Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  Condemned men get to make one call, so I make mine to Jay Koerner as I finish off my now flat club soda:

  “Jay,” I say, “who at headquarters is working for the Communists? Someone up here is trying to derail our investigation.”

  We have an adage in the FBI that perfectly captures how so many of us in the outposts feel about HQ: “Only the guppies get eaten, never the sharks.”

  9

  SHE-MOODY

  I mentioned earlier that Lynn Tremaine had gotten herself hitched during the year FBIHQ red-lighted us on Ramsay. Ironically, Lynn met the INSCOM agent of her dreams while in Germany running into a lot of Ramsay case brick walls. Good for her but bad for me. Now I need to find another partner.

  And it can’t just be anyone. I need to find someone who is sharp, works hard, and will have my back. If I get stuck with the wrong person, it will make both of us miserable. Believe me. I speak from experience.

  When I first entered the FBI, I was assigned to work with someone I’ll call Frank in the Yuma, Arizona, office. The first thing he said to me when we shook hands was “You don’t look like a spic.” Naturally, I replied, “You don’t look like Efrem Zimbalist Jr.” Things went downhill from there. Not only was Frank a slob and morbidly obese—the polar opposite of the trim and natty Zimbalist on all those F.B.I. shows—he also had about as much personality as an iguana. Pedantic, nitpicking, paranoid, distrustful, and permanently unhappy, he resented just about everyone, and he especially abhorred Mexicans and the Native Americans who lived on the reservations that surrounded us: i.e., just about everyone we had to deal with on a daily basis.

  I promised myself way back then that I’d never work again with someone like Frank. So far I’ve lucked out, but the agent pickings in the Tampa bureau are thin, and the Ramsay investigation, I’m hoping, is about to break wide open.

  “How about Terry Moody?” Koerner is saying. We’re sitting in his office, late in the morning, and my boss is playing nice with me. He knows I’m still fuming over the ABC news broadcast two evenings ago. Terry Moody is one of the bones he’s throwing my way.

  I like Terry Moody. Koerner knows that. Terry is the latest addition to our SWAT team—just last month I was teaching him how to rappel off of a forty-foot tower dangling by an eleven-millimeter rope. Terry’s tough, a quick learner, and funny. There’s just one problem.

  “What I need is a female partner, Jay, a woman.”

  Koerner responds by shaking his head.

  “C’mon, Jay! Rod loved Lynn. She had him eating out of her hand. I don’t know if he has a mother complex, or a sister one, or if he’s just one horny son of a bitch, but I need a female partner—that’s what this case needs.”

  “I know that, Navarro.” Koerner has stopped shaking his head. In fact, he’s smiling as if he’s trying to coax, oh, say, a five-year-old toward understanding. And then it dawns on me.

  “Oh!” I say. “She-Moody?”

  “The very one.”

  This requires a moment of explanation. We have two agents named Moody in our office: Terry Moody and his wife, Terry Moody. The odds against this are probably astronomical, but there it is. Terry Halverson was already an FBI agent when she met and married fellow agent Terry Moody, and they became agents Terry and Terry Moody. To keep them straight, we refer to the former Miss Halverson as She-Moody and to her husband as He-Moody. Koerner was obviously setting a trap for me when he sprung “Terry Moody” on me, and I fell right in. Now my job is to extricate myself as gracefully as possible.

  “Christ, Koerner, She-Moody is a first-office agent. She’s never worked counterintelligence before—never ever. She’s been all criminal. It’s not the same thing. You know that. I don’t want to train another agent—I don’t have fucking time.”

  But even as I’m trying to talk my way out of She-Moody, my mind is talking me into it. Terry is tall and, frankly, beautiful, and Lynn already proved that looks go a long way toward opening up Rod Ramsay. What’s more, Terry has a disarming smile and laugh, and she’s humble to the core and a pleasure to be around. If this investigation is headed where I want it to go, we’re going to be spending, literally, hundreds of hours together, maybe thousands, doing interviews that might stretch up to half a day, and that’s just the interviews, not the parsing and dissection—and endless FD-302s!—afterward. Even a little friction between partners can quickly grow into big rifts, even open feuds, under those circumstances.

