Extraordinary Rendition

9

CHRISTINA ROSARIO’S CHEEK RESTED on Byron’s chest. A sheet was draped over her hips. Uncovered and naked, Byron was on top of the sheets, slowly cooling down, relaxing deeply, and utterly content. Christina looked up at the handsome ridges of his face-the taut cheeks, the sloping forehead that reminded her of Cary Grant’s, the hazel eyes, the high cheekbones-as he in turn stared down at the beauty of her unblemished face and shoulders, the alluring contours of her breasts, and the tautness of her young stomach. And then, too, the swell of her womanly hips under the white sheet, still damp from their love-making. As she stroked the slightly graying hair on his chest, he felt himself get aroused again.

It was the middle of the afternoon. The windows of Christina’s apartment were ten stories above Riverside Park. A breeze stirred the gauzy beige curtains. Although the weather was hot-almost, Byron had said before they began to undress each other, like “miserable Miami”-the wind was refreshing. The breeze came from New Jersey, from the high cliffs of the Palisades, over the sultry expanse of the Hudson River and Riverside Park. The old-world apartment had no air conditioning. Standing fans, rotating, stirred the air.

For the third time she whispered, “That was so, so good.”

He turned slightly to kiss her forehead. “You are a sweetheart, Brighteyes.” Over the last several weeks, and especially since the first glorious evening when they made love, he sometimes called her Brighteyes. She called him Carlos.

There was almost complete stillness in the bedroom. The traffic noises from Riverside Drive were muffled. Byron couldn’t remember a time in his life when he’d experienced such satisfying lassitude, such contentment, as he slowly and lightly moved his fingers along the unblemished skin of her upper arm. Why have I waited so long for this? he wondered. This was happiness, he thought, a feeling always possible, never realized.

Christina sensed that Byron’s stillness had passed into the realm of sleep. Gradually his breathing deepened. She stopped moving her hand gently across his chest. She, too, felt drowsy-more than two hours had passed since she kissed him, said, “Hey, lover boy,” and, naked, led him to her bedroom. During the two weeks in which, like an uncertain schoolboy from an earlier generation, he hadn’t done more than touch her hand, she had wondered what kind of lover Byron would be. Arrogant, indifferent, devoted, caring, self-absorbed, athletic, timid, quick, potent, impotent? She had been certain, from the moment she sought him out at the evening party in the Central Park Zoo, that he would become her lover. She saw the beginning of his enthrallment in the artificial bantering they exchanged in that first conversation. So she was certain he would pursue her-the week’s delay after she left SpencerBlake in August and his sending her that first email didn’t shake her confidence-but she could never predict how he or any other man would be as a lover.

As she lay on his chest, with the afternoon light all around them, she realized she was surprised: Byron, that handsome, polite, and at times awkward guy, was a devoted and passionate lover. In the courtroom, he was cogent and self-possessed but restrained, even when he was being battered and baited by a judge, as in Miami. But there was little restraint in the way he undressed her and helped her undress him. There was no uncertainty or prep school mannerism in the way he kissed her, stroked her, licked her, and entered her. And stayed in her, in position after position. She was young, athletic, and supple. He was lithe and strong. If he took Viagra, he didn’t tell her that. But she imagined that his long endurance, his steady erection, and his intensity probably came from that magical blue pill. Even teenagers were using it: the age of the universal stud had arrived.

It was just after sunset when they both woke up. A breeze from the Hudson and Riverside Park lifted and then dropped the gauzy curtains. In all the time she had spent with him over the last few weeks-in diners, libraries, courts, airports, even in taxis-she’d been puzzled about whether Byron Johnson was a happy or unhappy person. There was that demeanor she could only describe to others as “equable”-unflustered, patient, tenacious, and at times self-deprecating. There was also what she thought of as old-world kindness. Byron let other people leave an elevator before he took a step to enter it, he held doors open for people who followed them into a restaurant, and he said thank you to taxi drivers as he paid them. She had once imagined that, if she ever met a man who behaved like that, he’d drive her crazy. But nothing about Carlos annoyed or distracted her.

She admired his focused mind. As soon as he came out of the shower, toweling his thick, subtly graying hair, he said, “Listen, my little lovely, I need to look at these documents before I head downtown tomorrow morning. Let’s order up some Chinese food.”

“Or,” she said, “do we want falafel from the Moroccan place on 104th Street?”

“I think it’s enough that I’m learning how to read the Koran in Arabic. I don’t need genuine Arabic food.”

In Christina’s experience, other men in the wake of an afternoon like this would have suggested the quiet recuperation of a movie or supper in a small restaurant. And maybe, she thought, she and Byron might later do that, but as soon as Byron put on his pants he sat down at the dining room table on which he had earlier placed two manila envelopes given to him that morning by Hal Rana. The envelopes contained two documents he had not yet read.

One of the documents was the indictment of Ali Hussein. As soon as Byron arrived at his office that morning, his telephone rang and he picked it up himself because his secretary was not yet there. It was Rana. He said that Ali Hussein had been moved the day before from the detention center in Miami to the bleak federal prison in lower Manhattan. Hussein would be indicted, Rana said, “tomorrow, for money laundering, racketeering, terrorism, and conspiracy to murder.”

When he heard those words, Byron felt his body flush, that system-wide pulse of blood that was the result of sudden anxiety. This had last happened to him seven years earlier, when his wife simply looked at him during supper at their apartment and said, “I don’t want to be married to you any longer. Not for one more day.”

