Extraordinary Rendition (31 page)

They also knew that he was a consummate lawyer, a man with an enormous capacity to extract facts from clients and to inspire confidence in them. Byron was one of those increasingly rare lawyers who looked like what people once viewed as the prototype of a lawyer—handsome, tall, well-mannered, projecting an aura of
noblesse oblige
without any trace of arrogance or haughtiness.

And, finally, they knew he had become restless, irritable, and discontented as he entered and warily moved into his early sixties.

From that gorgeous moment in the dusk at the Central Park Zoo, the Rosario strategy worked.
I not only became your
lover
, she wrote in the text message,
I became your alter ego. Like any new lover, you let me roam through your life. I had free access to your notes, your computer and cell phone (although I had to work to haul you into the 21st century), and what I knew to be your soul. I took all of that from you, and gave it to others so that they could sift it all to find money, like those prospectors in the California Gold Rush who screened sand and water for gold
.

It was because I fell in love with you that Hurd and his minions started a campaign of disinformation and deception. When the $52 million kissed your account and fled, I asked Hurd where the money came from and how it had landed in your account and skipped off like a stone a kid tosses on the surface of the water
.

“Ask your boyfriend,” he told me
.

It was never in the plan and strategy as disclosed to her, she wrote, that Byron’s life would be put at such profound risk. She told Hurd it was crazy to suggest that Byron had divined how to locate the funds, move them to himself, and then managed to have the money pass through multiple accounts until it slipped into a black hole somewhere.
If he has it
, Hurd said to her,
then he has a choice: he can give it to me or he will never be able to use it. Unless, of course, he said, you’ve got it, too
.

And in that moment, Carlos, I knew he had decided I’d betrayed him. He kills people, Byron, for the sport of it. Remember King Lear? “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.” Be careful, Carlos. I love you
.

Gazing through the windows at the ice-silvered pine trees and the boulders against which the Atlantic crashed, tossing icy foam into the air, Byron hit the keys on his BlackBerry and forwarded her text message to his own email account.
Life at risk
. It felt as though every muscle, bone, and organ in
his body were dissolving. The bathroom was cold. But he felt the overwhelming need to strip off all his clothes. Job’s words came to his mind, and he spoke them out loud:
Naked, naked came I into the world, and naked shall I return
.

When the ferry docked at Boothbay Harbor on the mainland, he stopped at the coffee shop on the wharf. He sat at the counter, on a circular stool with no arms or backrest. The new weekly edition of the local newspaper, the
Harbor Express
, was on the countertop. He casually pulled it toward him and spread open the first page on the worn counter as his black coffee and glazed doughnut—known here as a honey-dipped doughnut (a name that to him always had a wonderful sexual resonance)—arrived.

At the top of the front page was a driver’s license picture of Christina Rosario:
Frozen Body Found on Beach in Acadia
.

Byron struggled for breath, holding his hand over his mouth. The prematurely old waitress, her face worn by cigarettes and perennial cold weather, asked in that laconic Maine accent as she gestured at the headline, “Isn’t that something?”

He glanced at her, overwhelmed by a desire to have her take him to wherever she lived on this isolated coast and protect him. He shook his head. He couldn’t speak.

A
S ALWAYS, ALI HUSSEIN appeared to grow younger each time Byron Johnson saw him. Somehow the dark pockets in which his eyes were set—the dominant feature of his face when Byron first saw him in Miami—had noticeably lightened. He had also become more talkative, almost light-hearted. He wanted to know more about news in the outside world, including news about himself. “Was I on CNN this week?” he once asked. He had more questions about his case. He was more interested in Byron. Over time, as Ali became more chatty, Byron admired him less.

And he had stopped giving Byron quotations from the
Koran
and hearing the Imam’s guidance for readings from the
Koran. He knows
, Byron thought,
that I’ve been changing them, that now I’m the only one who holds the messages
.

Byron was tense and intense. He leaned toward Ali’s ear. “We will be in court tomorrow. I have asked the judge to throw out the charges against you.”

“How?”

“I was given a video of Jesse Ventura trying to drown you.”

Ali raised his hand to his ear, leaning closer to Byron.

“The government said there were no videos of you. But there is one.”

“I told you that, Mr. Johnson.”

“And I believed you. And now I have a tape.”

“I saw the camera. It was humiliating. I was stripped, I was crying, my body was exposed, I was weak. I thought it was insane that they were filming it.”

“Ali, you have to understand that there’s no way to know what Goldberg will do.”

“Mr. Johnson, he’s an animal. His heart is bad.”

“You don’t want to die?”

“No, I don’t.”

“There’s a way to save yourself without relying on Goldberg. The other side has told me that they want to do a deal with you.”

“What kind of deal?”

“They say they know that the passages from the
Koran
you gave me, and the ones the Imam had me bring back to you, were codes. They think they’re close to knowing what the codes are, but they don’t know enough.”

“These people are crazy, Mr. Johnson. I never had money, I never took money, I never gave money to anyone.”

“All I can do is convey word for word what their offer is. I have an obligation to do that. You have to decide what you want to do.”

“I want to live, I want to leave here, I want to be in the world again.”

