by Joe Navarro
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” I reply, knowing Rod has just fed me grade A bullshit. I saw yesterday how deft Rod was at manipulating Al Eways, but that didn’t guarantee he wouldn’t make a mistake during an interview, and Ramsay has just demonstrated that. In fact, he’s painted himself into a corner that I don’t intend to let him get out of, but I’m going to wait for the forensics lab to tell me what the real story is with that paper.
For the moment, it’s enough to know that the arm’s-length relationship with Clyde Conrad that Ramsay described yesterday was a lot closer than that. Rod had gone to Conrad’s house and enjoyed his wife’s cooking. The two even supposedly went shopping together, to a novelty store of all places. Some investigators really go off when a subject lies to them. Not me. The more lies I hear, the closer I know I’m getting to the truth.
Rod seems to realize he needs to change the conversation, because out of the blue he asks Lynn what kind of gun she’s wearing.
“None,” she says (not true, by the way), “but the weapon I’ve been issued is a Smith & Wesson model ten-six revolver.”
Ramsay’s excitement over this news reminds me of the hum that always races around a classroom when we show schoolkids our weapons on career day.
“How about you?” he asks, turning my way.
“Sig Sauer two-two-six.”
“Whoa, those are nice guns,” he says, arching his eyebrows. “Made in Switzerland, right?”
“Yup,” I answer, “and very expensive.”
“Why do you get to have such a special one while she”—nodding toward Lynn—“has to make do with a Smith & Wesson?”
“Because I am a s-p-e-c-i-a-l agent,” I joke, drawing out each letter.
Lynn jumps in. “He’s not that special, trust me. But he’s on the SWAT team—that’s why he gets the Sig Sauer.”
“Cool,” Ramsay says, and I can tell that in his eyes my credentials have just been considerably burnished.
“Listen, we have to leave,” I say, catching Lynn by surprise, “but before we go, that number Conrad gave you, what was the significance of that?” I’m keeping my tone of voice light, as if the answer barely matters.
“Not sure,” he says, “just a number he wanted me to have.”
“I see, but that’s not his house phone number in Germany, right?”
“No, I know his number. I used to call him all the time.”
“Right, well, maybe he was going on vacation, and this is where he could be reached,” I say.
Rod just shrugs his shoulders as I take my empty glass of lemonade to the kitchen.
Lynn and I both thank him for his time and for the refreshments, and for the help.
“No problem,” he says. “Call anytime,” and he honestly seems to mean it. Just to put a cap on our chummy morning, Lynn and Rod make one more crack in German, probably about me again, that sends them both into temporary hysterics.
* * *
“WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT?” Lynn asks as we’re buckling up. “Why end it so early? He seemed willing to keep talking.”
“He definitely was. A regular chatterbox, and I want him to continue that way.”
Lynn still has a puzzled look on her face as we pull out of the trailer park, so I explain further. “It’s all about timing, about not pushing too hard, about pacing. By leaving now, we’re convincing him that we believe what he’s telling us, even the bullshit parts. Indifference at this stage is far better than pressing too hard for details. It’s too early for that. Rod is giving us what we need.”
“And what’s that?”
“More reason to come back.”
“So what was he bullshitting about?”
“There is no store he went to with Conrad to buy flash paper—that’s just crap.”
“How do you know?”
“Because after he answered that, his Adam’s apple jumped up like a kid on a trampoline.”
3
TIRED AND WIRED
On a bad night of flying surveillance, you’re looking at a small object on the ground that you can’t take your eye off for hours at a time while also maintaining altitude, avoiding other aircraft, adjusting for winds, orbiting around an erratically moving vehicle, coordinating with the spotter/observer you’ve been partnered with, and trying not to get too lost in your own thoughts. Trust me, it’s not easy. Even though the plane is air-conditioned, I often end up with my backside completely soaked.
