, before you call your new friends at the networks and the papers.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that you probably paid so little attention over the years to the firm that you don’t know that the firm’s partnership agreement was changed a few years ago.”

“To say what?”

“To say that partners expelled from the firm had to clear every public statement through the firm or risk losing things like their partnership accounts, insurance payments—you know, all those things that ordinary lawyers need in order to avoid living on the street?”

“It’s not a good idea to threaten me, Sandy.”

“The only real threat in the world, Byron, is the threat you are to yourself. Be careful.”

The early afternoon air on Park Avenue had that crystalline dazzle created by clear sunshine flooding over the handsome buildings, the innumerable windows, and the long and colorful median dividing the uptown and downtown lanes of traffic. Yellow taxis glinted in the sunlight. Byron had become used to these early afternoons on Park Avenue; they had been part of his life for years. He walked quickly, almost jogging, from the Regency at 61
^st
and Park toward the black-glass Seagram Building at 49
^th
and Park. All around him, hundreds of men and women walked, most of them gazing into their hands at cell phones and handheld electronic equipment. Byron was still surprised, even bemused at times, by the way people now moved, oblivious to other walkers and even traffic, transfixed by their gadgets.

Since 9/11 the security system in the Seagram Building had become more and more elaborate. Immediately after that September day, armed guards had been posted in the lobby, allowing only people they recognized into the elevators to reach the firm’s offices, which occupied the 21st through the 30th floors. Then more and more invisible but elaborate screening mechanisms had been installed. Just two months earlier, Byron, like all the other partners in the firm, had started holding the palm of his hand in front of a small unit in a turnstile near the elevators that would allow the gates of the turnstile to open. It was a handprint identification device, and it was much faster and far less obtrusive than the plastic card he had used for several years.

When Byron passed the palm of his hand over the electronic eye, nothing happened. The arm of the turnstile didn’t drop for him. He turned to the security guard stationed near the elevator, a black man who was almost as tall as a professional basketball player and who had always made friendly, knowing eye contact with Byron.

“There’s something wrong with the gate,” Byron said.

“No, there isn’t, Mr. Johnson.”

“What?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the gate, Mr. Johnson.”

“Say that again?”

“You can’t go upstairs, sir.”

Another security guard, also dressed in a blue blazer and a regimental-striped tie, walked over. He was short, beefy, and muscled-up, almost grotesquely bunched into the blue blazer he wore.

“Open this,” Byron said, glancing at the name tag of the guard’s jacket. “Mr. Ricciardi, open this up. My office is upstairs.”

“You can’t go up there,” Ricciardi said. He had a Brooklyn accent.

Tall, still lithe and athletic, Byron vaulted over the turnstile. Although they were surprised, the two guards were quick. Ricciardi passed his right hand over the electronic eye with a magician’s practiced wave, and the arm of the turnstile immediately fell open to let them through. The two guards ran forward, stopping three feet in front of Byron.

“We need you to turn around and leave, sir.”

“And I need you to step out of my fucking way,” Byron said, wondering if the quaver in his body was reflected in the tone of his voice.

The guards stepped even closer to Byron. Instinctively, he pushed at Ricciardi, who stumbled to his side and did a quick and awkward dance to regain his balance. As he recovered, he raced at Byron, who was pushing at the black guard’s groping hands. It seemed to Byron that a thousand things were happening at once: he registered the fact that Ricciardi was really a street thug, stronger than Byron and enraged that Byron had deftly deflected and humiliated him. And, in the instant before Ricciardi’s right shoulder burst against Byron’s left ribs, he glanced at the elevator bank and saw the stunned, questioning look on the faces of two of his partners.

The burst of pain in his ribs and lungs was intense and fiery, but Byron controlled the instinct to cry out. Like a football lineman, Ricciardi pushed Byron backwards, trying to knock him off his feet, but Byron, who had been pushing at the big
hands of the other guard when Ricciardi hit him, kept himself on his feet by grabbing Ricciardi’s head.

Somehow Byron pulled himself away from the two men. His lungs heaving for breath, he managed to keep his balance. Ricciardi was disheveled, furious, ready for more, stunned that a man who was years older than he was had managed to shake him off. In that moment, as Byron waited for Ricciardi’s next thrust, he felt his blood rushing through his entire body as if it were icy water. Ricciardi had an expression of sheer rage.
This guy’s an animal
, Byron thought.
Run
.

Breaking the moment, the tall guard spoke, “You need to leave, sir.” The voice was calm.

Embarrassed, outraged, and furious, Byron decided to leave. In order to make himself appear more collected, he tried to button his suit jacket. He groped for an awkward moment before realizing the button was torn off.

As Byron Johnson approached the revolving doors, he saw Sandy Spencer standing just inside the entrance. He had been watching. Byron stared at him: for the first time in all the years Byron had known him, Sandy Spencer looked confused and flustered. He glanced away from Byron, opening his cell phone as if taking an incoming business call. It was a ruse.

