Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  “Just talked shop?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. We were reminiscing about old times.”

  Another question mark: Does the WFO know about this visit? If so, were they intending to mention it to us? But then of course they haven’t told us jack-shit about anything so far.

  Me: “When was this?”

  Rod: “Can’t say exactly, but you know, after I failed the piss test [same ironic tone] and before Mom and I came down here. Maybe the spring of ’86?”

  Conrad had been in WFO’s sights for years by then. What an opportunity that would have been to grab him on American soil so he could be tried in an American court. Crap.

  “Did he come alone?”

  “I think so. At least, he didn’t have any family with him when he came to see me.”

  “How about gifts—did he bring you anything?”

  “He gave me a little cowbell, the kind that they sell at the airport and tourist shops in Germany.”

  “A cowbell? Weird.”

  “No, not really. People go to France, and they bring back a little Eiffel Tower. In Germany, it’s a cowbell. Same idea.”

  Lynn chimes in, in German, with what I take to be something like: “He’s right; I’ve got a shelf full of them myself.” The only words I can really pick out our da, mein, and glocke, like the glockenspiels in high-school marching bands. Whatever Lynn actually says, though, it’s enough to lighten everyone’s mood, mine included.

  “See?” Rod says with a smile. “Lynn knows. She’s seen a little of the world”—in a tone that implies my knowledge of the world might cover a hundred square blocks of downtown Tampa, Florida.

  “Okay, okay. I give,” I say, holding my hands up in surrender. “This bell—what did you do with it?”

  “I still have it. Want to see it?”

  “Yahhhh,” Lynn answers before I can say yes.

  “Let me get it.”

  “Uh, you don’t have a gun back there by any chance, do you?” I ask, not that he’d tell me if that was what he had in mind.

  “Naw,” Rod answers. “I left my Sig Sauer in the glove compartment.”

  Ha-ha.

  At any rate, he’s back in thirty seconds with a crummy little fake-brass bell that Conrad probably bought in bulk on discount at the base PX.

  “Any significance other than a memento?” I ask, gently shaking the clapper against the bell casing.

  “No, not really,” answers Ramsay, cracking his neck joints to the left.

  “Would you mind if I take it for a few days, just so I can send a photo to our folks in Bonn? You never know what’s going to be important,” even (though I don’t say it) this piece-of-crap souvenir.

  “Sure, I don’t need it. Keep it.”

  “Thanks,” I say, handing it to Lynn.

  “So after Conrad visited you, he left for Ohio?”

  “That’s where he said he was going.”

  “More specific? Cleveland? Toledo? Cincinnati? Do you remember what airport he was flying into?”

  “Didn’t ask, and he didn’t say that I can remember.”

  “Did you hear from him again?” I’m thinking Rod’s an information freak. Wouldn’t he ask where Conrad was headed next?

  “No, and I haven’t heard from him since.”

  “No letters or postcards?”

  “Nope, nothing,” Rod replies, cracking his neck again. To some this might seem like ordinary stretching. To me, the neck cracking is a sign of how uncomfortable he is with his own answer. Why, I don’t know, but at least I’ve confirmed that Ramsay and Conrad were closer than I imagined on that first interview. Did the army or WFO not have any idea of that either?

  Back to Rod: “I meant to ask you the other day, what kind of games did you guys like to play over there?”

  “Video games. Donkey Kong was a big hit”—a groan from Lynn—“and Hydlide”—bigger groan—“stupid stuff mostly.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Dungeons and Dragons.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Boy, you are old,” Lynn jumps in.

  “Seriously, I’ve never heard of Dungeons and Dragons,” I say, smarting just a bit. Old? Me? “What is it?” And to my deep regret, for the next twenty-seven minutes, Ramsay proceeds to describe in pedantic, mind-numbing detail this apparently wildly popular fantasy game that has flown completely beneath my radar.

  “Did Conrad play?” I ask when Rod finally takes a breather.

  “Nah, he was like you—old-fashioned.”

  “Old this! Who else played?”

  “Everyone, all the guys in the barracks. We’d play for hours, sometimes days at a time.”

  “Get out.”