Tonight’s not like that. For starters, I’ve got a copilot helping as we do three-mile-wide circles over Apollo Beach, just south of Tampa. While my flying partner monitors the traffic descending into and climbing out of Tampa International, I’m in the left seat, eyes fixed on the Gulf Coast home of a minor drug kingpin. We’re waiting for him to fire up the Caddy in the driveway and head off on his nightly rounds, but he never does. Maybe the guy’s a huge fan of The Wonder Years reruns. Whatever he’s doing inside, at 9 p.m. the surveillance supervisor tells us to call it a night, but that doesn’t mean the workday’s over. By the time we land, park, refuel, and do the paperwork on the plane, it’s almost ten o’clock, and I still face a forty-minute drive home.
Just shy of eleven, I tiptoe into the house, take a quick shower, hold my daughter Stephanie’s face for a moment with my hands while she sleeps—I always do this, no matter how late—then slip into bed beside my wife. Luciana is thirty now, five years my junior, slender but fragile. Even though I’m half a foot taller than she, I used to marvel at how amazingly our bodies fit together in the middle of the night, when Luciana would snuggle her back into the curve of my chest and belly. I long for those days and pray for good health for Luciana—lately, she’s had a series of medical problems.
There’s a photo in a frame on my bedside table—Luciana, Stephanie (then three, now eight), and me on the beach at Culebra, a little island off the east coast of Puerto Rico, bright sun, sparkling water, all smiles. I keep it there as a reminder not of an idyllic past but of everything Luciana and I thought we were getting away from when I transferred from the San Juan office to Tampa. Puerto Rico did have its wonderful moments—the beach on weekends; walking with Stephanie to the park, her tiny hand cradled in mine—but the FBI was hunting terrorists there, the Macheteros I mentioned earlier, and, in turn, being hunted by them. Most of us agents carried not one gun but two. We checked our cars every day for bombs, and many of us spread talcum powder around the car-door handles and hood and trunk latches at night so we could see if they’d been tampered with while we slept. Luciana got a sense of how bad things were when the Bureau paid to have splinter-proof metal doors installed in our house and metal bars as well. The danger was further underscored when the office issued her and other spouses walkie-talkies just in case they came under siege when they were home alone. Trust me, Puerto Rico was no picnic, not for agents or spouses.
Tampa was going to be our reward for all that—not R & R exactly, but not a hardship post either—and for a while it was. The pace was slower. More evenings than not, I was home in time for dinner and almost always in time to read Stephanie a bedtime story. But the Tampa office, I soon came to realize, is a lot like Florida itself, a kind of early-retirement home for aging agents. Way too few can pass the physical exam for SWAT team duty, or even want to do so. Same with flying surveillance—poor eyesight, too many medications, etc. Inevitably, the work piles up on those of us capable of doing it, and, consequently, home time, evening meals, and bedtime stories have been shrinking. Too often when I get home now, I want nothing more than a soft pillow to lay my head on. Tonight, though, like too many other nights, I’m “tired and wired,” and try as I might, I can’t get Rod Ramsay out of my mind.
A big part of the problem is the way I do my job. If I’m in charge of an interview, no one ever takes a note unless the subject hands us a piece of paper to write on. You miss too much when you have your head down, scribbling away. Notepads also put up a wall between you and the interviewee. So do tape recorders. They say Official Business, and the
y tell the person you’re talking with to be very careful about his or her replies. I want to build rapport, not ramp up blood pressure, but there’s a downside to my way of doing things: the FD-302.
Agents use this special form—a “302” we call it—to record anything that might be introduced in court in any way. You can go an entire career on a CI squad without filling out a 302 because so many intelligence matters never see the light of day, much less go anywhere near a judge and jury. But if Rod Ramsay has been aiding and abetting Clyde Conrad’s espionage in any significant way, he’s likely to face criminal charges, and when that happens the FD-302s Lynn and I are required to fill out after every interview session will become our sworn word to the court of what we observed—official documents, with our signature, distributed to both the prosecuting and defense attorneys.
