Extraordinary Rendition by Paul Batista Page B

countries. At first, as the thousands upon thousands of hours accumulated, he was desperate and sick with the thought of how much of his life had been permanently taken from him. Over the last three years, struggling to see himself as free and vigorous, he thought of himself as a runner who covered unimaginably long distances alone.
    But there were many hundreds of minutes over the interminable span of minutes when he had not been alone. Recently there were the precious ten hours he’d been with Byron Johnson. And on the flights to and from various parts of the world, including the flight to New York, there were pilots and armed men in the small jets in which he traveled.
    And, for years, there had been Andrew Hurd.
    When the door of his cell made that deep hum as the magnetic lock was disengaged, Ali instinctively knew that Hurd would soon enter the cell. Even though he was in the bowels of the prison, where there were no windows, Ali Hussein sensed it was the middle of the night, 2 or 3 a.m.
    There was light in the hallway. Behind Hurd, two men in uniform, both with rifles, stood in the open doorway.
    “Mr. Ali,” Hurd said. “How the hell are you?”
    Ali Hussein, sitting on his cot, didn’t answer.
    “You didn’t look happy yesterday morning.” Hurd pulled from its place near the steel sink a stool that was the only chair in the cell. Ali’s copy of the Koran lay open on the stool. “Are you reading at this hour of the night?”
    Dressed in a gray pinstripe suit, Hurd sat down and held the Koran open to the page at which Ali had left it. Hurd stared at the page. “You know, Mr. Ali, I love this book. It’s so much more interesting than our New Testament and Old Testament they had me read as a kid. I mean, take a look at this: ‘ Let not the believers take disbelievers for their friends in preference to believers. Whoso doeth that hath no connection with Allah. Allah biddeth you beware only of himself. Unto Allah is the journeying. He knoweth that which is in the heavens and that which is in the earth, and Allah is able to do all things .’”
    Hurd paused, raising the book as if searching for better light. He smiled. “Mr. Ali, there’s eloquence and poetry and mysticism in that. And I picked that passage randomly. You can learn to live a whole life out of those lines, can’t you?”
    Even Hurd was surprised when Ali, his head still bent forward into his left hand, his face in darkness, recited as if praying: “ On the day when every soul will find itself confronted with all that it hath done of good and all that it hath done of evil every soul will long that there might be a mighty space between it and that evil. Allah biddeth you beware of him .”
    “Jesus H. Christ, Mr. Ali, those are the very next words.” Hurd closed the Koran and tossed it on the floor, in thedirection of the lidless steel toilet. “There, you see, as I’ve been telling everybody, you’re blessed with a prodigious memory.”
    Ali knew he would be hit. Hurd always hit him. And he knew the hitting would be painful. He always tried to pull away, but he’d never succeeded in eluding the hit. As he had told Byron Johnson only twelve hours earlier, the man whose name he didn’t know—this man—was very strong.
    “Now that your memory is really working overtime,” Hurd said, “let me see how much you remember about this.”
    Rolling it into a tube, Hurd held up a copy of the indictment. “You remember all about Lashkar-e-Taiba, don’t you, Mr. Ali? The LET terrorist organization? I’ll bet that rings a bell.”
    Still seated, Ali looked up. Hurd saw the dark, almost effeminate oval of the man’s face. “How did you get the money to LET?”
    Ali Hussein stared straight ahead.
    “Mr. Ali,” Hurd said as he reached out and gripped the tender back of the man’s neck, “you see we also know about the Dar al Arqam Islamic Center. You’ve got a great memory, Jesus, you can probably recite this whole great holy book. So tell