Extraordinary Rendition (16 page)

For weeks, Tom Nashatka, Kimberly Smith, and unseen technicians at a Homeland Security office in New Mexico had evaluated the passages from the
Koran
that Ali Hussein gave to Byron Johnson. The numbers of the books, chapters, and verses had quickly assumed a pattern, one that resembled the pattern of numbers by which wire transfers were made. The identities of originating banks, the numbers of accounts, and sometimes the numbers of what appeared to be destination accounts, all seemed to depend on the book, chapter, and verse
numbers of the quotes in the
Koran
from the old Marmaduke Pichtall translation.
6 8 12 13 48 52
. So far the numbers never quite fit the numerical patterns for bank codes, account numbers, and wiring routes for thousands of banks and fund transfer businesses in the United States and around the world. But they were getting closer to recognizable numbers that might lead to the locations somewhere in the world of real money. The virtual to the real.

Naked, Tom Nashatka scrambled out of the bed. He looked at the screen of the computer.

Kimberly said, “The last sets of numbers Byron sent don’t resemble any bank numbers or wire routing codes in the world.”

“Maybe Johnson just got it wrong.”

“I don’t think so. He’s always correctly written down what Ali’s given him in the past. Byron’s one of those careful bigtime lawyers. He doesn’t make little mistakes like that. He’s sent out the wrong passages for a reason.”

Tom struck several other computer keys, searching for something. “I told Hurd and Rana two days ago, after that last time with the judge, that they were misreading Johnson. They think he’ll get scared, fold, and work with them. That’s not my take on Johnson.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Our sweeps of his office and apartment. He reads Dickens and William Burroughs, he has subscriptions to the
New York Review of Books
and the
National Review
. He watches
Casablanca
and
Legally Blonde
. He writes letters to himself, some that he never sends.”

She gave him one of those dazzling blonde smiles. “That’s it. He’s a Renaissance man.”

Tom was serious. “I don’t think so. Byron is restless, irritable, discontented. He’s rebellious, even though he has that, like, you know, New England aristocrat in him.”

“Why not just walk up to Byron and say, ‘Hey, Byron, we’re with the good guys, we’d like you to help us. Can’t you get Hussein to tell you where all the money is and then let us know?’ And America’s been good to him. He’s a lawyer, he has a license to print money. Why not just ask him to help us all out?”

“Andy told me weeks ago that that was not the way to reach Byron. Remember, Byron wanted to represent one of these guys. He asked for this. Andy and his profilers say that Byron can only be made to cooperate the old-fashioned way—scare the hell out of him. It’s our job to scare the shit out of him. I’m not so sure.”

“Who ever knows what a person will do? Profilers? Relying on a profile? Relying on astrological signs works as well.”

“Hurd, loony as he is, has been in the business of nailing people for years and years. He’s a legend.”

“In his own mind.” She glanced at Tom, waiting for him to join her in mocking Hurd.

The faintest traces of dawn had just spread over Central Park. There were the open spaces where the trees parted for the Sheep Meadow, that undulating and well-tended field of green, and, further north, the Great Lawn. In the far distance, even higher in the park, the dawn light glowed on the acres of water in the reservoir.

“What about Christina?” Tom asked.

“What about her?”

“What does she think? She’s spent lots of time with him.”

Kimberly Smith paused. “What do you want me to say to her?”

“What time are you meeting her?”

“Ten.”

“Where?”

“There’s a French restaurant on Madison Avenue and 83rd Street with long tables and benches where all the East Side ladies gather for breakfast, French-style, after dropping their kids at their forty-thousand-dollar-a-year private schools. Byron, she told me, hates Madison Avenue and would never walk into a French-style place.”

“Just have the usual conversation, Kim. Let her tell you what Byron is saying and doing. But if you have a chance, ask her where Byron is keeping his notes of his meetings with Ali.”

“Why?”

