Extraordinary Rendition (12 page)

There was black coffee for the three of them at the dining room table. Byron wore a white shirt with his initials sewn into the pocket. He also wore chino pants but, to Khalid’s surprise, no shoes or socks. Khalid took in something else that surprised him about Byron: he was not only tall but strongly
built, a body constructed from a youth of playing squash, lacrosse, and tennis.

“Khalid,” Byron said, “you know what an indictment is, don’t you?”

When he dealt with what he often called “white men,” Khalid roughened up the tone of his voice. “I read the newspapers. But tell me what it is.”

“It’s something in writing that tells a defendant what he’s charged with, the crime. Do you want to see it?”

Khalid shrugged.

“Here,” Byron said, “take it anyhow.”

Christina, who rested her chin in her hand as she looked at them, noticed that Khalid dyed his thick hair black and had manicured fingernails gleaming at the blunt ends of the back of his hairy hands. She also registered that his real voice and accent were far more polished than he made them seem. And she saw that he was a very good-looking man. Wanting to goad him just a little because of his studied annoyance about her presence, she decided to speak: “Byron’s meeting with your brother tomorrow.”

Khalid ignored her. He spoke to Byron. “What does Ali say about this?”

“Very little, Khalid. They only gave me ten minutes to speak to him.” Byron was careful not to mention yet the thirty-page memo he had picked up the day before from the United States Attorney’s Office.

“And what happens next?”

“Your brother has to explain the facts to me.”

“My brother is an honest man.”

“You can help him, too, Khalid. I have to start understanding what happened. And what didn’t. I need information in
order to defend him. I need to know more about his background. I hope you can help.”

With his thick fingers, Khalid raised the edges of the document. He wore a gold bracelet on his right wrist. “You want me to read it tonight?”

Byron spoke quietly, pouring more of the black coffee for himself. “If you can, Khalid. Without learning as much as I can as fast as I can, I won’t be able to help. There are some names of people and places and events in here—not many, but some—that you might know something about. Ali needs help if he is going to have any chance at all.”

“You seem to be a nice man. But for years I’ve seen what’s going on. My brother doesn’t have any chance at all. Nobody will see him again outside, here, in this life.”

“I’m not that pessimistic.”

Khalid raised the document, rolled it, and tapped its bottom edge on the table, as though trying to arrange the pages even more neatly than they already were. “I’ll read it.”

“Can we meet tomorrow somewhere? In the evening? Maybe you can talk about this with his friends or yours and let me know.”

Khalid asked, “What do you really think?”

“That your brother is in a very dangerous place.”

“We visited the Imam before I came tonight, Mr. Johnson. He knows this is a dark time for Ali. Can you tell him that there is in the
Koran
a guide for courage?”

“Sure. What is it that you want me to give him?”

Khalid said from memory, “Have Ali look at book three,
chapter five
. The tenth through the twentieth lines. The Imam says he will be able to draw strength from that.”

Byron and Christina both wrote down the reference as Khalid, with the document in his hand, abruptly got up from the table. “We’ll meet tomorrow, Mr. Johnson.”

He left the apartment. He didn’t even look at Christina.

Three hours later, as Christina and Byron drove uptown along empty Riverside Drive, the river to their left and the dense, rustling trees of Riverside Park to their right, Christina said, “He’s a scary guy, Carlos.”

He glanced at her. She was in the front seat of the car he called his “toy,” a silver convertible BMW sports car. The top was down. The gorgeous night air rushed over them. Byron Johnson didn’t ask her what she meant.

A
LI HUSSEIN, A MAN who cherished numbers and took pride in the fact that many of the great early mathematicians were from the Middle East, could compute without a pencil or paper that in the years of his imprisonment he had spent almost five million minutes in cells in at least four countries. At first, as the thousands upon thousands of hours accumulated, he was desperate and sick with the thought of how much of his life had been permanently taken from him. Over the last three years, struggling to see himself as free and vigorous, he thought of himself as a runner who covered unimaginably long distances alone.

But there were many hundreds of minutes over the interminable span of minutes when he had not been alone. Recently there were the precious ten hours he’d been with Byron Johnson. And on the flights to and from various parts of the world, including the flight to New York, there were pilots and armed men in the small jets in which he traveled.

And, for years, there had been Andrew Hurd.

When the door of his cell made that deep hum as the magnetic lock was disengaged, Ali instinctively knew that Hurd would soon enter the cell. Even though he was in the bowels of the prison, where there were no windows, Ali Hussein sensed it was the middle of the night, 2 or 3 a.m.

There was light in the hallway. Behind Hurd, two men in uniform, both with rifles, stood in the open doorway.

“Mr. Ali,” Hurd said. “How the hell are you?”

Ali Hussein, sitting on his cot, didn’t answer.

“You didn’t look happy yesterday morning.” Hurd pulled from its place near the steel sink a stool that was the only chair in the cell. Ali’s copy of the
Koran
lay open on the stool. “Are you reading at this hour of the night?”

Dressed in a gray pinstripe suit, Hurd sat down and held the
Koran
open to the page at which Ali had left it. Hurd stared at the page. “You know, Mr. Ali, I love this book. It’s so much more interesting than our New Testament and Old Testament they had me read as a kid. I mean, take a look at this: ‘
Let not the believers take disbelievers for their friends in preference to believers. Whoso doeth that hath no connection with Allah. Allah biddeth you beware only of himself. Unto Allah is the journeying. He knoweth that which is in the heavens and that which is in the earth, and Allah is able to do all things
.’”

