Extraordinary Rendition (20 page)

There was absolute fury in his eyes as he looked at Byron Johnson. He spoke in Arabic before he turned and walked away.

Byron was now completely isolated. Several men and women were watching from a semi-circle that had formed around them as soon as Khalid Hussein was cut. These people had no intention of helping. They were spectators waiting for a spectacle. One of them was even recording the scene on a tiny digital camera, hoping for a scene of mayhem for YouTube.

And Byron ran toward an exit in the iron fence on the western border of the park. For the first time in his life he felt like a fugitive.

S
IMEON BLACK HAD LIVED for more than three decades in a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, at the quiet corner of Waverly Place and West 10th Street. His second-floor window overlooked the Three Lives Bookstore, an intimate shop into which Simeon had walked at least once each week in all the years he had lived there. A small section of the store’s shelves was devoted to his books, including the 1971 book based on his reporting about the secret American invasion of Cambodia,
The Dark War
. As a favor to the owners, he had autographed each copy.

It was rare for Simeon to invite anyone to his apartment. He had been married twice but never had children; the two much younger women with whom he had been involved over the last fifteen years had both left, one thirteen years ago and the other three years ago. He had lived with his two wives and his two live-in lovers in this rent-controlled, low-cost apartment. He had long ago run out of bookshelf space—books were now piled carefully in the corners and along the walls. Long expanses of built-in filing cabinets lined the walls in the hallway; they contained notes and drafts of his articles and books. He had already made arrangements for the Columbia School of Journalism to take the papers after he died. He still wrote every sentence of his first drafts in longhand, but now that he had become adept with computers,
he put his second and final drafts in the deep reservoirs of his hard drive.

Byron Carlos Johnson was one of the few people who regularly visited him. Simeon, like a classic New York psychiatrist working from an office in his apartment, had now spent hours interviewing Byron.

“And what else did he say?” Simeon asked.

“That there was always one man who was in the room with him, no matter where in the world he was.”

“Does he know who?”

“Not by name, Sy.” Although he was surrounded by computer equipment at his cluttered, old-fashioned rolltop desk, Simeon Black still took notes on the spiral notebooks he had first used when, just out of Harvard where he was an editor at the
Crimson
, he joined the
Washington Post
and started on the night police detail, learning that the first sentence of each article had to convey the name, the place, and the event. “But Ali is a very smart man, and he has described this man so well that I’m certain I’ve been in the same room with him.”

“He’s followed him to New York?”

“He’s Zelig-like,” Byron said, leaning backward in a frayed, overstuffed chair. “If I’m right—and I think I am—he appears in court and in conferences with the judge. Even sometimes on the streets where I’m walking.”

Simeon was urbane, and he recognized that Byron Carlos Johnson was as well. He liked to rib Byron. “Sure we’re not a little paranoid here, fella?”

“Not a whit,” Byron answered. Simeon hadn’t heard the word
whit
in a conversation in years.

“What does he look like?”

“Like an older model out of
GQ
. Blue suits, pinstripe gray suits, dress shoes, sometimes even a vest. Mustache. The look of one of those Ivy League CIA agents from the early sixties.” Byron paused. “And breath that exudes the smell of Cuban cigars.”

Simeon Black looked up from his notebook, glancing over the half-frame of his reader’s glasses. “And how do you know what his breath is like?”

“Two days ago, when I was leaving Washington Square Park after Ali’s moody brother was slashed, I saw him. Loitering with intent, as they say, just staring at me. I did something simple. I walked over to him, held out my hand, and said, ‘I’m Byron Johnson. We seem to bump into each other all the time. You know me, I don’t know you.’”

“What did he do?

“I love his style,” Byron said. “He laughed.”

Just outside the windows of the second-floor apartment, the upper branches of the London plane trees glittered in the mid-autumn sun. Yellow and orange light swept through the comfortable, book-filled room.

“And then?”

“To my surprise, I’ve become reasonably accomplished with digital technology. I had my BlackBerry in my hand. I held it up and took his picture.”

Simeon lit a cigarette. He was one of those rare people who had smoked for so long that he was able to make a cigarette appear from nowhere and ignite a match so deftly that it was all one motion, like a magician’s trick. Simeon lifted his chin, blew out the first smoke from the unfiltered cigarette, and asked, “How did he react?”

“Flat-footed. He was so surprised that he had no change of expression.”

“So what you had was basically a mug shot?”

“That’s a good way to put it, Sy.”

They shared a laugh as the cigarette smoke expanded over Simeon Black’s head. The smoke was bright and diaphanous in the leafy light.

“I’ll bet he took your camera away.”

“Sy, he couldn’t pry my BlackBerry out of my cold, dead hand.”

Simeon stopped taking notes. “Do you want a drink, Byron?”

“I gave it up for Lent. But I’ll have some water. You’re making me do all the talking.”

Simeon tossed a bottle of water, and Byron, always a quick-handed athlete, caught it firmly. “I have nothing to say, really, Byron. You’ve got all the information.”

“It’s interesting: the concept of the source, Deep Throat. I never saw myself as Deep Throat.”

“But I need more than Deep Throat,” Simeon said, “I need to have what Ali is saying confirmed, or have it made more concrete.”

