Extraordinary Rendition by Paul Batista
I am looking forward to reading Extraordinary Rendition in the very near future, however, since I wasn't able to read it in time for the blog tour, I am going to post a small excerpt from this exciting new thriller as well as the press release. I am delighted to provide a brief glimpse at this story and I am anxious to read the rest of it. I hope it interests others as well. There are links to online purchase options at the end of my post.
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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.
###
AN EXCERPT FROM
CHAPTER 1
OF
EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION
BY
PAUL BATISTA
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.
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.
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