Hal Rana dispassionately said, “I’ll contact you tomorrow morning, early, and let you know what courtroom to meet us in. We’re going to allow your client to be in court for the arraignment. Judge Goldberg has already been designated. The indictment was filed under seal today. Only we know about it and now you know about it. Your client hasn’t been told why he’s been brought here. Once the arraignment is over, the indictment will be released to the media and posted on the Internet, probably before you even leave the courthouse.”

“Why are you telling me all this, Mr. Rana?”

“We’re not monsters, Mr. Johnson. We did start a dialogue with you a little while back, when you were down here meeting with us. You didn’t continue the dialogue, but now we’re showing you the courtesy of giving you a heads up.”

“Don’t misunderstand me, I appreciate that.”

“Good. It’s always good to be appreciated, Mr. Johnson. You’re about to appreciate us even more because we’ve decided to give you a copy of the indictment today, rather than wait to hand it to you when you and your client appear in court tomorrow. That way you can spend the night with it. It might help you.”

Byron said, “I appreciate that, too.”

“And we are also going to give you something else, if you can guarantee me that you’ll keep it to yourself and your client only, not share it with anyone else.”

Byron painfully remembered the steps of the courthouse in Miami when he had been taken aback by the reporters and cameras on the scorching plaza. He felt at the time that he had been exposed as an amateur. “Maybe before we go any further, Mr. Rana, you should tell me what you want me to keep so confidential.”

“Fair enough. It’s a highly classified report we’ve prepared explaining in detail the allegations about money laundering and money transfers that are mentioned in the indictment. It provides details ordinarily not seen in an indictment.”

“Such as?”

“Account numbers your client may have used. Wiring instructions he might be familiar with.”

“Why give me that?”

“We want to make sure that in the long run no one will accuse us of having been unfair to you or your client. We know how very rare this case is, so we’re taking the unusual step of giving you and your client the kind of blueprint of our case you would expect to see at trial, not now, so that we can’t be accused of having held onto the company secrets and taken advantage of you by springing information for the first time at trial.”

“It sounds interesting.”

“And maybe once your client sees what we know-as well as what we believe he knows-he’ll see the wisdom in pleading guilty and cooperating with us.”

Byron paused, uncertain about whether to accept the offer. Rana, a skillful man, waited. And then Byron said, “Sure.”

“No one other than you and your client sees it, at least for now. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“And we’ll make it even fairer for you: if there comes a point in time when you feel you want to share it with other people, like accountants, you can file a motion, under seal, with the judge for permission to release it to other specific people. But you can’t release it without a court order. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough.”

“We’ll need to have you come downtown to pick up these two envelopes yourself. We don’t want to risk emails, pdfs, or messengers. This is hand-to-hand contact, Mr. Johnson.”

Byron had been waiting for a lighthearted tone from the steady Hamerindapal Rana. Maybe, he thought, that last sentence was it. “Did you say contact or combat, Mr. Rana?”

Rana didn’t respond to that. “There is one last thing, Mr. Johnson, so that you’re not surprised.”

“What?”

“The death penalty, Mr. Johnson. The government is seeking the death penalty.”

Christina was dressed in Byron’s comfortable button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and nothing else. He saw below the tapered edge of the shirt’s hem the alluring curve of her ass and glimpses of the hair surrounding her vagina.

As he slipped the documents out of both envelopes Hal Rana had given him, she said, “Want some coffee, Carlos?”

“What would Gloria Steinem say about a smart modern woman making coffee for a guy?

“Baby, do you know how over Gloria Steinem is?”

He smiled at her. “Black, no sugar.”

Throughout his career Byron had had an intense capacity to concentrate, a kind of trance focused entirely on the words in front of him or the face of a witness during one of the thousands of depositions he had taken over the years. That same trance happened now, that cone of silence, as he turned the pages of the indictment and the report stamped on every page with the words “Confidential-National Security Information.” He never touched the mug of coffee Christina placed in front of him.

When the trance was broken, he slipped the documents back into their envelopes. Christina had turned the lights on in the kitchen while Byron was reading. It was almost entirely dark outside. Only the lights in Riverside Park and on the heights of the Palisades on the New Jersey shoreline were visible. The soft light shed by the lamp over the dining room table made his features, she thought, even more handsome. Christina really hadn’t expected to have such a fast-developing affection for this man. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was not the plan.

Byron’s face was absolutely calm and his voice resonantly thoughtful: “This is serious.”

She lifted her face, silently conveying the question, How so?

“They’re looking for the death penalty.”

“That’s a joke, isn’t it?”

“This says he arranged the money for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. The bombings at the U.S. embassies in Africa.”

“Anything else?”

“And that he took part in funding the flight training for Mohammad Atta and the other pilots of the 9/11 jets.”

After a pause, she asked, “What are you thinking about?”

“Mystery. How mysterious people are. I know absolutely nothing about Ali Hussein. He doesn’t have the sulfur of evil about him, but here are all these powerful people insisting that he is a killer. Why would Rana and the others make this up? Why should I believe Ali Hussein and not the dozens of people in the government who must believe he’s evil? I don’t even know for certain that Ali Hussein is his name. Why in fact should I believe anybody?”

They stared at each other. “Can you handle this, Carlos?”

“I don’t know, but I will. Except for Timothy McVeigh, the last execution by the federal government was the execution of the Rosenbergs. And nothing since McVeigh. States execute, not the U.S. government.”

“You’re going to let me go on working with you on this, Carlos?”

“Every brutal step of the way.”