This was a persistent theme for Simeon Black. He preferred verification from one or more other sources of the information Byron Johnson was relaying to him. He made that point several times to Byron, who once chided him, “What is it, Sy, you don’t believe me?” Simeon had shrugged. “I’d trust you with my first-born, Byron, but my editors won’t.”

He liked Byron Johnson, and he knew that liking a source was a problem. Simeon had done his apprenticeship with
hard-edged, skeptical, and long-forgotten reporters.
The facts, just the facts, ma’am
. Simeon’s mentors never, as far as he knew, developed friendships with anyone they used as sources. They lived lonely lives.

He had relaxed some of that rigidity; he saw it as a sign of age and experience and also a profound change in the world of journalists, who were now chatty and ingratiating. But he still clung to the idea that a story without verified sources was in many ways a fiction. Byron, he felt, was a person he could trust. He was the kind of person Simeon, a scholarship boy from the Bronx, had first encountered in his freshman year at Harvard. Byron was born to the American ruling class, the son of an ambassador who had written a small classic on diplomacy. Byron had received as if by right of birth almost every gift America could bestow: famous parents, elegant homes, private grammar schools, a boarding school (Groton), Princeton, and Harvard Law School. An officer in the Army, a partner at one of the most white-shoe of all the white-shoe law firms in the country. Not to mention the looks that accompanied that kind of pedigree, tall, slender yet powerful, brown hair that he never lost and now was graying just slightly, and a face that had some of the vivid features that a Latin mother could pass along, unexpectedly dark eyebrows, a slightly cleft chin, and an almost imperceptibly aquiline nose.

But now something else had happened to Byron, and it was a something else that made Simeon think twice about finishing and publishing his articles. Byron had passed ever so slightly into the realm of the outcast, the man who could be made to seem paranoid, off, delusional. He had gotten a great deal of bad publicity in conservative, even right-wing newspapers like the
New York Post
and the
Washington Times
.
He had been called, by Kimberly Smith and others, a “lackey for bin Laden” on the Fox network.

Byron said, “I can have something as close to what you need, Sy, as you are ever likely able to get.”

Simeon held his cigarette the way men in France in the 1950s had: the butt between his forefinger and middle finger, the lit end pointing away from him, the way Sartre held his cigarettes in pictures taken of him. “What?”

“Next week there will be a hearing in a sealed courtroom on a motion I’ve made to dismiss the indictment on the basis of what we lawyers like to call prosecutorial abuse. That’s a nice expression for really nasty behavior by government agents and lawyers. Justin Goldberg surprised the hell out of me when he read my motion and then issued an order saying he would hold a hearing.”

“What kind of hearing? The usual stuff where lawyers get up and argue with each other and there’s no testimony from real persons?”

“Not that kind. Ali Hussein will testify. Just as defendants who contend there has been an illegal search and seizure testify.”

“The problem is I can’t get in there to hear that.”

“I know. But I’ll be asking the questions and Ali will be speaking under oath.”

Simeon exhaled: a billow of smoke refilled the space where the earlier smoke had been suspended in the autumn light from the window. “But it’s still the same problem,” he said. “It’s tough to rely on what you say happened in court. There is too much at stake for me. I need the words from Ali himself. I can’t rely on the good graces of my editors any longer that what I’m writing is based in reality.”

“I’m going to give you a source that’s better even than an interview between you and Ali.”

“What’s that?”

“The actual transcript of the hearing. My questions, Hal Rana’s cross-examination, the judge’s questions, and most important, Ali Hussein’s answers, under oath.”

Simeon Black sipped from the glass of Scotch that had been sitting on his desk for several hours, untouched. He tilted the glass toward Byron, as if saluting him. “How can you do that, Byron?”

“The judge said in that same surprising order that I’m entitled to the videotape and transcript.”

Simeon immediately recognized the risk to Byron Johnson. “Isn’t it a felony for you to give that to me?”

“Sy, let me worry about that. At this point I have men following me, my phones and my emails are intercepted, I’m watched every second when I’m speaking to Ali Hussein. Not to mention, on the other side, a supposed brother who takes too much interest in my client’s religious well-being.”

Simeon took another sip of the warm Scotch. He raised his eyebrows, waiting for more.

Byron smiled. “You don’t know this, Sy, but you’re giving me something I can’t get anywhere else. Protection.”

“You think I can protect you?”

“At this point, Sy, where else can I go? Barack Obama? The Pope? Costa Rica? There’s an old expression I learned in those boring chapel sessions I was forced to attend as an eleven-year-old in cold, cold New England.”

“What’s that? My parents in the Bronx never let me go to chapel.”

“The truth shall set you free.”

“S
TATE YOUR NAME FOR the record.”

He leaned forward slightly, toward a slender, snake-shaped microphone. “Ali Hussein.”

“How old are you?” Byron Johnson asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Why aren’t you sure?”

“I’ve been in prison for a very long time.”

“How long have you been in prison?”

“I don’t know.”

“More than five years?”

“For sure.”

“Do you know what today’s date is?”

“No, not really.” Ali sat back slightly from the microphone, waiting for the next question.

To his left, Byron heard but did not see Hal Rana stand. “Judge?”

“What’s the objection, Mr. Rana?” On the wall behind Justin Goldberg was an immense seal of the United Sates in bronze, the fierce eagle at the center, its talons gripping symbols of power and peace. Goldberg looked annoyed.