Extraordinary Rendition

39

BYRON JOHNSON STAYED ON the chilly island for two days after she left. There was no television in the house; there never had been. The only radio was a short wave on which the mechanical, inflectionless voices of the announcers for the national weather bureau gave the regional and maritime weather. Byron loved to hear the names of the geographic landmarks-the weather in the vast expanse of Casco Bay as far north as Nova Scotia and south to Kennebunkport, the readings from Execution Rocks, the conditions at the buoy ninety miles from Monhegan Island.

An ice storm enveloped the island for twenty-four hours. The island closed down completely-isolated, quiet, and intimate. Glistening and ice-burdened branches fell from some of the nearby pine trees.

Christina’s long text message had riveted him, and he spent those two days reading and re-reading it. Byron was angry, he was relieved, he was harrowed with fear. He was also repeatedly overwhelmed by pangs of love and the grieving void of loss.

This is who I am, she wrote. I’m multiple women. I change often. You were right about Christina. She died.

She was a Captain in the Army at the time of 9/11, she wrote. She was fluent in Arabic. She wanted to serve the United States. She joined the new Homeland Security Department. She received stratospheric security clearances.

When she and Andrew Hurd learned that Byron decided to represent a man they believed had been a master of terrorist finance since the USS Cole bombing in 2000, they drew together a team of diverse people with the same level of security clearances. Within days, she was transformed into a Columbia Law School student and, through people she called “institutional cooperators,” she became a summer associate at SpencerBlake, complete with a transcript from the law school and recommendations from two of its professors. She and her team members had several strategies for “downloading” from Byron the information he would absorb from Ali Hussein, the “banker for al-Qaeda.”

Only one of those strategies involved placing Christina Rosario into his life, mind, and soul. They knew Byron had left his marriage unwillingly, that he had brief affairs with other women, and that he had joined an online dating service in which he said little about himself and did not post his picture. So, they knew, he was vulnerable.

They also knew that he was a consummate lawyer, a man with an enormous capacity to extract facts from clients and to inspire confidence in them. Byron was one of those increasingly rare lawyers who looked like what people once viewed as the prototype of a lawyer-handsome, tall, well-mannered, projecting an aura of noblesse oblige without any trace of arrogance or haughtiness.

And, finally, they knew he had become restless, irritable, and discontented as he entered and warily moved into his early sixties.

From that gorgeous moment in the dusk at the Central Park Zoo, the Rosario strategy worked. I not only became your lover, she wrote in the text message, I became your alter ego. Like any new lover, you let me roam through your life. I had free access to your notes, your computer and cell phone (although I had to work to haul you into the 21st century), and what I knew to be your soul. I took all of that from you, and gave it to others so that they could sift it all to find money, like those prospectors in the California Gold Rush who screened sand and water for gold.

It was because I fell in love with you that Hurd and his minions started a campaign of disinformation and deception. When the $52 million kissed your account and fled, I asked Hurd where the money came from and how it had landed in your account and skipped off like a stone a kid tosses on the surface of the water.

“Ask your boyfriend,” he told me.

It was never in the plan and strategy as disclosed to her, she wrote, that Byron’s life would be put at such profound risk. She told Hurd it was crazy to suggest that Byron had divined how to locate the funds, move them to himself, and then managed to have the money pass through multiple accounts until it slipped into a black hole somewhere. If he has it, Hurd said to her, then he has a choice: he can give it to me or he will never be able to use it. Unless, of course, he said, you’ve got it, too.

And in that moment, Carlos, I knew he had decided I’d betrayed him. He kills people, Byron, for the sport of it. Remember King Lear? “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.” Be careful, Carlos. I love you.

Gazing through the windows at the ice-silvered pine trees and the boulders against which the Atlantic crashed, tossing icy foam into the air, Byron hit the keys on his BlackBerry and forwarded her text message to his own email account. Life at risk. It felt as though every muscle, bone, and organ in his body were dissolving. The bathroom was cold. But he felt the overwhelming need to strip off all his clothes. Job’s words came to his mind, and he spoke them out loud: Naked, naked came I into the world, and naked shall I return.

When the ferry docked at Boothbay Harbor on the mainland, he stopped at the coffee shop on the wharf. He sat at the counter, on a circular stool with no arms or backrest. The new weekly edition of the local newspaper, the Harbor Express, was on the countertop. He casually pulled it toward him and spread open the first page on the worn counter as his black coffee and glazed doughnut-known here as a honey-dipped doughnut (a name that to him always had a wonderful sexual resonance)-arrived.

At the top of the front page was a driver’s license picture of Christina Rosario: Frozen Body Found on Beach in Acadia.

Byron struggled for breath, holding his hand over his mouth. The prematurely old waitress, her face worn by cigarettes and perennial cold weather, asked in that laconic Maine accent as she gestured at the headline, “Isn’t that something?”

He glanced at her, overwhelmed by a desire to have her take him to wherever she lived on this isolated coast and protect him. He shook his head. He couldn’t speak.