Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  An even longer pause this time—so long that even Moody begins to look uncomfortable—but finally Rod decides to reenter the world.

  “I will tell you about the computer chips,” he says, “if it’s absolutely true that I can’t be arrested for just talking about it.”

  By now, this whole hypothetical back-and-forth has consumed more than thirty tortured minutes. For me, that’s more than enough time.

  “Rod,” I say, “the only absolutes in life are death and taxes. For crissake, just tell us what happened. No more hypotheticals—let’s deal in reality because my head is spinning. My boss needs to know if something really did take place and computer chips were sold to the Warsaw Pact. So please,” I say, leaning in, my palms up in supplication.

  “But first,” I say, rolling my chair back until I’m next to the coffee table and sliding the top off the small cooler we’ve had sitting there all along, “how about something to drink? Why don’t you help yourself?”

  * * *

  ROD’S FIRST PULL FROM the Pepsi bottle goes poorly, probably because his throat is tight with nerves and tension. He tilts the bottle back too far, sends half the drink down his windpipe and the other half up his nose, and the next thing I know he’s coughing like a madman and wiping snot away with his hand. Moody, thank God, is on top of him in seconds, pulling a wad of tissues out of her purse, dabbing at the spill on his shirt collar, and rapping him gently between his shoulder blades. Watching her, I’m struck by how few times I’ve even been around to wipe my little girl’s nose and comfort her coughs.

  Rod is just getting his composure back when Moody returns from the bathroom with a moistened towel for cleaning his hands and a glass. She’s pouring the rest of the Pepsi into the tumbler—“a little easier to drink from,” she explains—as Rod launches into his story.

  The first mention of computer chips, he says, came when Conrad stopped by Boston in 1986, on his way to Ohio (or wherever he was really going).

  “So it wasn’t just a social call?” I ask.

  Rod shakes his head and looks down, seemingly embarrassed. “No, it was more. I wasn’t really working much then, and Clyde thought it could be a way for both of us to make some serious money.”

  “Give us some details, Rod. Moody and I need to understand this.”

  “Well,” he says, settling into his professorial mode, “there are computer chips and there are computer chips. The more advanced ones were embargoed from sale to the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc countries. If we could obtain these in large numbers, Clyde said, he could think of a country that might buy them from us for somewhere in the seven-figures range.”

  As he says this, Rod raises his eyes at both of us, to let us know what a viable and clever idea this was—never mind, of course, the various illegalities involved. Those are never high on Ramsay’s priority list.

  “What country might that have been, Rod?” I ask.

  “Not the Soviets,” he answers. “They play rough. Maybe someone more like the Hungarians. They’re a lot more civilized.”

  And exactly how would you know all that? I’m wondering, but I simply say, “I guess that would be my choice also. Hungary, after all, would be easy to access through a third country such as Austria.”

  At this, Ramsay’s face positively lights up with joy that I’m getting the efficacy of picking a country like Hungary. Maybe he’s thinking that I’m not so dumb after all. More likely, he’s thinking what a first-rate person he is to be able to explain these things so well.

  “So what happened?” I ask, ready to bring this evening to a close.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing, Rod?”

  “Turns out,” he says, “this was a lot tougher to do than you might think. One computer chip would have been a snap, even a dozen or two. The advanced ones are about half the size of a credit card. You could hide them inside a stuffed animal and take them anywhere you wanted to. But hundreds? Now you’ve got to deal with a lot of questions from the retailer about who you are and why you need so many. What is your company name? Where are you registered? What’s your tax ID number? Do you intend to use these abroad? All that is pain in the ass enough without the packaging issues and significant up-front costs.”

  “And, Rod, just to put a lid on the evening, how do you come to know so much about this?”

  “I know this because I, hypothetically [air quote, air quote, air quote], looked into it.”

  “So ABC News got it wrong?”

  “It never took place. It just couldn’t be done.”

