“The presidential executive order makes it crystal clear that federal judges do not have the authority to review precisely those issues the defendant wishes to bring to the court’s attention. Like any federal judge, I lack the authority under the order to review the circumstances under which this defendant is held.”
“Judge, we’ve cited cases in our letter in which federal judges have done precisely that-authorized investigations into whether the government, through agents acting at the request of federal prosecutors, have attempted to interview defendants who are in prison awaiting trial.”
Justin Goldberg simply continued dictating. “I have reviewed all of the relevant executive orders, as well as orders issued by the National Security Court, and I find that any steps I might take to inquire into the matters this letter has raised would be unauthorized.”
“My client has been, and I believe is now being, tortured. That can’t be allowed to happen.”
Still not turning to Byron, Justin Goldberg continued: “The relevant rules mandate that judges abstain from even considering where prisoners such as defendant Hussein are held, how they are confined, what they read, who observes them, who speaks to them, and even how frequently they are permitted to bathe.”
Byron did not intend to stand down. “I’m raising, so that the record is clear for whoever might review this transcript in the future, issues that relate to his physical survival, to his mental well-being, and to his dignity as a human being. He has been the victim of practices like waterboarding, physical abuse, sleep deprivation, and continuous playing of loud rap music with obscene lyrics that are offensive to his religious beliefs, and these practices are continuing.”
Intently, Justin Goldberg went on: “As to the other branch of Mr. Johnson’s letter-an unsupported suggestion that his conferences and communications with his client are being tapped or intercepted, monitored and recorded and videotaped-this, too, under the relevant orders is beyond the court’s ability to consider or evaluate. A federal prison for a defendant in Mr. Hussein’s position is not a place in which he is entitled to any expectation of privacy or privileges. Mr. Johnson still has every right to meet with and speak to his client, and his client if he wishes has every right to speak with Mr. Johnson about any subject relating to Mr. Hussein’s defense of these charges. Mr. Johnson and his client must decide how they wish to proceed and what they wish to say during those encounters. Only discussions between them that relate to legal advice and legal issues are protected by the attorney-client privilege. If they discuss non-legal issues, then they talk at their peril.”
Byron Johnson, settling his mind on those last words, felt a chill. There was a clear threat implicit in Goldberg’s words.
“For the record, Judge, Mr. Hussein has a right to speak with me in confidence about anything that he and I deem appropriate to the defense of the charges. That could include what he eats for breakfast, not just specific legal strategies. The government can’t be allowed to decide what part of a lawyer’s conversation with his or her client relates to the defense of the specific charges and what part of the conversation doesn’t. The devil doesn’t get to decide what’s good and what’s bad.”
Justin Goldberg tensely paused. Still in profile to Byron Johnson, Goldberg raised the angle of his sight to the row of faces to his left-Rana, Berg, and the anonymous agents. “Let me say for the benefit of defense counsel that conversations he or any other lawyer might have with a client are not privileged if those conversations relate to the planning of a crime or the deliberate concealment of a crime or of an ongoing conspiracy. Lawyers do not exist for the purpose of immunizing criminals from liability. Nor do they exist for the purpose of facilitating crimes.”
Byron Carlos Johnson was now in a moment of complete clarity: They’re hunting me.
17
BYRON JOHNSON’S EXPENSIVE BUT austere office in the Seagram building had become over the last eight weeks less and less familiar to him. He’d occupied that corner office for more than a decade. Its windows overlooked Park Avenue and the MetLife Building, that diadem in the middle of Park Avenue, still known to him as the Pan Am Building even though the name had changed years earlier.
The office was what he had once described as his farm, an ancestral place where he made his daily bread and where he dealt with legal problems he once considered fascinating. He used to resort to it for twelve or more hours each day, often on the weekends, long before the annoying expression “24/7” became so popular in corporate America. Particularly during the painfully protracted two years that his divorce took, the office was his life’s geographic center-a place of stability, a safe harbor. He relaxed there often, read there often, and often just spent the quiet hours between eight and ten at night reading and writing as he sometimes looked out on the unique combination of glittering lights and the quiet at the heart of the city.
But now he sensed the steady erosion of his connection to the office. Sometimes when he walked into it in the middle of the day, after a week spent at the prison, at home, or at Christina Rosario’s apartment, he had the dislocated sense that he was visiting the rooms he’d once occupied years earlier at boarding school and college. There was an eerie sense, like a recurrent and unpleasant dream, of returning to a place where he no longer belonged. Byron had once been meticulous about maintaining the orderliness of the books and mementoes on the office bookcases, the gleam of the surface of the conference table, and the symmetry of the photographs, paintings, diplomas, and certificates on the walls. Now it seemed that time and inattention were steadily causing the decay of all that well-maintained structure, like an abandoned house. Some of the papers he had left on his desk-copies of letters to clients and memos from associates at the firm answering research questions he’d raised for corporate clients-were yellowing.
The laptop computer in his office also bore a light coating of dust. It had been weeks since he had turned it on. It had the corporate screen name BCJohnson@spencerblake.com, not his personal address. He hadn’t checked his business mail for days. As soon as he raised the lid, the small twinkling lights came on and the screen filled with white and blue light. The only thing Byron had carried into the firm that afternoon was the piece of yellow legal paper on which he had written down notes from that morning’s meeting with Ali Hussein.
Byron still addressed emails to himself. It was his way of preparing a diary, a resource for future reference, a kind of inventory of information. He entered his screen name in the Send To box before he began writing. Just two days earlier, Byron had suddenly stopped transferring to the computer the precise contents of the notes he had scrawled with the chapter, verse, and line numbers Ali Hussein had given him. Instead, Byron had decided to send disinformation.
He glanced at his notes with Ali Hussein’s references to the Koran. Ali knew that Byron planned to make yet another trip to Newark the next day, to that gold-domed mosque, and that he would see the young Imam, Sheik Naveed Haq. “Tell him,” Hussein had said of the sheik, “that these lines have always confused me. Ask him to explain them to you.”