  In that sense, at least, I know she’ll be easy for me to work with, but partnering is a two-way street, and word has gotten back to me that I’m not anywhere near high-man on She-Moody’s favorite-fellow-agent list, maybe because I’m a little, um, hyper, while Terry seems more laid back—not lazy, mind you, just more inclined to smell the roses occasionally.

  “So?” Koerner has his phone in his hand. I can tell he’s getting ready to punch in She-Moody’s extension.

  “Well,” I say, “we have worked together before, on a Title III, when we were short of personnel.”

  “And?”

  “And she was fine. Good, in fact. Sharp. But that was a wiretap, drugs, not CI. Also . . . ”

  He’s rolling his eyes by now.

  “Yes, Navarro, what else?”

  “Also,” I say, shifting uncomfortably in my seat, “our personalities might not match up all that well.”

  “Yeah, she’s nice,” he says, stabbing away at her extension number. “Now get the hell out of here.”

  “Yes, boss!” I say. “And . . . ”

  “And. And. And. It’s always something else with you, Navarro. And what?”

  “And let me know what she says,” but he’s already talking with She-Moody.

  * * *

  WHILE I’M WAITING TO hear from Koerner about a new partner, I try to piece together a surveillance team on a shoestring budget. Finding Rod after our year in the desert was hard enough. Keeping tabs on him now that we have him back in our sights is going to be harder still.

  For starters, these days Rod is driving a cab—and not his own. Every day he picks up a vehicle that he may or may not ever have driven before and spends up to twelve hours or longer behind its wheel, much of that time at Orlando International Airport, waiting in a long queue to pick up whoever happens to be at the front of the line when he gets there. Once he has a fare in the backseat, he goes wherever the customer directs, in a yellow cab identical from the air or ground to perhaps two thousand other yellow cabs working the streets of Greater Orlando.

  Put a bug in Rod’s cab? Which one? Make sure all his fares are our agents? Just imagine how many man-hours would be consumed standing in cab queues at the airport, not to mention the expense for the perpetual fares. And how would you ever time things so our agent was at the head of the line every time Rod’s turn came up? (God forbid that one of the agents might need to take a piss and screw up the entire cab-rank rotation.) This isn’t TV surveillance. This is the real thing. And you’ve got to be on your toes at all times because it’s easy to detect surveillance if you know what you’re doing.

  And don’t forget: The stakes are double on this surveillance job, maybe triple, depending on how you look at it. One, the world hasn’t gotten any safer since I made that list at National Airport two days ago. At some point, the KGB is going to say enough of this freedom shit, and who knows what might happen then, and not just behind the crumbling Iron Curtain. Two, ABC News has been harassing Rod almost nonstop since airing the Conrad segment on October 29—or would be harassing him nonstop if they knew where he was. As it is, they’re harassing Dorothy Ramsay almost nonstop, trying to find her pride and joy, and Dorothy, God bless her, is harassing me in turn, or at least harassing as much as an inherently nice and decent middle-age lady can bring herself to do. Three, most important, I don’t know for sure what secrets Rod might have to tell, but if he spooks and bolts, we’re likely never to learn any of them.

  Every CI agent in the FBI has memorized—or should have—the cautionary tale of Edward L
ee Howard from a few years back. Howard was already suspected of providing classified information to the Soviets when Vitaly Yurchenko walked into the American Embassy in Rome, defected to the US, and fingered Howard and Ronald Pelton as KGB assets. Things got confused when Yurchenko redefected back to Russia in November 1985—had he been a double agent? or was he now a redoubled one?—but the case against Howard remained strong enough that the FBI got permission to tap his Santa Fe, New Mexico, phone and set up a twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance operation on him.

