Extraordinary Rendition

12

KHALID HUSSEIN DROVE A gleaming Mercedes SUV through the Holland Tunnel. It was Tuesday night. Since the traffic was light, he increased the speed of the powerful car, racing between the tiled sides of the tunnel and the flexible yellow poles in the center of the roadway that divided the flow of traffic. He chased the red taillights of the car far ahead of him. Even inside the air-conditioned SUV, he heard the sustained whine of all the vehicles in the tunnel.

When he emerged onto Van Dam Street on the New York side of the tunnel, he sped eastward to the nearby streets of Tribeca. Most of the street surfaces were still old, paved with worn bricks. His Mercedes ran over them with a solid, well-built rumble.

Khalid Hussein knew these streets well. When he arrived in the United States in 1980-the first of his family to leave the Middle East-he found work on Warren Street at a huge brick warehouse. Khalid, who had earned a civil engineering degree in Lebanon before the civil war, took a job as a forklift operator. He worked at night, moving wooden pallets from the dim interior of the warehouse to unmarked trucks on the street outside. He had a sense that the warehouse operation was illegal, because there were no signs anywhere, the building was closed during the days, and the movements of large quantities of shoes in crates-or at least crates that he was told contained shoes-into and out of the warehouse only happened at night, for the most part between midnight and four in the morning. Never once, in the five years Khalid worked there, did he see a single policeman or police cruiser on what were then the largely unoccupied streets of that old industrial and warehouse area, long before the actors and investment bankers moved into the renovated buildings and before the area was suddenly given the made-up name Tribeca.

Despite its transformation-there were now many people on the cobblestone streets at all hours of the night, going to and leaving the after-hours clubs with names like X-3 and 2inc-the area was still familiar. Khalid had worked at the warehouse for five years. By 1985, just as he was turning twenty-nine, he borrowed five thousand dollars from Nick Ferrante, the handsome, engaging man who said he owned the warehouse, and bought a delivery van. He used some of the cash to buy spices from a Saudi who somehow always seemed to have Middle Eastern specialty food to distribute. Khalid often spoke about the first night he loaded bags of fragrant spices into the van and drove his precious cargo through the Lincoln Tunnel, working his way up Bergenline Avenue, Kennedy Boulevard, and Boulevard East in Jersey City, Hoboken, North Bergen, and Edgewater-that string of towns along the Palisades-selling the spices, for cash, to the Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian shops that were then slowly proliferating through these old towns. Even on that first trip, he made twice as much money selling the spices as he had spent to buy them. He was amazed by the reality of capitalism-you could buy something for three dollars and sell it for six. American magic. Within a month he had paid back Nick Ferrante all the money he had borrowed, and, without being asked, he gave Nick another nine hundred dollars. He and Nick stayed friends eight more years, until Nick was arrested. Khalid, fluent in English, read that Nick was taken down with thirty-five other members of the Gambino family in 1993. Khalid missed Nick, who always embraced him and called him “buddy.” Khalid liked that word: he still called many people “buddy.”

But not Byron Johnson. Khalid didn’t want this polite man to think he was anything other than a driven, narrow-minded Arab. And he didn’t want Byron Johnson to know that he was wealthy, that his first trip in the fragrant, heavy-laden van along the Palisades so many years ago was the start of Khalid’s assembling wealth that he never could have imagined even when, making his way out of the Middle East through Syria in the late 1970s, he glimpsed the rich men in armored Mercedes on the streets of Riyadh, surrounded by armed guards trotting along the sides of the cars.

Five blocks from Byron Johnson’s apartment on Laight Street, Khalid pulled into a gleaming new garage in the basement of a renovated warehouse that was swiftly filling up with people who were spending at least three million dollars for each apartment. Khalid owned the garage, but he didn’t want the cleanly dressed car jockeys who worked there to know that. He took a ticket like everyone else and told the snappy, efficient Puerto Rican garage man in a white shirt and black bowtie that he would be back around midnight.

