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.
.jpg)
Paperback: 380 pages
Average Customer Review: (4 customer reviews)
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.
AN EXCERPT FROM
CHAPTER 1
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.
We have a giveaway! The author is giving away a copy of the book to one lucky commenter. Just fill out the Rafflecopter.
If you can't wait to read the book, Extraordinary Rendition can be purchased on Amazon
If you can't wait to read the book, Extraordinary Rendition can be purchased on Amazon
and on Barnes & Noble
B&N: http://bit.ly/R44yAo
|
As per FTC requirements: My
Life. One Story at a Time. is an advertising affiliate with Amazon. A small
fee is earned when purchases are made using the above link. A free book was
obtained from the source mentioned above in order to provide an honest and
fair review. The views, beliefs, and opinions expressed by guest post authors
are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, beliefs, or opinions
of My Life. One Story at a Time. Guest Posts are offered so authors can share
their writing with my audience for their enjoyment.
|
Thank you again for the opportunity to enter xo
ReplyDeleteThank author. I love to read your note.
ReplyDeleteNew York Dog Boarding