Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  “Right,” Moody goes on, not skipping a beat, “and how much would you estimate he weighed then, compared to now?”

  They’re both looking me over top to bottom now, like maybe I’m a side of beef hanging from a slaughterhouse hook.

  “I would say fifteen more pounds at least,” Rod ventures. “He’s wasting away.”

  “Exactly,” Moody says, with a radiant smile his way. “And what do we do with people who haven’t been eating carefully?”

  “We buy them a big dinner . . . ”

  “And?”

  “And we make them eat their salad.”

  “Even if . . . ”

  “Even if we have to sit there all night long and feed them leaf by leaf.”

  And thus, fifteen minutes later, at the same table where we sat last evening, I’m tucking into a twenty-eight-ounce medium-rare Porterhouse, baked potato (without the sour cream), and a salad so lightly coated with oil and balsamic vinegar that a rabbit would feel right at home at our table. But Rod, I notice, is eating exactly the same thing, this time without any encouragement from Mother Moody.

  This woman is good, I’m thinking, and maybe right, too. I’m not a clothes horse, but I try to be a neat dresser, and things have been hanging a little loose off me of late. Fact is, I’m running out of holes on my belt to tighten it around what is no longer a size 34 waist. For whatever reason, those two eggs and three toast halves I left on my breakfast platter this morning are how too many of my meals end up of late, half or more uneaten while my brain races ahead to the next day’s work, chasing the clock while my body tugs the other way, crying out for more sleep.

  * * *

  WE’RE IN SUITE 416 this time, not the floor directly below, but otherwise things are identical. Moody and I have relocated the couch, her easy chair, the coffee table, the end tables and lamps to where they were when the three of us first walked into the room last evening (and this time without our little contretemps about the coffee table), and I’ve got what seems to be the same rolling swivel chair waiting in the center of the room.

  Showtime, I’m thinking, when Rod nervously shakes a cigarette out of his pack, lights up, and throws us an opening chin-high fastball.

  “Oh, by the way,” he says, anything but casually, “I got a call from Bamford again.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No,” he says, but so unconvincingly that Moody calls him on it.

  “Roddd . . . ?”

  “Well,” inhaling deeply now, “a little, maybe.”

  “Is that like being a little pregnant?” I ask, which causes both of us males in the room to take a quick glance at Moody’s belly.

  “But I didn’t tell him anything,” Rod insists, in the same voice a four-year-old would use in insisting that he had nothing to do with the vase smashed on the floor by his feet.

  “Just let me ask you one thing, Rod,” I say. “Then we’ll drop the subject. Did you tell him you were talking with us, with Moody and me?”

  “Well,” he answers, “I couldn’t lie.”

  Jesus, Rod, I want to scream, lying is what you do best—lying and cheating and stealing state secrets and doing dope and getting your pathetic butt cuckolded night after night in that sorry-ass camper parked off somewhere near the edge of the world. Instead, I draw a deep breath, count to five as I’ve trained myself to do in these circumstances (not always successfully), and say in as calm a voice as I can muster:

  “Rod, don’t complicate my life. Just don’t. Okay?” Then I think to add, “Don’t complicate Mrs. Moody’s either.”

  And maybe it’s the She-Moody part that does the trick, because I seem to see a look of resolve on Rod’s face.

  “I won’t,” he says, smiling apologetically both our ways. “I definitely won’t.” But of course how the hell do you trust a liar?

  But time to move on—in fact, past time. If Bamford is still calling, ABC News is still interested, which means we’ve got to get the case against Rod Ramsay signed, sealed, and delivered before Rod once again finds himself starring in the nightly news.

  “Rod,” I say, getting back to where I intended to start this evening, “you were very helpful and up-front with us yesterday about Clyde and the computer chips. We really appreciate that, and I can tell you our boss appreciates it, too.”

  He smiles appreciatively.

  “But we’re still trying to help the Germans round out their understanding of Clyde—what motivated him, all that stuff. And now they’re asking us if you could provide some insight on Conrad and money.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, for example, gold. There’s has been some indication, the Germans say, that Clyde was heavily into gold coins.”

