Extraordinary Rendition
Praise for
Extraordinary Rendition
“Batista does it again when international intrigue collides with murder in
Extraordinary Rendition
! A high-priced Wall Street lawyer gets the shock of a lifetime . . . law school never prepared him for this! It’s a fast ride—buckle up! . . .”
Nancy Grace, Attorney, TV personality and
New York Times
bestselling author of
Death on the D-List
Praise for
Death’s Witness
“The verdict on Batista’s debut legal thriller: guilty of delivering not only sharp courtroom drama but steamy romantic escapism as well.”
Publishers Weekly
“Batista, in a word, is wonderful here, guiding his readers skillfully and assuredly through a complex plot.
Death’s Witness
is Exhibit A for the proposition that Batista is as much a winner at writing as he is at defending.”
Joe Hartlaub
—
Bookreporter
XTRAORDINARY
R
ENDITION
A novel by
P
AUL
B
ATISTA
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION
Astor + Blue Editions LLC
Copyright © 2012 by Paul Batista
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by:
Astor + Blue Editions, LLC
New York, NY 10003
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Batista, Paul. EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION—1st ed.
ISBN: 978-1-938231-26-1 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-938231-25-4 (epdf)
ISBN: 978-1-938231-24-7 (epub)
1. Lawyer—Thriller—Fiction 2. Legal Thriller—Fiction 3. Government Stonewalling—Fiction 4. Top Secret Government Rendition—Fiction 5. Terrorism and Torture Court Case—Fiction 6. New York (New York), Miami (Florida)—Fiction 7. American Legal Thriller Story I. Title
Book Design: Bookmasters
Jacket Cover Design: Ervin Serrano
For
Iris Gerber Damson
1
T
HE PLANE WAS BANKING over Florida’s Atlantic coast when Byron Carlos Johnson felt the first tug of the landing process beginning eighty miles from Miami. He raised the plastic window shade to his left and, for the first time in two hours, looked out at the sky and the dazzling ocean. He put the book he’d been reading—Wilkie Collins’s
The Moonstone
—into the elasticized pouch in front of him. He’d last read the intricate nineteenth-century mystery when he was in college, and his concentrated passage through the Gothic prose had been a welcome reprieve from his incessant thinking about Ali Hussein, the Syrian who had already spent two months in the Federal Detention Center in Miami after years in foreign prisons not yet disclosed to Byron—mystery places somewhere in the world.
Since he carried only a slim briefcase for this one-day visit to Miami, Byron didn’t have to wait for baggage. He left the terminal before any other passenger on the flight and was in a barely air-conditioned taxi fifteen minutes after leaving the plane. The driver was a talkative Jamaican who seemed intrigued by the destination Byron gave him: “The prison on Southwest 137th Avenue.”
The driver repeatedly glanced into the rearview mirror at Byron. In that familiar Jamaican lilt, he asked, “You a lawyer, man? You look like a lawyer.”
“What does a lawyer look like, Jacques?” His name was on a plastic license taped to the dashboard.
“A dude in a suit, man. Down here anybody in a suit is a lawyer.”
Byron, who could see the driver’s face in the rearview mirror just as the driver could see Byron’s face, smiled. “Only crazy men wear suits, Jacques.”
“You don’t look crazy, man.”
“You never know, Jacques.”
The Miami skyline had changed in the thirty years since Byron first saw it. Then, Miami was a city with the low, smoky skyline of a Latin American capital. Byron remembered enjoying the streets in the heart of the city with small Cuban grocery stores and colorful, hole-in-the-wall bars. He spoke fluent Spanish—his mother was a Mexican who had given him the middle name Carlos and his father, who was the United States Ambassador to Mexico in the early 1960s, during the Kennedy Administration, was also fluent. Byron still had vivid early recollections of Mexico City and the black Packards with gaudily uniformed chauffeurs who drove him around the city, the slowly rotating ceiling fans, the parties on the leafy grounds of the Presidential Palace, and the sweet grammar school where he had only five classmates, all of them children of men who worked for his father at the grand embassy.
Now Miami’s skyline was dominated by high towers of flashing glass and steel. As the taxi sped along the causeway toward the city, Byron stared at the modern office buildings that reflected all the light of this brilliant day. Since Byron believed that taxi drivers knew everything, he asked Jacques, “Are there any tenants in those new buildings?”
Jacques whistled. “Empty, man. I never pick anybody up there, never drop anybody off. Somebody’s not making too much money.”
Byron gave Jacques a big tip, and in exchange Jacques gave Byron a big smile. “You my man,” Jacques said.
As soon as Byron stepped out of the taxi at the prison’s security gate, he was submerged in heat and humidity. He walked as quickly as he could across the football field–sized parking lot, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder. The Federal Detention Center, built in the 1970s, rose like a Soviet fortress over the warehouses on the waterfront. In the wide Miami harbor, tall cranes stood against the tropical sky in which cumulus clouds towered. Tankers and cargo ships, pleasure craft and sailboats moved on the water.