“You know what, Sandy? No reporter will pick up a statement from yet another big law firm. What the reporters want are statements from me. Any reporter who reads your press release will call me immediately.”
“You need to think through another issue, Byron, before you call your new friends at the networks and the papers.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that you probably paid so little attention over the years to the firm that you don’t know that the firm’s partnership agreement was changed a few years ago.”
“To say what?”
“To say that partners expelled from the firm had to clear every public statement through the firm or risk losing things like their partnership accounts, insurance payments-you know, all those things that ordinary lawyers need in order to avoid living on the street?”
“It’s not a good idea to threaten me, Sandy.”
“The only real threat in the world, Byron, is the threat you are to yourself. Be careful.”
The early afternoon air on Park Avenue had that crystalline dazzle created by clear sunshine flooding over the handsome buildings, the innumerable windows, and the long and colorful median dividing the uptown and downtown lanes of traffic. Yellow taxis glinted in the sunlight. Byron had become used to these early afternoons on Park Avenue; they had been part of his life for years. He walked quickly, almost jogging, from the Regency at 61st and Park toward the black-glass Seagram Building at 49th and Park. All around him, hundreds of men and women walked, most of them gazing into their hands at cell phones and handheld electronic equipment. Byron was still surprised, even bemused at times, by the way people now moved, oblivious to other walkers and even traffic, transfixed by their gadgets.
Since 9/11 the security system in the Seagram Building had become more and more elaborate. Immediately after that September day, armed guards had been posted in the lobby, allowing only people they recognized into the elevators to reach the firm’s offices, which occupied the 21st through the 30th floors. Then more and more invisible but elaborate screening mechanisms had been installed. Just two months earlier, Byron, like all the other partners in the firm, had started holding the palm of his hand in front of a small unit in a turnstile near the elevators that would allow the gates of the turnstile to open. It was a handprint identification device, and it was much faster and far less obtrusive than the plastic card he had used for several years.
When Byron passed the palm of his hand over the electronic eye, nothing happened. The arm of the turnstile didn’t drop for him. He turned to the security guard stationed near the elevator, a black man who was almost as tall as a professional basketball player and who had always made friendly, knowing eye contact with Byron.
“There’s something wrong with the gate,” Byron said.
“No, there isn’t, Mr. Johnson.”
“What?”
“There’s nothing wrong with the gate, Mr. Johnson.”
“Say that again?”
“You can’t go upstairs, sir.”
Another security guard, also dressed in a blue blazer and a regimental-striped tie, walked over. He was short, beefy, and muscled-up, almost grotesquely bunched into the blue blazer he wore.
“Open this,” Byron said, glancing at the name tag of the guard’s jacket. “Mr. Ricciardi, open this up. My office is upstairs.”
“You can’t go up there,” Ricciardi said. He had a Brooklyn accent.
Tall, still lithe and athletic, Byron vaulted over the turnstile. Although they were surprised, the two guards were quick. Ricciardi passed his right hand over the electronic eye with a magician’s practiced wave, and the arm of the turnstile immediately fell open to let them through. The two guards ran forward, stopping three feet in front of Byron.
“We need you to turn around and leave, sir.”
“And I need you to step out of my fucking way,” Byron said, wondering if the quaver in his body was reflected in the tone of his voice.
The guards stepped even closer to Byron. Instinctively, he pushed at Ricciardi, who stumbled to his side and did a quick and awkward dance to regain his balance. As he recovered, he raced at Byron, who was pushing at the black guard’s groping hands. It seemed to Byron that a thousand things were happening at once: he registered the fact that Ricciardi was really a street thug, stronger than Byron and enraged that Byron had deftly deflected and humiliated him. And, in the instant before Ricciardi’s right shoulder burst against Byron’s left ribs, he glanced at the elevator bank and saw the stunned, questioning look on the faces of two of his partners.
The burst of pain in his ribs and lungs was intense and fiery, but Byron controlled the instinct to cry out. Like a football lineman, Ricciardi pushed Byron backwards, trying to knock him off his feet, but Byron, who had been pushing at the big hands of the other guard when Ricciardi hit him, kept himself on his feet by grabbing Ricciardi’s head.
Somehow Byron pulled himself away from the two men. His lungs heaving for breath, he managed to keep his balance. Ricciardi was disheveled, furious, ready for more, stunned that a man who was years older than he was had managed to shake him off. In that moment, as Byron waited for Ricciardi’s next thrust, he felt his blood rushing through his entire body as if it were icy water. Ricciardi had an expression of sheer rage. This guy’s an animal, Byron thought. Run.
Breaking the moment, the tall guard spoke, “You need to leave, sir.” The voice was calm.
Embarrassed, outraged, and furious, Byron decided to leave. In order to make himself appear more collected, he tried to button his suit jacket. He groped for an awkward moment before realizing the button was torn off.
As Byron Johnson approached the revolving doors, he saw Sandy Spencer standing just inside the entrance. He had been watching. Byron stared at him: for the first time in all the years Byron had known him, Sandy Spencer looked confused and flustered. He glanced away from Byron, opening his cell phone as if taking an incoming business call. It was a ruse.
20
THEY MET MANY TIMES over the next three weeks. Simeon Black had immediately recognized the name Byron Carlos Johnson when he first heard the voicemail message late on a perfect autumn afternoon: “This is Byron Johnson. I’ve read several of your articles, The Atlantic especially, on terrorist detainees. I think we might have a common interest. My cell phone number is (917) 928-0111. Please call if you have a chance.”
Ever since he had started his first job in journalism in 1964 at the Washington Post when it was still in the dreary building at 1515 L Street, Simeon had made it his daily life’s work to know what was happening in the world. He read six newspapers each day, listened to CNN, the BBC, and even Pacifica Radio, and had mastered the art of seeking out information on the Internet. He instantly recognized Byron Carlos Johnson as the New York lawyer who had stepped out of the confines of corporate law firm practice-a rarified world-to represent a terrorist prisoner who had been taken to the United States for criminal prosecution. Just two months after the 9/11 attack, Simeon Black, who had won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for articles about the secret invasion of Cambodia, published his first article on arrests of Arabic men in the United States and Europe on suspicion of terrorism. He had steadily and slowly published other articles over the years of the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the subject of imprisoned Islamic men.
But he could never gain access to anyone held in Guantanamo or Bagram or the other places around the world rumored to hold men arrested overseas by the United States and transferred, by extraordinary rendition, to other countries. The lawsuits Simeon filed under the freedom of information laws were all dismissed on national security grounds without yielding anything. His stories for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Atlantic were based on thirdhand and even more remote sources, such as two former private government contractors who gave him what he believed was reliable information about the dark prisons around the world where Islamic men were held. He knew these were “weakly sourced” stories. Had he not been Simeon Black, had he not been proved absolutely right in the Pulitzer Prize stories about the Cambodian invasion also based on weak, attenuated sources, and had he not been given the benefit of every possible editorial doubt, the magazines in which his stories appeared since 9/11 would never have published any of them.