“They are offering you a deal to let you live.”

“And what do they want me to do?”

“To sit and talk with them. To cooperate, by which they mean to tell them everything you knew. People, conversations, money, your relationship with the Imam, names of banks, account numbers.”

“If I do all that, then what?”

“Then, after you give them all of that, they decide whether they will do a deal with you.”

“You mean the idea is that I give away everything first, and they get to decide later. I give, they take, and they can leave me where I am.”

“That’s the way it works.”

“But I don’t know anything, Mr. Johnson.”

“Then you have nothing to give them.”

“Unless I make things up.”

“They would tell me they don’t want you to make things up. And I can tell you that won’t work.”

“They are crazy people, Mr. Johnson.”

“They are the only people you can deal with. For us there are no other people in the world.”

“There is the judge.”

“There is.”

“And what if he does what you’re asking him to do? He sets me free. Then I don’t have these people trying to kill me.”

“Don’t invest too much in him, Ali. He was made a judge by Mr. Bush. He despises criminal defendants. He despises me. He despises you. He doesn’t have an Arab friend.”

“And he’s a Jew.”

Byron paused. In their dozens of conversations, they had never uttered the words “Jew” or “Israel.” It had never occurred to Byron to ask Hussein about his political opinions. In fact, Byron had only rarely heard any of his clients over the years speak about politics or public issues, except on those isolated occasions when a corporate executive let slip words like the “sweaty unwashed masses,” “Obamacare,” or the “newly
privileged welfare class.” Byron said, “There are many courageous Jewish judges.”

“I’ve seen the man. He is not courageous. Asking him to do anything for me is like slapping water. Futile.”

“I can’t predict what anyone will do in life, Ali, whether he’s Jewish or an Eskimo.”

I
T ARRIVED IN A tidy Amazon box as if packaged and sent by Amazon itself. The look of the box, Byron thought, was a miracle of counterfeiting. It appeared to hold two hardcover books.

Byron Johnson was endlessly amazed by the Internet. When he randomly typed in the words “Army Service Pistol” three days earlier, he hadn’t anticipated that there would be entry after entry describing the history of the Colt pistol and offering them for sale as if they were books.

It was a gorgeous object. Nestled in a soft foam setting shaped to its contours, the pistol was new. Its surface was highly polished. As if it were a perfectly crafted Swiss watch, he lifted it carefully from the box, turned it, and looked at it from every angle.

He lifted the Styrofoam case in which the Colt had been lodged.

Beneath the pistol-shaped indentation was a shoulder holster. He held the holster in front of him, spreading it out, admiring it. The leather was lustrous and new, as finely made in its own way as the burnished steel of the pistol. The odor of the new leather was rich.

There was a last layer in the box, like those colorful Russian eggs within identical eggs, the sizes steadily diminishing. There were two ammunition clips. Byron locked one of the clips into the Colt.

He put on the holster, draping it around his left shoulder like a surplice. He adjusted the straps. He smelled the leather. As soon as the holster was secure, he slipped the Colt into it. When he put on a suit jacket, he saw as he looked at himself in the mirror that the bulge was obvious, but, he thought, who would know? He tried on his overcoats—the expensive clothes from Paul Stuart on Madison Avenue that were the still-formidable remnants of his former life. The bulge wasn’t visible. Nor was it visible under the suede jacket he had worn on the weekends for several winters.

He continued wearing the holster for another hour as he concentrated again on the intense writing that engaged him. It was more of a narrative than a legal brief. He didn’t go through the process of inserting citations to decisions and statutes that supported legal writing like studs riveted into the sturdy beams of his arguments. He had realized since Simeon died, and particularly since Christina’s body had been found on the icy rocks of the Maine coast, that the legal brief he had written for Justin Goldberg elaborating the reasons Ali Hussein’s prosecution should be ended—arguments based on torture, abuse of any concept of due process, the opposing lawyers’ lies and deceptions—might never see the light of day. Goldberg had required that it be sealed and not filed on the court’s new electronic docket. Unlike the hundreds of thousands of other federal cases around the country, the computerized docket for
United States of America v. Ali Hussein
revealed only the name and docket number of the case, the name of the judge, and the name of the prosecutor. Not even Byron’s name. And the grid on the computer screen that was ordinarily filled with consecutive numbers and dates for each filing—and in some cases
in which Byron had been involved, there were more than a thousand separate entries—was blank, a modern
tabula rasa. National security material
.

No trace of the written record of the case might survive, as though the written words might be submerged forever. “This is my tablet, this is what happened.” He intended to write those words on the copies of the story he planned to send to his sons, to reporters at the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
, and to the immense universe of the Internet.

When he rose up from the desk, he stapled the pages he had written that night. He slipped the pages into a manila envelope. He cut his index finger on the envelope’s sharp metal clasp. A faint bloodstain was left on the envelope, which he dropped just behind the door of his apartment so that, in the morning, he could take it to the safe deposit at the bank on Lespenard Street, where the clerks appeared unfazed by his frequent visits; they were either indifferent or discreet. He looked like a courtly, important customer, always well-dressed, always courteous.