Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History

by Ben Mezrich

  And that’s exactly what they did.

  32

  The Sheraton Hotel, Orlando, Florida, July 20, 2002

  Wild,

  Wild horses,

  Couldn’t keep me away …

  The hotel lobby pitched hard to the left, then dipped forward, the carpet seeming to ripple up beneath Gordon’s boots, like ocean waves licking across a sandy beach, and he tried to stand perfectly still, eyes blinking rapidly as he fought the urge to topple over. Because toppling over in a Sheraton lobby at four in the afternoon just wasn’t done—no, it fucking wasn’t. That was the kind of thing that drew attention to yourself—yes, it fucking was—and the last thing that Gordon needed at that particular moment was attention.

  The lobby slowly began to stabilize, and soon Gordon felt okay enough to take a tentative step toward the pair of overstuffed couches that overlooked the arched doorway leading out onto International Drive. He had to admit, as he inched forward over the still-oscillating carpet, that it was a pretty darn nice lobby, for a Sheraton. He’d only been in Orlando for a couple of hours, but he was really quite impressed with the place. And a hundred degrees with a hundred percent humidity didn’t feel all that bad—that is, when you had enough marijuana coursing through your system to put a bull elephant in a smiling mood.

  And there, he’d made it to the couch; now it was just a matter of getting his knees bent, his ass into those friendly-looking cushions, his boots up on the pretty glass coffee table. Nothing to see here, nobody special, just a guy in a hotel lobby waiting for a couple of friends. Okay, he was a bit stoned and he’d had a couple of drinks at the airport, and he was certainly planning to have a couple more drinks and some more smokes before the day was out, but that didn’t make him all that different from anybody else … hell, everyone was a little bit high on something, everyone had his poison.

  Like Thad, or Orb, or whatever the hell Gordon was supposed to be calling him. Thad was just as high as he was, even if the kid hadn’t touched pot or booze in his life. He was high on that chick, and he was high on the idea of the money they were going to make—hell, he was high on the information Gordon had already given him. The Belgian rock man and his sister-in-law, the lady who was going to be meeting them, just two hours from now. Yeah, Thad was high on all that; he was so high that he was right up there near the chandelier that hung from the lobby ceiling, so wonderfully crystal and glowing and warm, looking down on Gordon, little old nothing of a Gordon. And Gordon was down there way below, in that dark, dark place, in a well of … well, sadness.

  Still thinking about his wife and child and sister, poor dead sister, and the world, yeah, the fucking world coming to an end. Any minute, any day, and it couldn’t happen fast enough for his liking. Armageddon. Damn, but it was taking too long, like Thad and the girl, taking forever to get to the goddamn lobby. Gordon knew he couldn’t wait much longer, because his high was starting to wane, and he needed another hit of something, anything, to keep it going. Because his plan was getting cloudy, and he was beginning to see that it wasn’t really a very good plan anyway. Come down to Florida, be a part of something big and fun and cool, feel like a person again, alive, and maybe get the opportunity to keep on going like that. Maybe make friends with the lady and go off to meet her brother-in-law in Amsterdam, backpack across Europe with the 10 Gs he’d make from selling that moon rock, use the 10 Gs in a very responsible and intelligent manner, get some more pot, some heroin, enough heroin to OD in some Dutch youth hostel, jacked up with a needle in his arm and a rubber rope around his biceps, vein popping up, and they’d find him like that and tell his mom that he went out happy, and he’d be where he was supposed to be. Wild fucking horses …

  And then there they were, coming through the front entrance of the Sheraton. Thad, in shorts and a collared shirt, carrying a fishing-tackle box in one hand and a suitcase in the other. And next to him, the chick, the chica, the Eve to his Adam. Yeah, she was pretty and had jet-black hair and was all-American and all that. And she had that greedy little look in her eyes that he now suddenly saw in Thad’s as well, that greedy little cartoon look, dollar signs springing out so high they could touch the chandelier.