T
HEY MET MANY TIMES over the next three weeks. Simeon Black had immediately recognized the name Byron Carlos Johnson when he first heard the voicemail message late on a perfect autumn afternoon: “This is Byron Johnson. I’ve read several of your articles,
The Atlantic
especially, on terrorist detainees. I think we might have a common interest. My cell phone number is (917) 928-0111. Please call if you have a chance.”

Ever since he had started his first job in journalism in 1964 at the
Washington Post
when it was still in the dreary building at 1515 L Street, Simeon had made it his daily life’s work to know what was happening in the world. He read six newspapers each day, listened to CNN, the BBC, and even Pacifica Radio, and had mastered the art of seeking out information on the Internet. He instantly recognized Byron Carlos Johnson as the New York lawyer who had stepped out of the confines of corporate law firm practice—a rarified world—to represent a terrorist prisoner who had been taken to the United States for criminal prosecution. Just two months after the 9/11 attack, Simeon Black, who had won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for articles about the secret invasion of Cambodia, published his first article on arrests of Arabic men in the United States and Europe on suspicion of terrorism. He had steadily and slowly published other articles over the years of the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the subject of imprisoned Islamic men.

But he could never gain access to anyone held in Guantanamo or Bagram or the other places around the world rumored to hold men arrested overseas by the United States and transferred, by extraordinary rendition, to other countries. The lawsuits Simeon filed under the freedom of information laws were all dismissed on national security grounds without yielding anything. His stories for the
New Yorker
, the
New York Review of Books
, and the
Atlantic
were based on thirdhand and even more remote sources, such as two former private government contractors who gave him what he believed was reliable information about the dark prisons around the world where Islamic men were held. He knew these were “weakly sourced” stories. Had he not been Simeon Black, had he not been proved absolutely right in the Pulitzer Prize stories about the Cambodian invasion also based on weak, attenuated sources, and had he not been given the benefit of every possible editorial doubt, the magazines in which his stories appeared since 9/11 would never have published any of them.

Simeon recognized that the most he could ever expect was to get information through the conduit of a lawyer representing one of these men. Lawyers, he knew, had the incalculable advantage of face-to-face contact with the ultimate source of information, the detainee himself. A lawyer would have been in the presence of the prisoner, would have heard his words, would have seen his clothes, and would have looked at his client’s hands and face.

But until Byron Carlos Johnson left a message for him, Simeon had not succeeded in speaking to a single lawyer who had represented any of these men. Most of the defense lawyers, including those who represented prisoners at Guantanamo,
were JAG officers. And JAG officers had never, in all of his years of experience starting in Vietnam, changed: they were the keepers of the secrets, they formed a green wall of secrecy, a cone of silence. Simeon had approached three former Army lawyers over the last seven years. Not one word from any of them, except “no comment” in one case and simple silence in the others. These were men to whom the name Simeon Black probably meant nothing or was associated with someone who had done damage in the past.

It was Byron who suggested that they have their first meeting in the old Viand Diner at the busy corner of 86th Street and Second Avenue. Simeon had met people for interviews in so many places over the decades in which he had been writing stories—from luxurious rooms in the Brown Hotel in London to a Motel 6 in New Mexico for a recent story for the
New Yorker
on a violent polygamist sect—that he didn’t find Byron’s choice strange or surprising. He was focused on the fact that Byron Johnson, who was at the center of a story that fascinated Simeon, apparently wanted to establish some sort of arrangement with him. “I want to explore,” Byron had said when they spoke by cell phone to arrange this meeting, “whether we can help each other.”

When he entered the coffee shop, Simeon recognized Byron from pictures that appeared on the Internet, on television, in the
New York Times
, and in the
New York Post
. In turn, Byron recognized Simeon from photographs on the dust jackets of his books. In the day between the first telephone call and the meeting, Simeon, a tireless worker even though he was now in his early seventies and could have simply lived out his long and illustrious career teaching
journalism somewhere like Columbia or Missouri, had navigated through all the Yahoo and Google entries for Byron. Most were dated after the announcement that Byron was representing an indicted detainee facing the death penalty. Simeon knew scores of people. He was able to call lawyers at prominent firms to ask about Byron Carlos Johnson, and the word he got back from that very self-protective world was that Byron was a hard worker, a stand-up guy, a straight-shooter. Two of the partners he spoke to—one at Shearman & Sterling and the other at Sullivan & Cromwell (two of the whitest white-shoe firms)—let drop a note of bewilderment that Byron would have elected to represent an accused terrorist. “If Byron Johnson was out to change the world,” one of Simeon’s contacts said, “he managed to do a good job not letting on about that for years.” The partner at the other law firm said, “Word has gone around for years that Byron was next in line for a federal judgeship whenever those openings came up, as they do three or four times a year in New York. But he never got the nod. Now that’ll never happen.”