Extraordinary Rendition (3 page)

“So you’re going to pick a state where the jury is most likely to convict, right?”

“We’ve been thinking about Oklahoma, Mr. Johnson. We relish the idea of putting a terrorist on trial in front of an Oklahoma jury near the site where McVeigh blew up the federal building.”

“I don’t think that’s fair.”

“You don’t? Then you have to complain to Congress. I’m just a simple country lawyer.”

Byron knew he had few options since new laws gave lawyers little leeway to do what they ordinarily did when they represented accused people. He couldn’t insist on a quick indictment, couldn’t seek bail, and couldn’t demand a speedy trial. Judges for the most part were timid and unwilling to disturb whatever the Justice Department, the CIA, and Homeland Security decided to do.

“My client and I don’t even know what the charges are, Mr. Rana.”

“We don’t know either yet. We can take our time to decide what the charges are.”

“Listen, I asked for this meeting so that I could develop at least
some
information to defend this man.”

“Information? You want information? I have a suggestion for you: Ask your client what he knows.”

“Ask my client? Don’t you think it might be fair at some point to let him know whether he’s accused of killing Kennedy or driving bin Laden around?”

“We don’t think he killed Kennedy. You don’t have to ask him about that. As for bin Laden, he’s left the planet and doesn’t need drivers any more, except for celestial chariots.”

“I don’t particularly want to go to the newspapers and tell them that the United States government is stonewalling. Reporters are dying to hear about this case, Mr. Rana. The Attorney General saw to it that this story was all over CNN, FOX, all the networks.”

“It hasn’t been our experience that there’s really a public outcry when we hold a terrorist in jail. And we are being nice
to you by having this meeting. We can stop having meetings if you don’t work with us.”

“Work with you? What does that mean?”

“In my world, Mr. Johnson, a lot of the work involves information. Information is hard currency here.”

“Information about what?”

“I can’t tell you how to do your job. But you might want to connect the dots for your client. He’s an accountant. He’s far better versed in numbers than most people are. Also, we know he’s a wizard in the wonders of money transfers—cash, wires, checks, computers, virtual accounts, human mules carrying cash taped to their bodies.” Rana paused. “I assume you’re following me? As they say in the mobster movies,
capiche
?”

“All I know, Mr. Rana, is that he’s an accountant. And so far I’ve had exactly thirty minutes to talk to him.”

Rana smiled almost benignly. “What does your client’s brother have to say?”

Byron was instantly unsettled. He had made no attempt to conceal the meeting at the diner in gritty Union City with Ali Hussein’s brother, but it had never occurred to him that the government would know about it.

“All his brother could tell me was what a nice man Mr. Hussein is, and how long he’d been gone.”

“You know what, Mr. Johnson? We do want to help you and your client. You probably haven’t done much of this kind of criminal work, and I can tell you’re a nice man just trying to do the world a favor by representing the oppressed. But you might want to talk with Mr. Hussein about the people he did accounting work for, what cash they had, where they got it, how they gave it to him, where he sent it, who gave him
instructions about where to send it, the names of the people he dealt with on both ends of the transactions—the collection of the money and the distribution of it, what the accountants call ‘first in, first out.’” Rana waited. “And, most important, ask him where he put the money just before he joined us and where it is now.”

Byron wanted to restrain himself, as he had throughout the conference, from responding to the condescending message that he was walking into dangerous and unfamiliar territory where he knew nothing about the pitfalls. He also resented that cultured edge of British superciliousness in Rana’s tone. “I appreciate that you’re trying to help my client. The government has been a great help to him over these last years. But, so that I don’t just grope around in the dark, tell me what you think he might know.”

“We don’t know what he knows.”

“You’ve had many years to chat pleasantly with him about his background and his work. Most marriages don’t last that long.”

“You know better than I do, Mr. Johnson, that creativity is the lifeblood of the law, as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote and we all heard in our first year at law school. Maybe once you get to know your client better you may want to think creatively and then call us if there’s anything that we might do for him in exchange for information. Your client knows a great deal about the value of exchange—he can apply the skills he learned about exchanging money to the exchange of information. We’ve found that Syrians are very effective in the workings of trades, exchanges, and bargains. The skill dates back to long before Biblical times.”

“Syrians? I thought the Justice Department wasn’t supposed to discriminate on the basis of national origin or religion.”

“You might also ask Mr. Ali about religion, now that you mention it. Nine years ago he was a devoted member of the Al Sunni Mosque in Newark, on Raymond Boulevard. He was particularly impressed, we’ve learned, by the teachings and wisdom of the Imam of the mosque, Sheik Naveed al Haq. Over the last few years Sheik al Haq has told a few of his congregants that he is particularly concerned about the fate and the soul of your client. Maybe your client can favor us with a little bit of information about the teachings of the Imam and what happened to the mosque’s collection boxes.”

“Now that’s useful information at last, Mr. Rana.” Byron still instinctively felt uncomfortable engaging this exotic man in any kind of cynical banter but found it hard to resist. “Now I know about the Imam. That’s a start. Are there any other people you can tell me about who I can call for information?”

“Maybe as we go along, Mr. Johnson, I can give you a boost on that. Maybe when you make your client understand that if he wants to help himself we might be able to help him, by someday letting him have the hope of seeing Damascus again, where he can enjoy the blessings of a true democracy, and in this life, not the next.”

