Extraordinary Rendition

14

IT WAS THREE IN the morning, always a bad time of night, and a time at which Byron Johnson had regularly been waking for weeks. When he was in his own apartment, he made coffee and then, seated at his sleek glass desk, wandered through the Internet. He hunted for information about the Koran, torture, and Guantanamo Bay. He had also started to search the Internet for information about himself. Christina had brought this sometimes disturbing miracle of instant information to his attention almost as soon as they spent that first night together. He was absorbed by what he found. During every twenty-four hour period there were new entries in which his name appeared. There were newspaper articles, verbatim transcripts of radio and television broadcasts, blog postings (most of them hateful), and pictures of him that rose from the vast interstellar spaces of the Internet. Almost none of the steadily accumulating Internet entries was flattering. Once he ruefully said to Christina, “I preferred the anonymity of being a big-time corporate lawyer to this.”

Most of his emails now were from reporters. He was intrigued by the fact that many reporters didn’t seem to sleep or rest, because emails sent at one or two or three in the morning often appeared on his screen. When Byron was in Christina’s apartment, as he often was, he would simply glance at the messages and never respond to them because writing would wake him for the rest of the night.

Leaving her bed-her lovely arm seemed to glow even in the dark-he went to the bathroom and then, naked, walked quietly to the computer in the alcove where Christina studied. He watched the little running cartoon figures dash across the screen as he connected to the spaces where he entered his screen name (“LordByron”) and his password (“Mexico”) and waited for a second as the familiar page suddenly materialized on the screen.

He typed by the glow from the screen. He had five emails that he assumed were from journalists, since each of them had abbreviations for newspapers and networks after the @ symbol.

And then, for some reason, he clicked on the Sent button. And there he saw an email that had been sent from his computer at 1:15 that morning, two hours earlier. The email had been sent to “SesameStar,” an address to which he’d never sent anything. SesameStar?

He clicked on the blue bar. The vaudeville-shaped, gloved hand and fingers on the screen pulsed, and the email opened. He immediately saw that the report Hal Rana had given to him had been sent to “Sesame Star.” He opened the attachment. Someone had scanned the secret thirty-five page report into the email. Byron Carlos Johnson knew he hadn’t done that, since his computer skills were limited to email (he didn’t even know how to create an attachment) and access to the search engines. He had only recently learned that the word “Google” was no longer just the name of a company but a verb, “to Google.” He was still learning how to use the beautifully engineered BlackBerry Christina had given him.

The email to “SesameStar” consumed his attention. Who was SesameStar? How had the paper report been scanned into the computer, making it a permanently embedded part of the ether of this new world? He thought about the promise Hal Rana had extracted, and which Byron had made, to keep the document a secret.

Naked, slightly chilly even in the hot apartment, Byron walked to the bedroom. Christina, her hair spread over the pillow and her gorgeous body now completely uncovered, was asleep. He heard her steady breathing. He let her sleep. It took a full hour of fitfulness for Byron Johnson to drift into sleep as he watched the television images of bulky American soldiers walking across the shattered, moon-like surface of Afghanistan.

Christina Rosario’s apartment was one of those roomy West Side apartments that Byron had always admired, even though he had never lived in one. There were intricately carved moldings along the seams where the walls and ceilings met. There were free-standing radiators from which the metallic paint was peeling. The bookcases along the walls were filled with books, thousands of them. The floors were brown and black parquet inlaid at angles to one another. The sink, shower stall, and built-in clothes hamper were from the fifties; they were white relics that still worked. There were two faucets on the sink, as in the bathtub, for hot and cold water. The sofas were deep, soft, and somewhat frayed.

Christina had told him that her father, now dead, had been a professor of engineering at Columbia. Her mother, a woman who wrote children’s books under the pseudonym Raquel Rematti (Christina called it her mother’s nom de guerre) lived in Paris with an Italian man twenty years younger than she was. Christina was raised in the apartment until she was fourteen, when she was sent to a boarding school in New England. Her mother still owned the apartment.

