Extraordinary Rendition

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THE PLANE WAS BANKING over Florida’s Atlantic coast when Byron Carlos Johnson felt the first tug of the landing process beginning eighty miles from Miami. He raised the plastic window shade to his left and, for the first time in two hours, looked out at the sky and the dazzling ocean. He put the book he’d been reading-Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone-into the elasticized pouch in front of him. He’d last read the intricate nineteenth-century mystery when he was in college, and his concentrated passage through the Gothic prose had been a welcome reprieve from his incessant thinking about Ali Hussein, the Syrian who had already spent two months in the Federal Detention Center in Miami after years in foreign prisons not yet disclosed to Byron-mystery places somewhere in the world.

Since he carried only a slim briefcase for this one-day visit to Miami, Byron didn’t have to wait for baggage. He left the terminal before any other passenger on the flight and was in a barely air-conditioned taxi fifteen minutes after leaving the plane. The driver was a talkative Jamaican who seemed intrigued by the destination Byron gave him: “The prison on Southwest 137th Avenue.”

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