“We’ve done three sweeps of his office in the last week. He isn’t keeping any of his notes there anymore. He must be carrying them with him and bringing them home.”

Kimberly smiled. “The cagey little bastard. Under that Gary Cooper exterior beats the heart of Abbe Hoffman. He wants to throw us off. Something has gotten his attention. It’s clear he’s now sending out random passages from the
Koran
, not the passages Ali’s giving him.”

“Well, if anyone can find out where his real notes are, it’s the foxy Christina Rosario.”

Kimberly, naked, stood up. She was blonde, slim, shapely and, as she embraced athletic Tom Nashatka, deeply alluring
and completely tantalizing. “Hey, Navy Seal, boy agents aren’t supposed to say sexy things about girl agents. It’s taboo.”

Kimberly Smith loved every facet of Tom’s size. He was a massive man, and at first he overpowered her, picking her up from the chair and carrying her around the room as she wrapped her legs around him. But gradually the tide of their love-making turned, and she finally overpowered him.

B
YRON WAS NEVER COMFORTABLE when he had lunch at the Regency Hotel at 61st and Park Avenue, although he had spent many hours in the noisy and elegant room over the years. It was a favorite lunch spot for Sandy Spencer and other leading partners at SpencerBlake. Every day of the week for years, the restaurant attracted at breakfast and lunch not only the partners at SpencerBlake but a perennial cast of celebrities. Smiling, radiantly bald Ron Perelman was in the room almost every time Byron was there. Before they went to jail, Bernie Madoff and Conrad Black were constant guests. Byron had often seen Wilbur Ross and Warren Buffett, Boone Pickens and George Soros there. And there were always people in the room whom his partners called the “entertainers”—Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, Larry King, and, at almost every breakfast for years, wide-eyed, droll Al Sharpton, that man of the people who loved expensive restaurants and the parties of celebrities.

SpencerBlake had its own table—a curved, plush bench in the far corner of the room with a view toward the Park Avenue windows. Byron had only heard rumors of the monthly tab for the use of the table: there were jokes about the $30,000 table, “$35,000 when you throw in the chairs.” Byron, who as a partner could have easily gotten the real information about the cost, never asked. He simply wasn’t interested. For years,
his wife and his law partners were baffled by Byron’s almost casual attitude toward his share of the firm’s profits and his disinterest in the firm’s finances. Some of the younger partners speculated that Byron must have been the scion of one of those old money families and that he had been born into great wealth completely independent of his earnings as a lawyer. To the manor born.

Byron had paid little attention to money over the years simply because he had always earned enough to meet his needs, not because he had inherited any real wealth. His father had started his working life in the 1930s with more inherited wealth than he left to Byron when he died in 1980. The Ambassador had devoted his life to working for the State Department and never earned as much as he and his wife and son needed; for decades he had steadily drawn down on his inheritance to meet the expenses of his imperial lifestyle. When he died, he left Byron the trim, well-built, sturdy house on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine, but little else. Byron had held onto the Maine house, although he used it only two or three weeks each year. It was the only property he now owned. The two-million-dollar Fifth Avenue apartment in which he and Joan had raised their children had been turned over to Joan as part of the divorce. Byron sometimes acknowledged to himself that, as his years of high earnings as a lawyer were coming to an end, he hadn’t accumulated enough or held onto enough to retire, to buy another apartment, and to enjoy the sense of financial security that most lawyers of his age and experience appeared to have.

And yet Byron never envied the wealth or possessions or resources of other people. Sandy Spencer, who had inherited
real wealth and over the years earned far more than Byron, owned a classic and tasteful mansion near the Maidstone Club in East Hampton overlooking Egypt Beach. He also had a ten-room apartment on Fifth Avenue and a smaller apartment near the Plaza Athenée in Paris. But Byron never felt any envy of the things Sandy possessed or the settled sense Sandy exuded that he would never have to worry about how well he would live for the rest of his life.

