As soon as Byron Carlos Johnson sent the email to himself with the quotation from the Koran, Tom Nashatka’s own computer screen was filled with the same words. He immediately knew they were from the eighth book of the Koran, a chapter entitled “Spoils of War.” And he immediately recognized the strange translation, first published in 1930, by Marmaduke Pickthall, that bizarre Englishman with the look and mannerisms of Oscar Wilde.
As he re-read the two quotations from the Koran that Byron had so carefully typed and then emailed to himself, Tom Nashatka was grateful that Byron had abandoned his old practice of writing longhand notes to himself. It had been time-consuming for Tom’s agents to copy every page of Byron Johnson’s loose-leaf notebooks; the agents spent hours on many nights in Byron’s twenty-seventh floor office in the quiet of the Seagram Building on Fifth Avenue, copying all those handwritten pages. Byron’s use of emails to himself made it easy for Tom to intercept and review Byron’s thoughts and actions in real time.
This was the second fragment of the Koran Byron Carlos Johnson had typed into his computer. He had sent the first quote to himself from his laptop as he sat in the Jet Blue terminal in Miami after a visit to the devout Ali Hussein. It had been Tom Nashatka’s idea to grant Byron’s request to allow Hussein to have a copy of the Koran, and to have it in English even though Hussein had asked for the original Arabic text. Tom had collected enough information about Byron Johnson to know that Byron, who was slow to learn the mysteries of email and the Internet, had gradually developed the habit of writing notes on his computer and emailing them to himself, a neater, more modern extension of Byron’s old practice of jotting messages to himself. The email notes had only recently started to replace the handwritten notes dating back to 1980, all kept in loose-leaf binders on a shelf in Byron’s office, which he had accumulated each year, a kind of diary, business calendar, and personal message system. And it was no longer necessary to arrange with Sandy Spencer for the agents’ late-night access to the office.
Tom Nashatka forwarded the email to Kimberly Smith, the professor at Stanford who still worked undercover for the CIA and who probably had studied the intricacies of Islam even more carefully than he had. But she was the one who wrote the articles that appeared in scholarly journals, as well as places like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, because her academic credentials as a writer and teacher gave her even deeper undercover protection than he had. Tom was anonymous, Kimberly was famous.
She was the one-blonde, edgy, striking-who appeared again and again on shows on CNN with Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer and on Fox with Bill O’Reilly. On television she was known as the “Islamic expert from Stanford.” The computers she and Tom used to communicate were as secure as any computers in the world; and the messages about the business, as they called it, were veiled, and indecipherable to anyone who might have, through some extraordinary feat of computer expertise and intuition, intercepted them.
Just seconds after he forwarded Byron’s email, Tom’s computer screen flashed a red star that registered an incoming message from Kimberly’s BlackBerry.
“Quite the student, isn’t he?” Kimberly wrote.
For the thousandth time, he thought about the two nights he had spent with her, first in San Francisco and then at the Essex House on Central Park South where she stayed when she came to New York for her television appearances. “This is strange,” she had said the first night they were together. “I never fucked a man with an earring.”
Tom wrote, “Are you naked, Professor Smith?”
There was a twenty-second gap as she typed. Then the message arrived: “I’m on a stationary bike at the gym. Almost naked. The old faculty letches are staring at my ass.”
“I have a hard-on.”
“That’s standard issue weaponry, right?”
“Fuck you, lady.”
“In your dreams, fella.”
“When are you coming out here?”
“Check the CNN listings.”
6
BYRON JOHNSON WAITED MORE than a week after Christina Rosario left the firm in mid-August to send her a tentative email. He had a right as a partner to ask the personnel office for information about her-partners, after all, owned the intangible entity known as SpencerBlake. Byron learned that Christina was in fact older than the fifty other young eager summer associates; she was thirty-four. Her appearance, her qualities-gestures, glances, reactions, her aura-were too developed for a woman in her twenties. According to the firm’s records, she’d worked in advertising at one of the very large, now lost-through-merger firms that was, when Byron was early in his own career, the archetype of the Madison Avenue advertising firm. She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Bowdoin, that college in Maine not far from where he spent parts of his summer on Monhegan Island, where no cars or trucks were allowed and people pulled their groceries and luggage on red children’s wagons from the ferry boats to their big, wood-shingled and weather-beaten homes. When he was young, Bowdoin was an all-male school. He’d considered attending it because he was attracted by the idea that it was the college from which both Hawthorne and Longfellow graduated in 1825; but his father was a Princeton graduate and the social forces that made Byron follow him there were as profound as the tides.
Christina’s email address was in the firm directory. So was her apartment address-405 West 116th Street, an immense, curved building that faced Riverside Park just two blocks from the Columbia campus. Byron found himself thinking that the building was a quick uptown drive from his apartment in Tribeca-there was no need to make the difficult passage across the island from the east side to the west. The thought was, he realized, a fantasy, a projection, a desire.
His first email message, which he sent at eleven-forty-five on a Wednesday night, wasn’t answered for a week. During that week he was often embarrassed by the note, and he tried to “unsend” it. He was mystified by that word on the computer screen: it was like reclaiming and eliminating an event, canceling a moment in the past. But he learned that since she was on a different Internet service it wasn’t possible to unsend the note. In that way, the sending of the note was like the sending of a letter in the time before the Internet-once dropped in an iron mailbox, the letter couldn’t be retrieved.
Byron’s note was simple enough: “This is Byron Johnson. I’m sorry we weren’t able to work together this summer. I guess the gods on the summer associate committee decided otherwise. Hope you enjoyed your summer with us. And that you have a good last year of law school.”
That was it, he thought, a valedictory, just a polite note from a senior partner that could easily have been sent to all of the summer associates as part of the firm’s vigorous policy of generating good relations with all these summer associates and the famous schools to which they returned for their third year of law school-Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Berkeley, Cornell (all of the schools from which all of the older partners had graduated) and NYU, Northwestern, Michigan, even Hofstra (the more diverse law schools from which, in the less elitist years of the last two decades, more and more of the associates and partners came).
During the week in which his email to Christina was out there, unanswered and irretrievable, Byron wondered whether his sending it violated the firm’s policy on contact between male partners and women associates. He had never given any attention to any of those proliferating personnel policies, because, he felt, they reflected only the common sense and respect by which he had instinctively lived for so long-there had never been a time when he thought it was appropriate for a male partner to have sex with a female associate (there were many years when there were very few female lawyers at SpencerBlake), and he had always believed that a lawyer should not be hired, or should be hired, because he or she was black or Jewish or Asian or gay or, as he now thought after meeting Hamerindapal Rana, a Sikh. What mattered, he had always said, was the person’s ability and the willingness to learn and not color or gender or religion or sexual preference. Three of the younger partners were gay males, and he had heard rumors, to which he paid no attention, that one of the new female partners was a lesbian.