Extraordinary Rendition (11 page)

The question came back, the tenacious voice, “But why are you doing it? Why you?”

Byron decided to be playful. He smiled. “Because I’m a lawyer. This is what I do.”

Then another question: “Who have your other famous clients been?”

Byron and his law firm had a client roster that was the envy of other lawyers in big law firms like SpencerBlake. But none of the names of those clients would resonate at all with the people now asking him questions. There were no names like Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga, or Casey Anthony on the list.

“It’s Mr. Hussein who is my only concern.”

T
OM NASHATKA AND ANDREW Hurd left the courthouse through the rear entrance reserved for judges and some high-ranking government employees. The area had become, since 9/11, a Baghdad-style green zone. Huge, dirty-white New York City garbage trucks blocked the entrance to the maze of old Manhattan streets that ran among the five nearby courthouses. Iron grates implanted in the roadbeds rose like sharks’ mouths from the streets. And United States Marshals in combat boots patrolled the area.

For Tom Nashatka, Andrew Hurd was an enigma, but a heroic one. He had met Hurd two months earlier on the flight from Guantanamo to Miami as they escorted the blindfolded, smelly Ali Hussein. From the outset Tom knew that Andrew Hurd was the boss, the
capo di tutti capi
, as one of Tom’s mentors had described him. Tom wasn’t familiar with the name, but when he met Andrew Hurd he felt he was in the presence of someone special. Even on sweltering nights in Cuba and Miami, Hurd dressed in a blue suit and tie. His black shoes were highly polished. He sported a black mustache, black hair streaked with gray, and the look and swagger of an agent in a James Bond movie. He smoked cigars even in the small plane.

It was a ten-minute walk from the courthouse to Juliano’s, an Italian restaurant on Mott Street with tables and chairs from the 1950s and an even older tin ceiling from which empty
bottles of wine hung. Kimberly Smith was waiting for them at a table with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. She raised her hand to get their attention, as if a beautiful blonde woman in a room crowded with men in suits needed to signal anyone.

For Kimberly, Andrew Hurd was not an enigma but a joke. She had first met him in a conference room at the CIA headquarters in Langley as Hurd was assembling “Team Ali” with Tom, Hamerindapal Rana, and several other agents. She saw him as cultivating the raffish look of crazy, communist-hunting G. Gordon Liddy, the leader of the Watergate break-in who claimed that he could hold the palm of his hand over a candle flame, the ultimate symbol of macho. Even in Hurd’s presence she seemed to mock his eccentricities, his cigar-smoking, his taste for double-malt Scotch.

Kimberly and Tom glanced at each other over the tops of the big plastic menus. She was impatient to finish the lunch with Hurd. He was so erratic—calling meetings at strange times and unexpected places, sometimes gently asking questions and at other times screaming, and often calling Hal Rana that “fucking towelhead”—that she never really wanted to see him and, when she did, wanted to spend as little time with him as possible. Besides, she was anxious to spend the afternoon at Tom’s apartment in Cobble Hill. Tom was a powerful and physically exciting lover.

“The plan,” Tom Nashatka said into the din of voices in the restaurant, “is working well so far, Andy.”

“Is that so? Tell me why.”

“Johnson has already showed the memo to his girlfriend.”

“My, my,” Kimberly said, “he’s a bad boy. That’s a no-no. He promised not to do that.”

Hurd actually had a roguish smile at times. “Love makes men blind, doesn’t it?”

When the Italian-accented, raven-haired waiter stood over their table, Hurd was the first to order. “Diet Coke and a Caesar salad,” he said, handing the oversize plastic menu to the waiter. “Too early for a Chivas.”

Tom and Kimberly ordered a small pizza and iced tea. When the waiter left the table, Hurd picked up his glass of water. “Byron is going to have a visitor at his apartment tonight. Khalid Hussein is driving into the city to meet with him.”

Kimberly said, “They’re going to have a prayer meeting, don’t you think, about the
Koran
?”

Hurd didn’t respond to her. He asked Tom, “When did brother Khalid last talk to the Imam?”

“He was in the mosque for an hour early this morning.” The mosque was wired with multiple listening and recording devices that Hurd’s agents had implanted and that so far had eluded detection.

“And what about Johnson and Khalid? How are they in touch? Computer, cell phone, smoke signals?”

“Email most of the time. Khalid and Johnson have one thing in common: they don’t sleep. They had an email exchange at two this morning to set up the meeting tonight.”

“Christina must be keeping Byron up at all hours,” Kimberly said.

Although Hurd recognized what she intended to convey by
up
, he again ignored her. “Anything else?”

“Johnson wrote—and Kimberly and I actually believe he is still this naive—that the case against Ali was complicated and that he thought Khalid might help him understand some
new information he had. Mr. Johnson doesn’t get it that everybody’s using him.”

“Did he mention the memo Rana gave him?”

“Not in the email.”

Hurd sipped more water as he watched the waiter approach with a basket of plain bread and garlic rolls. “What else?”

“Johnson’s so smitten that he’s told Khalid that his assistant will be there, too. I guess Byron wants to introduce his
amor
to the family.
Omnia vincit amor
.”

“Love conquers all,” Hurd said. Just as the waiter was placing the breadbasket on the checkered tablecloth, Hurd added, “Be careful who you love.”

Kimberly was surprised that Andrew Hurd knew a Michael Jackson lyric, just as she was surprised that he knew a Latin maxim. She often thought of him as a belligerent and stupid action figure. She was bemused by him, not afraid of him.

