Extraordinary Rendition (23 page)

But Byron didn’t want to think about his father now. All that mayhem and intrigue was decades earlier, and his father was dead. Even on a cold day, the air over the reservoir was warm in the early afternoon sunlight. Above the reservoir three seagulls, widely separated, rose and descended on invisible currents of wind; they were absolutely white against the bluest possible sky.

Byron and Christina stood against the low railing that encircled the reservoir; it had replaced the dreary chain-link fence that had surrounded the reservoir for many years. Suddenly, she said, “Carlos, some guy stopped me today. He asked questions about you.”

Byron glanced down from the point in the sky where one of the seagulls floated on extended wings. A speck of dazzling white against absolute blue. He looked into Christina’s face. “So tell me about it.”

“I’m worried.”

“Maybe I’ll be, too. But I can’t be until I know more.”

Runners swept behind them on the cinderblock path. They heard the strained breathing and the pounding of feet. “Let’s walk, Carlos.”

“Come on, Brighteyes. You sound as though you had a visitation from the golem.”

“I was leaving Low Library. Halfway down the steps, a big blond guy said, ‘Ms. Rosario.’ We were right next to the alma mater statue. I stopped. ‘Can I help you?’ I said. I used that haughty voice.”

“I know that voice.” Byron, sensing her anxiety, was trying to put her at ease. But he, too, was anxious.

“He said, ‘I need to speak to you about Byron Johnson.’ I walked quickly. I said, ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’ He didn’t go away. We were walking toward the gates on Broadway. He said you were the target of a grand jury investigation. And that I was a person of interest, a subject. He told me it was very likely you would be indicted.”

Even though he showed his instinctive stoicism, Byron sensed that surge of fear and anxiety that made his knees feel as if they had lost their bone structure and muscle: they melted.

“That’s crazy,” he said. “Who was this guy?”

“A strange name.
Nashatka. Special Agent Nashatka
. He seemed to enjoy the sound of his name. He gave me his card.”

To steady himself, he took her hand. They were in the shadow of one of the three stone pump houses, built during the Civil War, that stood at the reservoir’s edge. He placed his free hand against the cool, gray, ancient stone blocks. “He must have said something else.”

“Sure, that I would have to testify to the grand jury.”

“Did he say when?”

“At that point he handed me a grand jury subpoena. I left it at the apartment. Soon. I have to go soon. Next Thursday, I think.”

They turned and left the reservoir. As they approached the bridle path, two elegant riders, a man and a woman, galloped by on big horses. Their hooves thundered, the air vibrated as they passed. Huge, intense animals.

“What should I do, Carlos?”

“You’re a law student. You know the answer. You have to go.”

“Why shouldn’t I take the Fifth and not answer?”

He put his arm around her waist. She was still sweating from their run. She was so close to him that he could smell the residue of sweat mixed with the faint scent of perfume. He said, “Because you haven’t done anything wrong. You can’t take the Fifth unless you have a reason to believe your answer will incriminate you.”

She hesitated. “What about the money, Carlos?”

“Money?”

“He asked if you kept large amounts of cash.”

“Don’t I wish.”

“He asked if I could get copies of your bank statements, brokerage accounts, receipts for safe deposit boxes.”

He laughed. “I’ll pull them together for you so you can give them to him. He’ll see I’m fast running out of money.”

“Carlos, I’m worried. Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

“And not to me either, Christina.”

They left the park at West 86th Street and Central Park West. Streams of yellow taxis flowed uptown and downtown on the avenue, using all four lanes. In front of them, the monumental canyon formed by the rows of apartment buildings on 86th Street ran west to the Hudson. Now that they had left the
park, the afternoon air seemed to have turned more chill. The beautiful skin of Christina’s right arm was suddenly prickly. Byron rubbed her arm, as if to warm her.

“Let’s grab a taxi,” Byron said. “It’s too far to run back home.”

In the loose rear seat of the old taxi, Byron slid close to her. He took her hand, which had been resting on the cracked vinyl of the seat cushion. A bright panel with a television screen was embedded in the back of the front seat, an innovation of the city’s corporate mayor that must have earned millions of dollars for whatever company made these devices and installed them. The screen had bright graphics. A local news reporter was talking, a montage of soldiers in Afghanistan behind him. They were American soldiers dressed in what looked to Byron like space suits—goggles, miner’s lights on their helmets, bulky bulletproof vests that made them resemble puffed-up action figures, all that technological apparatus.

Ahead of them were the rows of traffic lights leading uptown along Central Park West. There were mothers with their young children on the sidewalks. Runners jogged across the avenue into and out of the park. Bright banners advertising the Museum of Natural History hung from the lamp poles. To their right were the tall walls of granite that underlay the northern reaches of the park. The granite walls were coal-colored.

“Christina, we don’t need to stay together. You don’t need all this in your life.”

The taxi turned left off Central Park West at 96th Street. Just as it completed the sweeping turn, a car decorated with Puerto Rican flags made a U-turn across the four lanes of the street just in front of them. The taxi slowed abruptly, and
Byron instinctively put out his arm to brace his hand against the partition and with his other arm kept Christina from jolting forward. Byron glanced at the taxi driver’s license taped to the partition. His name was
Ali Hussein
.

As they settled back into the seat, Christina, without looking at him, said, “I can’t do that, Carlos. I love you.”

Those words from this beautiful young woman—this woman with whom he could lie awake late into the night talking about books, the day’s events, the movies they regularly went to see, and the years he had passed as a boy moving from country to country—caused a rush of hot emotion to course through his body and mind.

“I love you, too.”