  Four o’clock, right on schedule. Gordon waited until they were just a few feet away before he sprang to his feet. For a brief moment, he tipped left, then right, but his boots were pretty well planted in the ocean of a carpet, and not even wild, wild horses would drag him away …

  He pulled the room key out of his pocket, showing them the number for no apparent reason other than that it seemed relevant; 905, lucky 905. And then Thad led the way, because he was a natural fucking leader, for sure, for certain, and Gordon still had plenty of jambo juicing through him, enough to make him the good little follower he needed to be. He got into step behind the girl, focused on her dark hair, because it was pretty and shiny and it would have looked interesting affixed to the rear of one of those wild, wild horses …

  And then, somehow, they were upstairs on the ninth floor and moving through a hallway and through a door and the door was locked behind them, and Thad was placing the tackle box on a coffee table in the middle of the room, and then he was fiddling with the locks, and then it was open, and then—

  Well, fucky me.

  Gordon approached the table. Thad moved aside so he could look into the tackle box, and what he saw made the sober part of his mind freeze up.

  The box was full of single-ounce vials and bags containing what appeared to be, from Gordon’s Internet research, lunar samples. As he stood there, staring, Thad explained that they were samples from every Apollo space mission from 1969 to 1974. That although Gordon was pretty sure man had never been to the moon and it was all a goddamn hoax, he was looking at moon rocks that had been brought back to Earth by men in space suits. And then Thad pointed to another thing in the box, another sample that wasn’t a moon rock, that was, Thad explained, a piece of the famed Mars rock found in Antarctica, the one that had proved that there might once have been life on the red, red planet.

  “Yeah,” Thad happily exclaimed. “That one alone might be worth five million to the right buyer!”

  Gordon looked at him, then at the girl who was standing a few feet away, grinning some perfect-looking little teeth, and then back at the tackle box. His head was spinning, and not just the orbit of pot and booze, but the cycles and rotations of a confusion much more serious. Because these little bags also had numbers and letters on them, and the numbers and letters looked like the kind of thing that meant they were from NASA, the space agency, the government space agency.

  “Wow, really” was all Gordon could manage out loud, but internally he was imploding. He now knew, for a fact, that there were no South American royalty trying to make ends meet, and if he was going to be honest with himself, maybe he had always known this. But at most, he had figured Thad was going to be getting a big fat moon rock from some museum, maybe the University of Utah, maybe somewhere else. And yeah, that would be illegal, sure, Gordon was helping to sell contraband—but this?

  “Yeah, wow,” Gordon repeated. “You guys are really serious. I thought it was going to be a sample or two—wow.”

  And then Thad was suddenly talking, a mile a minute, telling them both what was going to happen next. Thad was saying that first he was going to go to Wal-Mart and get some more gloves so that the buyer would be able to touch the samples if she wanted. And then he was saying that he would go to the restaurant by himself, that Gordon and the chick would wait here or go to a movie or take a swim, whatever, wait it out—and then when he brought the buyer back to the hotel, made the deal, they could rejoin him and divide up the cash. And then the chick was suddenly arguing with him, which seemed to come as a surprise to Thad; she was saying she wanted to go along to the restaurant, that she couldn’t go to a fucking movie, that hell, they could make a movie out of her life—except she said it backward because she was so full of adrenaline and energy and yeah, fucking greed, she said hell, they could make
a life out of my movie, and maybe she meant it that way. Maybe it sounded better that way. And Gordon was listening to it all, but he wasn’t listening; he was staring at the moon rocks and knowing, just knowing that this was going to end badly, that they were going to get caught. But Thad and the chick just kept on going, and then their argument ended and Thad was agreeing and the new plan emerged: Thad would go in first and then Gordon and the chick would come in twenty minutes later like they were a couple, hand in hand, Mr. and Mrs. Americana, pretty little thing and her hubby, and they would eventually all do the deal together. And then Thad and the girl weren’t talking anymore, they were just looking at Gordon, waiting for him to say something. And he was still staring at the tackle box and the moon rocks.

  And it hit him, right there and then, that okay, this wasn’t the way out of the well, this was the way even deeper into the well, but it was okay, it was fine, it was too late to back out now.