  “No, it’s intoxicating. Once you start a game, you can’t stop. I have a whole book on D and D. You want a look?”

  “Sure,” I say, “let me see it,” thinking that there can’t be anything else to learn on the subject after Rod’s dissertation, but he’s back from his bedroom in a jiffy with a thick hardcover book full of illustrations. I thumb through while Lynn and Rod trade D&D stories, but the charm is still lost on me. Is this something young people do when they’re stoned or just bored out of their minds? (I have trouble imagining Lynn being either.) Or is there something here I’m just not seeing—a Key to Rebecca–type thing, maybe, to help decode secret messages? The best codebooks often hide in plain view, which is why the Bible is often as useful to spies as it is to priests. In any event, I figure I need to do a little deeper dive into this.

  “May I take this and read it?” I ask Rod, holding the book high.

  “Sure,” he says, “I want you to have it.” And just like that I’ve got another puzzle piece in my hands. Why’s he giving me all these things? I wonder. Maybe he’s just generous, or impulsive more likely, but there’s also a good chance he’s testing me in some way I can’t quite understand. Whatever’s going on, I figure it’s time to change the tenor of our session.

  “Do you like to read history?” I ask.

  “Herodotus, of course. Napoleon.”

  “What about Clausewitz?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sun Tzu?”

  “Yes, he was a near contemporary of Herodotus.” Is that right? I better check.

  “Machiavelli?”

  “What do you think? Of course. Why?”

  “I just wondered if you only read shit like Dungeons and Dragons.” I intended to be harsh—Rod’s snotty tone is getting out of hand again—but even as the words are coming out, I know I’ve gone over the top. For a moment, I worry that I might have really offended him. Instead, Rod seems to decide that it’s game on.

  “Have you ever read about Theodora?” he asks, slipping into a higher gear, as if he wants to put me in my place.

  “You mean Justinian’s wife?”

  “Justinian the First’s wife,” he clarifies. “I’m surprised you know that.”

  “I really don’t know that much about her,” I concede, although I’m not exactly ignorant on the subject.

  “Well,” Rod says, “she was a whore before she became empress.” He gives Lynn a quick glance to see if she’s shocked, but Lynn just shrugs.

  “I’m not sure she was so much a whore as she was peddled by her mother,” I say. “Later, she became an actress.”

  “She was a whore.”

  “Whatever, she ended up an empress,” I say through clenched teeth. “Now, Justinian the Second—”

  “Slit-Nose?” Rod has gotten way up on his high horse. Maybe so have I.

  “Boys, boys, boys.” Lynn wisely intervenes, shaking her finger at both of us. “What am I going to do with you two?”

  “Matters for discussion next time,” I say.

  “You bet.” Rod’s beaming now, almost glowing with excitement. This is clearly the kind of contest he thrives on. For my part, I think I better bone up on the Byzantine Empire, in a hurry. But as I keep saying, face time is what counts in this business, and if that means adding late-
night history sessions to the rest of my schedule, so be it.

  “Well,” I say, rising. “Bonn’s waiting. We better get all this to them. It’s got to be what time there?”

  “Four-forty-two,” Rod chimes in, almost before the question is out of my mouth. I don’t see a clock or watch anywhere in sight. “P.m.,” he adds, just in case I’m a dope.

  I’m halfway out the door when I remember my manners.

  “The book,” I say, waggling my D&D primer. “Thanks.”

  “And for the bell,” Lynn adds, giving it a little shake.

  “No problem,” Rod says airily, like a philanthropist being thanked for giving alms to the poor.

  I’m practically to the car when I remember Rod’s mom.

  “Did you talk to your mom yet? Did you tell her what I said—she can call Lynn or me anytime?”

  “I did.”

  “And we’re okay?”

  “We’re good.”

  “Later, then.”

  This time, the neighbor watering his grass in front of the trailer across the way doesn’t even bother looking up from his hose as we drive away.

  “Nearly lost it back there, didn’t you, Navarro?” Lynn says once we’re back on main roads.

  “That, Agent Tremaine, was calculated.”

  “To achieve what?”

  “To shake Ramsay out of his comfort zone.”