Khalid Hussein had lived in America long enough to love American women. And he spent as much time as possible with them. There were quick-talking, sexily dressed Jersey girls who worked in the office at his immense new warehouse near the Meadowlands; the perfectly tanned, Harvard-educated lawyer at the big firm in Roseland that handled the lawsuits that seemed to swirl around business; and the twenty-five-year-old Oklahoma woman who was the hostess at the popular restaurant he and three partners had recently opened on West Broadway. Khalid no longer had to work at the business he had established and ran for so many years; he had three nephews who operated it for him and who, he was sure, were intensely loyal to him. So Khalid had time during this stage of his life to enjoy these enthralling women whenever he liked. If his wife, Benazir, knew anything about them-and she had to-it didn’t matter, because she had absorbed the lessons of obedience.

Khalid almost smiled when, just after Byron Johnson opened the door to his apartment, he saw the gorgeous young woman standing in the light at the end of the hallway, waiting to be introduced to him. Suddenly, putting on what he knew was his dark, brooding face, Khalid said, “And who is this?”

“She’s helping with your brother’s case. Christina Rosario, this is Ali’s brother Khalid. This is Christina Rosario.” He made no effort to shake her hand. He even succeeded in the difficult effort of barely glancing at her.

There was black coffee for the three of them at the dining room table. Byron wore a white shirt with his initials sewn into the pocket. He also wore chino pants but, to Khalid’s surprise, no shoes or socks. Khalid took in something else that surprised him about Byron: he was not only tall but strongly built, a body constructed from a youth of playing squash, lacrosse, and tennis.

“Khalid,” Byron said, “you know what an indictment is, don’t you?”

When he dealt with what he often called “white men,” Khalid roughened up the tone of his voice. “I read the newspapers. But tell me what it is.”

“It’s something in writing that tells a defendant what he’s charged with, the crime. Do you want to see it?”

Khalid shrugged.

“Here,” Byron said, “take it anyhow.”

Christina, who rested her chin in her hand as she looked at them, noticed that Khalid dyed his thick hair black and had manicured fingernails gleaming at the blunt ends of the back of his hairy hands. She also registered that his real voice and accent were far more polished than he made them seem. And she saw that he was a very good-looking man. Wanting to goad him just a little because of his studied annoyance about her presence, she decided to speak: “Byron’s meeting with your brother tomorrow.”

Khalid ignored her. He spoke to Byron. “What does Ali say about this?”

“Very little, Khalid. They only gave me ten minutes to speak to him.” Byron was careful not to mention yet the thirty-page memo he had picked up the day before from the United States Attorney’s Office.

“And what happens next?”

“Your brother has to explain the facts to me.”

“My brother is an honest man.”

“You can help him, too, Khalid. I have to start understanding what happened. And what didn’t. I need information in order to defend him. I need to know more about his background. I hope you can help.”

With his thick fingers, Khalid raised the edges of the document. He wore a gold bracelet on his right wrist. “You want me to read it tonight?”

Byron spoke quietly, pouring more of the black coffee for himself. “If you can, Khalid. Without learning as much as I can as fast as I can, I won’t be able to help. There are some names of people and places and events in here-not many, but some-that you might know something about. Ali needs help if he is going to have any chance at all.”

“You seem to be a nice man. But for years I’ve seen what’s going on. My brother doesn’t have any chance at all. Nobody will see him again outside, here, in this life.”

“I’m not that pessimistic.”

Khalid raised the document, rolled it, and tapped its bottom edge on the table, as though trying to arrange the pages even more neatly than they already were. “I’ll read it.”

“Can we meet tomorrow somewhere? In the evening? Maybe you can talk about this with his friends or yours and let me know.”

Khalid asked, “What do you really think?”

“That your brother is in a very dangerous place.”

“We visited the Imam before I came tonight, Mr. Johnson. He knows this is a dark time for Ali. Can you tell him that there is in the Koran a guide for courage?”

“Sure. What is it that you want me to give him?”

Khalid said from memory, “Have Ali look at book three, chapter five. The tenth through the twentieth lines. The Imam says he will be able to draw strength from that.”

Byron and Christina both wrote down the reference as Khalid, with the document in his hand, abruptly got up from the table. “We’ll meet tomorrow, Mr. Johnson.”

He left the apartment. He didn’t even look at Christina.

Three hours later, as Christina and Byron drove uptown along empty Riverside Drive, the river to their left and the dense, rustling trees of Riverside Park to their right, Christina said, “He’s a scary guy, Carlos.”

He glanced at her. She was in the front seat of the car he called his “toy,” a silver convertible BMW sports car. The top was down. The gorgeous night air rushed over them. Byron Johnson didn’t ask her what she meant.