Extraordinary Rendition by Paul Batista Page A

said, “you know what an indictment is, don’t you?”
    When he dealt with what he often called “white men,” Khalid roughened up the tone of his voice. “I read the newspapers. But tell me what it is.”
    “It’s something in writing that tells a defendant what he’s charged with, the crime. Do you want to see it?”
    Khalid shrugged.
    “Here,” Byron said, “take it anyhow.”
    Christina, who rested her chin in her hand as she looked at them, noticed that Khalid dyed his thick hair black and had manicured fingernails gleaming at the blunt ends of the back of his hairy hands. She also registered that his real voice and accent were far more polished than he made them seem. And she saw that he was a very good-looking man. Wanting to goad him just a little because of his studied annoyance about her presence, she decided to speak: “Byron’s meeting with your brother tomorrow.”
    Khalid ignored her. He spoke to Byron. “What does Ali say about this?”
    “Very little, Khalid. They only gave me ten minutes to speak to him.” Byron was careful not to mention yet the thirty-page memo he had picked up the day before from the United States Attorney’s Office.
    “And what happens next?”
    “Your brother has to explain the facts to me.”
    “My brother is an honest man.”
    “You can help him, too, Khalid. I have to start understanding what happened. And what didn’t. I need information inorder to defend him. I need to know more about his background. I hope you can help.”
    With his thick fingers, Khalid raised the edges of the document. He wore a gold bracelet on his right wrist. “You want me to read it tonight?”
    Byron spoke quietly, pouring more of the black coffee for himself. “If you can, Khalid. Without learning as much as I can as fast as I can, I won’t be able to help. There are some names of people and places and events in here—not many, but some—that you might know something about. Ali needs help if he is going to have any chance at all.”
    “You seem to be a nice man. But for years I’ve seen what’s going on. My brother doesn’t have any chance at all. Nobody will see him again outside, here, in this life.”
    “I’m not that pessimistic.”
    Khalid raised the document, rolled it, and tapped its bottom edge on the table, as though trying to arrange the pages even more neatly than they already were. “I’ll read it.”
    “Can we meet tomorrow somewhere? In the evening? Maybe you can talk about this with his friends or yours and let me know.”
    Khalid asked, “What do you really think?”
    “That your brother is in a very dangerous place.”
    “We visited the Imam before I came tonight, Mr. Johnson. He knows this is a dark time for Ali. Can you tell him that there is in the Koran a guide for courage?”
    “Sure. What is it that you want me to give him?”
    Khalid said from memory, “Have Ali look at book three, chapter five . The tenth through the twentieth lines. The Imam says he will be able to draw strength from that.”
    Byron and Christina both wrote down the reference as Khalid, with the document in his hand, abruptly got up from the table. “We’ll meet tomorrow, Mr. Johnson.”
    He left the apartment. He didn’t even look at Christina.
    Three hours later, as Christina and Byron drove uptown along empty Riverside Drive, the river to their left and the dense, rustling trees of Riverside Park to their right, Christina said, “He’s a scary guy, Carlos.”
    He glanced at her. She was in the front seat of the car he called his “toy,” a silver convertible BMW sports car. The top was down. The gorgeous night air rushed over them. Byron Johnson didn’t ask her what she meant.

13

    A LI HUSSEIN, A MAN who cherished numbers and took pride in the fact that many of the great early mathematicians were from the Middle East, could compute without a pencil or paper that in the years of his imprisonment he had spent almost five million minutes in cells in at least four