Bottom line: We have to get the 302s right, and if you’re not taking notes or otherwise recording interviews that can stretch for hours at a time, that requires prodigious acts of memory. Over the years, I’ve developed all sorts of mnemonic devices to help with that—mental filing systems, code words that will bring back half an hour of conversation as clearly as if I had the interview transcribed by a court reporter. If I’ve done the interview away from Tampa and have a long drive to get home, I can generally dictate all the key parts on the way back to the office and have one of the Bureau secretaries type up the FD-302 for my signature the next day. The real challenge comes when I pull back into the office expecting to have time to download my memory and get hit instead with some new shitstorm. Then I’ve got to put the memory circuits on pause and hope the mental systems don’t crash in the meantime.
On the way back from our meeting with Rod yesterday, I was telling Lynn about all this: how to handle the 302s, and some simple memory tools she can start using right away. Jay wants me to use this investigation to mentor her, and keeping on top of the 302s will be a key part of that.
Here’s what I didn’t tell her, though: Memory isn’t like a water faucet. You can’t just turn it on and off at will. Once you get something lodged so well in your head that even, say, an intervening SWAT operation won’t shake it loose, it’s with you day and night for weeks, sometimes months, even years on end. And it’s not just the words; it’s everything that goes along with them and helps to make the words meaningful—a look, a nuance, that bony finger pushing glasses up the nose, a broken smoke contrail. That stays with you, too, and all that’s what’s going on now as I lie in bed, trying to align my own breathing with my wife’s. Rod Ramsay is living inside my head.
Christ, I’m thinking, if it’s this bad now, after only two sessions, what’s it going to be like if this goes on for another six months or more? I’ll be possessed by a demon!
* * *
ANOTHER VOICE HAS JOINED the chorus, too—a more comforting one but not worry-free: Al Eways.
Al was happy to hear from me when I ran him to ground at his hotel in the Baltimore area, just before heading to the airport for my evening surveillance. Although he was reluctant to give details on a nonsecure line, he did manage to let me know that Conrad wasn’t talking, and he reminded me not to expect anything from the Kercsik brothers. As for Szabo, Patient Zero of all this spying, who knows if we’ll ever catch him.
One more thing, Al said: The search of Conrad’s house in Germany had turned up a shortwave radio and some camera and video equipment. Al seemed to think that could be important, but I have serious doubts from a prosecutorial standpoint. If you arrest every German who owns a Grundig shortwave radio or a Leica camera with a macro lens, you are going to need a lot more prisons. Besides, the Germans are notoriously lenient with spies. Court sentences on average are measurable in months, not years. Shaving six weeks off a six-month sentence isn’t going to give someone like Conrad much incentive to cooperate.
Here’s what I keep coming back to, though: Why did they haul in Conrad in the first place? And if there’s a case to be made, why are American authorities leaving that up to the Germans? It’s not just the embarrassment of letting another country do your job—although that’s a big deal in the Bureau. The real issue is now that Conrad knows we’re on to him and is keeping his mouth shut, and the Kercsiks are doing the same, and Szabo is in the wind, we’re likely never to find out just how many documents have been purloined and just how much our national security has been compromised—unless, that is, we can find some other back door into the whole mess. Someone like Rod Ramsay. But Conrad’s arrest has likely fired a warning shot across his bow as well.
Snafu—that’s the word playing through my brain when I finally fall asleep: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. No wonder I’m sleep-deprived. On the bedside table next to my head, the night-glow clock reads 12:35. The alarm is set for the usual wake-up call: 4:55.
4
CLARIFICATIONS AND EVASIONS
August 25, 1988
At 4:55, the alarm drags me out of a nasty, repetitive dream—a critical exam at the FBI Training Academy at Quantico that I’ve forgotten to study for, being held in a classroom I can’t find, in a building with stairs that keep climbing to dead-end hallways. The ring of the alarm coincides exactly with the last ringing bell at the Academy, the one that says: “Test rooms closed and secured.”
