The nighttime fog dissolved just after dawn each morning, as each gloriously clear day began. They woke early. They hiked in the afternoons. The only snow on the island was lodged on the sides of the immense boulders shielded all day from the sun. From the heights and shore of the island they saw the glittering of the frigid sea. In the distance, the small, uninhabited, pine-covered islands were surrounded with brilliant light. The trees seemed to be on fire, but never burned.
At night they read. There were old books on the shelves that Byron had first seen there in the late fifties and early sixties, in the last years of his grandfather’s life-novels and short stories by once-famous and now almost forgotten writers like John O’Hara and James Gould Cozzens. The Cape Cod Lighter. Morning, Noon, and Night. Advise and Consent. His grandfather was a meticulous lover of books. Each book had its original dust jacket, on thick paper. The pages were all swollen by the sea air.
Christina studied on a table near the fireplace while Byron read. A small lamp shedding soft light glowed on her gorgeous face. Although he tried to resist, Byron often glanced up at her as she studied. From time to time she caught his eye and smiled a wistful but seductive smile, as if she were saying: Not now, later, I’ll give you the ride of your life.
The kitchen had not changed since the 1950s. Big white refrigerator, linoleum floor, black stove. There was no dishwasher. Byron rinsed the supper dishes and placed them in a rack next to the sink. Christina was cleaning the table with a sponge.
He said, as he dried his hands on a towel, “Who are you?”
Christina reacted as though Byron was teasing her. Then the moment lasted too long. “What?”
“The only Christina Rosario who ever graduated from Bowdoin died eighteen years ago.”
“What are you saying, Carlos?”
“And your apartment on Riverside Drive is leased to a company known as Alpha Sources. Tell me why your father the engineering professor didn’t leave a single engineering book in his apartment. And why there’s no record of anyone named Rosario who ever taught engineering or anything else at Columbia.”
“Carlos, I don’t know why you’re saying this. It’s wrong. Someone is lying to you.”
“You’re lying to me.” His voice was vehement. “You’re a liar, a fraud.”
“Carlos, please.”
“Who is this animal you pal around with? The one with the suit and the mustache?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And who is that blonde girlfriend of yours?”
“Please, Byron.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“Carlos, I’m Christina Rosario. I’m a law student at Columbia. I’m your lover. I admire you. I love you.”
“I have pictures of you with a man who is a torturer. I have pictures of you with a woman who works with the same fucking torturer. She’s a fraud, like you.”
“What’s the matter with you? Please tell me.”
“I have the video from your computer. You know the one. The one with your friend beating and drowning Ali Hussein.”
Suddenly she placed her hands over her face. She turned from him. He heard her cry.
At first light she put her soft luggage and backpack in one of the red wagons and pulled it behind her as she made her way to the dock. The ferry was scheduled to leave at nine. The door to the small, unheated waiting room was always unlocked.
During her two-hour wait in the cold room, she composed on her BlackBerry a long text message to Byron. Carlos, she started, I want you to know this. I hope when you read what follows you can understand that I became involved in the work I’ve done because I love this country and want to protect it. I had no idea how crazily it would unravel. Or how dangerous it’s all become. And I had no idea how much I would love you. Don’t look for me. I’ll transform myself again. I’ve done this before. I’ll become someone else.
She created the message as if in a trance. When she finished, she saw for the first time that the old station room was now flooded with morning light. The wooden planks of the walls and floors glowed; they seemed to radiate slightly with heat.
She gripped the BlackBerry, hesitating to press the Send button. She found the only bathroom. Still clutching the BlackBerry, she sat on the toilet, which was clean but had rust-colored stains on the porcelain. She looked at the sleek object in her hand as if it were a bomb; she was afraid of it.
Minutes later, just as she pressed Send, she saw the heavy, unwieldy lobster boat ease gradually into the dock’s wooden pilings, which had been worn smooth by countless dockings over the years. Surprised, she recognized two of the men standing on the cluttered deck of the boat. When she had last seen them in New York a week earlier, they had looked subdued and weary in the lousy midwinter weather. Today in the brisk morning, they looked bright, athletic, and vigorous.
“We got your message,” Tom Nashatka called out. “We came out to get you. The ferry was cancelled.”
39
BYRON JOHNSON STAYED ON the chilly island for two days after she left. There was no television in the house; there never had been. The only radio was a short wave on which the mechanical, inflectionless voices of the announcers for the national weather bureau gave the regional and maritime weather. Byron loved to hear the names of the geographic landmarks-the weather in the vast expanse of Casco Bay as far north as Nova Scotia and south to Kennebunkport, the readings from Execution Rocks, the conditions at the buoy ninety miles from Monhegan Island.
An ice storm enveloped the island for twenty-four hours. The island closed down completely-isolated, quiet, and intimate. Glistening and ice-burdened branches fell from some of the nearby pine trees.
Christina’s long text message had riveted him, and he spent those two days reading and re-reading it. Byron was angry, he was relieved, he was harrowed with fear. He was also repeatedly overwhelmed by pangs of love and the grieving void of loss.
This is who I am, she wrote. I’m multiple women. I change often. You were right about Christina. She died.
She was a Captain in the Army at the time of 9/11, she wrote. She was fluent in Arabic. She wanted to serve the United States. She joined the new Homeland Security Department. She received stratospheric security clearances.
When she and Andrew Hurd learned that Byron decided to represent a man they believed had been a master of terrorist finance since the USS Cole bombing in 2000, they drew together a team of diverse people with the same level of security clearances. Within days, she was transformed into a Columbia Law School student and, through people she called “institutional cooperators,” she became a summer associate at SpencerBlake, complete with a transcript from the law school and recommendations from two of its professors. She and her team members had several strategies for “downloading” from Byron the information he would absorb from Ali Hussein, the “banker for al-Qaeda.”
Only one of those strategies involved placing Christina Rosario into his life, mind, and soul. They knew Byron had left his marriage unwillingly, that he had brief affairs with other women, and that he had joined an online dating service in which he said little about himself and did not post his picture. So, they knew, he was vulnerable.