Christina squeezed his hand. He leaned against her and kissed the salty skin on her shoulder.

I
T WAS WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, almost winter now. Byron walked on the worn cobblestones in the middle of Greene Street in Soho. Double-parked delivery trucks had brought all traffic on the narrow street to a standstill. Sunlight shone on the smooth stones of the street and threw into etched relief the iron facades on the old industrial buildings on both sides. At street level, each building housed expensive stores, all filled with bright light and mostly bare interiors. The international glitter in what had not long ago been a warehouse district:
Givenchy, Tse, Polo
.

Byron loved these long walks on weekday afternoons through parts of Manhattan in which he had literally never set foot. Several weeks earlier, he had remembered a line from the first chapter of
Moby Dick
, which he had read as a twelve-year-old during a long summer on the coast of Maine with his aunt and uncle; it was early in the first chapter when Ishmael is speaking to the readers and tells them:
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon
. Over the last six weeks he had walked through the streets of Soho—Greene Street, Broome Street, West Broadway; through the wide areas on West Fourteenth Street where there were still trolley car rails embedded in the pavement, as faint as chalk lines; and through the cozy companionable neighborhoods around Christopher Street, Perry Street, and Bank Street in the West Village.

Byron now thought of the years he had spent in Manhattan, and of his life, as carpet-bombing. The weaponry of the bombing was his work. It dominated virtually everything from the day he arrived in Manhattan. From the outset he was vigorous, engaged and driven. For many years he loved the work, and loved the traveling across the country, as well as to Europe and Asia, for clients. He had far more interest in the issues he dealt with and the people—clients, judges, witnesses—he encountered than in the money.

In fact, the money for him was almost invisible. His large income simply flowed by electronic transfer from the firm’s bank account into his own bank account. Without his even counting it, the money paid for the Fifth Avenue apartment where he lived with his wife and children, the upkeep on the second house in Maine, and his children’s school tuition. For many years he worked six days a week; he relished the quiet Saturday mornings or Sunday afternoons in the office. Each week he played squash on Wednesday afternoon, and this was his regular break from work. And for years he had gone each Thursday night to the opera or symphony in Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. In the long years of his marriage, his wife Joan went with him, often in the company of some of the other faculty members who taught with her at NYU.

And finally, in the last six months the long, all-consuming engagement with work was suspended. There was only so much effort he could devote to Ali Hussein’s ordeal—a finite amount of time to spend meeting with him, reading background materials, preparing briefs and motions, and handling telephone calls from random people, most of them obvious cranks, who wanted him to believe they had information he
vitally needed, or to abuse him. He couldn’t spend all of his days with Christina Rosario. She was in class from nine every morning until noon and then, in the afternoon, in the wood-paneled, frayed offices of the law review.

So he took to the streets to fill the extra time he now had. On the three or four days each week when he went on his long walks, he picked the neighborhoods based on the names he had heard for years: Soho, the Meat Packing District, the East Village, and Morningside Heights. He was a prodigious walker. He spent at least three hours crisscrossing each neighborhood, often walking down the same streets several times because Manhattan was, in fact, a small island, and the legendary neighborhoods were even smaller. He stopped at each bookstore, usually the vast, shiny Barnes & Noble stores, where tall posters of famous writers (Twain, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut) hung from the ceilings. He drank iced coffee in the Starbucks enclave in each store, surrounded by scruffy kids bent over their laptops. Less often, because there were far fewer of them, he stopped in the small bookstores that had managed to survive. In those stores he made it a point to buy books, which he always arranged to have shipped to either his apartment or Christina’s because he didn’t want anything to encumber his hands as he continued his free-wheeling walking.

At the congested intersection of Greene and Spring, Byron waited for the light to change in his favor. At first he didn’t notice the dark blue Chevy sedan with tinted windows that gradually came to a halt near him. When he focused on it, he guessed, correctly, that the oversize tires without hubcaps meant that it was a government-owned vehicle. As
soon as the door opened on the passenger side of the front seat, Byron realized that the man leaving the car was there for him. Another man rose from the back seat. They were both blond. Byron glanced into the car to see if Jesse Ventura was there. He wasn’t. The man closest to him had a gold earring in his left ear lobe, in total contrast to the blue sport jacket, white shirt, blue pants, and penny loafers he wore. His head was completely shaven.

“Mr. Johnson.”

Byron faced him. He forced himself to look composed. And in that moment he realized he had seen this man before, in the courtroom gallery and in Justin Goldberg’s chambers.

“Let me guess,” Byron said. “You are Agent Nashatka.”

“That’s right.”

“And where is Jesse Ventura?”

Tom Nashatka was unfazed. His training for this work had taught him that at times the appearance of politeness, restraint, and deference was appropriate. “Why don’t we walk toward West Broadway?”

“Why don’t we not do that?”

“That’s fine, sir; we can talk here.”

Young men and women passed by them. This area of the city, Byron knew, belonged to the young.

“Your call,” Byron said.

“Fifty-two million dollars came into your bank account yesterday afternoon, by wire. Two hours later, fifty-two million dollars flew away, also by wire.”

“You need to say that again. Slowly.”

“Mr. Johnson, you need to talk to us. You need to tell us what you know.”

“You need to tell me what you know. Don’t talk fantasies with me.”

“Sure, Mr. Johnson. You have a checking account with the Private Wealth Management Division at Chase. A wire transfer from the Royal Bank of Canada arrived at 7:52 last night. It was there until 9:55. Then it was sent, intact and in full, to the Bank of the Caribbean in the Turks and Caicos. And three hours ago it flowed again to Norde Bank in Iceland. And from there it’s vanished.”