Read Online Extraordinary Rendition by Paul Batista - Free Book Online

the research of a young lawyer, he’d throw a book across the desk at him. It was a different world then, austere, aristocratic, and arbitrary.
    “Byron, work with us. I don’t want to discuss when clients can and can’t pick the lawyers they want on particular cases. Jack asked for you. He rarely does that.”
    “Jack can’t have me,” Byron said.
    “Why not?”
    “I’m fully tied up.”
    “Really, Byron? I looked at your time sheets for the last six weeks. Either you forgot to write down your time or you don’t have more than three billable hours.”
    Byron found himself drawing, in pencil, the shape of a house crowned by two triangles meant to represent a sloping roof. It was precisely the kind of drawing he had made ingrammar school. “Sandy, I expect my client in Miami to be indicted next week. When he’s indicted I’ll have to put everything and anything else aside to deal with it.”
    “Come on, Byron.”
    “Come on? I took on a client, Sandy, for better or worse. And for better or worse he wants me to represent him. He’s just like any other client: he’s entitled to loyalty, attention, respect.”
    “And so is Jack Andrews. And so is his company. You should be flattered that he asked for you.”
    “I’m way beyond flattery.”
    “I guess so, Byron, I guess so. You certainly aren’t getting much these days.”
    Byron finished the carbon pencil streaks that represented the roof of his childlike drawing. Then he made little rectangular boxes and a door on the front of the house: the drawing had assumed the style of a colonial saltbox in New England. “There’s a charm,” he said, “in being on the wrong side of a genuinely unpopular case.”
    “Really? Who remembers the name of the lawyer who represented Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh case? Or the lawyer who represented Ted Bundy?”
    Byron looked up from the drawing in front of him. “You know what? Nobody remembers the name Byron Carlos Johnson in any of the cases where I’ve represented American Express, or Microsoft, or Goldman Sachs. It might be that that is what a lawyer is all about—working for a client so that the client is important, not the lawyer.”
    Sandy shrugged. He had lived in New York for so long that even he had adopted the New York Jewish shrug—weary,expressive, and frustrated. He stood, and Byron remained seated, relieved that the conversation was about to end.
    But it wasn’t. “Byron,” Sandy said, “you are going to take the American Express case. And something else: you are embarrassing yourself and this firm. Everybody has seen the pictures of you leaving that courthouse in Miami. You looked like a deer caught in the headlights.”
    “It wasn’t the most flattering picture I’ve ever seen.”
    Sandy waved his hand. As he watched the abrupt wave—so uncharacteristic of the patrician Sandy Spencer, as was the New York shrug—he had a sense that Sandy meant to wave him into another world. “You know what else wasn’t flattering, Byron? What else is an embarrassment for the firm?”
    Byron now stood. They were separated by the gleaming top of Byron’s desk. He managed to control the antagonism he had held against this man for years. “What else?”
    “It’s very bad form, Byron, to take an associate of this firm with you to Miami and have the world witness you acting dumbfounded in front of a camera and then stumbling into a cab with her. We were trying to recruit her as a lawyer, not recruit her as your travel companion.”
    “She doesn’t work here, Sandy. She certainly hasn’t got any intention of coming back.”
    “You’re tone deaf, Byron. You’re a relic, even worse than I am. I had a call less than an hour ago from the dean at Columbia to ask the firm for an explanation as to why a partner here would travel with a law student, especially one who spent the summer working here as an associate. And one who must be decades younger than the partner.”
    Byron spoke slowly in an effort to