By five-thirty, I’m shaved, dressed (casual, in the expectation of seeing Ramsay again), and sitting down to a bowl of yogurt, a big helping of Florida fruit, and a homemade café cubano that seems to blur the line between liquid and solid. On the breakfast table in front of me is the ever-growing to-do list prepared for my attention by my sleeping wife upstairs. What yanks at my heart are all the activities and events coming up for Stephanie—events I’ll miss and already regret not attending.
I’m on the road a little before six, and by the time the Tampa Bureau building heaves into view, about six-fifteen, I’m once again feeling strangely optimistic. Sure, the Washington Field Office is trying to screw us. No doubt about it, WFO is much closer to HQ’s ear than we are down in the semi-tropics. Granted, something about the way this whole investigation has gone down to date is starting to smell a little like a three-day-old armadillo squished along the side of US 41. But like Annie sings in the movie, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.”
Fortified by a fistful of Tums—I raided my home stash, rather than risk Koerner’s Rolaids wrath—I positively bounce into the office at six-thirty, and by 7:05 everything has gone to hell in a handbasket.
* * *
LYNN MUST HAVE BEEN looking on the rosy side of life, too, because she bounced into the communications vault at the same time I did, 7:05, and seemed equally frustrated that there was nothing for either of us regarding Conrad, the mysterious piece of paper I’d sent to the lab people, the enigmatic six-digit short number written on same, or anything else that might give us the least leg up in loosening some semblance of the truth from Rod Ramsay.
Koerner is just settling into his office when Lynn and I storm through his door.
With Lynn’s tacit approval, I cut to the chase. “We haven’t received shit from WFO.”
“Christ, Navarro—I haven’t had my coffee yet.”
“We’re doing another interview today, and we have nada, nothing, zilch.”
“Give ’em a few days, guys,” he tells us. “You know how it is. They get—what?—three, four, five thousand of these requests for examination a week, and all are priorities: rapes, murders, cases going to trial. I mean, look, the main suspect here is in jail already, for crissake.”
“And . . . ”
“And?” Koerner is looking at me a little strangely, sort of the way people in the movies look at ticking time bombs. Am I about to go off? “Just get it off your chest, Navarro.”
“I know we’re a small office and HQ all but ignores us, but this isn’t another smudged fingerprint from a goddamned bank robbery. This is an espionage case, and you’ve always taught me that nothing trumps espionage. What’s more, in case no one has noticed, it now involves three countries tha
t we know of and, according to Eways, the defense of Western Europe. So, yes, I am pissed, and”—turning to Lynn, who nods in agreement—“we are pissed that it takes the lab so long to get this processed.”
“Are you done?”
“Jesus, Jay, you know I’m goddamned right!”
Jay looks up, seeking either saintly patience or one of those famous Gulf Coast lightning bolts that occasionally strike a person—hopefully me.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to get them off their ass and treating this as a priority, just as we have. Lynn and I are pushing this as hard as we can. All we’re asking for is their support.”
Koerner ponders this for a minute or so, with fingers steepled under his chin, then slips into his supervisor’s voice. “Well, let’s see what you guys get today, and hopefully we’ll hear tomorrow from Washington or the army. Who knows? Maybe both!”
“Will you call?”
“I will. Now get the hell out of my office.”
Truth is, I probably would have said the same thing in his position—we weren’t the only brushfire that needed tending—but still, it’s frustrating. I always want things done now, not ten minutes later. That’s a weakness, I know, but I’m feeling an urgency with this case, and “Well, let’s see . . . ” just fans my flames.
Lynn and I clear our desks, head to Perrera’s, and over the always-excellent coffee agree that this time she’ll call Ramsay and arrange for us to get together. But for the second day in a row, he’s beaten us to the punch. While we’re out, he leaves a message for us to call him. Lynn is ready to dial as soon as we’re back in the office, but I tell her to wait. First, I don’t want Ramsay thinking we’re needy. More important, if he’s done this twice, he’s either terribly lonely or really worried about something. I’m betting on the latter. No harm in letting him stew a little longer.