Extraordinary Rendition (5 page)

He was smaller and younger than Byron expected, probably no older than thirty-five. When Ali Hussein, at their meeting a week earlier in Miami, told Byron that he was certain his brother could arrange a meeting with the Imam (“Please do this for me, see him and convey my respects to him,” Ali had said), Byron had cruised through the miraculous Internet to search for more information about him. He easily located many entries, mainly copies of news articles and pictures of the man. The photographs were not posted by the Imam or anyone around him; instead, they were pictures posted by people Byron assumed were right-wing American men, who added messages such as “Is this bin Laden’s brother?” and “Put a hole-a-in-the-Ayatollah.”

The man was in a robe. He wore heavy glasses. He had a beard. Somehow he had the look and demeanor, Byron thought, of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. Byron nodded slightly, respectfully, not knowing if this was the proper way to greet a Muslim holy man. He waited for some signal that he should sit. Khalid translated the words the Imam spoke, “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Johnson?”

Byron was surprised that Khalid translated. On one of the Internet sites devoted to the Imam, Byron had seen and heard a video, obviously surreptitiously made, of him speaking in clear English to an audience. In that Internet video, the Arabic translation of what he was saying ran across the lower screen.

Although his face was somber, his voice almost had a lilt, was almost in fact effeminate. Khalid translated, “You have seen our brother Ali?”

Byron was uncomfortable. This was a strange setting—a bare room in a mosque. These men were also strange: a brooding man in typical American clothes and an Arabic-speaking Imam in a robe. This mosque, too, was for Byron otherworldly. He tried to convey nothing of his discomfort, but he was aware of the quaver in his voice. He wondered whether the other men detected it.

“Ali isn’t happy. And I can’t say that he looks healthy.”

And then the soft voice spoke, followed immediately by Khalid’s abrupt-sounding, harsh translation. “The people who did this to our brother are not good people.”

“It’s not those people who concern him,” Byron said. “Ali is very concerned about his wife and children.”

It was Khalid who answered, not the Imam. “They are well taken care of.” Khalid seemed to resent the question.

“But he wants to know where they live, what they’re doing, what’s happened to them.”

Khalid translated Byron’s words, listened to the Imam, and then translated. “You can tell Ali that they have been well cared for.”

“Ali isn’t asking that. He wants to know where they are, what their health is, what schools his children are in.”

Khalid didn’t translate. There was silence in the room. The Imam spoke, and then Khalid said, “What has our brother told you?”

Byron knew that he would confront this problem: he had explained to Ali, when Ali asked that he visit the Imam, that there was very little he could say to him about what Byron and Ali had discussed. Byron had tried to make Ali understand that there was an attorney-client privilege that made it impossible for Byron to tell anyone the words that he and Ali had exchanged. And Byron had explained that, if Ali gave him permission to tell his brother and the Imam what their conversations were, then the attorney-client privilege would be lost and Byron might be required to tell other people as well. He was certain that Ali, an intelligent man who had worked as an accountant, understood. But Ali simply said, “Please, just speak to my brother and the Imam. I want them to know that I’m here, I want them to tell you about my wife and kids, I want you to let them know that you are a life-giver, and that you were able to bring me the holy
Koran
.”

Byron spoke slowly: “I can’t tell you everything we’ve talked about.”

Again Khalid translated: “What has our brother said to you?”

“I can tell you this: that he was in prisons in Europe, or so he thinks, for two years, and then for years in a hot place, probably Guantanamo, in Cuba; that he has been very badly treated; that he doesn’t know what he’s accused of. And that he now has a copy of the
Koran
.”

The Imam spoke. Khalid translated: “What did he tell you about the
Koran
?”

“He said that it was life-giving water to read it again.”

Khalid said, “My brother was always very devout.”

“And he also wanted me to let the Imam know that he has read and understands at last the words of book nine.”

“What words in book nine?”

Byron removed from his pocket the yellow sheet of paper. He read aloud: “
Those who were left behind rejoiced at sitting still behind the messenger of Allah, and were averse to striving with their wealth and their lives in Allah’s way. And they said, Go not forth in the heat! Say: the heat of hell is more intense of heat, if they but understood.
”

Suddenly the Imam, his voice sibilant and rapt, began reciting words in Arabic. It took almost a minute for him to finish. At the end, Khalid said, “The Imam asks that you let our brother know that the next lesson he must understand is in book eight,
chapter six
, the verses 55 through 62. Ali’s strength is in Allah, in the
Glorious Koran
.”

Byron had read enough about the
Koran
to know that its title was properly translated as the
Glorious Koran
, not just the
Koran
. He wrote down the reference that the Imam had given him.
Book, chapter, lines of verse. 8, 6, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62
. He knew also that almost every edition of the
Koran
, no matter who the translator was, had the same chapter, verse and line number so that readers could all find the same text, just as the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays had common chapter, verse, and line numbers.

Then, somewhere outside the room, a bell sounded. Byron had seen a sign indicating that there were classes for children in the building, and the bell, although muffled, sounded like a school bell. There were no children in the building, no sound of children’s voices anywhere.

Khalid stood. Byron did as well. The Imam remained seated. “The Sheik sends his blessings to our brother,” Khalid said.

Three hours later, in his apartment, Byron turned to the passage of the
Koran
the Imam had mentioned. He had an old translation by a long-dead man who wrote in his preening introduction that he was Marmaduke Pickthall, the first Englishman who had himself become a Muslim to translate the holy text.

Byron read aloud:
Lo! The worst of beasts in Allah’s sight are the ungrateful who will not believe. Those of them with whom thou madest a treaty, and then at every opportunity they break their treaty, and they keep not duty to Allah. If thou comest on them in the war, deal with them so as to strike fear in those who are behind them, that haply they may remember. And if thou fearest treachery from any folk, then throw back to them their treaty fairly. Lo! Allah loveth not the treacherous. And let not those who disbelieve suppose that they can outstrip Allah’s purpose. Lo! They cannot escape. Make ready for them all thou canst of armed force and of horses tethered, that thereby ye may dismay the enemy of Allah and your enemy, and others beside them whom ye know not. Allah knoweth them. Whatsoever ye spend in the way of Allah it will be repaid to you in full, and ye will not be wronged
.

Byron typed these words into his computer. He had developed a habit of typing notes and sending them through the ether by email to himself, so that he had them in both his
Sent
column and his
Old
column. He printed out the passage. He planned to take the sheet of paper on his next trip to Miami
to read to Ali. He felt it was part of his task to give this man, isolated for so many years from his family, his neighborhood, his surroundings, and his religion, some link to the world he once knew. And Byron believed he could never assess another person’s religion—life had taught him enough about the mysteries of religion that he long ago gave up considering Roman Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, even the Episcopal formalities of his youth, absurd or misguided or useless. They all mattered to billions of people in the world, and sometimes they mattered to him.

From the privacy of his loft apartment on Laight Street in Tribeca, where the sounds of huge garbage trucks and tractor trailers still rumbled at night on the cobblestone pavements of the old warehouse district, he gazed at the top of the Empire State Building. Shimmering red and blue lights were draped over its heights. He then read again:
Lo! Allah loveth not the treacherous. And let not those who disbelieve suppose that they can outstrip Allah’s purpose
.

“What the hell,” he said aloud, “can this mean?”

T
OM 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.