Tom had never told her that Andrew Hurd had killed twelve men since 9/11.

“Be sure,” Hurd said to Tom, “that we find out exactly what these two guys talk about tonight. Word for word, gesture for gesture.”

“Don’t worry, Andy. Johnson’s apartment is, as they say, transparent.”

K
HALID HUSSEIN DROVE A gleaming Mercedes SUV through the Holland Tunnel. It was Tuesday night. Since the traffic was light, he increased the speed of the powerful car, racing between the tiled sides of the tunnel and the flexible yellow poles in the center of the roadway that divided the flow of traffic. He chased the red taillights of the car far ahead of him. Even inside the air-conditioned SUV, he heard the sustained whine of all the vehicles in the tunnel.

When he emerged onto Van Dam Street on the New York side of the tunnel, he sped eastward to the nearby streets of Tribeca. Most of the street surfaces were still old, paved with worn bricks. His Mercedes ran over them with a solid, well-built rumble.

Khalid Hussein knew these streets well. When he arrived in the United States in 1980—the first of his family to leave the Middle East—he found work on Warren Street at a huge brick warehouse. Khalid, who had earned a civil engineering degree in Lebanon before the civil war, took a job as a forklift operator. He worked at night, moving wooden pallets from the dim interior of the warehouse to unmarked trucks on the street outside. He had a sense that the warehouse operation was illegal, because there were no signs anywhere, the building was closed during the days, and the movements of large quantities of shoes in crates—or at least crates that he was told
contained shoes—into and out of the warehouse only happened at night, for the most part between midnight and four in the morning. Never once, in the five years Khalid worked there, did he see a single policeman or police cruiser on what were then the largely unoccupied streets of that old industrial and warehouse area, long before the actors and investment bankers moved into the renovated buildings and before the area was suddenly given the made-up name Tribeca.

Despite its transformation—there were now many people on the cobblestone streets at all hours of the night, going to and leaving the after-hours clubs with names like X-3 and 2inc—the area was still familiar. Khalid had worked at the warehouse for five years. By 1985, just as he was turning twenty-nine, he borrowed five thousand dollars from Nick Ferrante, the handsome, engaging man who said he owned the warehouse, and bought a delivery van. He used some of the cash to buy spices from a Saudi who somehow always seemed to have Middle Eastern specialty food to distribute. Khalid often spoke about the first night he loaded bags of fragrant spices into the van and drove his precious cargo through the Lincoln Tunnel, working his way up Bergenline Avenue, Kennedy Boulevard, and Boulevard East in Jersey City, Hoboken, North Bergen, and Edgewater—that string of towns along the Palisades—selling the spices, for cash, to the Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian shops that were then slowly proliferating through these old towns. Even on that first trip, he made twice as much money selling the spices as he had spent to buy them. He was amazed by the reality of capitalism—you could buy something for three dollars and sell it for six. American magic. Within a month he had paid back Nick Ferrante all the money he had borrowed,
and, without being asked, he gave Nick another nine hundred dollars. He and Nick stayed friends eight more years, until Nick was arrested. Khalid, fluent in English, read that Nick was taken down with thirty-five other members of the Gambino family in 1993. Khalid missed Nick, who always embraced him and called him “buddy.” Khalid liked that word: he still called many people “buddy.”

But not Byron Johnson. Khalid didn’t want this polite man to think he was anything other than a driven, narrow-minded Arab. And he didn’t want Byron Johnson to know that he was wealthy, that his first trip in the fragrant, heavy-laden van along the Palisades so many years ago was the start of Khalid’s assembling wealth that he never could have imagined even when, making his way out of the Middle East through Syria in the late 1970s, he glimpsed the rich men in armored Mercedes on the streets of Riyadh, surrounded by armed guards trotting along the sides of the cars.

Five blocks from Byron Johnson’s apartment on Laight Street, Khalid pulled into a gleaming new garage in the basement of a renovated warehouse that was swiftly filling up with people who were spending at least three million dollars for each apartment. Khalid owned the garage, but he didn’t want the cleanly dressed car jockeys who worked there to know that. He took a ticket like everyone else and told the snappy, efficient Puerto Rican garage man in a white shirt and black bowtie that he would be back around midnight.

Khalid Hussein had lived in America long enough to love American women. And he spent as much time as possible with them. There were quick-talking, sexily dressed Jersey
girls who worked in the office at his immense new warehouse near the Meadowlands; the perfectly tanned, Harvard-educated lawyer at the big firm in Roseland that handled the lawsuits that seemed to swirl around business; and the twenty-five-year-old Oklahoma woman who was the hostess at the popular restaurant he and three partners had recently opened on West Broadway. Khalid no longer had to work at the business he had established and ran for so many years; he had three nephews who operated it for him and who, he was sure, were intensely loyal to him. So Khalid had time during this stage of his life to enjoy these enthralling women whenever he liked. If his wife, Benazir, knew anything about them—and she had to—it didn’t matter, because she had absorbed the lessons of obedience.

Khalid almost smiled when, just after Byron Johnson opened the door to his apartment, he saw the gorgeous young woman standing in the light at the end of the hallway, waiting to be introduced to him. Suddenly, putting on what he knew was his dark, brooding face, Khalid said, “And who is this?”

“She’s helping with your brother’s case. Christina Rosario, this is Ali’s brother Khalid. This is Christina Rosario.” He made no effort to shake her hand. He even succeeded in the difficult effort of barely glancing at her.