And, for years, there had been Andrew Hurd.
When the door of his cell made that deep hum as the magnetic lock was disengaged, Ali instinctively knew that Hurd would soon enter the cell. Even though he was in the bowels of the prison, where there were no windows, Ali Hussein sensed it was the middle of the night, 2 or 3 a.m.
There was light in the hallway. Behind Hurd, two men in uniform, both with rifles, stood in the open doorway.
“Mr. Ali,” Hurd said. “How the hell are you?”
Ali Hussein, sitting on his cot, didn’t answer.
“You didn’t look happy yesterday morning.” Hurd pulled from its place near the steel sink a stool that was the only chair in the cell. Ali’s copy of the Koran lay open on the stool. “Are you reading at this hour of the night?”
Dressed in a gray pinstripe suit, Hurd sat down and held the Koran open to the page at which Ali had left it. Hurd stared at the page. “You know, Mr. Ali, I love this book. It’s so much more interesting than our New Testament and Old Testament they had me read as a kid. I mean, take a look at this: ‘Let not the believers take disbelievers for their friends in preference to believers. Whoso doeth that hath no connection with Allah. Allah biddeth you beware only of himself. Unto Allah is the journeying. He knoweth that which is in the heavens and that which is in the earth, and Allah is able to do all things.’”
Hurd paused, raising the book as if searching for better light. He smiled. “Mr. Ali, there’s eloquence and poetry and mysticism in that. And I picked that passage randomly. You can learn to live a whole life out of those lines, can’t you?”
Even Hurd was surprised when Ali, his head still bent forward into his left hand, his face in darkness, recited as if praying: “On the day when every soul will find itself confronted with all that it hath done of good and all that it hath done of evil every soul will long that there might be a mighty space between it and that evil. Allah biddeth you beware of him.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Mr. Ali, those are the very next words.” Hurd closed the Koran and tossed it on the floor, in the direction of the lidless steel toilet. “There, you see, as I’ve been telling everybody, you’re blessed with a prodigious memory.”
Ali knew he would be hit. Hurd always hit him. And he knew the hitting would be painful. He always tried to pull away, but he’d never succeeded in eluding the hit. As he had told Byron Johnson only twelve hours earlier, the man whose name he didn’t know-this man-was very strong.
“Now that your memory is really working overtime,” Hurd said, “let me see how much you remember about this.”
Rolling it into a tube, Hurd held up a copy of the indictment. “You remember all about Lashkar-e-Taiba, don’t you, Mr. Ali? The LET terrorist organization? I’ll bet that rings a bell.”
Still seated, Ali looked up. Hurd saw the dark, almost effeminate oval of the man’s face. “How did you get the money to LET?”
Ali Hussein stared straight ahead.
“Mr. Ali,” Hurd said as he reached out and gripped the tender back of the man’s neck, “you see we also know about the Dar al Arqam Islamic Center. You’ve got a great memory, Jesus, you can probably recite this whole great holy book. So tell me all you remember about the Dar al Arqam Islamic Center. Most of your brothers from there are already in prison, forever. You remember Ali Timimi? Well, he’s in jail for life fifteen times over. And he says you know how the money got from the streets to the mosques to LET. We heard him say that. He now enjoys talking to us. He says he wants to help us. He can shorten his sentence to thirteen life terms.”
Hurd’s powerful right hand continued to stroke the tendons at the back of Ali’s neck. He felt the sweat on the man’s skin and the rock-hard tension of the muscles. “And you know what? Mr. Timimi’s mad at you. He says that you know where the money is and you’re not telling anybody about it. Are you saving it for a rainy day?”
No answer.
“Your rainy day is here, Mr. Ali. Pretty soon we’re going to know where all that money comes from and where it is. Some of your other brothers are helping us, but they all say no one knows as much as you. You, they say, know everything. But we will figure it out without you if we have to. And when that happens, nobody will need you. Allah is not going to be able to help you. Your dummy lawyer sure as hell won’t help you.”
Hurd waited. There wasn’t a sound. Ali counted the seconds, methodically, accurately. Ninety-six seconds passed.
Hurd took his hand away from Ali’s neck. He stood and left the cell. The steel door slid shut, and the magnetic hum ended as soon as the lock was engaged.
Ali Hussein slid off the cot. He tried for a moment to kneel so that he wouldn’t collapse completely. This time Andrew Hurd had not hit him, but it felt as if he had, like an instinctive memory of something that had happened again and again. Then he simply fell to the floor and stayed there. His body shook.
14
IT WAS THREE IN the morning, always a bad time of night, and a time at which Byron Johnson had regularly been waking for weeks. When he was in his own apartment, he made coffee and then, seated at his sleek glass desk, wandered through the Internet. He hunted for information about the Koran, torture, and Guantanamo Bay. He had also started to search the Internet for information about himself. Christina had brought this sometimes disturbing miracle of instant information to his attention almost as soon as they spent that first night together. He was absorbed by what he found. During every twenty-four hour period there were new entries in which his name appeared. There were newspaper articles, verbatim transcripts of radio and television broadcasts, blog postings (most of them hateful), and pictures of him that rose from the vast interstellar spaces of the Internet. Almost none of the steadily accumulating Internet entries was flattering. Once he ruefully said to Christina, “I preferred the anonymity of being a big-time corporate lawyer to this.”
Most of his emails now were from reporters. He was intrigued by the fact that many reporters didn’t seem to sleep or rest, because emails sent at one or two or three in the morning often appeared on his screen. When Byron was in Christina’s apartment, as he often was, he would simply glance at the messages and never respond to them because writing would wake him for the rest of the night.
Leaving her bed-her lovely arm seemed to glow even in the dark-he went to the bathroom and then, naked, walked quietly to the computer in the alcove where Christina studied. He watched the little running cartoon figures dash across the screen as he connected to the spaces where he entered his screen name (“LordByron”) and his password (“Mexico”) and waited for a second as the familiar page suddenly materialized on the screen.
He typed by the glow from the screen. He had five emails that he assumed were from journalists, since each of them had abbreviations for newspapers and networks after the @ symbol.
And then, for some reason, he clicked on the Sent button. And there he saw an email that had been sent from his computer at 1:15 that morning, two hours earlier. The email had been sent to “SesameStar,” an address to which he’d never sent anything. SesameStar?
He clicked on the blue bar. The vaudeville-shaped, gloved hand and fingers on the screen pulsed, and the email opened. He immediately saw that the report Hal Rana had given to him had been sent to “Sesame Star.” He opened the attachment. Someone had scanned the secret thirty-five page report into the email. Byron Carlos Johnson knew he hadn’t done that, since his computer skills were limited to email (he didn’t even know how to create an attachment) and access to the search engines. He had only recently learned that the word “Google” was no longer just the name of a company but a verb, “to Google.” He was still learning how to use the beautifully engineered BlackBerry Christina had given him.