Extraordinary Rendition (15 page)

Byron Johnson, settling his mind on those last words, felt a chill. There was a clear threat implicit in Goldberg’s words.

“For the record, Judge, Mr. Hussein has a right to speak with me in confidence about anything that he and I deem appropriate to the defense of the charges. That could include what he eats for breakfast, not just specific legal strategies. The government can’t be allowed to decide what part of a lawyer’s conversation with his or her client relates to the defense of the specific charges and what part of the conversation doesn’t. The devil doesn’t get to decide what’s good and what’s bad.”

Justin Goldberg tensely paused. Still in profile to Byron Johnson, Goldberg raised the angle of his sight to the row of faces to his left—Rana, Berg, and the anonymous agents. “Let
me say for the benefit of defense counsel that conversations he or any other lawyer might have with a client are not privileged if those conversations relate to the planning of a crime or the deliberate concealment of a crime or of an ongoing conspiracy. Lawyers do not exist for the purpose of immunizing criminals from liability. Nor do they exist for the purpose of facilitating crimes.”

Byron Carlos Johnson was now in a moment of complete clarity:
They’re hunting me
.

B
YRON JOHNSON’S EXPENSIVE BUT austere office in the Seagram building had become over the last eight weeks less and less familiar to him. He’d occupied that corner office for more than a decade. Its windows overlooked Park Avenue and the MetLife Building, that diadem in the middle of Park Avenue, still known to him as the Pan Am Building even though the name had changed years earlier.

The office was what he had once described as his farm, an ancestral place where he made his daily bread and where he dealt with legal problems he once considered fascinating. He used to resort to it for twelve or more hours each day, often on the weekends, long before the annoying expression “24/7” became so popular in corporate America. Particularly during the painfully protracted two years that his divorce took, the office was his life’s geographic center—a place of stability, a safe harbor. He relaxed there often, read there often, and often just spent the quiet hours between eight and ten at night reading and writing as he sometimes looked out on the unique combination of glittering lights and the quiet at the heart of the city.

But now he sensed the steady erosion of his connection to the office. Sometimes when he walked into it in the middle of the day, after a week spent at the prison, at home, or at Christina Rosario’s apartment, he had the dislocated sense that he was visiting the rooms he’d once occupied years
earlier at boarding school and college. There was an eerie sense, like a recurrent and unpleasant dream, of returning to a place where he no longer belonged. Byron had once been meticulous about maintaining the orderliness of the books and mementoes on the office bookcases, the gleam of the surface of the conference table, and the symmetry of the photographs, paintings, diplomas, and certificates on the walls. Now it seemed that time and inattention were steadily causing the decay of all that well-maintained structure, like an abandoned house. Some of the papers he had left on his desk—copies of letters to clients and memos from associates at the firm answering research questions he’d raised for corporate clients—were yellowing.

The laptop computer in his office also bore a light coating of dust. It had been weeks since he had turned it on. It had the corporate screen name
[email protected]
, not his personal address. He hadn’t checked his business mail for days. As soon as he raised the lid, the small twinkling lights came on and the screen filled with white and blue light. The only thing Byron had carried into the firm that afternoon was the piece of yellow legal paper on which he had written down notes from that morning’s meeting with Ali Hussein.

Byron still addressed emails to himself. It was his way of preparing a diary, a resource for future reference, a kind of inventory of information. He entered his screen name in the
Send To
box before he began writing. Just two days earlier, Byron had suddenly stopped transferring to the computer the precise contents of the notes he had scrawled with the chapter, verse, and line numbers Ali Hussein had given him. Instead, Byron had decided to send disinformation.

He glanced at his notes with Ali Hussein’s references to the
Koran
. Ali knew that Byron planned to make yet another trip to Newark the next day, to that gold-domed mosque, and that he would see the young Imam, Sheik Naveed Haq. “Tell him,” Hussein had said of the sheik, “that these lines have always confused me. Ask him to explain them to you.”

Hussein had developed a deferential, intelligent, and even playful demeanor at times with Byron. “I’ve got to rely on you now, Mr. Johnson, even for my understanding of the
Koran
.” He smiled. “May Allah help me.”

Byron picked at random these words from the paperback edition of Marmaduke Pickthall’s translation of the
Koran
that he kept on his desk:
We sent no messenger save that he should be obeyed by Allah’s leave. And if, when they had wronged themselves, they had but come unto thee and asked forgiveness of Allah, and asked forgiveness of the messenger, they would have found Allah’s forgiving, merciful. But nay, by thy Lord, they will not believe in truth until they make thee judge of what is in dispute between them and find within themselves no dislike of that which thou decides, and submit with full submission
.

And then he typed in the numbers of the book, chapter, and lines for that quote. He put the numbers Ali had dictated on a slip of paper in his wallet.

When he finished, Byron glanced up at the glittering play of mid-afternoon sunlight on the surface of the MetLife building. Then he moved the leaning arrow on the computer screen to the yellow, cartoon-style envelope just above the words “Send Now.” Instantly his computer screen displayed “Your mail has been sent.”

