Extraordinary Rendition (27 page)

“What else?”

“If you work with us, we’ll protect you.”

“And if I don’t?”

“We won’t protect you. And we’ll let the judge know we have a grand jury that is about to indict you for assisting terrorism.”

Byron rose from the folding chair. “Let me help you, Mr. Rana. I’m an older guy than you and I’ve been around in the world for a long time. You need to know something about yourself. You’re an asshole.”

W
HEN THEY LEFT THE Thalia, the first snow of the season was descending in shimmering curtains through the street lamps at the corner of 95th Street and Broadway. It was crystalline and gorgeous, just enough to barely cover the parked cars and the sidewalks. The snow had brought the children of the neighborhood to the streets. The shriek of young voices. In the adults, the wonder at the renewal of the snow, the coming of winter.

Byron took Christina Rosario’s hand, as if to steady her on the glistening sidewalk. They had just finished watching
The Third Man
, the Orson Welles movie Byron had first seen when he was a teenager, in Paris on one of his brief visits to his parents, probably in 1965. Christina had never seen the movie. The opening scenes of cold and steel-gray Vienna, just after the Second World War, and the unforgettable zither music, had brought Byron to watch the movie at least ten times over the years. At the outset of the film, Orson Welles as Harry Lime had staged his own death, assisted by a team of effeminate and evasive Romanians and Hungarians, so that they could continue trafficking in adulterated and deadly vaccines. Joseph Cotton, mourning the lost Harry Lime, continued to believe in him until he saw children in the hospital crippled by the adulterated vaccine Harry distributed. He then discovered that Harry was alive and helped to hunt him down in the Vienna sewer system. In the last scene, the fingers of the shot
and dying Harry Lime gripped the rails of a manhole cover on a Viennese
strasse
as he futilely attempted to lift the cover off.

“What a great movie,” Christina said. “Thanks for bringing me, Carlos.”

“And next week I’ll take you to
The Maltese Falcon
downtown.”

They walked three blocks west to Riverside Drive and then uptown to Christina’s apartment at the familiar corner of Riverside Drive and 116th Street. To their left, the park shone in the darkness as snow fell through the bare branches. Ghostly, seductive. She let go of his hand and held onto his arm, walking as if in an embrace. As the snow created an evanescent veil on her hair, he felt the overwhelming pang of his love for her. He found himself wanting these times he had spent with her to last forever.

They didn’t turn on the lights in the apartment. The whiteness outside suffused the rooms with a faint glow. They stood at the windows overlooking the park. The upper branches of the trees were covered with snow. The trunks of the trees and the bare shrubs were etched in black against the snow on the ground. There was less snow on the winding walkways, and there were already footprints in it. The old-fashioned street lamps in the park were surrounded by white halos as the snow swept downward. Further west, two or three barely visible tugboats, their red lights shining steadily, moved on the Hudson River.

Crazy with desire for her, Byron touched her shoulder. He inhaled the chill odor of snow that had freshened her face and hair, and with it the smell of her skin. She kissed him, and then her tongue caressed his tongue. In a swift gesture she shed her
shirt. Byron lifted his turtleneck sweater over his head. Skin touching skin, they embraced. Even while they stood at the window, he kissed the upright nipples of her beautiful breasts, holding them in his hands.

In her bedroom—itself very familiar to him (the odors, the placement of furniture, books, and lamps)—he stroked the folds of her vagina first with his fingers and next with his tongue before slipping his finger deep into its luxurious softness. She said, “Oh, Carlos,” and shifted her body beneath him, beckoning him. He entered her. He fell into her luxuriousness. Thrusting, he made her move beneath him. Her breasts rose and fell, soft except for the erect nipples.

She signaled him by a slight movement to her left to roll onto his back. They managed to stay connected as she rose to her knees and looked down on him. As always in this position he felt he could not be more deeply buried in her. And her face, her breasts, her shoulders—all exposed to his view—rose above him. She moved her hips.

Then they neared that magic point when they knew they would soon come at the same time. They deftly exchanged positions. Byron rose high above her, accelerating his back-and-forth thrusting. Her moaning escalated to a scream. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her arms were spread out to her sides. Her fists were clenched.

He nailed her to her cross.

At three in the morning, he woke to a room that still shone in a ghostly white as the snow continued to fall. Christina slept deeply. Naked, Byron Johnson got up, found his wallet in his
jacket, and went directly to the small room cluttered with books where she kept her computer. Even though he was habitually and deeply protective of other people’s privacy, as well as of his own, he had once, for reasons he never understood, written down the lengthy password to her AOL account. He took from his wallet the worn slip of paper with her password. And now he entered the world of her Internet space.

He bypassed the many entries he was sure were the ordinary email traffic of a young woman who was a law student. He scrolled the blue bar down through dozens of entries, most of which were from screen names ending in
columbialaw.edu
.

But, as he sat naked in the glow from the computer screen, he noticed another recurrent suffix on the incoming and outgoing emails:
hotrocks.org
. He began clicking on those that had attachments. Christina kept a diary. It was about him, describing his conversations about his visits with Ali Hussein, the thoughts he expressed about strategy, and the research assignments on legal issues he gave her. There was no personal history about her relationship with him in the entries.

