Extraordinary Rendition

15

TOM NASHATKA, WITH ANDREW Hurd just behind him, pressed the grimy buzzer of the storefront on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The neon sign on the window read Money Orders, Etcetera. Nashatka looked down the long, barren, and unoccupied entrance of the store. At the far end was a counter sealed off from the customer area by double layers of protective, shatter-proof glass. Three or four people stood behind the counter. One customer, an enormous black woman, was leaning toward the speaker in the glass partition. It was ten in the morning.

When the buzzer at the front door finally sounded and the magnetic lock disengaged, Tom Nashatka entered the store as Andrew Hurd pushed a city trash can between the open door and the frame. Nashatka walked steadily forward. Behind him, Hurd and seven uniformed U.S. Marshals filled the room, moving forward. The black woman turned and started to scream. And in the closed off area, the three women and one man began running toward a metal door behind them.

Calmly, Nashatka pressed a badge against the scratched security window at the counter. He shouted, “Police. Let me see your hands. Unlock the door and step out.”

As if staring into a cloudy fishbowl, Nashatka watched a slender, elegant man, probably Pakistani, emerge through the rear door. He had a prematurely gray beard but absolutely black, glistening hair. He moved gracefully, deliberately. He reached toward the counter and knocked the two laptop computers to the floor. From under the counter, as he ignored Nashatka’s pounding on the glass, the man took out a hammer. He knelt over the computers and began hitting them. They fractured like plastic toys.

As though calmly painting a portrait, the man continued to smash the smaller and smaller pieces even while the battering ram, wielded by Nashatka and one of the uniformed marshals, struck the frame of the bulletproof door in the window barrier. The door fell backwards, intact, its hinges detached from the frame. The man dropped the hammer and simply stood over the pieces of the computer. Nashatka and the other men who entered the room had their pistols out. “Hands in the air, hands in the air.”

The elegant man raised his hands. Nashatka hit him in the chest with his fist, a powerful blow, and the man collapsed. One of the marshals held a pistol to his head as another put plastic handcuffs on him. The man was groaning. A puffy red foam blew out of his nostrils with each breath he took.

When Nashatka saw that no piece of the laptops larger than a sliver remained, he kicked the man just below the rib cage. The women were screaming. One of the marshals touched Nashatka on the shoulder and said, “Sir,” as though cautioning him.

Nashatka looked around the room with the fast, all-encompassing movement of a receiver in a football game. He said, “I want every security camera in here ripped out of the wall. Give them all to me before we leave. Don’t inventory them.”

“Sir?”

“Don’t fucking put them on the inventory sheet. I’ll secure them.”

Byron’s sparely furnished, high-ceilinged apartment had tall windows. His apartment was higher than most of the three or four story buildings that still dominated the old warehouse area, and he enjoyed the sense of light that filled his living room and kitchen-actually, there were no walls between the living room and kitchen areas in the huge apartment-during the day. And he loved to look out the big windows at night: there were all the sparkling lights of the city and, to the north, the immense tower that was the Empire State Building, its top always illuminated by at least three different colors. Tonight the lights on the spire were white, green, and blue.

Christina was as uninhibited as he was about walking either barely dressed or naked in the apartment at night, with the windows unobstructed by shades or curtains. They kept only dim lights on in the apartment at night. Traces of the bedroom, and of Byron and Christina, were always visible at night because the television, resonant with sound and vibrant with images, was always on. When they spent the night at Byron’s apartment, they lay in bed watching Charlie Rose’s interviews from eleven to twelve and then, before either making love again or falling asleep, watched the local news just after midnight. They often lay naked on top of the crisp sheets that Byron’s housekeeper changed every day-a practice that was a holdover from the years when Byron had lived with his wife and sons on Fifth Avenue.

The late-night anchor was a literate, extremely precise Asian woman, no older than thirty, with an unaccented, chirpy voice. Christina focused on the woman’s story before Byron did. “Federal agents and local police,” the anchor said, “conducted raids today on three separate money exchange stores with links to terrorism. One of the stores is in the Bronx. Another is in Fort Lee, New Jersey. And the third, also in New Jersey, is in Irvington.”

“Carlos,” Christina whispered as Byron read an old Modern Library edition of Moby Dick, “listen to this.”

Suddenly Byron Johnson was no longer drifting toward a refreshing, longed-for sleep. He stared at the televised images of the three raided store fronts. The signs bore the names that Ali Hussein had given him that morning: Abad’s Carnival Ice Cream, It’s Your Money, Money Orders, Etcetera. Hesitantly, quietly, Hussein had almost whispered and then repeated those names as part of the long process by which he seemed to gradually give up information while he became more confident in Byron. He wrote down the names on a yellow legal pad; Ali said he had done part-time accounting work for them.

Hawala. That, Hussein told him, was the Arabic word for money transfer stores that acted, as Western Union had for many years, as places where United States dollars could be sent by wire to family members in distant countries and converted into the local currencies. Hawala. Byron had never heard the word before, and he wrote it that morning in large, blocky letters next to the names of each of the stores, names that now flashed on the screen.

Christina, although she was used to the focus that Carlos could bring to certain events, was aware of the special intensity in his expression as he watched the broadcast. The spell didn’t end when the report dissolved into a commercial for a cell phone service, an image of two cute, wisecracking girls talking into their phones in a restaurant as a trim, beautiful man walked by them, blessing them with an alluring glance.

“What’s the matter, Carlos?”

Instinctively he let go of the thought of telling her that these were the three stores that Hussein had carefully spelled out that morning.

Later, while Christina slept, Byron roamed his apartment, repeatedly gazing out the windows at the streetlights, the cobblestoned pavement, the many dark windows of the buildings in his neighborhood, and the white, green and blue lighting at the curved height of the Empire State Building.

That seductive and welcome sensation he had had before the news broadcast-that drifting toward a restorative sleep-was shattered.