He pressed down the lid of his computer and walked to the elevator, smiling and waving at the secretaries and young lawyers he passed in the carpeted, muted hallways.

Byron Johnson never again saw his office.

K
IMBERLY SMITH LOVED THOSE hour-long periods when she sat alone in a small studio with the automated camera in front of her as she listened attentively to Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper at CNN or Bill O’Reilly or Geraldo Rivera at Fox bring her into the live broadcast conversations. Just at the moment when a question was directed at her, or at the moment when she decided to intervene in an exchange, the red light at the top of the camera glowed, as if turned on by the sound of her voice, signaling to her that her face and voice were being broadcast to millions of people. She had been such a regular guest on these shows in the years since 9/11 that she was a celebrity people recognized in airports, on streets, and at conferences. These shows were deeply pleasurable for her, more engaging than teaching or writing or researching (although she enjoyed those parts of her life, too, just as she enjoyed other, far less visible work she did). Elegantly produced, stimulating, these broadcasts engaged her best qualities. She could exercise all the fluency, quick intelligence, and snappy, sardonic humor she had developed during her years in college at Harvard, graduate school at Yale, and teaching and writing at Stanford.

And she took pleasure, too, from the fact that she was beautiful. It was there for all the world to see. Sometimes, after a live show was broadcast at eight or nine in the evening, it would be repeated three or four times in the long interval
between midnight and the start of the early morning live news shows at six. In the middle of the night, she would sometimes watch herself, proud of the ease and grace and feistiness she displayed. It pleased her deeply, too, to witness how enthralled the men with whom she was spending the night were when, at three in the morning, they watched a broadcast she had done at nine the night before.

Six months into their relationship, Tom Nashatka still thought of Kimberly Smith as his golden girl, even though he suspected she had many other lovers. He knew that from the first time they made love. It was at the end of a day of secret meetings in a nondescript but highly secure building on L Street. They went to a bar on DuPont Circle, and after two hours she asked, “So, do you want to come up to my room?”

Want
was not the right word to describe Tom’s intense desire—this unexpected invitation to her room was like the granting of the wildest wish on his life’s wish list. Everything about her seemed unattainable. She was the daughter of wealthy New Yorkers; his father had spent a lifetime working in a steel foundry in Pittsburgh. She had gone to the best-known college in the world; he’d attended gritty Penn State. She went on fellowships to the most famous graduate schools in the country; he had enlisted in the Navy after college. She looked like one of the golden girls, the blessed girls, of American culture—the circle that included Christie Brinkley, Diane Sawyer, Valerie Plame. Tom, although he was a muscular football player and Navy Seal, could be easily recognized for what he was, the Polish son of a Pittsburgh steel worker. He had that flat accent and, at times, those working-class gestures. He used the words
you know
and
like
too often, the dominant
idioms of most Americans under the age of forty. Kimberly never said
like
unless she was drawing an analogy.

After the first night in the room overlooking leafy, elegant DuPont Circle, Tom came to believe something extraordinary—that Kimberly Smith loved him. He certainly loved her. She was not only this extraordinary prize, she also had qualities he admired. She was a patriot. During graduate school at Yale, she was recruited by the CIA and became a deep undercover agent. She loved the intrigue. While she was taking her graduate degree, she did fellowships in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and in those times she learned the exciting art of acting as a covert agent. She wrote a book, published by the University of Chicago Press, on Arabic linguistics and culture. She was invited to attend seminars and give lectures on subjects such as the language and message of the
Koran
in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. After the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, she had started to give secret seminars to CIA agents about Islam and the beliefs of Islamic men and women.

When Kimberly came to New York to appear on television, she stayed at the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South, and the networks paid for her travel and her room. The hotel was only three blocks from the CNN studio in the new buildings on Columbus Circle at the southwest corner of Central Park. Her room, although small, overlooked the park. On the nights after her shows, when she and Tom Nashatka were together, they would have dinner in her room, make love, wake at around one in the morning, step out onto the quiet of Central Park South, return to the room, and continue working on the emailed notes that Byron Carlos Johnson regularly sent to
himself, particularly the passages from the
Koran
that he copied out on his computer screen and sent to himself.

The white light of early dawn filled the trees of Central Park. Tom Nashatka woke from a short sleep and saw Kimberly at the computer. He had fallen asleep two hours earlier, after watching a rebroadcast of the show she had done the night before on CNN. She had been dazzling then, and she was dazzling now, too, although now she was naked and perched with her legs crossed on the desk chair.

“We underestimated him,” she said.

“Say what?” Tom asked, drowsily.

“We underestimated Byron Carlos Johnson,” Kimberly repeated, the clarity of her voice the same as when she was speaking on one of the television broadcasts. Even in private, she never spoke indistinctly or lazily.

Tom Nashatka sat up in the bed, the sheets wound around his waist. “Professor, you have got to give me more information than that.”

“The financial people are telling me that the new numbers just don’t compute. We’re now getting book, chapter, and verse numbers that don’t fit the paradigm.”