“Byron,” Sandy said as he rose from the table. “I’m glad you were able to stop by.”

Byron shook Sandy’s hand. They had known each other for decades, but they still were oddly formal with one another. They had learned their manners in all-male New England prep schools where the boys were required to wear jackets and ties and call every teacher and coach and the headmaster “Mr.” As they sat at the curved table overlooking the dining room, Byron said, “Someday we’re going to have to learn how to do fist bumps, don’t you think?”

Sandy laughed. “Byron, how the hell do you know what a fist bump is?”

“Hey, Sandy, I’ve walked around for a long time on the face of the earth, and I’ve always kept my eyes open. I even noticed fist bumps long before presidential candidates and their wives began doing them.”

“And fist bumps are—how should I say this?—cleaner, don’t you think? Less chance to pass germs through the knuckles as opposed to the palms.”

“I never thought of a handshake as a sanitation issue.” Byron settled himself into his seat, touching the cool surface of his water glass. “I’ve always tried to be a student of handshakes.
I once thought you might be able to predict character through a handshake. Didn’t they teach us that at school? For example, the wet handshake is the sign of the nervous and deceitful, or so I once thought. Handshake style tells you nothing about a person’s character, I’ve learned. And the fist bump probably tells you even less.”

A waiter in his sixties approached the table. “Mr. Spencer, nice to see you, sir. Diet Coke?”

“Sure, Juan. Byron?”

“Just water, thanks.” When the waiter turned away, Byron said, “Remember, Sandy, when we started out in the seventies everybody ordered martinis at lunch?”

“Now we immediately send a lawyer who has a martini at lunch to rehab.”

“Hell, Sandy, I’m so with it these days that I not only know what a fist bump is, but I’ve heard of things like ‘dirty martinis.’”

“The Generation Z drink? My youngest daughter loves to just toss around the words ‘dirty martini.’ Better she says that than ‘dirty sex.’”

Byron casually asked, “Helena is already in college?”

Sandy was surprised that Byron remembered the name of his youngest daughter—Sandy had four children, and Byron had last been among the members of Sandy’s family at a Christmas party almost eight years earlier. But Sandy Spencer knew Byron was an immensely talented lawyer for many reasons, including a prodigious memory. “In fact, Byron, she just finished.”

“What does she plan to do? Graduate school? One of those British gap years? The Marines?”

“Now that would be a learning experience for her.”

Byron, touching the beads of water that clung to the surface of his water glass, said, “Sandy, why are we here?”

Sandy Spencer had developed the skill of gracefully adjusting to any turn in a conversation. Hearing the unexpected, abrupt edge in Byron’s tone, Sandy calmly said, “I know you never liked this place, Byron. You showed real sportsmanship down through the years in getting through places like this, lunches with clients, firm parties, Christmas parties, and the box at Yankee Stadium.”

“And let’s not forget the long weekends at conventions for federal judges that I always attended, the judicial conferences. It still beggars my mind that these federal judges let us pick up the tabs for weekends at golf resorts and that we all expect that no one would accuse us, or them, of buying and selling favors.”

Sandy smiled. “Those conferences, Byron, are for the purpose of fostering collegiality among the members of the judiciary and the lawyers who appear before them. Isn’t that the fact?”

Byron laughed. “A weekend of golf and tennis at the Sagamore fosters lots of things. Collegiality might be one of them. I don’t hear of many federal judges who spend collegial weekends with lawyers at the Legal Aid Society playing stickball in East Harlem.”

Sandy’s face, as if on cue, became serious. “Byron, I owe something to you. And that’s the ability to be direct. We had a partners’ meeting last night. A vote of ninety percent of the partners was needed to vote your expulsion from the firm. And at least ninety-five percent of the partners voted to do that.”

A system-wide pulse of emotion throbbed through Byron. He wondered whether that surge of blood was fear, or anger, or resentment, or shame. “And you called me here to tell me this?”