Extraordinary Rendition (29 page)

“Simeon Black?”

“The writer, Byron Johnson’s old girlfriend.”

“What did Black have?”

“Resources. He was a safe-keeper for Byron Johnson’s knowledge and Ali Hussein’s secrets. Byron whispered sweet nothings to Simeon that he never whispered to Christina Rosario.”

“And how do you know this?”

“We took down the two brothers who murdered Mr. Black. They were trying to fence his computers.”

“Where are these people now?”

“I have them.”

“Where?”

“Never mind where, Mr. Rana.” Hurd stood up. “Same place I have you, Mr. Rana.”

K
HALID HUSSEIN SAW THE six black Chevy SUVs, all unmarked but somehow unmistakably police vehicles, as they parked at the rear gate of the mosque. Two of the cars blocked the exit to Raymond Boulevard. At least fifteen men stepped out of the vehicles, several of them in blue blazers, others in jackets with the words “Homeland Security” or the letters “FBI” on the back. Other men in Army-style uniforms, wearing vests and carrying rifles, suddenly appeared from the rear door of an unmarked van.

Khalid Hussein turned from the window, started to run down the gleaming hallway toward the Imam’s office, and stopped. He simply waited. There was no time to do anything. Within seconds, the men carrying M-16s were in the hallway.

“On the ground. Face down. On the ground. Now. Fast, fast.”

Slowly, Khalid Hussein fell to his knees, instinctively raising his hands in front of him to show he had nothing in them.

“
Fast, fast, down, down
,” a single commanding voice shouted.

As soon as he was on the floor, his arms spread out in front of him, he felt the painful push and pressure of boots on his back. Powerful hands reached down to pull his hands backward and lock plastic handcuffs tightly on his wrists.

Tom Nashatka knew from surveillance that, by this time of the morning, the Imam had finished his prayers and was in the windowless inner office. The thickly padded door to that office was locked. Nashatka pounded on the door with the palm of his hand, but the padding absorbed the strikes as though he were punching a mattress.

He signaled to one of the armed agents, a black man with the size and presence of one of Tom’s drill sergeants when he was a Navy Seal. Intense and perspiring even on this cold day, the man hit the doorknob with the stock of his M-16 rifle. Struck only once, the doorknob fell off.

As planned, two of the armed men entered the Imam’s sanctuary before Tom did. The Imam, smaller and more slender than Nashatka had expected, stood up calmly. In English, he said, “Who are you?”

Nashatka shouted, “
Down, get down, get down. Now.”
He and Hurd had decided before this raid that they would treat the Imam just as they would treat anyone else who was in a building during the execution of a search warrant. They would apply shock and awe.

For a moment, the Imam remained on his knees, plainly defiant. Tom pushed him face down. The Imam’s glasses fell to his side, and a booted foot crushed them as one of Tom’s crew members fastened plastic handcuffs to the man’s wrists.

As soon as he learned that only two people were in the mosque, Tom sent a signal to the outside that the building was secure. Armed officers pulled Khalid and the Imam, still handcuffed, to separate rooms; they were forced to sit on the floor. Each was guarded by three armed men.

By that point, more than twenty men and women in wind-breakers stamped with “Police” in big lettering fanned out through the entire building. At the apex of the central dome was a curved skylight, and from it stark light filled all the circular hallways. Because of that light, and even though it was early morning, every object in the building was vividly illuminated.

They worked like archaeologists at a new site. Wearing latex gloves, they sifted everything—religious artifacts, teapots, desks, papers. The search warrant Justin Goldberg had signed gave them permission “to seize and take all records, including bank statements, ledgers, and account books, that related in any way to financial transactions.” The warrant broadened the scope of records to include all computers and all “devices for the electronic collection and transmission of information.” The warrant also gave them authority to seize all weapons of any kind. And the warrant directed them to seize and take all religious texts, defining “texts” to include the
Koran
, the
Upanishads
, the Bible, and handwritten sermons, “among other things,” that expansive catch-all that essentially let Nashatka and his agents take anything they wanted.

For Tom Nashatka, the highest, most exciting moments in a search were at the start, the instant of entry, the adrenaline high of not knowing who was just on the other side of the door and what their reaction might be. He loved the sense of danger, as well as the intense solidarity among him and the armed men, and sometimes women, in his crew.

After the entry and lockdown, the rest of the search was, for Tom, a long ritual of watching the agents collect things, write down a shorthand description of each item, place
hospital-style plastic identification tags on them, and store them in big cardboard boxes. There were hundreds of boxes, all neatly stacked. From time to time, someone approached Tom with something—a document or an ornament or a piece of clothing—to ask whether it should be taken. Tom’s crews liked him. He had a standard joke line whenever they asked the question, “Should we take this?” He always answered, “Falls within the scope of the subpoena. Toilet paper falls within the scope of the subpoena. Put it on the inventory sheet and crate it.”