  “With good cause,” Rod says, settling into the subject and glad (as I knew he would be) to talk about anything other than himself. “Clyde never had any problems with money. In fact, we were at his house in Bosenheim one afternoon when he showed me this big box, and I mean big, stuffed with a huge collection of gold coins.”

  “How many?”

  “Who knows,” Rod says, “but he had gold coins from all around the world, especially South African Krugerrands. He kept them in that box the way most people keep loose change around for the parking meter.”

  “Did Clyde put any figure on the total value of the coins in that box?” I ask.

  “No,” Rod answers in a hurry, “but it had to be somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars, and that wasn’t his only box.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No, of course not. Listen, I don’t mean to be rude, but you and Terry are government workers, probably living paycheck to paycheck.” As if he isn’t, I’m thinking, as he looks at us both with pity. “Clyde didn’t think the way you do. He wanted currency that held its value through good times and bad and could be converted anywhere.”

  “Why?” Moody asks, in her best schoolgirl voice.

  “He always thought about the future and where he might end up, and he was careful to bury the money just in case.”

  “In case of what?” I ask, trying to hold back my desperation to know. “Why would he do that? Bury the money? I mean, who does that?”

  “Because,” Rod answers gleefully, “he was hiding the fact that he was making money on the side. Clyde always planned carefully.”

  The side money we already knew about, of course, but Conrad’s black-market deals weren’t bringing in so much side money that he had to bury Krugerrands in the backyard. This revelation is definitely moving us to a higher plane. I can see Moody itching to plead a pregnant woman’s pinched bladder and rush off to the bathroom to scrawl notes, but I’m not quite ready to let her go yet, and I don’t think Rod is either.

  “Tell me, Rod,” I say, not so much switching the subject as bending it. “All this stuff about burying gold coins—Clyde was no dummy, obviously.”

  “Spot on, Agent Navarro,” with a ha-ha look toward Moody.

  “In fact, it’s pretty obvious,” I say, “that Clyde was preparing for the future. [Emphatic nod yes.] He was lining other people up as well, wasn’t he? People to help him. Maybe people to carry on his business [air quotes] in case he had to dig up all those gold coins and skedaddle out of the country, right? [Double nod yes-yes.] But it couldn’t be just anyone, could it?”

  Moody, for Ramsay and right on cue: “Well, of course it couldn’t!” to which Rod again nods yes.

  Me: “It had to be someone he trusted, someone who was really smart, someone who wasn’t scared to push the envelope, someone as smart as Clyde himself.”

  Rod: “That would make perfect sense, wouldn’t it?”—with emphasis on the word “perfect.”

  Me: “Sure, and pretty much everybody I’ve ever heard you talk about who was part of Clyde’s team—the player-players, I think you once called them [more yes nods]—was shit-for-brains this and shit-for-brains that, Okies and West Virginia trash who had just enough brains to peddle cigarette PX coupons but hardly enough to wipe the
ir own asses. Would that be more or less correct?”

  “It wouldn’t be incorrect,” Rod allows, “to assume that Clyde and I existed on a different intellectual plane than the others who surrounded us.”

  “Not just existed but played on a higher intellectual plane,” I reply, to a Ramsay now beaming from ear to ear. Moody is silent, but I can see from the corner of my eye that she’s caught where I’m headed with this.

  “Let me put it this way,” Rod says, his arms spreading further, his fingers widening with confidence as he grips the back of the couch. “Clyde and I had no equals.”

  “Of course not. Now, again, correct me if I’m wrong,” I go on, “but I’m betting that what Clyde was looking for was someone who was not only intelligent and clever but also . . . may I call that person ‘entrepreneurial,’ too?”

  “You may.”

  “Someone who had the vision and the smarts and cojones to carry on the business in Clyde’s absence if it came to that.”

  This elicits a modest shrug of the shoulders that seems to me to be saying considerably more.

