I'd like to say a big thank you to Paul Batista for revealing the excerpt from Chapter 1 of Extraordinary Rendition on Spellbound By Books. Hope you all enjoy!
Excerpt
When
the guard left, the iron door resonated briefly as the magnetic lock engaged
itself. Byron sat in a steel folding chair. Directly in front of him was a
narrow ledge under a multi-layered, almost opaque plastic window, in the middle
of which was a metal circle.
Ali
Hussein seemed to just materialize in the small space behind the partition.
Dressed in a yellow jumpsuit printed with the initials “FDC” for “Federal
Detention Center,” Hussein, who had been described to Byron as an accountant
trained at Seton Hall, in Newark, was a slender man who appeared far more
mild-mannered than Byron expected. He wore cloth slippers with no shoelaces.
The waistband of his jump suit was elasticized—not even a cloth belt. He had as
little access to hard objects as possible.
He
waited for Byron to speak first. Leaning toward the metal speaker in the
partition and raising his voice, Byron said, “You are Mr. Hussein, aren’t you?”
The
lawyers at the Civil Liberties Union who had first contacted Byron told him
that, in their limited experience with accused terrorists, it sometimes wasn’t
clear what their real names were. There were often no fingerprints or DNA
samples that could confirm their identities. The name Ali Hussein was as
common as a coin. It was as though genetic markers and their histories began
only at the moment of their arrest.
“I
am.” He spoke perfect, unaccented English. “I don’t know what your name is.”
The
circular speaker in the window, although it created a tinny sound, worked well.
Byron lowered his voice. “I’m Byron Johnson. I’m a lawyer from New York. I met
your brother. Did he tell you to expect me?”
“I
haven’t heard from my brother in years. He has no idea how to reach me, I can’t
reach him.”
“Has
anyone told you why you’re here?”
“Someone
on the airplane—I don’t know who he was, I was blind-folded—said I was being
brought here because I’d been charged with a crime. He said I could have a
lawyer. Are you that lawyer?”
“I
am. If you want me, and if I want to do this.”
All
that Ali’s more abrasive, more aggressive brother had told Byron was that Ali
was born in Syria, moved as a child with his family to Lebanon during the civil
war in the 1980s, and then came to the United States. Ali never became a United
States citizen. Five months after the invasion of Iraq, he traveled to Germany
to do freelance accounting work for an American corporation for what was
scheduled to be a ten-day visit. While Ali was in Germany, his brother said, he
had simply disappeared, as if waved out of existence. His family had written
repeatedly to the State Department, the CIA, and the local congressman. They
were letters sent into a vacuum. Nobody ever answered.
Byron
asked, “Do you know where you’ve come from?”
“How
do I know who you are?”
Byron
began to reach for his wallet, where he stored his business cards. He caught
himself because of the absurdity of that: he could have any number of fake
business cards. Engraved with gold lettering, his real business card had his
name and the name of his law firm, one of the oldest and largest in the
country. Ali Hussein was obviously too intelligent, too alert, and too
suspicious to be convinced by a name on a business card or a license or a
credit card.
“I
don’t have any way of proving who I am. I can just tell you that I’m Byron
Johnson, I’ve been a lawyer for years, I live in New York, and I was asked by
your brother and others to represent you.”
Almost
unblinking, Ali just stared at Byron, who tried to hold his gaze, but failed.
At
last Ali asked, “And you want to know what’s happened to me?”
“We
can start there. I’m only allowed thirty minutes to visit you this week. Tell
me what you feel you want to tell me, or can tell me. And then we’ll see where
we go. You don’t have to tell me everything about who you are, what you did
before you were arrested, who you know in the outside world. Or you don’t have
to tell me anything. I want nothing from you other than to help you.”
Ali
leaned close to the metallic hole in the smoky window. The skin around his eyes
was far darker than the rest of his face, almost as if he wore a Zorro-style
mask. Byron took no notes, because to do so might make Ali Hussein even more
mistrustful.
