Extraordinary Rendition (24 page)

“You’re making this up as you go along.”

“You really need to talk to us. Hal Rana wants me to let you know that he’s waiting for you.”

“Why are you here? Rana knows my number.”

“It’s procedure, Mr. Johnson, that agents first approach the target.”

Target
. That was a special word, as well defined and dangerous as a stiletto. In the special parlance of federal criminal law, it designated a person who was almost certain to be indicted. There was a simple ranking system, as in the Army, except with fewer levels. Target was the top rank. Below that rank was the subject, a person who had a fifty-fifty chance of indictment. The next rank was person of interest, and below that was the witness. But it was a system that was also like chess—a subject could rise quickly to the rank of target, just as a person of interest could rise to the rank of subject. But the person who was the target rarely fell in rank to a subject. A target was, in essence, a marked person.

Byron had learned from his austere aristocratic father that
compose yourself
was the central message of manhood, as in the Kipling line about never losing your head while all about you
are losing theirs and blaming it on you. Byron stood almost chest to chest with Tom Nashatka.

“Why don’t you tell me,” Byron asked, “anything else you think I should know.”

“Sure, Mr. Johnson. We think you’ve been carrying messages in aid of terrorism.”

Byron let slip his anger. “You’re a hell of a messenger boy yourself, aren’t you?”

“We’re trying to help you, Mr. Johnson. That’s the basic message Hal Rana wants me to carry to you.”

Compose yourself
, Byron thought again, almost uttering the words.
Steady
. “Thank you,” Byron said, turning to walk west on Spring Street. Cold sunlight fell diagonally through the intricate pattern of iron fire escapes attached to the upper surfaces of the old buildings. The intricate grille-work of shadow and light.

Byron Johnson walked into a Starbucks, entered the bathroom, locked the door, and vomited into the sink.

S
IMEON BLACK MAINTAINED WHAT he called a “slush fund” in which he consistently kept at least fifty thousand dollars in cash to cover the expenses of researching and writing his articles. Virtually all of the money in the account came from expenses advanced by the magazines and newspapers and more recently from online publications willing to pay for articles from a legendary Pulitzer Prize winner who had been able to develop and evolve with the times. After the award-winning stories on Vietnam, he had moved on to journalism about the influence of oil companies on the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, the hostage taking in Iran that ended on the day when the vacuous Reagan was inaugurated, the Iran-Contra episode in the mid-1980s, the murders in Bosnia in the 1990s, and now the wars that had followed the September 11 attacks. Simeon Black was a journalist, not a historian; but he liked hearing himself compared to Thucydides, who wrote about the Peloponnesian War as it happened—in effect, the first journalist.

He had used his fund over the last several months to track and investigate Byron Carlos Johnson and to follow the paths of the information Byron gave him.

His favorite investigator was Duke Churchill, a retired FBI agent who was capable of such routine work as tracking license plates—still essential gumshoe work even in an age of cyberspace—and arranging to extract the entire contents
of a personal computer, like a medieval golem seizing a person’s soul. Simeon’s assignment to Duke was to get the name of the man whose picture Byron had taken on the border of Washington Square Park. The only information Simeon conveyed to Duke was the cell phone picture of the startled man and the name by which Ali Hussein knew him,
Jesse Ventura
. Simeon had his doubts that even Duke could deliver on such slender sources.

It took two hours for Duke to send an email message. “Andrew Hurd, (202) 793-9242. Not clear what agency. Major player. Be careful.”

Duke charged only six hundred dollars for that information. Simeon had many thousands left in the fund. He wanted to know more before he placed a call to Andrew Hurd’s cell phone and was willing to pay for it. “Follow him around,” Simeon told Duke. “Let me know the people he sees, how he spends his time, that kind of thing. Get me some pictures of him and his friends.”

Duke admired Simeon, and in turn Simeon, despite his long history of investigating and criticizing generals, politicians, and presidential candidates and uncovering the crimes and frauds of men in power, enjoyed the errant rogue in this former FBI agent. They only rarely met face to face. When they spoke, they used public pay phones, because calls involving pay phones were difficult to intercept or trace. Street-level drug dealers had learned that long ago. As pay phones began finally to vanish from the world—the Superman-style booths were long-lost relics, and even the open-air phones were steadily disappearing—they more and more often used the land lines in their homes, old technology much more
accessible to modern forms of interception. It concerned Simeon that land lines were unreliable, but cell phones and email were as easily overheard as shouts on a street.

Just five days later, Simeon’s computer emitted the sound of small cymbals that signaled the arrival of an email. At the moment the cymbals chimed, he had his back to the laptop as he edited the close-to-final version of his article for the
Atlantic
magazine on Byron Carlos Johnson, Ali Hussein, and the terror inflicted on Ali Hussein by an elusive American agent known to his victim as
Jesse Ventura
. Although adept and skillful with computers for what he called an “old man,” Simeon still clung nostalgically to some of the tools and habits he learned during his early years in journalism: he edited a printed copy of the article with a sharp blue pencil. He used a small, toy-like metal sharpener. He loved the odor of the curling pieces of pencil wood. It was as satisfying for him as tending the garden of his summer house in Columbia County in upstate New York.

