Extraordinary Rendition (4 page)

Almost involuntarily, he glanced over his shoulder. She was in profile, talking to the wife of another partner. Byron registered her entire body—the black hair, the perfect profile, the simple dress draped alluringly over her, and her slender legs. Around her slim left ankle was the distinct tattoo of a bracelet.

Sandy’s real first name wasn’t Sandy. It was Halliburton. He was Halliburton Spencer IV. He was the chairman of the firm. Tall, slender, sandy-haired, and impeccably dressed, he was the grandson of one of the founders of the firm. Although Sandy was to the manor born—his parents had an apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met and Central Park, he had spent the first seven years of his schooling at Collegiate in Manhattan before he graduated from Phillips Exeter, Yale, and Yale Law School—he was charming, easygoing, almost impossible to dislike. He had been able over the last three years to tell Byron that his share of the partnership profits was declining—from
three million each year to one and a half million—so soothingly that Byron, who had done nothing to resist the cutting of the percentages that accounted for a partner’s pay, had simply told Sandy that of course he understood. “It’s part of the arc of a partner’s career,” Byron had said, although Sandy, who was only four years older than Byron, had a career arc that continued to increase his pay every year.

Sandy disengaged himself from a group of people near the festive archway where clowns were entertaining the children. Multi-colored balloons swayed in the air. Sandy was a master of working any crowd, but there was nothing unctuous about him. “Byron,” he said, “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

Sandy was as tall as Byron, and they were among the tallest men in the firm. They had known each other for twenty-five years. “I’m not that much of a recluse yet,” Byron said.

“Even Thoreau left Walden every day to visit Emerson in Concord.”

“I think the firm would really benefit, Sandy, if the next lecture was on Thoreau and Emerson instead of marketing and networking.”

“Networking.” Sandy paused. “Awful word, isn’t it?”

Byron said, “It’s an even more atrocious concept.”

Effortlessly Sandy turned to a new topic. “How was your escapade in Miami?”

“Frustrating. I had a total of thirty minutes with him.”

Five days earlier Byron had sent an email to Sandy and the six other members of the executive committee simply announcing that he’d been approached to represent an accused terrorist brought from a foreign prison to the United States to
be indicted and tried. He wrote that he had decided that he would represent the man, if the man in fact asked him. Byron didn’t request that this be treated as a
pro bono
assignment, which would have required him to get approval from yet a different committee so that he could list the hours he spent as though they were time devoted to a paying client. Part of his annual income depended on the number of hours he billed to paying clients or to approved
pro bono
cases. No one had responded to his email.

“What’s he charged with?” Sandy asked as casually as if asking what Byron’s golf handicap was.

“I don’t know yet. This new regime fascinates me. A man is held in limbo in detention for years. Now he’s been in a United States prison for weeks. Publicity about it everywhere. Even the president commenting on it. And the man still doesn’t know what he’s charged with.”

“What’s his name again?”

“Ali Hussein.”

“Doesn’t sound real. It’s a name right out of
A Thousand and One Arabian Nights
.”

“Sandy, he’s not living a fairy tale. He’s real.”

Dozens of small birds, black against the deepening blue-black screen of the evening sky, swept over the zoo. Sandy said, “I think you can assume that he’s not charged with littering the sidewalk.”

“That didn’t appear to be what the CIA and the Justice Department had in mind when they called me into the U.S. Attorney’s Office so they could do a ranting-and-raving routine today.”

“So that’s where you were this afternoon? How did it go?”

Byron was annoyed that someone had taken account of his absence. But he masked his annoyance. “It wasn’t exactly a dialogue. It was a classic Mussolini-on-the-balcony scene.”

“It’s been a long time, Byron, since you did any criminal work.”

Byron’s first job out of law school was a two-year stint at the Justice Department. He had been assigned to criminal cases as an assistant to more senior lawyers. It was an era when a short tenure at the Department was considered a credential that, for the chosen few, followed graduation from certain New England prep schools, prestigious colleges, and elite law schools and preceded the passage to big law firms. It was exactly the trajectory Byron’s career had followed, and until now he’d never resisted it.

“Cases are cases, Sandy. There’s one side, there’s the other side. There’s one version of the facts, there is another version of the facts. Or several versions, sometimes all true, more or less. The law that applies is usually pretty simple, certainly the law’s no Jesuitical mystery, no matter how hard we want people outside of this business to believe it is. Cases start, they move forward, and they come to an end, all in the fullness of time.”

“Speaking of time, Byron, have you thought about how much time you’ll spend on this?”

“Not at all. It’s like any other case in that way, too, Sandy. It takes whatever time it takes. It may take no more time than the hours I’ve already put into it. Ali Hussein may decide he doesn’t want me to represent him.”

“I doubt that, Byron. You’re skillful, you’re dedicated, you’re respected all around the country—”

“And I’m free, Sandy.”

Streams of multi-colored rockets began to rise, hissing, from reedy poles placed all around the zoo. It was a dazzling display. The firm had all the resources in the world: it could spend thousands of dollars to rent the Central Park Zoo; it could bring together popular bands; it could assemble caterers, magicians, and entertainers; and it could stage fireworks.

Sandy waved his glass at the display of sparks, the expanse of the zoo, the skyline of the grand buildings along Fifth Avenue. “Nothing is free, Byron. You know that.”