  “So, yeah,” he said, finally. “I’m going to go get something to eat.”

  And just like that, he was heading toward the door. Thad and the chick looked at each other and then Thad was talking low to him.

  “You okay, man?”

  “Sure, fine. Just going to get something to eat, and then I’ll be back. Gonna get a little pizza.”

  And just like that, he was out the door. Moving down the hallway, using the walls for balance because the floor wouldn’t stay still. Heading for the elevator, which he knew he should have taken all the way to the roof, like a rocket ship, baby, all the way out the top of the building and up into the sky. He should have taken that elevator wherever it would go, away from here, never look back. He should have simply disappeared.

  But he also knew that what he was going to do, in fact, was get a pizza, maybe get a little high, and head right back to the hotel to see this through.

  Wild horses couldn’t drag him away …

  33

  “Gordon’s going to be back any minute.” Rebecca’s voice drifted out through the open bathroom door, barely audible over the sound of the shower. “This could get really awkward.”

  Thad grinned as he yanked back the heavy blanket of the hotel bed and tested the overly springy mattress. He was stark naked, still dripping wet from the shower himself; it hadn’t been the first time he’d taken a shower with Rebecca, but it had certainly been the most exciting, the two of them taking turns under the quirky, chrome-plated faucet, their bodies pressed together as his hands roamed over her skin, his fingertips gliding across her flat stomach, around her thin waist to the small arch of her back, to the gentle hills of her perfect little ass—he almost took her right there, under the low-pressure stream of water, soapy, glistening, slipping around in their bare feet against the shiny white tub—but then he had a better idea and, without a word, had dived past the plastic shower curtain and out into the hotel room.

  “You obviously haven’t spent a lot of time with stoners. Getting a pizza to them is kind of like a religious affair. If Gordon makes it back in time for the exchange, I’ll be shocked.”

  Thad wished the words were true, even as he said them. They still had about an hour before they had to meet the buyer at the restaurant, and he was pretty certain from the way Gordon had reacted to seeing what was in the tackle box that the dude was going to see this through to the end.

  Gordon had been pretty damn shocked at the sight of the little containers of moon rock, but even though he’d seemed shaken by the reality of the situation, he also appeared to understand the historical nature of what Thad had done. This was a party Gordon wasn’t going to miss. The scary thing was, he looked stoned out of his mind, and would probably come back from his pizza mission even more so; Thad could only hope that Gordon would keep it together long enough not to screw up the deal.

  Whether Gordon was returning or not, Thad knew that he and Rebecca had some time alone. A quick nap after the fourteen hours spent in the car—and the five hours in the Baptist church parking lot—would have been the most sensible thing, but Thad had come up with a much better idea.

  He quickly crossed to the bureau, where the tackle box was sitting between the hotel television and the suitcase they had brought with them from Houston. Thad went straight for the tackle box, opening the clasp with almost loving care. He surveyed the carefully lined-up bags and vials containing the lunar samples. Then he reached for the bag with the markings that indicated it was from Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon.

  Slowly, like he was walking down the aisle of a church, he crossed back to the bed. With one hand he lifted up the mattress cover, and then he carefully placed the bag containing the lunar sample underneath. He replaced the mattress cover and the sheet, then went back and closed the tackle box.

  He was just stepping away from the bureau as Rebecca came out of the bathroom, wrapped only in a towel that was way too small for even her diminutive frame. Her porcelain skin was glistening where it was visible above the top of the white cotton material, beaded drops of water resting in the small crevice between the tops of her breasts, like pearls escaped from a necklace that Thad might soon be able to afford. Her legs, tight and muscled, were naked to the very peaks of her thighs—and even a little higher. Her hair was soaking wet, a few errant strands plastered down against the sides of her neck, jet-black strands beckoning down toward her bare shoulders and beyond, toward her perfectly sculpted back.

  She was waiting for his cue. If they had had more time, he would have been content to just stand there, looking at her. But in less than an hour, they were going to be meeting the sister-in-law of a Belgian rock collector to make a deal. So instead, he headed for the bed.