  “By the way, how do you know about this Theodora?”

  “Justinian I was a grand spymaster. He’s the one who covertly sent two monks to China to obtain the secrets to silk production. They returned with silkworms and white-mulberry bush seeds hidden in their walking staffs, thus permanently shifting the silk trade from China to the Byzantine Empire and permanently weakening China’s balance of trade.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “I’m into books, just like Rod.”

  * * *

  MY BLOWUP ASIDE, I’M pleased with our morning session. By seizing the initiative, we’ve managed to take a day that started out as chicken shit and turn it into chicken salad. What I don’t know is that a five-course chicken feast will be waiting right inside the Bureau when we return.

  Koerner can hardly contain himself when we walk through the door.

  “My office,” he says, almost breathless as he grabs each of us by the elbow, pulls us through his door, and all but pushes us into the two chairs opposite his own, across the vast paper mountains of his desk.

  “Look at this,” he orders, reaching behind him, grabbing a sheet of paper for each of us, and shoving them in our hands. “It came in just twenty minutes ago.”

  “Holy shit!” is all I can blurt out of my mouth as I read. Lynn is more decorous: “Damn!”

  “I gotta hand it to you, Joe,” says Koerner, who uses my first name as rarely as I invoke his. “You were right all along. This changes everything.”

  Does it ever.

  The message is from FBIHQ, with copies to our legal attaché in Bonn and of course to the Washington Field Office. The FBI lab processed the note Ramsay gave me. The paper, the lab report says, “is consistent with the paper used by East European intelligence services”—a “water-soluble paper that dissolves instantly when exposed to water or saliva.” The kind of paper, for example, useful to a spy anxious to get rid of information quickly by throwing it in a toilet or placing it in his mouth. Not quite the same thing as the novelty-store magician’s paper in the story Ramsay ginned up on the spot.

  But there’s more, and even better. The number written on the paper is the known “hello” number for the Hungarian Intelligence Service in Budapest. Every spy network has something similar, an emergency contact number. You call it, someone answers “Hello,” and then you deliver a coded message via a prescribed menu. “Is this the pharmacy?” might mean an operation has been blown or someone in the network compromised. Hello numbers are common currency in espionage, but why does Rod Ramsay have one? And why did Clyde Conrad give it to him—if Rod is telling the truth about that?

  Oh, and as for the six digits, that’s part of the price for living in a Warsaw Pact nation. Technology is so backward in Hungary that the country has yet to go on the seven-digit system standard in Western Europe.

  “What are you going to do?” Koerner finally asks.

  “WFO is going to have to step up to the plate and help us now. They can’t ignore us any longer,” I say. “We have to sit down and start putting together all the leads we want covered, everything, and we need to put together a plan for moving forward. The cat is out of the bag—we need to start thinking prosecution.”

  Koerner concurs. He still looks a little shocked that all this has fallen into place so quickly.

  “I mean, there is so much more we need to do here,” I say. “I want to arrange for a meeting in DC to coordinate matters and to meet with the folks handling the Conrad case, including the Internal Security Section. We’ve got leads that should have gone out yesterday, others that can wait, but we’ve got to start prioritizing, and we need to review everything to date and where we want to go next.” Lynn is taking notes as fast as I’m spitting things out.

  “Are we going to talk to Ramsay again?” Koerner asks.

  “Of course, but we may have to wait a day while we coordinate all this,” I say. “We need to make sure the army, the Germans, and the Swedes are all on board. If the Kercsik brothers can give us more background, that’s going to help us climb the ladder with Ramsay. Information is power. We can’t play this dance-around-the-campfire routine forever. I need to know more. I need to know the whole case—front to back.”

  “Remember,” Lynn cautions, “tomorrow is Saturday. Nothing will get done until Monday.” Maybe so, I’m thinking, but so much for R & R, and the long, sleepy two-day break and family-bonding (okay, re-bonding) events I’d been planning. My mind is going to be racing a thousand miles an hour all weekend long.