“Today
don’t ask me any questions. People have asked me lots of questions over the
years. I’m sick of questions.” It was like listening to a voice from a world
other than the one in which Byron lived. There was nothing angry or abusive in
his tone: just a matter-of-fact directness, as though he was describing to
Byron a computation he had made on one of Byron’s tax returns. “One morning
five Americans in suits stopped me at a red light. I was in Bonn. I drove a
rented Toyota. I had a briefcase. They got out of their cars. They had
earpieces. Guns, too. They told me to get out of the car. I did. They told me
to show them my hands. I did. They lifted me into an SUV, tied my hands, and
put a blindfold on me. I asked who they were and what was happening.”
He
paused. Byron, who had been in the business of asking questions since he
graduated from law school at Harvard, couldn’t resist the embedded instinct to
ask, “What did they say?”
“They
said shut up.”
“Has
anyone given you any papers since you’ve come here?”
“I
haven’t had anything in my hands to read in years. Not a newspaper, not a
magazine, not a book. Not even the Koran.”
“Has
anyone told you what crimes you’re charged with?”
“Don’t
you know?”
“No.
All that I’ve been told is that you were moved to Miami from a foreign jail so
that you could be indicted and tried in an American court.”
There
was another pause. “How exactly did you come to me?” Even though he kept
returning to the same subject—who exactly was Byron Johnson?—there was still no
hostility or anger in Ali Hussein’s tone. “Why are you here?”
In
the stifling room, Byron began to sweat almost as profusely as he had on the
walk from the security gate to the prison entrance. He recognized that he was
very tense. And he was certain that the thirty-minute rule would be enforced,
that time was running out. He didn’t want to lose his chance to gain the
confidence of this ghostly man who had just emerged into a semblance of life
after years in solitary limbo. “A lawyer for a civil rights group called me. I
had let people know that I wanted to represent a person arrested for terrorism.
I was told that you were one of four prisoners being transferred out of some
detention center, maybe at Guantanamo, to a mainland prison, and that you’d be
charged by an American grand jury rather than held overseas indefinitely. When
I got the call I said I would help, but only if you and I met, and only if you
wanted me to help, and only if I thought I could do that.”
“How do I know any of this is true?”
Byron
Johnson prided himself on being a realist. Wealthy clients sought him out not
to tell them what they wanted to hear but for advice about the facts, the law
and the likely real-world outcomes of whatever problems they faced. But it
hadn’t occurred to him that this man, imprisoned for years, would doubt him and
would be direct enough to tell him that. Byron had become accustomed to
deference, not to challenge. And this frail man was suggesting that Byron might
be a stalking horse, a plant, a shill, a human recording device.
“I
met your brother Khalid.”
“Where?”
“At
a diner in Union City.”
“What
diner?”
“He
said it was his favorite, and that you used to eat there with him: the Plaza
Diner on Kennedy Boulevard.”
Byron,
who for years had practiced law in areas where a detailed memory was essential,
was relieved that he remembered the name and location of the diner just across
the Hudson River in New Jersey. He couldn’t assess whether the man behind the
thick, scratched glass was now more persuaded to believe him. Byron asked, “How
have you been treated?”
“I’ve
been treated like an animal.”
“In
what ways?”
As
if briskly covering the topics on an agenda, Ali Hussein said, “Months in one
room, no contact with other people. Shifted from place to place, never knowing
what country or city I was in, never knowing what month of the year, day of the
week. Punched. Kicked.”
“Do
you have any marks on your body?”
“I’m
not sure yet what your name really is, or who you really are, but you seem
naive. Marks? Are you asking me if they’ve left bruises or scars on my body?”
Byron
felt the rebuke. Over the years he’d learned that there was often value in
saying nothing. Silence sometimes changed the direction of a conversation and
revealed more. He waited.
Hussein
asked, “How much more time do we have?”
“Only
a few minutes.”
“A
few minutes? I’ve been locked away for years, never in touch for a second with
anyone who meant to do kind things to me, and now I have a total of thirty
minutes with you. Mr. Bush created a beautiful world.”