  “Well,” I say with a big sigh, meant to push the burden back on Koerner again, “I’m sure glad to hear this. I was worried that something was afoot that we had to investigate. Our boss is going to be relieved to hear it was all talk and bullshit.”

  “And you, Terry?” Ramsay asks, turning her way.

  “Oh, Rod,” she says, “I never doubted you for a moment.”

  What a beautiful answer, I tell myself, without, of course, giving it away.

  * * *

  ROD, I’M GUESSING, IS back in his camper, snuggled beside his lover [air quotes] with visions of Agent Moody dancing in his head, by the time we get the furniture moved back in place.

  I’m already thinking of how Shirley the Office Scold will question why I have to do these interviews in a hotel room when, as she so often says, “the office interview room is absolutely free. Why do you have to keep interviewing people at the Waldorf-Astoria?” As if the Embassy Suites were the Waldorf-Anything. I could cite for Shirley plenty of evidence that Bureau offices have a chilling effect and are far more likely to drive a suspect into the arms of an attorney, but I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s wisdom at times such as this: “Don’t try to teach a pig to sing. It annoys the pig, and it wastes your time.”

  Moody snaps me out of my reverie as we’re waiting for the elevator.

  “What do you think, Navarro?”

  “About what?”

  “What else? About how it went.”

  Three fingers immediately pop up.

  “Yes and . . . ?” Moody asks just as two tourists in Panama Jack floral prints walk by with ice buckets in hand, headed for the ice machine around the corner from the elevator bank. I wait to answer until the elevator doors slide open and the ice cubes around the corner begin clattering on plastic.

  “One, we’ve garnered a huge conspiratorial admission. Ramsay basically told us that he and Conrad were very comfortable with each other talking about things that could potentially break laws and get them prosecuted. And what’s more, they were both willing to do these things. We also learned that either Ramsay or Conrad had a means to get the computer chips into the hands of a buyer from an embargoed country. That kind of connection just doesn’t appear in the phone book; most likely someone already existed who could facilitate this.”

  “Ditto. I thought the same thing. Two?”

  “Two, my ass is going to get raked over the coals tomorrow.”

  “For the hypothetical prosecutorial stuff?”

  “You noticed that, too?”

  “I wasn’t sure where you were headed, or where he was headed, but I think you’re right. This is going to be an issue of clarity, but—”

  “But?”

  “For the record I’m on your side on this one. I don’t think you overstepped any bright lines, and I do know that we wouldn’t have learned what we did if you hadn’t taken the risk. He asked and you tried to answer, and you did preface it by saying you weren’t an attorney.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that.” I’m incredibly glad I threw in that bit about not being an attorney—hopefully, that will save me. I’m also more and more impressed with Moody’s performance tonight.

  “And three?”

  “Three, we’re just scratching the surface with this little shit. He has tons more to tell us, and I think he’s ready to—”

  “Unburden himself?”

  “Maybe that,” I say.

  “And maybe what el
se?”

  “Impress you even more.”

  We’ve crossed the parking lot by now and are just pulling out on International Drive when I feel the need for a little unburdening of my own.

  “Point Four.”

  “Four?” Moody says, with what might be mock surprise. “There’s still more?”

  “Yes, Point Four. You were right. There’s nothing in the FBI manual that says I have to be an asshole.”

  “All of the time?”

  “That’s right,” I say, “all the time.”

  “Well,” Moody says, leaning back into her seat and clasping her hands under her slightly swelling belly, “that’s a Big Friggin’ Relief.”

  11

  SMARTEST GUY IN THE ROOM

  November 6, 1989

  Jay Koerner takes my accidental venture into the prosecutorial waiver minefield much better than I expected, which is to say he doesn’t come flying over his desk at me with both fists pounding. He has every reason to be upset, but he also knows that this is for the legal minds to sort out now. Moody is in his office with me when I break the news, and Jay is old-fashioned enough that he likes to play the gentleman when a lady is around. Besides, Moody has done a damn good job of standing up for me when she could have left me twisting in the wind.