So it may have taken ten minutes after hearing the computer’s cymbal chime before he rose from the reverie-like trance of his work. He rotated in the wooden swivel chair he had taken with him from his dormitory at Harvard to many apartments over the years until he finally came to rest in his cluttered, companionable apartment on Waverly Place. The chair squeaked. It was a sound that mystified and annoyed people with whom he was speaking on the telephone, particularly on the speaker phone he often used so that his hands could be free to write. An editor once sent him a can of oil.

Simeon opened the email from the screen name
[email protected]
. It was Duke Churchill’s
nom de guerre.
It was also the name of the tough Marine who overmastered the Senate with his unflappable testimony at the Iran-Contra hearings. The email read “See pictures below,” and Simeon moved the arrow to the
Download
box, pressed the trackball, and watched as the screen’s tiny gloved hand opened a series of pictures.

There were ten pictures. In each of them, the common element was Andrew Hurd. And in each picture there were other people, several of them young women. The pictures had obviously all been taken over the last several days, since they were all set outdoors, and the background in each picture was the weather of late fall, the weather of the last few days: gusty rain.

Simeon recognized one of the young women in the pictures. He had seen the face many times on television. He was not only a devoted daily reader of newspapers and magazines, but he also kept two televisions on constantly in his office, tuned to CNN and Fox. He was a prolific provider of information, and a voracious consumer of it.

It took only seconds for Simeon to conjure up her name. She was the woman, Kimberly Smith, who appeared on CNN, Fox, and other networks. Simeon thought of her as the Ann Coulter of Islamic reporting: with flair and a shake of her blonde hair, she once said that Islamic terrorists were “religious garbage.” Kimberly was Sarah Palin with brains, but just as silly and dangerous. The “religious garbage” comment was so odd, so forceful, and so pandering to right-wing audiences that Simeon had even made an entry of it in the notes he made and kept of daily events, references, and quotes.

Like all old-fashioned reporters, Simeon was fearless and direct about his work. As soon as he recognized Kimberly Smith in the vivid pictures that Duke had taken, he went to the Stanford University website and found her email address and telephone number. He intended to ask her why a Stanford professor and network talking head would be walking into a building in Manhattan at some point in the last five days with a man who was a torturer.

Simeon placed the call to Palo Alto. A cultured, British-accented voice said, “This is Dr. Smith’s office.”

“I’m trying to reach her.”

“Who may I say is calling?” she asked.

“Simeon Black.”

He was put on hold. It often happened that his name was its own calling card. He was as famous as any print journalist in the world, and he sensed that someone like Kimberly Smith would know who he was.

Kimberly’s confident voice came on the line: “Mr. Black, what can I do for you?”

“Professor, thanks for taking my call.”

“When the legendary Simeon Black calls, who wouldn’t answer?”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m working on a story about enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Her bright, strong voice rang out. “Hope you’re writing a manual on how to do them.”

Simeon, leaning back in his creaking wooden chair, joined in her laugh. There were not many people in the world, Simeon Black thought, who would pull his leg. People either feared him or were eager to please him.

“Actually, I need to ask you about Andrew Hurd.”

She had learned from all of her work on live television that there should never be dead time between question and answer. But there was some dead time before she said, “And who is Andrew Hurd?”

“He’s a federal agent who was with you four days ago in Manhattan.”

“Mr. Black, if you have questions, why not put them in an email?”

And then her side of the call went silent: the technological equivalent of the curtain falling.

Simeon smiled as he pressed the
End
button on his cell phone. He had no intention of writing an email to her. He had her picture. He had this abrupt conversation. For now, that was all he needed.

B
YRON CARLOS JOHNSON TOUCHED Christina’s face, amazed as always at her skin’s softness.

“Your friend Special Agent Nashatka came to see me.”

They were in the Athens coffee shop on West 113th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The noisy and convivial place was filled with Columbia students. The steamy air was redolent with the odor of hamburgers and french fries and the faint scent of black coffee. Across Amsterdam Avenue was the immense and unfinished mass of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Against its Gothic front doors, homeless men and women had set up a cardboard village.

“What did he want?”

“To tell me I had become a rich man.”

Christina loved his playful moods. In the months they had been together, the reserved Byron—the Byron whose formal tension she had sensed when she approached him in the Central Park Zoo at the SpencerBlake summer party—had evolved into a man who made her laugh.

“How so?”

“It was my Michael Anthony moment.”

“Michael who?”

“Michael Anthony. In the 1950s, long before you were born, there was a television series called
The Millionaire
. Every week a very rich man, John Beresford Tipton, would
call Michael Anthony into his library and give him the name of a man or woman on whom he wanted to bestow a million dollars, a fortune then. Mr. Tipton, a recluse, would hand a check for the million to Mike. Mike would smile at Mr. Tipton, slip the check into his suit jacket, and go out to find the lucky and totally unsuspecting man or woman who was to become the next millionaire. Mr. Tipton had an almost sadistic interest in seeing how a million dollars would screw up someone’s life. And Mike Anthony was the cordial emissary who delivered the check. The lives of the lucky winners never turned out well.”