“There’s another president.” Byron paused,
and, with the silly thought of giving this man some hope, he said, “His name is
Barack Hussein Obama.”
Ali
Hussein almost smiled. “And I’m still here? How did that happen?”
Byron
didn’t answer, feeling foolish that he’d thought the news that an American
president’s middle name was Hussein would somehow brighten this man’s mind.
Byron had pandered to him, and he hated pandering.
Ali
Hussein then asked, “My wife and children?”
No
one—not the ACLU lawyer, not the CIA agent with whom Byron had briefly talked
to arrange this visit, not even Hussein’s heavy-faced, brooding brother—had
said a single thing about Hussein other than that he had been brought into the
United States after years away and that he was an accountant. Nothing about a
wife and children.
“I
don’t know. I didn’t know you had a wife and children. Nobody said anything
about them. I should have asked.”
It
was unsettling even to Byron, who had dealt under tense circumstances with
thousands of people in courtrooms, that this man could stare at him for so long
with no change of expression. Hussein finally asked, “Are you going to come
back?”
“If
you want me to.”
“I
was an accountant, you know. I always liked numbers, and I believed in the
American system that money moves everything, that he who pays the piper gets to
call the tune. Who’s paying you?”
“No
one, Mr. Hussein. Anything I do for you will be free. I won’t get paid by
anybody.”
“Now
I really wonder who you are.” There was just a trace of humor in his voice and
his expression.
As
swiftly as Ali Hussein had appeared in the interview room, he disappeared when
two guards in Army uniforms reached in from the rear door and literally yanked
him from his chair. It was like watching a magician make a man disappear.
ABOUT THE BOOK
When
Ali Hussein—suspected terrorist and alleged banker for Al Qaeda—is finally
transported from Gitmo to the US mainland to stand trial, many are stunned when
Byron Carlos Johnson, pre-eminent lawyer and the son of a high-profile diplomat,
volunteers as counsel. On principle,
Johnson thought he was merely defending a man unjustly captured through
Rendition and water-boarded illegally. But Johnson soon learns that there is
much more at stake than one man’s civil rights. Hussein’s
intimate knowledge of key financial transactions could lead to the capture of—or
the unabated funding of—the world’s most dangerous terror
cells. This makes Hussein the target of corrupt US intelligence forces on one
side, and ruthless international terrorists on the other. And, it puts Byron Carlos Johnson squarely in
the crosshairs of both. Pulled
irresistibly by forces he can and cannot see, Johnson enters a lethal maze of
espionage, manipulation, legal traps and murder. And when his life, his love,
and his acclaimed principles are on the line, Johnson may have one gambit left
that can save them all; a play that even his confidants could not have
anticipated. He must become the hunter among hunters in the deadliest game. Written
by no-holds-barred-attorney Paul Batista, Extraordinary Rendition excels not
only as an action thriller, but as a sophisticated legal procedural as well;
tearing the curtains away from the nation’s most controversial issues. Provocative.
Smart. Heart-pounding. A legal thriller of the highest order.
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Paul
Batista, novelist and television personality, is one of the most widely known
trial lawyers in the country. As a trial attorney, he specializes in federal
criminal litigation. As a media figure, he is known for his regular appearances
as guest legal commentator on a variety of television shows including, Court TV, CNN, HLN and WNBC. He’s also appeared in the HBO
movie, You Don't Know Jack, starring
Al Pacino.
A
prolific writer, Batista authored the leading treatise on the primary federal
anti-racketeering statute, Civil RICO
Practice Manual, which is now in its third edition (Wiley & Sons, 1987;
Wolters Kluwer, 2008). He has written articles for The New York Times, The Wall
Street Journal, and The National Law
Journal.
Batista's
debut novel, Death's Witness, was
awarded a Silver Medal by the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA).
And his new novel, Extraordinary Rendition, is now being published—along with a
special reissue of Death’s Witness—by
Astor + Blue Editions.
Batista
is a graduate of Bowdoin College,
where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa,
and Cornell Law School. He’s proud to
have served in the United States Army. Paul Batista lives in New York City and
Sag Harbor, New York.
