Extraordinary Rendition

34

THE NEW FEDERAL OFFICE building at the corner of Broadway and Duane Street in lower Manhattan was five blocks from Ground Zero, now a raw excavation where the World Trade Center had once stood. The office building opened only three months after 9/11. On the building’s inaugural day, the unimaginable debris still smoldered.

Andrew Hurd was there for the opening ceremony in December 2001, one of at least eighty agents providing security for President Bush, Mayor Giuliani, and the other clowns Andrew Hurd was convinced could never do what was necessary to exact revenge and make certain that the people responsible for this heinous act would be punished. Hurd, watchful of the crowd, could only glance at the people he was protecting. He was twenty feet from them. In real life, Bush was larger than Hurd had expected but had the self-satisfied look of a sneak, someone who had evaded service in the Army during the war in Vietnam and sipped beer on hot afternoons in the empty stands of a Texas Rangers game when he claimed to own that losing team. And, with his hair plastered over the top of his balding head, Giuliani looked like the comedian Bob Newhart, not a hero and not a commander.

Andrew Hurd had made certain when he scheduled this meeting with Hal Rana that Tom Nashatka was with him. Although Hurd had been required to incorporate Rana into his task force for political reasons, he had never trusted him and would have been more comfortable with another lead Assistant US Attorney. It wasn’t so much Rana’s silk turban that bothered Hurd. It was the deliberate, Anglicized diction the man maddeningly used and the expensive British suits so unlike the routine warehouse suits worn by other lawyers in the prosecutor’s office.

Hurd had often wondered how a forty-year-old foreign-born lawyer earning a government salary of less than $100,000 a year could afford suits that must have cost several thousand dollars each. Hurd had free access to every item of information that the United States government had about Hal Rana and hundreds of thousands of other people living in America and around the world. He pulled up Rana’s income tax returns and found that he had income from foreign investments five times larger than his salary. He was born in Sri Lanka, according to his immigration papers. His law school applications described his father as an investor living in London and Geneva. Although he was only forty, he had been married and divorced twice, once to a Jewish woman and once to the daughter of a British major. Unreal bastard, Andrew Hurd had often thought about Hal Rana.

He knew Hal Rana was cool to the point of toughness. He had the steady presence of Barack Obama. Hurd was sick of treating him like a holy guru. He was intent on breaking the back of that coolness. He asked, “Has the candy ass gotten back to you?”

“Johnson? No.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“If I knew why people did or didn’t do things, Mr. Hurd, then I would be in another line of work.”

Hurd glanced at Tom Nashatka, who was observant and quiet, as though learning from a master. “Screw other lines of work. Let’s talk about the work we’re in. Tell me again what you told him.”

“That unless he cooperated with us he will be indicted, arrested, and tried. That we believed he was passing messages from Ali Hussein to his Imam and taking messages from the Imam to Hussein. That he might be able to save himself if he persuaded his client, who trusts him, to tell him, or us, what he knows about millions of dollars held in bank accounts around the world.”

“That sounds pleasant.” Hurd paused. “It sounds like a nice, mannerly law school seminar.”

“We’re both lawyers.”

Andrew Hurd pounded his right hand on the table. The sound was as abrupt as a gunshot. Seated across the heavy table, Hal Rana visibly winced. No one had ever done anything like this to him.

“Listen up, Mr. Rana. Our people finally located one of the accounts at a bank in Canada. Yesterday afternoon I got in touch with the Canadians. Thirty minutes later the money was gone.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. You tell me.”

Hal Rana said, “What are you saying?”

“You had a chance to squeeze the bastard and scare the shit out of him. You fucked up.”

“I’m a lawyer, Mr. Hurd. I did all I could do to make it clear that he was in grave jeopardy. I gave him the option we usually give to people who can help us get information. That if he cooperated with us he would save himself a world of pain.”

“World of pain? What bullshit. What really happened in that room?”

“I don’t know what you’re asking me.” His voice was quiet, but for the first time in his life, that voice trembled.

“What am I talking about? What I’m talking about is this. I tell you to meet with him. I tell you to do everything to get information from him. You meet. A few hours later, just as we’re about to freeze an account, someone pulls the trigger and the money flies out. You either fucked up or you’re as much of a wise guy as Mr. Johnson. Which is it?”

Hal Rana had been flattered months earlier when he was selected to lead the legal team spearheading the prosecution in a civilian court of the first accused terrorist brought to the United States. He was told at the time that President Obama, intrigued by having a Harvard Law graduate who was a Sikh lead the prosecution, personally approved his selection. He had been pleased, too, when he met face to face with the Attorney General to sanction the decision to seek the death penalty for Ali Hussein.

“Now I understand, Mr. Hurd.” Despite his nervousness, that unaccustomed tension in the core of his body that made his voice and his hands shake, he stared at Andrew Hurd. It was as if this was the first time in all the hours they had spent together that he actually saw him. Hurd had the steady, unblinking eyes and the solid face of a Marine. As Hal Rana instinctively knew, Andrew Hurd was excitable, dangerous; there was no end to his hatred and his tenacity.

“I don’t care what you understand, Mr. Rana.”

“So,” Hal Rana said, “if you don’t care that I don’t understand anything, that I fucked up, as you put it, that I’m not as hardcore as you, why don’t I just call the Attorney General and tell him to get me off this case?”

“You know too much, Mr. Rana. I never thought you had what this needed, but I got stuck with you. And now you’re stuck with me. You work for me, not Mr. Fucking Attorney General.”

“I think I’ll leave now, Mr. Hurd. You need a chance to calm down.”

Hurd lunged out of his chair and reached a powerful arm across the table. He cut the air just in front of Hal Rana’s eyes; it was a figurative, slashing warning. “Don’t use that haughty bullshit on me.”

Rana glanced at Nashatka, as if believing Nashatka would help him, just as a boy being beaten up on a playground imagines that the other boys who are watching will help him, and no one does.

“I want you to use your smooth Eaton style to get Goldberg to sign a search warrant for the Imam’s mosque in Newark.”

“A mosque? Goldberg will never let you seize a mosque.”

“You will put together affidavits from agents saying we have reason to believe there are either weapons in the mosque or information there as to where the weapons are. And you will tell the judge we need to seize all the mosque’s financial records.”

“Why would the Imam be so stupid as to have guns and rifles in his mosque?”

“He doesn’t.”

“So you want me to lie to a federal judge?”

“I want you to do what I tell you to do. There are pieces of information out there, Mr. Rana, that are finally starting to coalesce. Johnson has some of the pieces, I have some of the pieces, the fucking Imam has some of them, and Simeon Black had some of them.”

“Simeon Black?”

“The writer, Byron Johnson’s old girlfriend.”

“What did Black have?”

“Resources. He was a safe-keeper for Byron Johnson’s knowledge and Ali Hussein’s secrets. Byron whispered sweet nothings to Simeon that he never whispered to Christina Rosario.”

“And how do you know this?”

“We took down the two brothers who murdered Mr. Black. They were trying to fence his computers.”

“Where are these people now?”

“I have them.”

“Where?”

“Never mind where, Mr. Rana.” Hurd stood up. “Same place I have you, Mr. Rana.”