Extraordinary Rendition

17

BYRON JOHNSON’S EXPENSIVE BUT austere office in the Seagram building had become over the last eight weeks less and less familiar to him. He’d occupied that corner office for more than a decade. Its windows overlooked Park Avenue and the MetLife Building, that diadem in the middle of Park Avenue, still known to him as the Pan Am Building even though the name had changed years earlier.

The office was what he had once described as his farm, an ancestral place where he made his daily bread and where he dealt with legal problems he once considered fascinating. He used to resort to it for twelve or more hours each day, often on the weekends, long before the annoying expression “24/7” became so popular in corporate America. Particularly during the painfully protracted two years that his divorce took, the office was his life’s geographic center-a place of stability, a safe harbor. He relaxed there often, read there often, and often just spent the quiet hours between eight and ten at night reading and writing as he sometimes looked out on the unique combination of glittering lights and the quiet at the heart of the city.

But now he sensed the steady erosion of his connection to the office. Sometimes when he walked into it in the middle of the day, after a week spent at the prison, at home, or at Christina Rosario’s apartment, he had the dislocated sense that he was visiting the rooms he’d once occupied years earlier at boarding school and college. There was an eerie sense, like a recurrent and unpleasant dream, of returning to a place where he no longer belonged. Byron had once been meticulous about maintaining the orderliness of the books and mementoes on the office bookcases, the gleam of the surface of the conference table, and the symmetry of the photographs, paintings, diplomas, and certificates on the walls. Now it seemed that time and inattention were steadily causing the decay of all that well-maintained structure, like an abandoned house. Some of the papers he had left on his desk-copies of letters to clients and memos from associates at the firm answering research questions he’d raised for corporate clients-were yellowing.

The laptop computer in his office also bore a light coating of dust. It had been weeks since he had turned it on. It had the corporate screen name BCJohnson@spencerblake.com, not his personal address. He hadn’t checked his business mail for days. As soon as he raised the lid, the small twinkling lights came on and the screen filled with white and blue light. The only thing Byron had carried into the firm that afternoon was the piece of yellow legal paper on which he had written down notes from that morning’s meeting with Ali Hussein.

Byron still addressed emails to himself. It was his way of preparing a diary, a resource for future reference, a kind of inventory of information. He entered his screen name in the Send To box before he began writing. Just two days earlier, Byron had suddenly stopped transferring to the computer the precise contents of the notes he had scrawled with the chapter, verse, and line numbers Ali Hussein had given him. Instead, Byron had decided to send disinformation.

He glanced at his notes with Ali Hussein’s references to the Koran. Ali knew that Byron planned to make yet another trip to Newark the next day, to that gold-domed mosque, and that he would see the young Imam, Sheik Naveed Haq. “Tell him,” Hussein had said of the sheik, “that these lines have always confused me. Ask him to explain them to you.”

Hussein had developed a deferential, intelligent, and even playful demeanor at times with Byron. “I’ve got to rely on you now, Mr. Johnson, even for my understanding of the Koran.” He smiled. “May Allah help me.”

Byron picked at random these words from the paperback edition of Marmaduke Pickthall’s translation of the Koran that he kept on his desk: We sent no messenger save that he should be obeyed by Allah’s leave. And if, when they had wronged themselves, they had but come unto thee and asked forgiveness of Allah, and asked forgiveness of the messenger, they would have found Allah’s forgiving, merciful. But nay, by thy Lord, they will not believe in truth until they make thee judge of what is in dispute between them and find within themselves no dislike of that which thou decides, and submit with full submission.

And then he typed in the numbers of the book, chapter, and lines for that quote. He put the numbers Ali had dictated on a slip of paper in his wallet.

When he finished, Byron glanced up at the glittering play of mid-afternoon sunlight on the surface of the MetLife building. Then he moved the leaning arrow on the computer screen to the yellow, cartoon-style envelope just above the words “Send Now.” Instantly his computer screen displayed “Your mail has been sent.”

He pressed down the lid of his computer and walked to the elevator, smiling and waving at the secretaries and young lawyers he passed in the carpeted, muted hallways.

Byron Johnson never again saw his office.