  “It was all hypotheticals,” she keeps reminding Koerner. “Nothing specific was ever promised. Joe was answering his questions as they were asked, and he did throw in that caveat about not being an attorney.”

  I’m grateful for her support. And as I look at my other fellow agents trickling in before the 8 a.m. start of the day, I’m having trouble picking out many others who would go to bat for me in a situation like this. In the end we all agree on a game plan. We’ll go ahead with this evening’s interview as scheduled. I’ll keep my big yap shut if any more hypotheticals are thrown at me or if the subject of prosecutorial anything comes up again—She-Moody looks absolutely giddy at the prospect of enforcing this stricture—and tomorrow morning I’ll go see my pal Greg Kehoe, the first assistant at the United States Attorney’s Office in the Middle District of Florida. Greg will be prosecuting the Ramsay case if and when it comes to that—“as now it likely will,” Koerner reminds us, “if Agent Navarro hasn’t fucked the whole business to high heaven—with apologies,” he adds, with a penitent look toward the demure Mrs. Moody.

  Now Moody and I are seated at the far left end of the counter at the Zack Street Sandwich Shop a short block from the Bureau office. Fact is, I don’t like the place. It’s filled with fellow agents, for obvious reasons, and the only one who seems entirely comfortable with seeing Moody and me huddled together is the other Terry Moody—He-Moody—who waves cheerfully from a booth all the way at the back of the room, where he is holding court with his white-collar-crime buddies. Almost worse, the coffee is unforgivably watery. I’ve been trying to talk She-Moody into doing these morning briefings at Perrera’s, but she claims the Cuban coffee there is so strong that her unborn baby will be kicking all day long and probably grow up with three different kinds of attention deficit disorders.

  “Nonsense,” I tell her. “Cubans are the most laid back, mañana, no problema, take-it-as-it-comes, play-it-as-it-lays people on the face of the Earth.”

  “Like Fidel during one of his four-hour speeches?” she says.

  “The exception that proves the rule.”

  “How about Ricky Ricardo?”

  “Ohhh, that’s low, Moody—even for a first-office agent.”

  “What about you, Navarro?” she asks with a big grin, knowing she’s getting under my skin.

  “I’m laid back. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “The only thing laid back about you is that photo in your office.” She doesn’t have to say which one. It’s the only photo there: My daughter is eighteen months old, fresh out of the pool. I’m reclined, holding her to my chest underneath a beach towel. I keep it on my desktop. “Everything else about you is a tempest, Navarro, and I’m being kind because I’m in a maternal mood.”

  “Really, I don’t see myself that way.”

  “That’s because mirrors don’t stand up to hurricane-force winds.”

  “Noted. Can we talk about something serious?”

  “I thought we just were.”

  “Something serious that I want to talk about. Something serious about the case.”

  The words are out of my mouth before I can even think about them, and for a moment there’s a look of such pity on Moody’s face that I want to take them all back.

  “Okay, Joe,” she says after a long pause, her voice somewhere between resignation and curiosity. “What’s this serious thing you want to talk about? This serious thing about the case?”

  “The language of interviewing. The words we’re going to use and not use this evening.”

  “Ah,” she says with what sounds almost like relish, and I think she really means it. I’m not much for socializing with my colleagues—that much is obvious, I guess—but I can mentor all day long, and Moody seems willing to hear what I have to teach. She’s like Lynn in that regard. She knows she has a lot to learn in a Bureau that is mostly male and still very biased against women, and I’m sure she feels she has to work harder than her male colleagues just to prove herself. Not with me, though. Most of my Bureau partners have been women, and none has let me down, and I don’t expect Terry to be the first.

  “Espionage,” I say.

  “Espionage?”

  “That’s a word neither of us is going to utter at any point when we’re talking with Ramsay for as long as we’re interviewing him.”

