Extraordinary Rendition

5

TOM NASHATKA WAS WELL over six feet tall and, at thirty-nine, still weighed less than two hundred pounds. He was blond and blue-eyed, the son of a Polish immigrant family that had settled in Pittsburgh two years before he was born. He went through the Pittsburgh public school system and graduated from Penn State, where he played football and was the captain of the Greco-Roman varsity wrestling team. He had even contended in the 1996 Olympic trials. Tom enlisted in the Navy after he graduated and trained as a Navy Seal. He spent six years in the Navy and was then accepted for a rare slot as a special agent of the Secret Service. After September 11, he asked for a transfer to the new Department of Homeland Security and got it.

His head was completely shaven. For years he had worn an earring, a golden circle in his right earlobe. It gave him, he said, deep cover. “I look like Mr. Clean-bald head and earring, ready to take care of the kitchen and bathroom.”

He was friendly and engaging. After his transfer to New York, he developed many friendships in the upscale, gentrified Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. He had girlfriends-not one of them knew he was a federal agent-and he enjoyed several nights out each week at the coffee bars and the real bars of his neighborhood. By eleven he was usually in his small, neat apartment on the third floor of a renovated brownstone. His friends thought he worked at a brokerage firm. Although they found it odd for someone in the sales business, Tom let his friends know he didn’t want to take them on as clients because he thought there might be some kind of conflict of interest. There were times, too-and his young friends thought this was strange for a broker-when he was out of town, without explanation, for two or three weeks at a time.

As soon as Byron Carlos Johnson sent the email to himself with the quotation from the Koran, Tom Nashatka’s own computer screen was filled with the same words. He immediately knew they were from the eighth book of the Koran, a chapter entitled “Spoils of War.” And he immediately recognized the strange translation, first published in 1930, by Marmaduke Pickthall, that bizarre Englishman with the look and mannerisms of Oscar Wilde.

As he re-read the two quotations from the Koran that Byron had so carefully typed and then emailed to himself, Tom Nashatka was grateful that Byron had abandoned his old practice of writing longhand notes to himself. It had been time-consuming for Tom’s agents to copy every page of Byron Johnson’s loose-leaf notebooks; the agents spent hours on many nights in Byron’s twenty-seventh floor office in the quiet of the Seagram Building on Fifth Avenue, copying all those handwritten pages. Byron’s use of emails to himself made it easy for Tom to intercept and review Byron’s thoughts and actions in real time.

This was the second fragment of the Koran Byron Carlos Johnson had typed into his computer. He had sent the first quote to himself from his laptop as he sat in the Jet Blue terminal in Miami after a visit to the devout Ali Hussein. It had been Tom Nashatka’s idea to grant Byron’s request to allow Hussein to have a copy of the Koran, and to have it in English even though Hussein had asked for the original Arabic text. Tom had collected enough information about Byron Johnson to know that Byron, who was slow to learn the mysteries of email and the Internet, had gradually developed the habit of writing notes on his computer and emailing them to himself, a neater, more modern extension of Byron’s old practice of jotting messages to himself. The email notes had only recently started to replace the handwritten notes dating back to 1980, all kept in loose-leaf binders on a shelf in Byron’s office, which he had accumulated each year, a kind of diary, business calendar, and personal message system. And it was no longer necessary to arrange with Sandy Spencer for the agents’ late-night access to the office.

Tom Nashatka forwarded the email to Kimberly Smith, the professor at Stanford who still worked undercover for the CIA and who probably had studied the intricacies of Islam even more carefully than he had. But she was the one who wrote the articles that appeared in scholarly journals, as well as places like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, because her academic credentials as a writer and teacher gave her even deeper undercover protection than he had. Tom was anonymous, Kimberly was famous.

She was the one-blonde, edgy, striking-who appeared again and again on shows on CNN with Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer and on Fox with Bill O’Reilly. On television she was known as the “Islamic expert from Stanford.” The computers she and Tom used to communicate were as secure as any computers in the world; and the messages about the business, as they called it, were veiled, and indecipherable to anyone who might have, through some extraordinary feat of computer expertise and intuition, intercepted them.

Just seconds after he forwarded Byron’s email, Tom’s computer screen flashed a red star that registered an incoming message from Kimberly’s BlackBerry.

“Quite the student, isn’t he?” Kimberly wrote.

For the thousandth time, he thought about the two nights he had spent with her, first in San Francisco and then at the Essex House on Central Park South where she stayed when she came to New York for her television appearances. “This is strange,” she had said the first night they were together. “I never fucked a man with an earring.”

Tom wrote, “Are you naked, Professor Smith?”

There was a twenty-second gap as she typed. Then the message arrived: “I’m on a stationary bike at the gym. Almost naked. The old faculty letches are staring at my ass.”

“I have a hard-on.”

“That’s standard issue weaponry, right?”

“Fuck you, lady.”

“In your dreams, fella.”

“When are you coming out here?”

“Check the CNN listings.”