  That’s what they were doing in September 1985 when Howard and his wife, Mary, returned home from dinner out. As Mary slowed to round a corner, Howard leapt from the car, leaving a stuffed-clothes dummy topped with an old wig in the passenger seat to dupe the agents who were tailing them. Back home, Mary called a number connected to an answering machine and played a message her husband had prerecorded to fool the wiretap. The next thing anyone knew, Edward Lee Howard was knocking on the door of the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki and carrying all his secrets with him.

  Screw up our surveillance, overplay our hand, spook Rod Ramsay too badly, and we’ll end holding the same empty bag—with, to my mind, even bigger secrets unrevealed. That’s what’s been haunting my sleep these last few nights, along with the teletype from HQ kindly letting us know that the Swedes, the Germans, and the Austrians are all in a lather because Washington is making them look bad and they don’t appreciate the news leaks. They don’t? What about us? We have to investigate with the intention of prosecution, and we’re being thwarted at every turn!

  First things first, though. Ramsay is a lot less likely to go to ground if we can stabilize his life even a little bit. And since I still don’t have a partner, “we” in this case is a substitute for “I.”

  I reached Rod this morning in the office where he picks up cab keys, and we agreed to meet after his shift. She-Moody and Koerner are heavy in conversation, door closed against the world, when I knock on his office window to let him know I’m leaving. Neither of them bothers to look up.

  * * *

  HERE’S THE ALARMING THING: Rod’s life is an even bigger mess than I realized. Not only is he still getting thrown out of his camper regularly so his “girlfriend” can get it on with her ex-beau; Rod, I learn, is also getting screwed (not quite so literally) by the outfit he’s working for. The first $75 he makes each and every day goes to the cab company no matter how his day goes. Some days he breaks even, he says; other days he actually loses money and has to dig into his own pocket to pay off his daily obligation. It’s the rare day—when the tourists are pouring into Orlando International and in a generous tipping mood—that he actually turns anything close to a decent profit.

  Images of Southern tenant farmers trapped in their miserable lives float through my head as he talks. No wonder Rod is, even by his own high standards, jittery as a frog in a frying pan. I wonder for a moment if he’s on speed. I can see a vein throbbing like a disco light along his right temple. But I finally convince myself that this is just what life of late has done to him.

  I learn all this, by the way, as Rod and I lean against my car, munching on ranch-flavored Doritos and downing Busch Beer in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven near the campground that Rod now calls home. Sounds like a dump, doesn’t it? Well, it should—it is a dump, but it’s also a perfect place for what I want to accomplish tonight.

  Interviewing? Forget it. Interviewing is nuanced. It requires enormous advance planning, and in Rod’s case, it helps greatly to have a feminine presence to grease the skids. What we’re doing tonight is lots simpler and utterly necessary: an old-fashioned man-to-man, under the stars—raw, basic, simple. Nowhere is the human condition more on display than in a convenience store parking lot, after dark, on the back edge of civilization. Everyone out here has a story, and each new one is sorrier than the last. As Rod enumerates his problems, I point out others in the passing parade who are beyond any doubt worse off than he: slouched, emaciated, even maimed. One guy has a truncated limb that looks as if it might have been picked clean in a thresher.

  Dastardly? Yeah, sure, and calculating. I want Rod to see where he could end up, or sink to, if he doesn’t make some effort to get his act together—and of course I want to be a key part of that reversal of fortune. But this isn’t entirely cold-blooded on my part. There’s also something about Rod that screams out “Help me! Help me!” And as I said before, he can be winning in an almost childlike way.

  When I ask him if he’d like to meet again tomorrow night for dinner at the Embassy Suites on International Drive, his face splits with what I think is the first smile I’ve seen all night. I can’t imagine when Rod had his last square meal. When I tell him (with fingers crossed) that my new partner will be joining us, the smile widens into a grin.

  “Is she nice?” he asks.

  “Nice,” I answer, “and beautiful.”

  Check that: a shit-eating grin.

  “But, Rod,” I add as he settles back into his car, “she’s a lady—like Lynn. Clean up a little for her, okay?”