  “And, Rod, I got to tell you,” I go on, rolling my chair directly in front of him and staring him straight in the eyes, “I see only one person in the Eighth Infantry Mechanized HQ that fulfills that role, and do you think he’s in this room?”

  Rod’s eyes aren’t meeting mine, but I see that sheepish grin creeping up his face as Moody leans in from her easy chair.

  “So to sum up, Rod, I think that the person I’ve just been talking about is really . . . you.”

  Rod is squirming in his seat now, but I can almost see the war going on in his mind—on the one hand the natural defensive instinct to deny what I’ve just said, on the other the natural desire to be recognized as a clever, intelligent entrepreneur and the worthy partner of, and if necessary successor to, the man he seems to most admire in the whole world, Clyde Conrad. In the end, as I hoped and was almost certain he would, Rod opts to feed the narcissistic beast raging inside.

  “Well deduced, Agent Navarro,” he says, pulling himself up erect on the couch and finally meeting my eyes. “I was in fact Clyde’s right-hand man—his ‘other half,’ as he once called me.”

  “I should hope so!” Moody chimes in just as he finishes up. “Clyde Conrad would have been a fool to have picked anyone else.”

  And as much as I want to stand up and slug Rod for that “well deduced . . . ‘other half’ ” pretentious crap, I also want to hug Moody for realizing we’re only at the starting line and striking just the right note to keep our momentum going forward. Instead of doing either, I push my chair back to give Rod some psychological breathing room—a small subconscious reward for his admission—then invite him to take a bathroom break.

  “It’s that way,” I say, pointing with my open hand exactly as I did the day before. I’m the gatekeeper to everything—dinner, cold drinks, even the toilet. For his part, Rod doesn’t even question whether he has to go or not. He’s on his feet and headed to the bathroom almost before I finish making the offer.

  * * *

  ROD AND I ARE talking—what else?—women when Moody emerges from her own turn in the bathroom and settles back into her easy chair.

  “Cold drink?” I ask her, raising my own Coke can her way.

  “No thanks,” but without suggesting that I include Rod in the offering, as she would have yesterday. For his part, Rod is following the motion of my can with considerable interest. Earn it, you son of a bitch, I say to myself as I kick off the second part of our interview with a soft floater to the twenty-yard line.

  “Rod, now that we’ve established that you are the [BIG emphasis] expert on Clyde Conrad, tell me, what was he best at?”

  “Bullshitting and fooling others,” Rod answers, back in his expert mode, “making himself indispensable so that no one would ask questions. Clyde understood human psychology and knew every trick in the book.”

  Moody: “Like?”

  “Like the officers came and went every eighteen months. They were still trying to figure out the game, while Clyde had been there for more than a decade and knew how to game the system. He was always up to something, always scheming, and always in it for himself [said admiringly] but always looking good to the front office.”

  Me: “Front office? You make it sound like an insurance company.”

  “Okay, brass. Is that better, Agent Navarro?” Another moment when I want to throttle him. “The generals and full birds thought Clyde walked on water. No military exercise could take place without his expertise. He knew the lay of the land. He knew the war plans. He personally knew each strategic and tactical location, and he knew the towns like the back of his hand. The generals had read about these places or seen them on maps—maps, by the way, that Clyde and I prepared. We actually walked these places and visited them on our terrain treks. Remember, I told you and Lynn about those?”

  “I do,” I say, aware that I was being put to a test.

  “The generals drove around in their black-tinted Fords. Clyde and I walked the roads, the bicycle paths, and the fields. We could tell the generals how wide the roads were, if they were suitable for a main battle tank or if a field was too waterlogged in the spring—invaluable information that most senior officers had no clue about.”

  “So that was it?” I said, with a touch of disappointment in my voice. “You just walked the roads, in a sense, so the brass wouldn’t have to soil their well-polished shoes?”

  “No,” Rod said. “It was more than that. Lots more.”

  “You want to enlighten us?”