Not answering, Byron looked up at the fireworks and, beyond them, the black heights of the park’s ancient trees. During the years he was married to Joan, he had lived in an apartment three blocks from the zoo, at Fifth Avenue and 65th Street. He had never lived as long anywhere else in the world: his father was a career officer in the Foreign Service who never stayed more than four years in any post, and as a child Byron Carlos Johnson had lived in New York City, Mexico City, West Berlin, and Washington, DC. At thirteen he was sent to Groton and, during the four years he spent there, he saw his patrician father and aristocratic Mexican mother eight times, never for more than three weeks each time. He knew even then that there was no real relationship between him and his parents; they were acquaintances, and something about the world in which he grew up—an all boys’ prep school, an all-male college, and law school in the sixties and early seventies—made him believe there was nothing unusual about a family in which a boy visited his parents once or twice each year in whatever city in the world they lived at the time and spent three weeks each summer with them on Monhegan Island, just off the coast
of Maine, in the sprawling, shingled house that had been in his father’s family for ninety years. If he had ever been asked if he felt lonely, if he often wondered what his mother and his father were doing in their lives at the lonely moments he was thinking of them, he would have said
no
, and would have believed it.

Raising his martini glass as if making a toast at a wedding, Sandy said, “I’m glad you’re here, Byron. It’s important for the younger lawyers to see that the old guard is still involved.”

“When did we get to be the old guard?”

“When the young Turks started wondering what we really do.”

“What is it you think we do, Sandy?”

“We make money so that we can have these parties.”

D
ECADES HAD PASSED SINCE the 1967 and 1968 riots in Newark, yet the corner of Broad Street and Raymond Boulevard still looked devastated. Byron remembered the grainy televised images from 1968 when, at a hamburger joint on Nassau Street while he was still at Princeton, he watched news footage of burning storefronts and overturned cars in Newark during the days after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. In the fuzzy, black-and-white images on the screen, National Guard troops ran chaotically back and forth. Black men stood on the sidewalks and streets, apparently unconcerned with the presence of the tense, obviously frightened soldiers. There were trash fires, smashed store fronts, and burning police cars.

Byron traveled to Newark on the PATH train from Penn Station in Manhattan to Penn Station in this old, eternally decaying city. From the station, he walked to the intersection of Broad Street and Raymond Boulevard. The Al Sunni Mosque glowed brilliantly in the early afternoon sunlight. The crescent-moon symbol fixed at the top of the dome glinted like a curved sword, dazzling.

He saw Khalid Hussein standing near the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the mosque. Just above Khalid was a horizontal screen, at least twenty feet long, on which sentences in English were electronically displayed, moving from left to right like a zipper-message strip in Times Square. The
words
All are welcome to worship Allah
slid across the display board again and again.

Khalid was in a business suit, a somber, heavy-set man noticeably different in appearance and presence from his brother. Now that Byron had seen Ali Hussein three times, he believed there was a possibility that these two men were half-brothers.

Byron knew from his first meeting with Khalid in the diner in Union City that he didn’t shake hands. So Byron didn’t offer his hand as he said, “It’s good to see you, Khalid.”

“How is my brother?”

Byron had also learned that Khalid had zero interest in pleasantries. “Your brother’s a very unhappy man.”

Khalid’s voice was much heavier, far more determined than his brother’s. “Wait until we go inside to tell me more. I want the Imam to hear this.”

Without speaking, Byron walked at Khalid’s side toward the ornate entrance to the mosque. Khalid slipped an identity card through a slot on the fence, and the gate made a magnetic clicking noise as it disengaged from the frame. Between the fence and the mosque’s circular wall was a lush lawn, totally unique in this area of the city, where every bleak surface was either cement or tar. There were fresh, newly planted weeping willows on the lawn. As he walked, Byron touched in his pocket the piece of paper on which the night before he had written words from the ninth chapter of the
Koran
, words he had found himself reading several times on the train from Manhattan here:
Those who were left behind rejoiced at sitting still behind the messenger of Allah, and were averse to striving with their wealth and their lives in Allah’s way. And they said:
Go not forth in the heat! Say: The heat of hell is more intense of heat, if they but understood
.

Every night for the past several weeks Byron had steadily read three pages of the
Koran
, and from time to time he wrote down passages for no particular reason. Ali Hussein had recently been allowed, because Byron had persisted in asking permission for it, to have a paperback copy of the
Koran
, in English only because the government wanted to know precisely what its prisoner was reading. Byron wasn’t interested in books that interpreted or explained Islam, a subject to which he had never paid attention beyond what he’d read from time to time over the years in newspapers and magazines. Always with the instincts of a genuine student, he decided to read the
Koran
itself, without guidance, without preparation for what he might expect, and without any external explanation. What was it, he wanted to know, that this book said? More than two hundred pages into the text, he was baffled. He kept returning to earlier pages, reading out loud, underlining passages, and sometimes putting question marks in the margin. And now he had taken to writing down sentences and paragraphs. What did the words mean?
The heat of hell is more intense of heat, if they but understood
. In the two hours Byron was now allowed to spend with Ali Hussein on his trips to Miami, Ali had quoted the passage from memory, and it had taken Byron two days to find it. When he did, it was precisely as Ali Hussein had recited. Ali had even recalled the numbers of the separate books of the
Koran
, the chapter numbers within each book, and the numbers of the verse lines within each chapter that he repeated from memory.

The mosque’s interior was not as ornate as the outside walls and the bronzed, glinting dome. The inside was plain, almost utilitarian, with cinderblock walls, like a public high school cafeteria. Byron, carrying nothing, followed Hussein down a hallway. There seemed to be no other men in the building. Byron, when he had asked Hussein to make arrangements for a visit to the Imam, imagined for some reason that there would be as many guards protecting the Imam as Louis Farrakhan always seemed to have. Certainly Byron never imagined that he could simply walk through a door into the almost bare room in which the Imam sat at a simple wooden desk.