  “Okay,” he says. “Definitely okay!”

  * * *

  ROD KEEPS HIS WORD the next evening. I don’t know where he showered, but he looks almost presentable. I keep mine, too, in part. We have a big dinner—steak, baked potato, salad, the basics—and Rod seems to down half of it without even chewing while I fill him with a combination of fatherly advice (stand up to the son of a bitch who’s screwing your girl and throw her out of the camper while you’re at it) and motherly cautions (brush your teeth twice daily, eat a balanced diet, don’t wash up only when I’m coming to see you). But the most important part of the promise I made to Rod, I can’t keep. Yes, I do have a partner—She-Moody herself—and she’s a stunner. But, no, she’s not able to make it. She’s on another case at the moment. Truth is, it’s probably best that Terry and I have a night to get over the time we spent together earlier in the day.

  * * *

  THE DAY BEGAN UNPLEASANTLY enough with a new missive forwarded on to us from the Austrians regarding the ABC News report. In yesterday’s installment, they were merely lathered. Today, they were royally pissed, largely because they’d managed to contact Zoltan Szabo only to find out that he now feels the FBI can’t be trusted and will have nothing to do with us. Really? Just because someone high up leaked the whole story to the media? Picky. Picky. But this is also deeply troubling because I know that at some point I’ll have to visit the Austrians in furtherance of my investigation. A warm welcome doesn’t seem in the cards.

  Koerner’s first words to me didn’t do a lot to lift the cloud.

  “She-Moody would rather not work with you,” he said, leaning against my doorjamb and cradling his morning cup of coffee. “In fact, she’d rather work with anyone else but you.”

  “Really, anyone?” That hurt a little. We have a couple of real jerks in our office.

  “Pretty much.”

  “What’s the issue?”

  “She knows about your work habits, and she just doesn’t want to be driven crazy by your demanding nature. But . . . ” He hesitated here as if delivering news he’d rather not be bearing.

  “But?”

  “But she’ll do it because she knows we need this.”

  “Aw, don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get along fine.”

  “Seriously, Navarro, be kind. Let her come up for air. Not everyone is comfortable working at warp speed.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  I might be wrong, but I think the dagger look Koerner shot back at me was completely unwarranted.

  * * *

  A FEW HOURS LATER, I saw Moody descending the stairs from her office on the floor above ours and walking my way. Her smile said “I can do this,” but everything else about her screamed “What in the hell have I gotten myself into?” so I took her into one of our small conference rooms, where I could brief her on the case in general and then get down to the details of how we’d work together. She barely said
a word until I got to the details part.

  “Two things you should know at the outset,” she declared, holding up her hand like a crossing guard. “One, I’m not going to drive myself into the ground if that’s what it takes to keep up with you. If this gets out of hand, I’m gone.”

  “Okay, it won’t. And two?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine? I tell you I’m pregnant heading into a major case, and all you can do is say ‘fine’?”

  “What do you want me to say? I can’t undo it, although I got to say that I’m worried you’ll name this child Terry. Then we’ll have He-Moody, She-Moody, and Wee-Moody.”

  That at least got a smile from her, a real one.

  “But listen, I’ll take the lead in the interviews, and I’ll do all the FD-302s, at least for now. Those wore Lynn into the ground.”

  “I know.”

  “She told you so?”

  “Many times. And much more. Your reputation, Navarro, does precede you,” she said with a knowing smile and confident face.

  And then, as if to prove her point, I launched into the meat of this get-together: how we were going to work together. And as I went on, I couldn’t help but notice that her genuinely warm smile was slipping increasingly into incredulity.

  “Item One, when we first meet Ramsay, I’ll keep him on my right, so stand to my left as we walk in. He has to look through me to see you.”

  Right? Left? She was locked into my eyes, but somewhere behind those powder-blue orbs, I could see her brain saying Huh?

  “Two, you and I must be in complete synchronicity at all times except when it comes to humor. You want to laugh, laugh. I’ll control what I do depending on the situation.