Extraordinary Rendition (30 page)

“T
HE ROOM IS SECURE,” Justin Goldberg said, “and the court reporter is on the record. Counsel, state your appearances.”

“Hamerindapal Rana, for the United States. With me are Helen Gardner and Bart Stone, both Assistant U.S. Attorneys.”

“Byron Johnson for defendant Ali Hussein.”

Justin Goldberg was, as usual, crisp and business-like. “Let the record reflect that I initiated this conference. I did so because I received from an anonymous source, by mail, in an envelope with no return address and with postage stamps, a disk containing a video. It is that video’s content that has caused me to call this conference.”

Justin Goldberg held up the disk by its edge. It glinted momentarily. “The video on this disk reflects events involving the defendant.”

Justin Goldberg paused, staring at Hal Rana. Byron had long ago learned that it was often more important to watch than it was to act. He waited.

“I’m disturbed. Let me tell the government, to which I will give a copy of this disk, that I want a written explanation of why this video was not disclosed by the United States to the court so that the court could evaluate whether to turn the video over to the defense or treat it as national security material.”

Hal Rana made a mistake. He said, “I knew nothing about a video depicting Mr. Hussein.”

Curt, icy, and imperious as a god, Justin Goldberg said, “Be careful, Mr. Rana. I will continue to pay careful attention to this. You shouldn’t comment on this until the government investigates and provides the explanation I require. Listen carefully. Who other than the defendant is on the video? What were their duties? Where was this taken. When? Why? Who had custody of the video? To whom were copies given?”

Hal Rana made another mistake. “Your Honor, can we ask Mr. Johnson whether he has seen a video with his client in it?”

“No, no, no,” Justice Goldberg said. “At the moment Mr. Johnson doesn’t concern me. You concern me. Mr. Johnson didn’t make the video. You did. If I have issues with Mr. Johnson, I will reach them soon.”

Justin Goldberg waved his hand as if brushing lint from his suit. It was a gesture of dismissal. Byron Johnson was the first to stand and first to leave. His heart raced. Almost incredibly, Justin Goldberg was showing independence and courage. He had not just tossed away or ignored the disk Byron had anonymously mailed to him.

For the first time in many weeks, he was happy.

C
OLD FOG. THE OLD wood of the rambling house never lost the chill of Maine. The wood—the sea-washed shingles and the broad planks on the outside porches and floors throughout the house—always had the same pine scent as the trees on the island’s rocky soil. Foghorns regularly sounded from the points of the island, the recurring resonance of warning and reassurance. Byron had seen only two other houses on the island with lights on as he and Christina had sat, three hours earlier, inside the stripped-down passenger compartment of the old ferry on one of the three passages it made each week in the winter from the mainland.

“My God, Carlos,” Christina said. “Why do you ever leave this place?”

“I’ve been coming here since I was nine. In the summers the island is hot in the day, cool every night. The sky was always clear. High Maine weather. Those were usually the only times each year when we spent fourteen continuous days and nights together. My father’s father was still alive then. A poetry-quoting Boston lawyer who, of course, loved to sail. Sailing was an addiction of upper-class Bostonians with summer houses on the coast of Maine. As much of an addiction of that class as the gin martinis. I loved him, and loved sailing. I spent more time with him than with my mom and dad. Out on the sea. Sunlight and sea spray. Even twelve miles out you can still smell the pines.”

She embraced him. She wore a sweatshirt with a hood; on the front of the sweatshirt was the word “Bowdoin.” She said, “It’s wonderful how our paths have crossed. When I was in college we used to drive out to Mere Point and light fires on the boulders, cook, smell the ocean, and look out at the small islands that had only pine trees. The same ocean and the same smells you had.”

He kissed her lips. They tasted of salt from the chilly air on the ferry and the short walk from the dock to the house. They had carried their bags on red children’s wagons. The house was a half mile from the wooden dock.

The only other person they saw in the three days they spent in the house was Eben Cain, the caretaker of Byron’s house and several others for more than forty years. He was one of the two hundred year-round residents of the island, probably the last member of the last generation of a family that had been here since the 1700s. Eben kept the furnaces running year-round because Byron, although he rarely came to the island, usually visited on a day’s notice, and Byron’s sons also came unexpectedly and intermittently. Eben—a thin, compact man with that terse Maine accent—hadn’t seen Byron with his sons since they were young teenagers. Eben made sure there was enough oil in the furnace, hot water in the tank, and wood near the fireplaces.

The nighttime fog dissolved just after dawn each morning, as each gloriously clear day began. They woke early. They hiked in the afternoons. The only snow on the island was lodged on the sides of the immense boulders shielded all day from the sun. From the heights and shore of the island they saw the glittering of the frigid sea. In the distance, the small, uninhabited, pine-covered islands were surrounded with brilliant light. The trees seemed to be on fire, but never burned.

At night they read. There were old books on the shelves that Byron had first seen there in the late fifties and early sixties, in the last years of his grandfather’s life—novels and short stories by once-famous and now almost forgotten writers like John O’Hara and James Gould Cozzens.
The Cape Cod Lighter. Morning, Noon, and Night. Advise and Consent
. His grandfather was a meticulous lover of books. Each book had its original dust jacket, on thick paper. The pages were all swollen by the sea air.

