She admired his focused mind. As soon as he came out of the shower, toweling his thick, subtly graying hair, he said, “Listen, my little lovely, I need to look at these documents before I head downtown tomorrow morning. Let’s order up some Chinese food.”
“Or,” she said, “do we want falafel from the Moroccan place on 104th Street?”
“I think it’s enough that I’m learning how to read the Koran in Arabic. I don’t need genuine Arabic food.”
In Christina’s experience, other men in the wake of an afternoon like this would have suggested the quiet recuperation of a movie or supper in a small restaurant. And maybe, she thought, she and Byron might later do that, but as soon as Byron put on his pants he sat down at the dining room table on which he had earlier placed two manila envelopes given to him that morning by Hal Rana. The envelopes contained two documents he had not yet read.
One of the documents was the indictment of Ali Hussein. As soon as Byron arrived at his office that morning, his telephone rang and he picked it up himself because his secretary was not yet there. It was Rana. He said that Ali Hussein had been moved the day before from the detention center in Miami to the bleak federal prison in lower Manhattan. Hussein would be indicted, Rana said, “tomorrow, for money laundering, racketeering, terrorism, and conspiracy to murder.”
When he heard those words, Byron felt his body flush, that system-wide pulse of blood that was the result of sudden anxiety. This had last happened to him seven years earlier, when his wife simply looked at him during supper at their apartment and said, “I don’t want to be married to you any longer. Not for one more day.”
Hal Rana dispassionately said, “I’ll contact you tomorrow morning, early, and let you know what courtroom to meet us in. We’re going to allow your client to be in court for the arraignment. Judge Goldberg has already been designated. The indictment was filed under seal today. Only we know about it and now you know about it. Your client hasn’t been told why he’s been brought here. Once the arraignment is over, the indictment will be released to the media and posted on the Internet, probably before you even leave the courthouse.”
“Why are you telling me all this, Mr. Rana?”
“We’re not monsters, Mr. Johnson. We did start a dialogue with you a little while back, when you were down here meeting with us. You didn’t continue the dialogue, but now we’re showing you the courtesy of giving you a heads up.”
“Don’t misunderstand me, I appreciate that.”
“Good. It’s always good to be appreciated, Mr. Johnson. You’re about to appreciate us even more because we’ve decided to give you a copy of the indictment today, rather than wait to hand it to you when you and your client appear in court tomorrow. That way you can spend the night with it. It might help you.”
Byron said, “I appreciate that, too.”
“And we are also going to give you something else, if you can guarantee me that you’ll keep it to yourself and your client only, not share it with anyone else.”
Byron painfully remembered the steps of the courthouse in Miami when he had been taken aback by the reporters and cameras on the scorching plaza. He felt at the time that he had been exposed as an amateur. “Maybe before we go any further, Mr. Rana, you should tell me what you want me to keep so confidential.”
“Fair enough. It’s a highly classified report we’ve prepared explaining in detail the allegations about money laundering and money transfers that are mentioned in the indictment. It provides details ordinarily not seen in an indictment.”
“Such as?”
“Account numbers your client may have used. Wiring instructions he might be familiar with.”
“Why give me that?”
“We want to make sure that in the long run no one will accuse us of having been unfair to you or your client. We know how very rare this case is, so we’re taking the unusual step of giving you and your client the kind of blueprint of our case you would expect to see at trial, not now, so that we can’t be accused of having held onto the company secrets and taken advantage of you by springing information for the first time at trial.”
“It sounds interesting.”
“And maybe once your client sees what we know-as well as what we believe he knows-he’ll see the wisdom in pleading guilty and cooperating with us.”
Byron paused, uncertain about whether to accept the offer. Rana, a skillful man, waited. And then Byron said, “Sure.”
“No one other than you and your client sees it, at least for now. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“And we’ll make it even fairer for you: if there comes a point in time when you feel you want to share it with other people, like accountants, you can file a motion, under seal, with the judge for permission to release it to other specific people. But you can’t release it without a court order. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough.”
“We’ll need to have you come downtown to pick up these two envelopes yourself. We don’t want to risk emails, pdfs, or messengers. This is hand-to-hand contact, Mr. Johnson.”
Byron had been waiting for a lighthearted tone from the steady Hamerindapal Rana. Maybe, he thought, that last sentence was it. “Did you say contact or combat, Mr. Rana?”
Rana didn’t respond to that. “There is one last thing, Mr. Johnson, so that you’re not surprised.”
“What?”
“The death penalty, Mr. Johnson. The government is seeking the death penalty.”
Christina was dressed in Byron’s comfortable button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and nothing else. He saw below the tapered edge of the shirt’s hem the alluring curve of her ass and glimpses of the hair surrounding her vagina.
As he slipped the documents out of both envelopes Hal Rana had given him, she said, “Want some coffee, Carlos?”
“What would Gloria Steinem say about a smart modern woman making coffee for a guy?
“Baby, do you know how over Gloria Steinem is?”
He smiled at her. “Black, no sugar.”
Throughout his career Byron had had an intense capacity to concentrate, a kind of trance focused entirely on the words in front of him or the face of a witness during one of the thousands of depositions he had taken over the years. That same trance happened now, that cone of silence, as he turned the pages of the indictment and the report stamped on every page with the words “Confidential-National Security Information.” He never touched the mug of coffee Christina placed in front of him.
When the trance was broken, he slipped the documents back into their envelopes. Christina had turned the lights on in the kitchen while Byron was reading. It was almost entirely dark outside. Only the lights in Riverside Park and on the heights of the Palisades on the New Jersey shoreline were visible. The soft light shed by the lamp over the dining room table made his features, she thought, even more handsome. Christina really hadn’t expected to have such a fast-developing affection for this man. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was not the plan.
Byron’s face was absolutely calm and his voice resonantly thoughtfuclass="underline" “This is serious.”