Extraordinary Rendition (22 page)

Without speaking, the man gave a hard, deliberately insincere smile as Byron turned away and left the brown lobby.

Waverly Place—tree-lined, orderly, and quietly beautiful—was empty. Rain still fell. Water ran along the old gutters and pooled at each sewer, congested with fallen leaves. The Three Lives Bookstore had just opened for the day. In its warm interior, a young woman with purple hair sat near the cash register, head bowed, reading. There were no customers in the store.

Just inside the front door of the townhouse in which Simeon Black lived, Byron pressed the intercom button. The peremptory buzzer sounded at the door, and Byron quickly pulled it open. Shaking the water off his felt hat, Byron walked up the creaking stairs. The carpeting was worn. The hallway was damp; it smelled of wet wool and soaked newspapers.

The door was unlocked. At the end of the bookshelf-lined hallway, Simeon, at his desk, lifted his right hand and waved Byron in. He was smiling. Byron had grown to feel comfortable in the shabby, scholarly aura of Simeon Black’s
apartment—it reminded him of the cozy, book-filled, and cluttered apartments of some of his bachelor professors at Princeton. Even though it was the 1960s, those genteel men actually still wore tweedy blazers with elbow patches. They were literate and kind, and they seemed completely at ease in a style of life that would soon end, in fact had already ended without their knowing it.

And now, in Simeon’s old-world, immensely attractive apartment, Byron, taking off his raincoat and draping it on a standing hat rack, felt a sudden uneasiness. Those professors at Princeton—all certainly dead by now—had only wished Byron and the other students well. They were intelligent, privileged, and kind. They had no agenda other than to live out their lives in the austere luxury of Princeton, and to accomplish that, all they had to do was teach and, if they could, write books of literary criticism, history, or, in one case, a wildly successful novel about a year at a New England prep school.

But, as Byron knew, Simeon was not a kindly professor, and his mission was not to move Byron safely forward in life. Simeon was a reporter. He had written about Army generals and politicians who had waged a secret war. Simeon had named the killers in his books and articles. He had once uncovered the secret financial life of a House of Representatives Democrat who, not long after Simeon’s articles appeared, shot himself in the head in his office. Byron had recently read, because he was now skilled at finding information in the deep recesses of Google, Yahoo, and Bing, that the man’s seventeen-year-old daughter had naively begged Simeon not to publish the articles about her father. Byron also knew the old adage
about dealing with reporters:
Those who ride the tiger’s back might end up in the tiger’s stomach
.

Simeon reached over the clutter on his desk and shook Byron’s hand. He assumed Byron had come to describe what had happened two days earlier, when Ali Hussein testified at the secret hearings in a sealed courtroom about years of physical and emotional torture, the mind-numbing pain of total isolation, and the persistent demon who had followed him for years.
Jesse Ventura
.

Byron held the gleaming disk. “I want you to make a copy of this, Sy. What’s that called? Burn the CD.”

“What is it?

“It’s the transcript of the hearings, word for word. And the video.”

Simeon knew that, as Ali Hussein’s lawyer, Byron had a legitimate right to have the disk, but he had no right to give it away.

Byron handed the disk to Simeon. He inserted it into the slot at the side of his computer. They could both hear the whirring hum as it was replicated.

“Is the hearing over?”

“It is.”

“When will the judge make his decision?”

“Don’t know.” Byron smiled. “He may never make it. It’s an old trick some judges use. Never ruling. Remember, these federal judges are our modern royalty. They have lifetime appointments. That literally means they stay until they die. And the truth is they can do, or not do, whatever they want. One of those stupid lawyers’ jokes is this: ‘What’s the difference between God and a federal judge? God wants to be a federal judge.’ If Goldberg never rules, then I can never appeal.”

Simeon smiled. “So, Dr. Johnson, what’s your next step?”

“Will you be my Boswell?”

“Of course, I’m already writing
Life of Johnson
.”

Rain flowed down the windows just beyond Simeon’s desk. All the leaves had been stripped from the London plane trees.

“My next step? I’m going to start insisting that the government turn over to me every videotape, report, note, plane ticket, picture, blood sample, bank record, and DNA sheet that relates in any way to Ali.”

“Talk to me about the videotapes of the torture.”

“Ali testified that cameras were often running, especially in the times when Jesse Ventura was with him.” Byron paused. “Including when he was pushed under water.”

“Waterboarded?”

“That’s what it’s called, although Ali never heard the word, since it started to be used after he was picked up. Waterboarding, it turns out, is being pushed under water. Just like fourteen-year-old boys do in school pools to twelve-year-old boys. But in this case, it’s men doing it. And it lasts longer, long after it stops feeling like a prank. A whole different order of magnitude.”

The gentle whirring inside the computer had stopped. Simeon stood up, sat on the edge of his desk, and turned the computer screen so that he and Byron could both view it. He deftly hit two keys.

And there on the screen was a scene from the hearing.

An image of Ali Hussein, in mid-sentence, emerged. Simeon Black, his voice with that edge of awe of a man winning a lottery, said, “Lordy, lordy, is that him? Your client?” There were no known pictures of Ali before or after he was taken down.

Arms folded, Byron stood behind Simeon as they both gazed at the screen. “The one and only.”

“You know, sightings of these men are rare.”

“He’s a man, Sy, not an egret.”

Simeon grunted. He was excited. He pressed a practiced finger on the volume key, and as if out of nowhere, Ali Hussein’s soft and precise voice rose to high volume.

Byron’s voice, well-modulated and intelligent, spoke in the background: “And you have no idea where the room was, is that right, Mr. Hussein?”