And there were other recurrent entries—every reference to the verses of the
Koran
he had ever written down in his visits to Ali Hussein and to the Imam. Christina had forwarded every one of those references to
[email protected]
.

Christina and Byron had active, inquisitive, and thoughtful minds. Byron once told her he had never paid as much attention in college to the subject of religion as he had to history, philosophy, and mathematics—the prevalent fare of colleges in the 1960s. She knew that since he began representing Ali Hussein, he had become a reader of the
Koran
, searching for meaning. He had told her several times that the text
frustrated him—what was the divine message of all that language of war, of defending the faith, of the need to kill those who didn’t embrace the faith? And what about messages of love, obedience, and rapture? They were elusive. They appeared from time to time as phrases surrounded by language about battle and revenge. Early in their relationship, he had shared his frustration—which he often attributed to the narrow scope of his boarding school and college education—with Christina. She bought and read books on the history of Islam and the messages of the
Koran
. There were times as they lay in bed when she read passages from serious books that dwelled on Islam.

Who was
fantasy7
?

Intrigued, suddenly nervous, he left the computer room—which had once been a utility closet in this big, old West Side apartment—and walked quietly through the long hallway to her bedroom. He checked to make sure she was still sleeping. She was.

Still naked and increasingly chilly but sensing that he had to hurry, Byron didn’t even stop at the bathroom to urinate, although the urge was acute. He continued to scroll through Christina’s computer, still opening only those entries for
fantasy7
that had an attachment. He went back into her emails to the date when they first began to send messages to each other. He found her first email to him—“So good to hear from you, Byron”—which she wrote at the end of that long week after he had sent his first email to her. He recalled those nights in his apartment in Tribeca when he incessantly glanced at his computer, nervous as he was now, waiting and hoping for a response from her.

Not long after he began the random process of opening the emails from her to
[email protected]
and from that address to her, an attachment emerged with an image that was some type of logo depicting a shield. He moved the cursor to the center of the shield and clicked. The new screen opened onto a video and audio recording of a scene in progress. There was a scan of what looked like a motel room, the style of room in which amateur porn videos were filmed. Suddenly there were voices, two men speaking. And then Jesse Ventura appeared, seated on the edge of a perfectly made motel bed. He was in a hot country. He wore a suit with the edge of a carefully shaped handkerchief showing in the jacket’s pocket.

Byron heard Jesse Ventura ask a question, his tone almost pleasant, although Byron’s mind was racing so fast that he couldn’t in fact hear the exact words. The video image widened. Ali Hussein came into view, poised almost daintily on a chair next to a motel desk. He didn’t answer. Excited, Byron cruised forward through the disk. At some points, he saw Jesse Ventura slap Hussein. At another point, he saw Hussein, naked, hairy, and frail, being forced into an overflowing bathtub by two men younger than Ventura.

Byron took a clean CD from the stack on Christina’s desk. He had learned enough by now to sense that he shouldn’t forward the email and its video attachment to his own computer because it would be intercepted. He tapped the side of the laptop, and a tray emerged. He placed the disk on the tray, gently pushed the tray into the magical interior of the machine, and reproduced the video. The muted whirring sound ended in five seconds.

He walked quickly down the hallway to the bedroom, holding the disk close to his body, as if protecting it. He had something he believed to be precious and irreplaceable, like a winning lottery ticket. Hamerindapal Rana had often told Byron, and had said in letters to Judge Goldberg, that the prosecution had no photographs, no records, and no images of Ali Hussein from all of his years in detention. No transcripts, no summaries of interrogations, no videos, no records. And, Rana had proclaimed, no physical assaults, no torture, and no enhanced interrogation techniques. It was as though Ali Hussein had spent years as a cipher with whom no one ever interacted.

Now Byron knew he had the disk that laid bare the lies.

The warm, seductive bedroom was darker than it had been when Byron had left it an hour-and-a-half earlier. The snow had stopped. With dawn only an hour away, the heavy iron radiators began to clang and tick as the heat rose from the furnaces in the basement of the building. It was deeper night outside now that there was no falling snow.

He put the disk carefully into the inner pocket of his jacket. Still asleep, Christina lay on her left side. He lifted the sheets and placed the front of his naked body against the back of her naked body. He draped his arm over her shoulder and put his hand on her right breast. His penis, aroused, rested in the cleft of her beautiful rear.

He wondered what insanity made him still crave her.

B
Y THE TIME BYRON came out of the subway station at nine, the snow had melted from the Manhattan streets and sidewalks, but it still clung to tree branches and the roofs of the low buildings in his neighborhood. He walked quickly along the four blocks between the station and his apartment, frequently touching the inner pocket of his coat and always finding the outline of the disk.

As soon as he entered the lobby of his building, Pedro, the engaging and gregarious doorman with diamond studs glistening in the lobes of his ears, pointed to two people seated in the lobby chairs. One was a man, obviously an Irish plainclothes cop, and the other a woman. She was obviously Puerto Rican. They recognized him.