At noon, jackhammers began to destroy the colorful inlaid tile on the floor beneath the towering skylight in the mosque’s central hall. Translucent columns of dusty debris rose to the skylight like smoke. Within three minutes, the excavation uncovered the tops of coffin-sized metal containers. They were located exactly where Tom Nashatka had been told to expect them. They were brought to the surface by winches and cataloged by Nashatka himself on the inventory sheet.
Three tin boxes
.

F
OR MONTHS, BYRON CARLOS Johnson had kept on night and day the flat-screen television in the high-ceilinged main room of his apartment. He had rarely watched television over the years. The first television set he ever saw was in the master’s room in his dorm at Groton, when he was thirteen; it was a circular Zenith with an unmanageable rabbit-ear antenna. By eight each night, the master was so obliterated by whiskey that Byron and the other boys could watch the set for hours while the lost forty-year-old man slept in the next room. Byron could still recall and hum the theme songs of the television Westerns that so engrossed him—
Johnny Yuma the Rebel
(“He searched this land, this restless land, he was panther quick and leather tough and he figured that he’d been pushed enough, the rebel, Johnny Yuma”),
Have Gun Will Travel
(“Paladin, Paladin, where do you roam?”),
Texas John Slaughter
(“Texas John Slaughter made ’em do what they oughta and if they didn’t they died”). Byron now realized that the shows he remembered were the ones in which a brave and lonely man confronted a hostile world.

In the three weeks since Simeon Black’s killing, Byron had left his apartment only rarely, for groceries, newspapers, and the unfiltered cigarettes he had resumed smoking because they calmed him and because Simeon had smoked them. He also went out for three visits to the Metropolitan
Detention Center to visit Ali Hussein. He had even spent two nights in Christina Rosario’s apartment, where she was wakeful and restless and nervous, limiting Byron’s ability to search for more information—computer files, written notes, her law school papers—that might help him. “Carlos,” she said on one of the visits, “why the one-night stands? Did you forget who I am?”

“I’m working,” he said, “on a major brief for Ali. I think the expression is that I’m about to throw a Hail Mary pass.”

“Let me help you with it.”

“Later,” he answered. “Later. Concentrate on your school-work. That article for the law review must be due, and exams are coming.”

Years of practicing law had made Byron Johnson a dedicated writer. Very few lawyers were Perry Mason, who appeared to live in court and never spent time in his office or even at home. The fact was that even for a lawyer like Byron Johnson, long a big firm litigator with many cases going at all times, the real work consisted of meetings, writing letters and legal briefs, and research. It was almost monastic work.

Byron wrote in longhand. At the end of each day—or in the morning when, as often happened, he spent the night writing—he made two copies of each page on the copier in his apartment. He put the copies in separate envelopes. He addressed one of the envelopes to his post office box on Monhegan Island. He took the other to the bank on West Broadway where he had safe deposit boxes. Each day he shredded the original papers. To prevent people from finding anything in his garbage, he dropped the shredded papers like confetti in three or four garbage cans along the way.

Byron thought of his writing as a testament. It was a testament for Simeon Black. It was a testament for himself. It was also a quarry out of which he intended to send information to people at newspapers, magazines, Internet news services, and television networks whose names Simeon had mentioned to him as reporters he admired.

This was Byron’s Hail Mary pass. His mother was Catholic; he often heard her say when they were together,
Hail Mary, full of grace
. . .

Byron paused at eight, after three hours of concentrated writing. He had started just as the winter night was falling, darkening the tall windows of his apartment. When his concentration lifted, he walked around the apartment, stretching.

The television in the living room was on. Displayed on the screen was a vivid scene of a building he knew well: the mosque at Raymond Boulevard and Broad Street in Newark. The zipper message on the screen read:
Mosque Raided, Floor Dug Up, Thousands of Documents Seized
.

Byron noticed at the bottom of the screen the name of the woman speaking before he focused on her.
Kimberly Smith, Stanford University, Terrorism Expert
. And instantly, Byron recognized the woman. She was the striking blonde whose pictures Simeon Black had displayed on his computer screen. In one of the pictures, Kimberly Smith was with Christina Rosario. In several of the pictures Kimberly Smith was with Jesse Ventura and with Tom Nashatka in others.

In a strong, articulate voice, Kimberly Smith said: “There is nothing wrong, Bill, with the government investigating
terrorists to protect this country. It could have been a church, synagogue, cathedral.”

Bill O’Reilly said, “And what about drilling holes in the floor?”

“Look, Bill, nobody drilled holes in anyone’s head, although law enforcement could have found more information in minds than in floors.”

“What about the ACLU screaming foul?” O’Reilly asked.

“They scream over taking off shoes at security gates. We have dedicated law enforcement men and women. Those are the people who need our protection.”

And you are people
, Byron thought,
who live on fear and hate
.