  “We knew more than the roads and all the choke points where troops would get bogged down. Clyde knew all the hotel owners and all the inns, and because he could speak German fluently, he always made sure that officers got the best rooms during training exercises.”

  “And the quid pro quo?”

  “In return, Clyde always got great write-ups from all those same officers who counted on him, his expertise, and his command of the German language. It was a closed approval loop, and he was teaching me how to construct the same thing if”—he paused here, not quite certain where to head next—“if for some reason he could no longer be around or he retired.”

  “I see,” I say, ignoring for a moment the bait he waved under our nose. “So that’s the main thing you talked about on these terrain walks?”

  “No,” he answers. “We talked about lots of things—the lay of the land, the buildings, places to hide, where fuel could be obtained, the choke points, where antennas could be placed, where field artillery would be laid out, where helicopters could land, where we would place the field hospitals.”

  Moody, more gently: “Anything else?”

  Rod, smiling slightly: “Sure. Girls, wines, best cities to visit, what would happen if war really did break out, his family, ways to make money.”

  “Money”—that’s the word I’m waiting for. Moody, too, I realize—after all, her question has led him there.

  “Rod,” I jump in, “did Clyde ever help you out with money?”

  “Sure, he’d buy me dinner, lunch, sometimes maybe a pack of cigarettes or a beer, maybe a bottle of Riesling if he was feeling really generous.”

  “Anything else?” The same question again from Moody, but this time with a bigger pot sitting on the table.

  Rod seems a little hesitant. He stops talking, and his blink rate, which I previously pegged at about twelve times a minute, suddenly triples. Not only that: He’s compressing his lips, a sure sign of heavy decision-making, and tugging on his collar, more of the ventilating behavior I saw outside that Tampa home where he was house-sitting when Al Eways and I first called on him.

  “Rod,” I say after a long pause, “you look like you have something you want to tell us.”

  Moody, meanwhile, is leaning in once more, with her head canted sideways and a smile on her face that would melt Hitler’s heart.

  “Rod?” she asks, again stretching out the “o” the way a
mother would when asking a child.

  Ramsay remains silent for what seems an eternity, so I back slightly off in my chair and look down at his feet to remove any pressure my face might be causing.

  “Can I ask a hypothetical?”

  “God, no!” I say. “Let’s not do that again.”

  That, at least, is enough to jerk his head up and reestablish eye contact, so I press on with my point.

  “Rod, we’ve been talking for a while now, and some things just don’t make sense. We know that Conrad was up to no good. Hell, he’s been arrested by the Germans and is facing prosecution. You know that. You don’t know this, but up in Sweden the Kercsik brothers have also been arrested, and they’re singing like a Nordic choir at summer solstice.” (Ramsay’s Adam’s apple jumps up like a bagel in a toaster at this news bulletin.) “And that piece of paper you gave me last fall, the one with the phone number on it—Clyde didn’t buy that at a novelty store, did he? Come on, no more games, no more hypotheticals. Just be honest with us.”

  I say all this matter-of-factly, without a trace of anger in my voice but without pleading either. This is my show. I’m in charge, and I want Rod to damn well know that. We’ve been at this more than four hours now, I suddenly realize, and there’s no place on Earth right now that I’d rather be. I’m watching Rod’s feet to see if they turn toward the door. That’s what jurors do when they hate a prosecutor. Rod’s feet, thank God, are still facing me, but now he’s pressing his arms close to his sides and his thumbs are inching farther under his cupped fingers—two important signs that his confidence is ebbing.

  Finally, Rod unpurses his lips. There’s sweat on his philtrum, the little indentation between his upper lip and his nose, as he reaches over to shake a cigarette out of his pack, then slides it back in.

  “I’m afraid,” he says, “that I haven’t been totally honest with you.”

  “About what, Rod?” Moody asks. I’m so glad she says it and not me.

  “About everything. I helped Clyde Conrad take documents from the G-3.”

  Holy shit, we’re both thinking, this is it. Now the real fun begins.