Christina studied on a table near the fireplace while Byron read. A small lamp shedding soft light glowed on her gorgeous face. Although he tried to resist, Byron often glanced up at her as she studied. From time to time she caught his eye and smiled a wistful but seductive smile, as if she were saying:
Not now, later, I’ll give you the ride of your life
.

The kitchen had not changed since the 1950s. Big white refrigerator, linoleum floor, black stove. There was no dishwasher. Byron rinsed the supper dishes and placed them in a rack next to the sink. Christina was cleaning the table with a sponge.

He said, as he dried his hands on a towel, “Who are you?”

Christina reacted as though Byron was teasing her. Then the moment lasted too long. “What?”

“The only Christina Rosario who ever graduated from Bowdoin died eighteen years ago.”

“What are you saying, Carlos?”

“And your apartment on Riverside Drive is leased to a company known as Alpha Sources. Tell me why your father the engineering professor didn’t leave a single engineering book in his apartment. And why there’s no record of anyone
named Rosario who ever taught engineering or anything else at Columbia.”

“Carlos, I don’t know why you’re saying this. It’s wrong. Someone is lying to you.”

“You’re lying to me.” His voice was vehement. “You’re a liar, a fraud.”

“Carlos, please.”

“Who is this animal you pal around with? The one with the suit and the mustache?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And who is that blonde girlfriend of yours?”

“Please, Byron.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“Carlos, I’m Christina Rosario. I’m a law student at Columbia. I’m your lover. I admire you. I love you.”

“I have pictures of you with a man who is a torturer. I have pictures of you with a woman who works with the same fucking torturer. She’s a fraud, like you.”

“What’s the matter with you? Please tell me.”

“I have the video from your computer. You know the one. The one with your friend beating and drowning Ali Hussein.”

Suddenly she placed her hands over her face. She turned from him. He heard her cry.

At first light she put her soft luggage and backpack in one of the red wagons and pulled it behind her as she made her way to the dock. The ferry was scheduled to leave at nine. The door to the small, unheated waiting room was always unlocked.

During her two-hour wait in the cold room, she composed on her BlackBerry a long text message to Byron.
Carlos
, she started,
I want you to know this. I hope when you read what follows you can understand that I became involved in the work I’ve done because I love this country and want to protect it. I had no idea how crazily it would unravel. Or how dangerous it’s all become. And I had no idea how much I would love you. Don’t look for me. I’ll transform myself again. I’ve done this before. I’ll become someone else
.

She created the message as if in a trance. When she finished, she saw for the first time that the old station room was now flooded with morning light. The wooden planks of the walls and floors glowed; they seemed to radiate slightly with heat.

She gripped the BlackBerry, hesitating to press the Send button. She found the only bathroom. Still clutching the BlackBerry, she sat on the toilet, which was clean but had rust-colored stains on the porcelain. She looked at the sleek object in her hand as if it were a bomb; she was afraid of it.

Minutes later, just as she pressed
Send
, she saw the heavy, unwieldy lobster boat ease gradually into the dock’s wooden pilings, which had been worn smooth by countless dockings over the years. Surprised, she recognized two of the men standing on the cluttered deck of the boat. When she had last seen them in New York a week earlier, they had looked subdued and weary in the lousy midwinter weather. Today in the brisk morning, they looked bright, athletic, and vigorous.

“We got your message,” Tom Nashatka called out. “We came out to get you. The ferry was cancelled.”

B
YRON JOHNSON STAYED ON the chilly island for two days after she left. There was no television in the house; there never had been. The only radio was a short wave on which the mechanical, inflectionless voices of the announcers for the national weather bureau gave the regional and maritime weather. Byron loved to hear the names of the geographic landmarks—the weather in the vast expanse of Casco Bay as far north as Nova Scotia and south to Kennebunkport, the readings from Execution Rocks, the conditions at the buoy ninety miles from Monhegan Island.

An ice storm enveloped the island for twenty-four hours. The island closed down completely—isolated, quiet, and intimate. Glistening and ice-burdened branches fell from some of the nearby pine trees.

Christina’s long text message had riveted him, and he spent those two days reading and re-reading it. Byron was angry, he was relieved, he was harrowed with fear. He was also repeatedly overwhelmed by pangs of love and the grieving void of loss.

This is who I am
, she wrote.
I’m multiple women. I change often. You were right about Christina. She died
.

She was a Captain in the Army at the time of 9/11, she wrote. She was fluent in Arabic. She wanted to serve the United States. She joined the new Homeland Security Department. She received stratospheric security clearances.

When she and Andrew Hurd learned that Byron decided to represent a man they believed had been a master of terrorist finance since the
USS Cole
bombing in 2000, they drew together a team of diverse people with the same level of security clearances. Within days, she was transformed into a Columbia Law School student and, through people she called “institutional cooperators,” she became a summer associate at SpencerBlake, complete with a transcript from the law school and recommendations from two of its professors. She and her team members had several strategies for “downloading” from Byron the information he would absorb from Ali Hussein, the “banker for al-Qaeda.”

Only one of those strategies involved placing Christina Rosario into his life, mind, and soul. They knew Byron had left his marriage unwillingly, that he had brief affairs with other women, and that he had joined an online dating service in which he said little about himself and did not post his picture. So, they knew, he was vulnerable.