  * * *

  HAVE YOU EVER HAD one of those spurts when you just love your work? When you wake up inspired and go to bed inspired? When you feel that what you do in a day really counts? That your life and work are truly consequential? It’s not that the work is easy—anything but—but worlds are opening up into even larger worlds. There’s purpose. There’s direction. A light waits at the end of the tunnel.

  That’s what the start of the week is like for me—a workaholic’s nirvana. Lynn and I put out dozens of leads. We plot strategy, set up timelines. Both of us go back and read the FD-302s over again. We’ve each got lists longer than our arms of the follow-up questions we need to ask and flowcharts of where the various possible answers to those questions might lead us next.

  We do go back to talk with Rod again, pretty much at his invitation. Our few days away from his mobile-home park have him missing us, or so it seems, but we talk about nothing important, just maintenance chatter while our leads are being covered.

  And then, right at the height of our working high, the pushback begins. I want to set up a meeting with WFO so we can talk about the information everyone has and what we’re missing, but I’m reminded that the Washington Field Office holds the reins on this case, not Tampa, and I’m told in no uncertain terms to mind my place.

  I remind everyone up the chain of command of what has occurred down here. Rod Ramsay, I say, is obliquely cooperating, but we need to know more about the case itself so we can ask the right questions. Instead, I’m told to slow things down—Ramsay can wait.

  Then I make the horrific mistake of asking about the crime scene. “Crime scene? What crime scene?” they ask. “Well,” I answer, “the one from which the documents were stolen.” But WFO, it turns out, hasn’t conducted a crime scene investigation, and that’s when it dawns on me that things aren’t as bad as I thought; they’re far worse.

  On August 31, 1988, I get a call from Rod Ramsay’s mother, wondering if he’s in trouble. I’m touched that she’s called, and we have a nice long chat during which I assure her once again that only Conrad is in
trouble and that her son Rod is being very helpful to me and to the Germans. She says an attorney friend of hers has told her Rod really shouldn’t be talking to anyone. That would be true, I say, if Rod were the focus of our investigation, but that’s Conrad, not him. She thanks me for reassuring her, and I put the phone down feeling, well, a bit deceptive. I mean, what kind of man lies to a fearful mother? After reflecting on the conversation, I tell myself that some mistruths are more justifiable than others. Still, it bothers me to be leading Rod’s mom down a primrose path. Maybe it’s my Catholic upbringing, but this kind of dissembling feels like something the nuns wouldn’t have approved of.

  Then the next day, September 1, Washington Field Office case agent Bill Bray contacts me and asks me to stop talking with Ramsay.

  “Stop?” I say. “In the middle of an investigation that’s just getting started? That’s nuts.” Within a few minutes, someone from HQ does a follow-up call with the same request, and I give the same response: We’ve opened an investigation in accordance with FBI and Justice Department guidelines, and we will pursue said investigation with scrupulous attention to same.

  Then at roughly two o’clock that afternoon, I get a teletype from high up the FBIHQ chain of command informing me that the asking phase is over. Just nine days after first interviewing Rod Ramsay and after working so hard to get him comfortable talking with us, my partner and I are ordered not to talk with Rod Ramsay again, under any circumstances.

  6

  WORK-AROUNDS

  In the Bureau, as in any large organization, there are orders and there are orders. Orders are the ones you better obey lest you end up five rungs down the career ladder, transferred to a permanent post in Resume Speed, Idaho, in the middle of winter. Orders, though, are more like directives, often issued—in the FBI’s case—by HQ people who have their heads so far up their asses they haven’t seen sunshine since they were promoted. After stewing for several days about being pulled off the Rod Ramsay case, Lynn and I decide that what’s been issued is, in fact, a directive, a not-to-be-taken-too-seriously order, and that the best way to deal with it is mostly to ignore it. Besides, there’s too damn much to do.

  The Kercsik brothers, for example. They’re not telling all, but they are being more helpful than expected. They were the ones who confirmed that the six-digit number Ramsay handed me was, in fact, the Hungarian Intelligence Service’s hello line. If they’re willing to go that far, I figure, maybe they’ll go a little further and tell us if they’ve ever seen Rod themselves, so I put in a call to Jane Hein, one of the very good people at HQ and among the few with whom I have a long and pleasant history.