Paul Batista
Extraordinary Rendition
© 2013
For Iris Gerber Damson
1
THE PLANE WAS BANKING over Florida’s Atlantic coast when Byron Carlos Johnson felt the first tug of the landing process beginning eighty miles from Miami. He raised the plastic window shade to his left and, for the first time in two hours, looked out at the sky and the dazzling ocean. He put the book he’d been reading-Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone-into the elasticized pouch in front of him. He’d last read the intricate nineteenth-century mystery when he was in college, and his concentrated passage through the Gothic prose had been a welcome reprieve from his incessant thinking about Ali Hussein, the Syrian who had already spent two months in the Federal Detention Center in Miami after years in foreign prisons not yet disclosed to Byron-mystery places somewhere in the world.
Since he carried only a slim briefcase for this one-day visit to Miami, Byron didn’t have to wait for baggage. He left the terminal before any other passenger on the flight and was in a barely air-conditioned taxi fifteen minutes after leaving the plane. The driver was a talkative Jamaican who seemed intrigued by the destination Byron gave him: “The prison on Southwest 137th Avenue.”
The driver repeatedly glanced into the rearview mirror at Byron. In that familiar Jamaican lilt, he asked, “You a lawyer, man? You look like a lawyer.”
“What does a lawyer look like, Jacques?” His name was on a plastic license taped to the dashboard.
“A dude in a suit, man. Down here anybody in a suit is a lawyer.”
Byron, who could see the driver’s face in the rearview mirror just as the driver could see Byron’s face, smiled. “Only crazy men wear suits, Jacques.”
“You don’t look crazy, man.”
“You never know, Jacques.”
The Miami skyline had changed in the thirty years since Byron first saw it. Then, Miami was a city with the low, smoky skyline of a Latin American capital. Byron remembered enjoying the streets in the heart of the city with small Cuban grocery stores and colorful, hole-in-the-wall bars. He spoke fluent Spanish-his mother was a Mexican who had given him the middle name Carlos and his father, who was the United States Ambassador to Mexico in the early 1960s, during the Kennedy Administration, was also fluent. Byron still had vivid early recollections of Mexico City and the black Packards with gaudily uniformed chauffeurs who drove him around the city, the slowly rotating ceiling fans, the parties on the leafy grounds of the Presidential Palace, and the sweet grammar school where he had only five classmates, all of them children of men who worked for his father at the grand embassy.
Now Miami’s skyline was dominated by high towers of flashing glass and steel. As the taxi sped along the causeway toward the city, Byron stared at the modern office buildings that reflected all the light of this brilliant day. Since Byron believed that taxi drivers knew everything, he asked Jacques, “Are there any tenants in those new buildings?”
Jacques whistled. “Empty, man. I never pick anybody up there, never drop anybody off. Somebody’s not making too much money.”
Byron gave Jacques a big tip, and in exchange Jacques gave Byron a big smile. “You my man,” Jacques said.
As soon as Byron stepped out of the taxi at the prison’s security gate, he was submerged in heat and humidity. He walked as quickly as he could across the football field-sized parking lot, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder. The Federal Detention Center, built in the 1970s, rose like a Soviet fortress over the warehouses on the waterfront. In the wide Miami harbor, tall cranes stood against the tropical sky in which cumulus clouds towered. Tankers and cargo ships, pleasure craft and sailboats moved on the water.
After thirty minutes of security checks in the ammonia-smelling entrance to the prison, where the air conditioning was so minimal that Byron continued to sweat as much as he had during the long walk, he was led by a heavy-set Hispanic prison guard to a locked room. When the guard left, the iron door resonated briefly as the magnetic lock engaged itself. Byron sat on a steel folding chair. Directly in front of him was a narrow ledge under a multi-layered, almost opaque plastic window, in the middle of which was a metal circle.
Ali Hussein seemed to just materialize in the small space behind the partition. Dressed in a yellow jumpsuit printed with the initials “FDC” for “Federal Detention Center,” Hussein, who had been described to Byron as an accountant trained at Seton Hall, in Newark, was a slender man who appeared far more mild-mannered than Byron expected. He wore cloth slippers with no shoelaces. The waistband of his jumpsuit was elasticized-not even a cloth belt. He had as little access to hard objects as possible.
He waited for Byron to speak first. Leaning toward the metal speaker in the partition and raising his voice, Byron said, “You are Mr. Hussein, aren’t you?”
The lawyers at the Civil Liberties Union who had first contacted Byron told him that, in their limited experience with accused terrorists, it sometimes wasn’t clear what their real names were. There were often no fingerprints or DNA samples that could confirm their identities. The name Ali Hussein was as common as a coin. It was as though genetic markers and their histories began only at the moment of their arrest.
“I am.” He spoke perfect, unaccented English. “I don’t know what your name is.”
The circular speaker in the window, although it created a tinny sound, worked well. Byron lowered his voice. “I’m Byron Johnson. I’m a lawyer from New York. I met your brother. Did he tell you to expect me?”
“I haven’t heard from my brother in years. He has no idea how to reach me, I can’t reach him.”
“Has anyone told you why you’re here?”
“Someone on the airplane-I don’t know who he was, I was blindfolded-said I was being brought here because I’d been charged with a crime. He said I could have a lawyer. Are you that lawyer?”
“I am. If you want me, and if I want to do this.”
All that Ali’s more abrasive, more aggressive brother had told Byron was that Ali was born in Syria, moved as a child with his family to Lebanon during the civil war in the 1980s, and then came to the United States. Ali never became a United States citizen. Five months after the invasion of Iraq, he traveled to Germany to do freelance accounting work for an American corporation for what was scheduled to be a ten-day visit. While Ali was in Germany, his brother said, he had simply disappeared, as if waved out of existence. His family had written repeatedly to the State Department, the CIA, and the local congressman. They were letters sent into a vacuum. Nobody ever answered.
Byron asked, “Do you know where you’ve come from?”
“How do I know who you are?”
Byron began to reach for his wallet, where he stored his business cards. He caught himself because of the absurdity of that: he could have any number of fake business cards. Engraved with gold lettering, his real business card had his name and the name of his law firm, one of the oldest and largest in the country. Ali Hussein was obviously too intelligent, too alert, and too suspicious to be convinced by a name on a business card or a license or a credit card.
“I don’t have any way of proving who I am. I can just tell you that I’m Byron Johnson, I’ve been a lawyer for years, I live in New York, and I was asked by your brother and others to represent you.”
Almost unblinking, Ali just stared at Byron, who tried to hold his gaze, but failed.
At last Ali asked, “And you want to know what’s happened to me?”
“We can start there. I’m only allowed thirty minutes to visit you this week. Tell me what you feel you want to tell me, or can tell me. And then we’ll see where we go. You don’t have to tell me everything about who you are, what you did before you were arrested, who you know in the outside world. Or you don’t have to tell me anything. I want nothing from you other than to help you.”