Extraordinary Rendition (6 page)

She was the one—blonde, edgy, striking—who appeared again and again on shows on CNN with Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer and on Fox with Bill O’Reilly. On television she was known as the “Islamic expert from Stanford.” The computers she and Tom used to communicate were as secure as any computers in the world; and the messages about
the
business
, as they called it, were veiled, and indecipherable to anyone who might have, through some extraordinary feat of computer expertise and intuition, intercepted them.

Just seconds after he forwarded Byron’s email, Tom’s computer screen flashed a red star that registered an incoming message from Kimberly’s BlackBerry.

“Quite the student, isn’t he?” Kimberly wrote.

For the thousandth time, he thought about the two nights he had spent with her, first in San Francisco and then at the Essex House on Central Park South where she stayed when she came to New York for her television appearances. “This is strange,” she had said the first night they were together. “I never fucked a man with an earring.”

Tom wrote, “Are you naked, Professor Smith?”

There was a twenty-second gap as she typed. Then the message arrived: “I’m on a stationary bike at the gym. Almost naked. The old faculty letches are staring at my ass.”

“I have a hard-on.”

“That’s standard issue weaponry, right?”

“Fuck you, lady.”

“In your dreams, fella.”

“When are you coming out here?”

“Check the CNN listings.”

B
YRON JOHNSON WAITED MORE than a week after Christina Rosario left the firm in mid-August to send her a tentative email. He had a right as a partner to ask the personnel office for information about her—partners, after all, owned the intangible entity known as SpencerBlake. Byron learned that Christina was in fact older than the fifty other young eager summer associates; she was thirty-four. Her appearance, her qualities—gestures, glances, reactions, her aura—were too developed for a woman in her twenties. According to the firm’s records, she’d worked in advertising at one of the very large, now lost-through-merger firms that was, when Byron was early in his own career, the archetype of the Madison Avenue advertising firm. She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Bowdoin, that college in Maine not far from where he spent parts of his summer on Monhegan Island, where no cars or trucks were allowed and people pulled their groceries and luggage on red children’s wagons from the ferry boats to their big, wood-shingled and weather-beaten homes. When he was young, Bowdoin was an all-male school. He’d considered attending it because he was attracted by the idea that it was the college from which both Hawthorne and Longfellow graduated in 1825; but his father was a Princeton graduate and the social forces that made Byron follow him there were as profound as the tides.

Christina’s email address was in the firm directory. So was her apartment address—405 West 116th Street, an immense, curved building that faced Riverside Park just two blocks from the Columbia campus. Byron found himself thinking that the building was a quick uptown drive from his apartment in Tribeca—there was no need to make the difficult passage across the island from the east side to the west. The thought was, he realized, a fantasy, a projection, a desire.

His first email message, which he sent at eleven-forty-five on a Wednesday night, wasn’t answered for a week. During that week he was often embarrassed by the note, and he tried to “unsend” it. He was mystified by that word on the computer screen: it was like reclaiming and eliminating an event, canceling a moment in the past. But he learned that since she was on a different Internet service it wasn’t possible to unsend the note. In that way, the sending of the note was like the sending of a letter in the time before the Internet—once dropped in an iron mailbox, the letter couldn’t be retrieved.

Byron’s note was simple enough: “This is Byron Johnson. I’m sorry we weren’t able to work together this summer. I guess the gods on the summer associate committee decided otherwise. Hope you enjoyed your summer with us. And that you have a good last year of law school.”

That was it, he thought, a valedictory, just a polite note from a senior partner that could easily have been sent to all of the summer associates as part of the firm’s vigorous policy of generating good relations with all these summer associates and the famous schools to which they returned for their third year of law school—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Berkeley, Cornell (all of the schools from which all of the older
partners had graduated) and NYU, Northwestern, Michigan, even Hofstra (the more diverse law schools from which, in the less elitist years of the last two decades, more and more of the associates and partners came).

During the week in which his email to Christina was out there, unanswered and irretrievable, Byron wondered whether his sending it violated the firm’s policy on contact between male partners and women associates. He had never given any attention to any of those proliferating personnel policies, because, he felt, they reflected only the common sense and respect by which he had instinctively lived for so long—there had never been a time when he thought it was appropriate for a male partner to have sex with a female associate (there were many years when there were very few female lawyers at SpencerBlake), and he had always believed that a lawyer should not be hired, or should be hired, because he or she was black or Jewish or Asian or gay or, as he now thought after meeting Hamerindapal Rana, a Sikh. What mattered, he had always said, was the person’s ability and the willingness to learn and not color or gender or religion or sexual preference. Three of the younger partners were gay males, and he had heard rumors, to which he paid no attention, that one of the new female partners was a lesbian.

During the week without a response from Christina, Byron felt nervous, offended, dissed. There was also at times a sense of jealousy. Who was the other guy? There had to be another guy, for the lady was so gorgeous. A Columbia professor? A writer? A hedge fund billionaire? A professional athlete? He had made a fool of himself even by making this
simple overture. At one point he even thought of sending her an email claiming that his earlier one had been sent inadvertently and asking her to ignore it.

