Thriller
Examines Extraordinary Rendition
Action
Pinpoints Issues in Constitutional Controversy
“Batista
does it again when international intrigue collides with murder in
Extraordinary
Rendition!
A high -priced Wall Street lawyer gets the shock of a lifetime...
law school never prepared him for this! It's a fast
ride--buckle up!"
--Nancy Grace, Attorney,
TV Personality and NY
Times
Bestselling Author of Death
on the D-List
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.
Buy this book on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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.
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.
MEDIA
CONTACT
Lauren
Marceau
(312)
788 - 9854
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