During the week without a response from Christina, Byron felt nervous, offended, dissed. There was also at times a sense of jealousy. Who was the other guy? There had to be another guy, for the lady was so gorgeous. A Columbia professor? A writer? A hedge fund billionaire? A professional athlete? He had made a fool of himself even by making this simple overture. At one point he even thought of sending her an email claiming that his earlier one had been sent inadvertently and asking her to ignore it.
And he knew he was smitten. It had been years since he found himself with such an intense and uncontrollable crush, imagining her virtually all the time, her name resonating constantly in his mind. Once a man with very methodical habits-including the ability to get to sleep no later than eleven and sleep soundly until seven-Byron over the last several months had become restless at night. He kept his computer on all night long, and, at various times in the quiet overnight, checked the screen. At three one morning, under the New Mail heading on his computer screen, he saw the screen name “ChristinaBrighteyes.” He almost lunged at the laptop glowing brightly in his home library. He clicked the mouse. He was so excited that the first click missed its target. Then he put the arrow more securely on the target and hit it. The hourglass image lingered over the line on the screen that bore the word “ChristinaBrighteyes,” and then, as if by miracle, the screen opened to the text of the message.
“So good to hear from you, Byron. I’ve been away. I had a great summer. Only regret is that we didn’t get to work together.”
Byron was naked as he read the message. He hadn’t read any words so avidly in years. My God, he thought, she wrote back. He checked the date line and saw that she had written her note only an hour earlier, 2 a.m. He imagined that she had returned from wherever it was in the world she had been traveling, saw an email from him, and, even before she started unpacking, wrote to him. That had to mean she was not with another man, at least not now. Byron thought it would be cool and appropriate if he waited a day or two before responding to her, but at three in the morning in his big apartment, he realized he wasn’t interested in being cool.
He wrote: “So glad to hear from you, and happy you enjoyed your summer with us. I do have some work that I might ask you to help me with, a kind of special project. Would you like to talk about it?”
Before sending it, he read the message six times, adding sentences, altering words, and even changing the typeface. Finally he pressed the Send button; in an instant the screen told him that his message had been sent.
He went to the bathroom. His spacious apartment-the ceilings in this converted warehouse building were fifteen feet high-was always suffused with light from the outside even at night, since the tall industrial windows were at the same level as the street lamps and Byron rarely drew the shades. As soon as he finished in the bathroom, he found himself drawn again to the glowing computer screen, yearning like a teenager for a response. On it was another message from Christina: “I’d love to, Byron. Why don’t you come up to the Three Guys diner at 115th and Broadway tonight at 7 and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
Without hesitating, Byron wrote: “Will do.”
Dressed only in his jockey shorts, Byron felt the erection that just reading her note gave him. It strained against his underwear. Miraculous, he thought, I’m a teenager again.
Soon he slept, without once waking until eight in the morning.
In his quiet apartment in Cobble Hill, Tom Nashatka heard his computer emit that blip of a noise that signaled the lodging of new emails. He opened the screen, and there were the emails he had expected to see during the week since the lonely, driven Byron Carlos Johnson had, like a love-possessed college kid, written to Christina Rosario.
When the new emails arrived, he immediately forwarded them to Kimberly Smith. He had been speaking to her on his regular cell phone, since they didn’t use their secure cell phones when they spoke late at night. Even for Kimberly, in Palo Alto, it was late, as it usually was when they had their nightly conversations. At night, they never talked about their intriguing, deeply secret work. Those talks happened during the day, and were invariably about business-the decoding of the mysteries of intercepted messages, many of them in Arabic, a language they had both fully mastered.
Tom interrupted their long conversation. “Well, well, well, will you look at this.” He had kept his laptop computer near him in bed while speaking to Kimberly. “The Eagle has landed.”
“What is it?”
“Lord Byron is lovesick.”
“Really?”
“Sure, look at this.” He forwarded the emails to her.
She read them. “Aw, ain’t that sweet?”
“Can you believe it? They already have a date.”
“He doesn’t have a chance,” she said. “The lady is a maneater.”
“That’s right,” Tom said, “he doesn’t have a chance.”
7
IN THE TWO WEEKS after the hot night when they met at the diner at 115th Street and Broadway, Byron Johnson fell more deeply into that exciting mixture of infatuation and love. He found that he could establish a direct connection with her-a connection he craved and that was suddenly at the center of his life-by asking her to research issues relating to Ali Hussein and prepare drafts of papers. He soon dropped the pretense of acting solely as her mentor and assignment-giver. Within two days they were in touch with each other many times by email, cell phone calls, and face-to-face encounters at diners, his apartment, her apartment, and the squash courts.
Byron in fact needed the information she researched and the papers she drafted for him. He no longer had the free use of the younger lawyers at the firm. She was a fully formed lawyer even though she was still in law school. Byron was struck by the fluency of her legal writing. Ordinarily it took years for a new lawyer to develop the style of writing that was the rare currency of the leading lawyers in the country-the fluent, well-crafted, slightly supercilious language that most federal judges, themselves products of major law firms and major federal agencies, used and in turn wanted to see from lawyers. Christina Rosario had it from the outset, and it only reinforced Byron’s ardor.
And there were those three squash matches they played soon after the meeting at the diner. She had casually mentioned she played squash, and he suggested they play. Christina was a powerful and experienced player, driving fast rail shots from just above the tin on the front wall of the court that, almost skimming the side walls, raced to the deep corners of the rear wall. The shots forced Byron to sprint backwards to reach the speeding black ball.
Byron was more skillful. He rarely relied on a hard shot. Instead he used the front wall to hit feathery drop shots. Racket drawn back, Christina raced forward, frequently reaching the ball just as it grazed down from the wall, but just as often not reaching it as it fell to the floor without a bounce.