And he knew he was smitten. It had been years since he found himself with such an intense and uncontrollable crush, imagining her virtually all the time, her name resonating constantly in his mind. Once a man with very methodical habits—including the ability to get to sleep no later than eleven and sleep soundly until seven—Byron over the last several months had become restless at night. He kept his computer on all night long, and, at various times in the quiet overnight, checked the screen. At three one morning, under the
New Mail
heading on his computer screen, he saw the screen name “ChristinaBrighteyes.” He almost lunged at the laptop glowing brightly in his home library. He clicked the mouse. He was so excited that the first click missed its target. Then he put the arrow more securely on the target and hit it. The hourglass image lingered over the line on the screen that bore the word “ChristinaBrighteyes,” and then, as if by miracle, the screen opened to the text of the message.

“So good to hear from you, Byron. I’ve been away. I had a great summer. Only regret is that we didn’t get to work together.”

Byron was naked as he read the message. He hadn’t read any words so avidly in years.
My God
, he thought,
she wrote back
. He checked the date line and saw that she had written her note only an hour earlier, 2 a.m. He imagined that she had returned from wherever it was in the world she had been traveling, saw an email from him, and, even before she started
unpacking, wrote to him. That had to mean she was not with another man, at least not now. Byron thought it would be cool and appropriate if he waited a day or two before responding to her, but at three in the morning in his big apartment, he realized he wasn’t interested in being cool.

He wrote: “So glad to hear from you, and happy you enjoyed your summer with us. I do have some work that I might ask you to help me with, a kind of special project. Would you like to talk about it?”

Before sending it, he read the message six times, adding sentences, altering words, and even changing the typeface. Finally he pressed the
Send
button; in an instant the screen told him that his message had been sent.

He went to the bathroom. His spacious apartment—the ceilings in this converted warehouse building were fifteen feet high—was always suffused with light from the outside even at night, since the tall industrial windows were at the same level as the street lamps and Byron rarely drew the shades. As soon as he finished in the bathroom, he found himself drawn again to the glowing computer screen, yearning like a teenager for a response. On it was another message from Christina: “I’d love to, Byron. Why don’t you come up to the Three Guys diner at 115th and Broadway tonight at 7 and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

Without hesitating, Byron wrote: “Will do.”

Dressed only in his jockey shorts, Byron felt the erection that just reading her note gave him. It strained against his underwear.
Miraculous
, he thought,
I’m a teenager again
.

Soon he slept, without once waking until eight in the morning.

In his quiet apartment in Cobble Hill, Tom Nashatka heard his computer emit that blip of a noise that signaled the lodging of new emails. He opened the screen, and there were the emails he had expected to see during the week since the lonely, driven Byron Carlos Johnson had, like a love-possessed college kid, written to Christina Rosario.

When the new emails arrived, he immediately forwarded them to Kimberly Smith. He had been speaking to her on his regular cell phone, since they didn’t use their secure cell phones when they spoke late at night. Even for Kimberly, in Palo Alto, it was late, as it usually was when they had their nightly conversations. At night, they never talked about their intriguing, deeply secret work. Those talks happened during the day, and were invariably about business—the decoding of the mysteries of intercepted messages, many of them in Arabic, a language they had both fully mastered.

Tom interrupted their long conversation. “Well, well, well, will you look at this.” He had kept his laptop computer near him in bed while speaking to Kimberly. “The Eagle has landed.”

“What is it?”

“Lord Byron is lovesick.”

“Really?”

“Sure, look at this.” He forwarded the emails to her.

She read them. “Aw, ain’t that sweet?”

“Can you believe it? They already have a date.”

“He doesn’t have a chance,” she said. “The lady is a maneater.”

“That’s right,” Tom said, “he doesn’t have a chance.”

I
N THE TWO WEEKS after the hot night when they met at the diner at 115th Street and Broadway, Byron Johnson fell more deeply into that exciting mixture of infatuation and love. He found that he could establish a direct connection with her—a connection he craved and that was suddenly at the center of his life—by asking her to research issues relating to Ali Hussein and prepare drafts of papers. He soon dropped the pretense of acting solely as her mentor and assignment-giver. Within two days they were in touch with each other many times by email, cell phone calls, and face-to-face encounters at diners, his apartment, her apartment, and the squash courts.

Byron in fact needed the information she researched and the papers she drafted for him. He no longer had the free use of the younger lawyers at the firm. She was a fully formed lawyer even though she was still in law school. Byron was struck by the fluency of her legal writing. Ordinarily it took years for a new lawyer to develop the style of writing that was the rare currency of the leading lawyers in the country—the fluent, well-crafted, slightly supercilious language that most federal judges, themselves products of major law firms and major federal agencies, used and in turn wanted to see from lawyers. Christina Rosario had it from the outset, and it only reinforced Byron’s ardor.