“It was in a hot place. Far from Germany. The flight from Bonn took two hours.”

“Can you describe the room, sir?”

“A hotel room. More like a motel room. The window had a steel plate that covered all of it. There was a double bed. No door between the bedroom and the bathroom. A painting of an oasis nailed to the wall over the bed. No television. No phone. A motel-style desk.”

“How do you know it was a hot country?”

“The air conditioning unit blew out warm air. Along the edges of the steel plate on the window there was always a glare from the outside. It must have been very bright outside, always. As if there was a desert out there.”

“Did anyone visit you?”

“Visit? Visit means a pleasant thing, Mr. Johnson. I expect visits from friends.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

“There were always two men in the room with me. Day and night.”

“Did they speak to you?”

“Never. And I never said a word to them.”

“They were in the room when you slept?”

“Not the same two men. There were six or eight men. They were there in shifts.”

“What else happened?”

“I was naked all the time. No sheets on the bed. I couldn’t cover myself, or hide any part of my body. I couldn’t take the towels out of the bathroom. I didn’t have pillows or a sheet, so I could never cover any part of my body. Exposed. In the middle of the night I shivered, even though the air conditioning was weak. And the men watched me all the time.”

“How long were you in that room?

“I don’t know. Weeks, I think. I never heard a sound from outside the room. I don’t think there was anyone else in the motel.”

“Did anyone hit you when you were there?”

“No.”

“Did anyone push you under water while you were there?”

“No.”

“Did anyone keep you awake all day?”

Simeon pressed a key on the computer, and the image paused. On the frozen screen Ali Hussein appeared calmly attentive. In that image he was gazing directly into the camera.

Simeon said, “Byron, are you sure you want to leave this with me?”

“Why, don’t you want it? It’s what you’ve been asking me for.”

“I do.” Simeon lit a cigarette and inhaled. The smoke almost immediately flowed from his nostrils. “But you have to be worried about what might happen to you.”

“I can’t make any prediction about that. In the last couple of months I’ve learned that every day is a new adventure.”

“My editors will want to use these pictures of him. It’s proof that he exists.”

“Let me also tell you this, Sy. You may want to use this information, or not. Ali is a sweet man. At first he was nervous and suspicious and guarded. When he first met me in Miami, I was the only non-hostile face he had encountered in years, but he didn’t trust me. Over time I’ve learned that he is thoughtful. I look forward to meeting with him.”

Simeon took a fresh unfiltered Gauloise from the cellophane-covered package. He pressed the tip of his cigarette he was finishing against the tip of the new one.
The handing of the torch
, Byron thought.

“Let me ask you this,” Simeon said. “What did he do?”

“Do you mean is he guilty? Did he launder money? Move millions and millions of dollars around the world so that the bad guys could buy AK47s, M-16s?”

Simeon smiled. “Something like that.”

Byron smiled in return. “I don’t have a fucking idea.”

C
HRISTINA ROSARIO WAS A strong runner. In the months during which she had been Byron Carlos Johnson’s lover, she had brought him time and again on long runs in Riverside Park, on the footpath’s curving lanes overlooking the Hudson River, in the beautiful arteries of roadways in Central Park, and sometimes as far upriver as the looming George Washington Bridge.

Christina wasn’t surprised that Byron quickly evolved into a strong and effortless runner. He had played squash for years in the upper floors of the University Club, that old-world bastion of privilege at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, and he had stamina, grace, and strength even though he had never been a dedicated runner.

And the runs with her were fun. Byron often said to her, “Get ahead of me. I love watching your beautiful ass.” They had developed a custom of stopping at the Boat House when they ran in Central Park. They would order hot chocolates and take them to the iron chairs on the flagstone plaza overlooking the lake or sit on the massive granite boulder in front of the building as they watched other runners, roller-bladers, cyclists, and walkers moving on the slopes of East Drive.

The November sunlight glinted on the surface of the reservoir. After their stop at the Boat House, they ran on the cinder path that encircled the reservoir. The path was more than a mile long. Byron remembered the reservoir and the cinder
path from his early teens, when he had lived for a year with his mother’s sister in her Park Avenue apartment while his father was on a mission to Saigon, before the war began its grim escalation.

Byron later learned that his father for that year had been temporarily assigned to the CIA from the State Department and had prepared secret reports that Byron saw for the first time in the late 1990s, when the government had suddenly released all classified material from the Vietnam era. In those meticulously written reports, typed on onion-skin on a Smith-Corona, his father had detailed the assassinations of Vietnamese suspected of working for the Vietminh and the Viet Cong. They were called action reports or after-action reports, depending on whether they described events that had already happened or were planned.

Byron was profoundly disturbed. There were descriptions of South Vietnamese politicians and military officers who were considered “impediments to success of the mission” and details of how they were to be killed. His father had written reports on villages whose populations were to be relocated because the villages were “impaired.” There were “scenarios” for the bombing of North Vietnamese targets. At the bottom of each report—each written with the precision and clarity that set the tone for everything his father did and said—his father’s signature was unmistakable, even though Byron had wished they were unsigned so that he could deny to himself that his father had prepared them. Byron was a man who understood the logic of evidence: this evidence showed that his father was a murderer just as certainly as a Mafia don who ordered a hit. Byron, after reading those reports, had burned
them. But he could only burn and eradicate his own copies. The reports were in the public domain. Recent books on the history of Vietnam mentioned the reports and his father. The reports were described as what they were—“testaments to and plans for murder.” Even the generally flattering biography of his father on Wikipedia had been altered to identify him as one of the profoundly misguided “best and brightest” who had callously manufactured and mismanaged that insane, useless war.