Wearing only underpants, Christina walked drowsily into the kitchen at first light as Byron sipped coffee. “How long have you been up, Carlos?”

“A little while. I found it hard to sleep.”

“Really? I didn’t hear you. I must have been out like the proverbial light.”

“You slept like a baby. Glad I didn’t wake you.”

He poured a cup of coffee and held it aloft for her.

“It’s early, Carlos. What time is it, anyway?”

“Six or so.”

“My first class isn’t until eleven.” She draped her bare arms over his shoulders. “Why don’t you come back to bed? We can mess around for a bit, and I guarantee you the sleep of the pure at heart.”

“You shameless hussy. Love to do it, but I made arrangements to visit Ali this morning. I want to read that report again, more carefully this time.”

She was fragrant with the sweet smell of sleep. As she continued to drape her arms over his shoulders her hair brushed his face.

Byron said, “I don’t want to keep you awake, honey, but something’s bothering me.”

More alert and less seductively drowsy than she had been, Christina said, “What’s the matter, Carlos?”

“When I got up at three I did what I always do these days. I’ve become as addicted to the computer as a teenager.”

“Wait until you get to be a CrackBerry head. You’ll be one of those zombies walking down Park Avenue never, ever looking up.”

Now more serious, Byron said, “My sent screen showed an email to a screen name I’ve never heard of.”

“What screen name?”

“Take a look.”

Byron clicked on the blue line.

“SesameStar?”

“Look familiar?” he asked.

“Is it for Bert or Ernie?”

“Your generation, not mine.” She was standing over his left shoulder. He turned and looked up at her. “There’s an attachment.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“The memo Rana gave me. The one you saw me reading last night.”

“The secret one?”

Byron nodded. “And now SesameStar has it. You know more about these things than I do: is there some directory, some way to find out who SesameStar is?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

“And how could anyone use my email account to send a message to a name I’ve never seen?”

“I don’t know, Carlos.”

Placing the leaning arrow of the cursor over the X at the upper right corner of the screen, Byron closed his email. He stood up. The robe he wore fell open. “Let’s get ready for our day. I need to be down at the prison soon. And you need to go learn all about criminal procedure.”

She touched his face. “Carlos, this is strange. Are you worried?”

“No. Intrigued, I think, is the right word.” He patted her naked rear.

“How’s about showering with me?”

“You’d tire me out. I want to be alert for my day. And you need to get ready for class.”

Byron Johnson poured a cup of black coffee. His heart was racing. He listened to the water throbbing as Christina showered. He glanced out at Riverside Park from the kitchen window. It was early dawn. Two or three people, indistinct, ran along the park’s pathways.

He walked down the long, book-lined hallway that led from the kitchen to the bedroom. He was possessed by that pre-dawn sense of dread that had arrived as soon as he’d woken up. Someone had said to him years ago, in a context he could not remember, “Your first thought of the day is your worst thought.”

Byron had intended to do something challenging when he volunteered to represent someone charged with terrorism. He’d never anticipated-and this lack of foresight troubled him-that so many people would be so alienated, that the vicious, right-wing pandering Rush Limbaugh would incessantly call him that “candy-ass, stuck-up idiot,” and that he’d fall in love with and constantly crave a beautiful woman who was the same age as his own sons.

And he began to recognize something else he hadn’t foreseen. There were times when, on the streets and in restaurants, he sensed that men were watching him. There were sometimes resonant voids when he used his cell phone. There were unexpected surprises on his computer, such as the appearance of “SesameStar.”

Have I ever, he wondered, been afraid?

To distract himself from the anxiety, he glanced at the books on the crowded shelves in the hallway. What suddenly caught his attention was that the books consisted of all the usual classics-Dickens, Melville, Hawthorne, Hemingway, and some recent novels still in their shiny dust jackets. There was even a copy of the Modern Library edition of The Moonstone, the book he had been reading on his trips back and forth to Miami.

And then he realized that of all the books on the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, there was not a single engineering or technical or scientific book in this apartment in which Christina’s father, a Columbia engineering professor, had lived for thirty years.