T
HREE BANDS WERE PERFORMING at the firm’s party in the Central Park Zoo. One was a reggae group near the pool in which the seals lived. Another band, more remote, up in the rocky area where the polar bears were kept, was a rock group playing music from U2 and Guns N’ Roses. More sedate, and far more popular with the older partners and their wives, was a band playing Motown music near the trees and mossy boulders where the monkeys lived.

Byron’s firm had rented the entire zoo for the night and invited not only the three hundred partners and associates who worked in the firm’s New York office but also the lawyers from the satellite offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami. They had come with their husbands, wives, partners, and children. The party, which was held once each year in the summer, started in the late afternoon and would run on until ten.

Byron looked forward to the day when he would never have to go to one of these parties again. He had attended the firm’s summer outings—at country clubs, in the Met, at the zoo—for years. Although the people had changed from year to year as lawyers joined the firm, left the firm, retired, died, or were forced out, with more and more new lawyers always replacing them, the core nature of the firm never changed—hundreds of lawyers celebrating their wealth, their success, and the firm’s longevity. In many ways, SpencerBlake was like
a baseball team: it had a name, and that name remained the same despite the fact that the lawyers who worked for the firm were constantly in flux. That nebulous thing—the firm—survived the specific identities of the lawyers who made up the firm. Not one of the players on the Boston Red Sox this year had been a player in 2007, yet the identity of the team survived its human parts.

Drink in hand, Byron walked around the zoo. He had arrived alone, six hours after his meeting at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in lower Manhattan. Byron was divorced, against his will, six years earlier.

“Mr. Johnson, I’ve been wanting to say hi to you.” The young woman—tall, slim, black-haired, beautiful—touched his elbow while he watched the seals leap into the air and clamber on the boulders as two zookeepers, young women in knee-high green waders and safari-style clothes, tossed fish into the air. The kids clapped each time the seals caught the fish in midair, as they always did, with the unerring accuracy of major league infielders. Even the adults applauded.

In the dusk, Byron faced her. He no longer made any effort to know the names of every lawyer in the firm and never looked at the pictures in the firm’s ever-changing, yearbook-size directory or on its splashy promotional website. He did what he always did when he encountered someone whose name he didn’t know or couldn’t remember. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you have to tell me who you are.”

“Christina Rosario.”

“Christina, hello.”

She shifted the drink she’d been carrying in her right hand to her left. When he touched her now free right hand it was
chilly and wet, electrifying. From years of meeting thousands of people at parties, at conventions, and in the ordinary course of his busy life, Byron instinctively knew how to engage a new person, even one as distractingly good-looking as Christina Rosario, in conversation. “Are you in the New York office? Chicago? LA?”

“I’m a summer associate, here.” Her voice was warm and calm, appealing.

“Welcome, Christina.” Byron asked the natural next question. “Where do you go to law school?”

“Columbia.”

She stood closer to him than he would have expected. She wore a red summer dress. In the steadily deepening dark, with the tinkle of glasses and laughter and the partying voices all around him, he saw that the dress was cut low enough to reveal the lovely shape of her neck and her shoulders, all that flawless young skin, and the swell of her large breasts.

“I’ve been hoping to work in the litigation department with you.”

Until five years ago—when his involvement in the work he had done for years began to wane—Byron had been the head of the firm’s litigation department. “We still have a rotation system, Christina, I’m sure you’ll get there.”

Christina made him uncomfortable, that mix of desire and concern. The desire was understandable: a long time had passed since Joan divorced him, he had spent several years essentially alone except for the fewer and fewer people with whom he had contact at work, and, although a handsome man, he had dated only seven or eight women. He had spent a few nights with only three of them. His sons, Hunter (his
father’s middle name) and Tomas (the first name of his mother’s father), lived in distant cities; they were in their early thirties, born just a year apart, probably the same age as this gorgeous woman, and they were starting their own careers. They were always popular, always engaged with friends and with life, more like Joan in that way than like him.

And the concern he felt, as he stood close to Christina in the dusk that gradually filled the zoo, was understandable, too. Male partners in the firm routinely received email reminders from the executive committee that alerted them to the absolute prohibitions against what was called “unwelcome” contact with the junior women and men in the firm. Two years earlier, the firm had been sued when a fifty-year-old corporate partner told a twenty-eight-year-old associate that she had a great ass. Byron barely knew the partner, but at a closed meeting among dozens of the partners, he was impressed by the man’s sincerity when he described the flirty conversation in which he had used those words. “I never even touched her hand,” he kept repeating, completely bewildered by what was engulfing him as a result of uttering one sentence. “I meant nothing by it.” The firm had settled the case swiftly with a payment of half a million dollars to the woman, who left the firm, complete with a six-month paid leave of absence, to join a firm in Houston. The partner had been forced to resign. Privately Byron considered the punishment too swift and too total.

Faced with this alluring young woman with her unsettling presence, Byron heeded the danger signals. She made him feel awkward, somewhat like a teenager at his first party. He raised the glass he was holding in a kind of mock salute. “Maybe we will get a chance to work together,” he said. “We’ll leave
that up to the hidden hand of the powers on the assignment committee.”

She stared directly into his eyes and smiled. “I hope so, Byron.”

Even as he turned from her, her presence continued to jar and stimulate him.
Byron
? There was a daring in her sudden, unexpected use of his first name. Should he avoid her for the rest of the summer? Or did he want to see to it that she worked for him for a week or two? Did he want to follow the temptation that she clearly knew she was presenting? Or did he want to concentrate on that enigmatic man in the prison in Miami?