Hurd paused, raising the book as if searching for better light. He smiled. “Mr. Ali, there’s eloquence and poetry and mysticism in that. And I picked that passage randomly. You can learn to live a whole life out of those lines, can’t you?”

Even Hurd was surprised when Ali, his head still bent forward into his left hand, his face in darkness, recited as if praying: “
On the day when every soul will find itself confronted with all that it hath done of good and all that it hath done of evil every soul will long that there might be a mighty space between it and that evil. Allah biddeth you beware of him
.”

“Jesus H. Christ, Mr. Ali, those are the very next words.” Hurd closed the
Koran
and tossed it on the floor, in the
direction of the lidless steel toilet. “There, you see, as I’ve been telling everybody, you’re blessed with a prodigious memory.”

Ali knew he would be hit. Hurd always hit him. And he knew the hitting would be painful. He always tried to pull away, but he’d never succeeded in eluding the hit. As he had told Byron Johnson only twelve hours earlier, the man whose name he didn’t know—this man—was very strong.

“Now that your memory is really working overtime,” Hurd said, “let me see how much you remember about this.”

Rolling it into a tube, Hurd held up a copy of the indictment. “You remember all about Lashkar-e-Taiba, don’t you, Mr. Ali? The LET terrorist organization? I’ll bet that rings a bell.”

Still seated, Ali looked up. Hurd saw the dark, almost effeminate oval of the man’s face. “How did you get the money to LET?”

Ali Hussein stared straight ahead.

“Mr. Ali,” Hurd said as he reached out and gripped the tender back of the man’s neck, “you see we also know about the Dar al Arqam Islamic Center. You’ve got a great memory, Jesus, you can probably recite this whole great holy book. So tell me all you remember about the Dar al Arqam Islamic Center. Most of your brothers from there are already in prison, forever. You remember Ali Timimi? Well, he’s in jail for life fifteen times over. And he says you know how the money got from the streets to the mosques to LET. We heard him say that. He now enjoys talking to us. He says he wants to help us. He can shorten his sentence to thirteen life terms.”

Hurd’s powerful right hand continued to stroke the tendons at the back of Ali’s neck. He felt the sweat on the man’s
skin and the rock-hard tension of the muscles. “And you know what? Mr. Timimi’s mad at you. He says that you know where the money is and you’re not telling anybody about it. Are you saving it for a rainy day?”

No answer.

“Your rainy day is here, Mr. Ali. Pretty soon we’re going to know where all that money comes from and where it is. Some of your other brothers are helping us, but they all say no one knows as much as you. You, they say, know everything. But we will figure it out without you if we have to. And when that happens, nobody will need you. Allah is not going to be able to help you. Your dummy lawyer sure as hell won’t help you.”

Hurd waited. There wasn’t a sound. Ali counted the seconds, methodically, accurately. Ninety-six seconds passed.

Hurd took his hand away from Ali’s neck. He stood and left the cell. The steel door slid shut, and the magnetic hum ended as soon as the lock was engaged.

Ali Hussein slid off the cot. He tried for a moment to kneel so that he wouldn’t collapse completely. This time Andrew Hurd had not hit him, but it felt as if he had, like an instinctive memory of something that had happened again and again. Then he simply fell to the floor and stayed there. His body shook.

I
T WAS THREE IN the morning, always a bad time of night, and a time at which Byron Johnson had regularly been waking for weeks. When he was in his own apartment, he made coffee and then, seated at his sleek glass desk, wandered through the Internet. He hunted for information about the
Koran
, torture, and Guantanamo Bay. He had also started to search the Internet for information about himself. Christina had brought this sometimes disturbing miracle of instant information to his attention almost as soon as they spent that first night together. He was absorbed by what he found. During every twenty-four hour period there were new entries in which his name appeared. There were newspaper articles, verbatim transcripts of radio and television broadcasts, blog postings (most of them hateful), and pictures of him that rose from the vast interstellar spaces of the Internet. Almost none of the steadily accumulating Internet entries was flattering. Once he ruefully said to Christina, “I preferred the anonymity of being a big-time corporate lawyer to this.”

Most of his emails now were from reporters. He was intrigued by the fact that many reporters didn’t seem to sleep or rest, because emails sent at one or two or three in the morning often appeared on his screen. When Byron was in Christina’s apartment, as he often was, he would simply glance at the
messages and never respond to them because writing would wake him for the rest of the night.

Leaving her bed—her lovely arm seemed to glow even in the dark—he went to the bathroom and then, naked, walked quietly to the computer in the alcove where Christina studied. He watched the little running cartoon figures dash across the screen as he connected to the spaces where he entered his screen name (“LordByron”) and his password (“Mexico”) and waited for a second as the familiar page suddenly materialized on the screen.

He typed by the glow from the screen. He had five emails that he assumed were from journalists, since each of them had abbreviations for newspapers and networks after the @ symbol.

And then, for some reason, he clicked on the
Sent
button. And there he saw an email that had been sent from his computer at 1:15 that morning, two hours earlier. The email had been sent to “SesameStar,” an address to which he’d never sent anything.
SesameStar
?