  “Why?” she says, but not in a challenging voice. “If I’m interviewing a suspected bank robber, at some point I’ve got to raise the fact that a bank was robbed, that money was taken. Same thing with a murder or any crime.”

  “This is different,” I tell her as our waitress, Linda, done up today in a lopsided hairnet, slops down a plate of eggs sunny-side-up and four halves of pre-buttered whole-wheat toast that already look cold and defeated. “With a bank robbery, solving who did it and getting a confession—or at least enough probable evidence to build a case—is the whole point. Same thing with murder: You find the body or enough forensic evidence to identify the body as well as the manner and means of death. You create a defensible link between the suspect, how the crime was committed, and the victim, and you file the charges.

  “With espionage, the crime in a sense is only the threshold of what we’re after. Even if we can establish beyond a reasonable doubt that espionage was committed in this instance, we’re never going to recover what Conrad and Ramsay, if he was involved, sold to the Hungarians or the Soviets. There’s no putrefying body, probably no bag of hundred-dollar bills hidden behind some false wall either. Instead, there are secrets, some highly classified, circulating among our enemies, and until we know what those secrets are—what was copied and stolen and sold—we have no way of knowing how badly our national security or the security of our allies has been compromised.”

  “And this has exactly what to do with uttering the word ‘espionage’?” Moody, I notice, hasn’t yet touched her fruit and yogurt. My eggs, meanwhile, are starting to look petrified.

  “And,” I go on, “it has to do with the fact that the very first time we name the actual crime he has committed and force him to confront at a conscious level the judicial shitstorm that lies ahead of him, including always the perceived possibility of execution (see Rosenbergs), Rod Ramsay will call an attorney or otherwise clam up, and we’ll never know just how much damage he and Conrad have done.”

  With that, Moody signals the waitress for a fresh cup of tea and dives into her expectant-mother breakfast special while I nibble warily on one of my toast halves. I’m just thinking that maybe I’ve overdone it again when my partner finishes off her last strawberry, gives the tea bag a slight squeeze against her spoon, and turns my way with a let’s-get-down-to-business look that’s about all a mentor could ask for.

  �
��So, how are we going to play this?” she asks.

  “We’re going to walk him right up the ladder again—past where we got to yesterday, until he tells us that he committed espionage without any of us saying the word and how he committed it and with whom, and then the son of a bitch is going to start telling us what he stole in infinite detail.”

  “And how, Agent Navarro,” Moody asks with a wry grin, “are we going to accomplish all these wondrous things?”

  “By making Rod feel just like what he certainly will be—the smartest guy in the room.”

  * * *

  WE MEET ROD AT the same place we did the previous evening, but this time with advance notice. Rod’s admission that he and Conrad had at least talked about conspiring to sell sophisticated computer chips to a foreign power has given me enough oomph to call in minimal surveillance. I have a guy waiting in the Embassy Suites parking lot, armed with Rod’s photo and a description of the rust-crusted Dodge Aries he drives when he’s not behind the wheel of a spanking-clean Yellow Cab. I don’t think Rod is a risk to bolt at this point—and one guy on surveillance couldn’t prevent that, at any rate—but I do want to know where our suspect goes when he leaves us at night. Back to the camper to endure more humiliation? Someplace to load up on his beloved cannabis? Or maybe he still has some kind of foreign minder hanging around—although if so, there is no apparent financial benefit of the arrangement accruing to Ramsay’s lifestyle. Also, it’s just really nice to know when someone you’re waiting for is only steps away from the lobby entrance, and two beeps on my pager takes care of that.

  Also like last evening, Moody is immediately concerned about someone’s weight, diet, and health, but to my great surprise, it’s me, not Rod, that she’s focusing on.

  “Do you see what I see?” she says to Rod, holding him by the elbow.

  “Of course,” he answers, with no idea of what she’s talking about but pleased as punch to be in the hands of a take-charge woman.

  “When did you first meet Agent Navarro—a year ago?”

  “More than fourteen months ago,” Rod corrects, “with Agent Eways.”