  If Rebecca noticed the small, fist-sized lump beneath the mattress cover, she didn’t say anything. Maybe she was simply too busy, her lips against his as her hands moved low, first touching herself and then him, teasing, and then guiding. Thad’s entire body surged, every nerve ending firing off as he rolled on top of her, his knees parting her legs, his hands reaching for her wrists. As the moment approached, he looked right into her eyes.

  For the briefest of seconds he saw himself, hovering over her, fantasy and reality superimposed—but now the fantasy was real, the moment was real. They were making love in a Sheraton Hotel in Orlando, Florida, separated by a thin strip of material from a piece of the moon.

  It was a first for humankind. Exactly thirty years earlier, to the day, Neil Armstrong had taken the first step—but right then, right now—Thad Roberts was the first man to have sex on the moon.

  34

  Thad did his best to conjure up the theme songs to either Mission: Impossible or James Bond as he strolled along the edge of the highway, but the notes just wouldn’t come, his mind simply couldn’t focus past the image of the restaurant parking lot—which he could already make out over a low hedge embankment a dozen yards ahead. The never-ending stream of cars whizzing by, some so close he could feel the hot wind of their exhaust against the back of his neck, didn’t help; the roar of engines mixing with the metronomic beat of his own sneakers against Florida-hot asphalt was the only score he was going to get as he made his approach.

  Getting dropped off two blocks from Italliani was about the only part of the newly reformatted plan that he actually liked. When Gordon had returned to the hotel room, just ten minutes ago, Thad had practically begged the two of them to let him handle the deal on his own; there was no need for them to be in the restaurant, and it seemed like such a stupid risk. His plan to protect Rebecca, no matter what, would be seriously hampered if she were caught with him, red-handed. And then there was the added loose-cannon factor, Gordon. The guy had seemed even more high when he returned from his pizza expedition, and there was no telling what he would do in the restaurant.

  As it was, Thad had practically ordered them to wait at least ten minutes before entering the place, and they had agreed to play the part of a couple who’d just happened to wander into the restaurant—without any connection to Thad. If things
went well, and Thad felt comfortable with the Belgian’s sister-in-law and her husband, he’d call them over and together they could all return to the hotel to show the buyer the moon rocks.

  It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do. Steeling himself—without the help of a really good theme song—Thad skirted past the low hedge and across the crowded parking lot.

  As he stepped through the front entrance of the restaurant, he did his best to take in all the details at once—the kitschy, Italian decor, the red-brown curtains that obscured the glass picture windows, the low booths that lined three walls of the rectangular space, the waiters and waitresses wearing black and white, the hostess stand where a young woman stood talking to a pair of middle-aged-looking customers. It was the kind of restaurant that could have appeared in any town in America, and it seemed like the perfect public setting for a deal to go down. As Thad approached the hostess, he was pleased and surprised to see that the restaurant was extremely crowded for six P.M. Then again, it was Orlando, which even in the summer was a haven for tourists from all over the world. Hell, he might as well have set the meeting for the middle of Disney. They could have exchanged contraband for cash on the way up Space Mountain.

  Except, of course, there would be no exchange of contraband for cash until everyone felt comfortable with each other. Thad hadn’t brought any of the samples along with him, and he was expecting the buyer to be just as cautious.

  After the middle-aged couple moved out of the way, Thad walked up to the hostess and told her that he was meeting someone for dinner. He didn’t give the hostess any names, nor could he actually describe whom he was meeting. In any event, the hostess told him that he was the first to arrive, so he opted to wait at the front of the restaurant.

  A good five minutes went by as he watched at least a half dozen more tables get seated. The place was really bustling. Standing there, with so many people hovering around, he started to feel pretty nervous. Hell, he wasn’t even certain that the other party was going to show up. Maybe the woman had chickened out at the last minute. Maybe she had even called 911. Thad knew his own nerves were working against him, and he had the sudden urge to just turn around and walk out of there.