Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  “How did that come about?” Moody asks, without missing a beat, in that warm, comforting, soft voice that makes me want to confess my own sins.

  “Conrad and I—”

  “Wait,” I say, sliding away from the coffee table. “Aren’t you thirsty? Wouldn’t a cold drink taste good now? Why don’t you help yourself?”

  * * *

  “CONRAD AND I TALKED every day,” Rod begins as soon as we’re all back in our seats. A cigarette is burning in the ashtray beside him. He drained his Sprite in one long tilt. “He was always testing me in one way or another. Maybe he didn’t completely trust me because I liked marijuana so much. He thought drugs were stupid.” As he says this, Rod is furrowing his forehead in a way I haven’t seen before. His eyes are squinting slightly—both signs that more admissions might be in the offing.

  “They are,” I say, with my fatherly voice, but that seems to slide right past him.

  “One day we’re on a terrain walk and he asks me, ‘What is the most valuable thing in the world?’ ”

  “What did you say?” I ask, wondering what my answer would be.

  “What would you say?”

  “Titanium, maybe.”

  Rod shakes his head at that, as if he’s talking to a dumb third-grader.

  “And you?” turning to Moody.

  “Family.”

  “I thought you’d say something like that”—this at least with a kindly smile.

  “How about you, Rod?” I ask, trying to get us back on track. “What did you say?”

  “Well, my first thought was gold because he clearly valued it so highly, but then I thought he might be laying some kind of trap for me so I started thinking of diamonds or some kind of rare, exotic metal—something way beyond titanium,” he adds, just in case I might feel my answer wasn’t completely idiotic. “But in the end I said DNA.”

  “DNA?”

  “Deoxyribonucleic acid, Joe. It’s a molecule—”

  “I know what DNA is, for crissake.”

  “And was that the correct answer, Rod?” Moody asks in voice that says Now, now, boys.

  “Information. Clyde said information is the most valuable thing in the world. He then asked me if I was interested in making money by selling information. I said I was intrigued. At first I thought he was talking about commercial information—you know, like giving hotels a heads-up on when exercises were planned and lots of generals would be looking for cushy places to stay and bars packed with American whiskeys. That kind of thing. Then he explained it to me.”

  Me: “Go on.”

  Rod: “Well, take a base telephone book. What do you get from a telephone book?”

  Moody: “Numbers?”

  Rod, indulgently: “A lot more than that, Terry. You see who’s in charge, who’s transferred in, who’s transferred out, what unit someone works for.”

  Me, playing dumb: “Wait a minute. We have an FBI phone book, but it just lists people by name. There’s none of that other stuff.”

  “That’s the FBI, Joe,” Rod says in his grating, ever-so-patient voice. “In the military, the base phone book has you by what section you’re in and so forth. That’s very valuable.”

  “Okay,” I say, “I can see that. What else is valuable?”

  “When we’re having exercises,” Rod says. “That’s very valuable, too. Some exercises are announced; others aren’t. But even when an exercise is announced ahead of time, they almost never say such-and-such a force strength is going to be at such-and-such a place at 0320 hours.”

  “C’mon,” I say. “They have freaking satellites. You don’t need to know all that ground stuff now. You can sit in Moscow and watch exercises unfold in real time.”

  “Oh, Joe, Joe, Joe,” Rod says as he lights a fresh cigarette, “satellites can tell you the trucks are leaving, but they can’t tell you what?”

  “Oh, Rod, Rod, Rod, for crissake, what?”

  “Intentions,” Rod says. “That’s the valuable information.”

  Again, it’s Moody’s turn to step in between us.

  “Well, what can they actually see from a satellite?” she asks Rod.

  “We know they’ve got satellites that will bring you down to three meters off the ground—say, from here to the bedroom door,” he says, pointing past me into the dark at the back of the suite. “And we know they have stuff that can actually see closer than that. The point, though, is that even if they see a truck going down the road and read its license plate, and can tell whether the driver is smoking a Gauloise or a Camel, they still can’t figure out where the truck is going to stop, or why.”

  “Okay, I’m impressed, Rod,” I concede, only half pretending. “I never thought of a base phone book as a commodity.”

  “Clyde was very smart.”

  “I can see that, but it seems to me that somewhere here a line was jumped from unclassified to classified information. I mean troop exercise plans and phone directories only get you so far, right?”

  “Exactly, Joe,” Rod says, still in his patient lecturing-to-an-idiot voice. “If unclassified information has value, it stands to reason that classified information would have greater value . . . ”

  “Even I can understand that, Rod. And top-secret . . . ”

  “Would have greater value still. It’s like clothing,” he says, turning to Moody with what he hopes will be a useful analogy. “You know, off-the-rack—cheap. Custom-fit—more expensive.”

  “Dior—most expensive?”

  “Exactly!”

  “And, Rod,” I jump in, “Conrad wasn’t the type to sell things off the rack when exclusive is so much better.”

  “No, that was not Clyde.”

  “I suspect that wouldn’t be good enough for anyone working with Clyde either.”

  “Like I said,” Rod goes on, ignoring my implication, “Clyde was always testing me.”

  “Example.”

  “One time, out of the blue, he said, ‘I’m going to Austria in a few days to sell some information. I want you to come with me. All you have to do is carry the money back.’ I said I would.”

  “Did you?”

  “I didn’t have a lot of choice, did I? Clyde told me to hang out at a restaurant near the Hauptbanhof in Vienna, while he met with someone in a booth near the back. I watched him hand the man a manila envelope that he’d been carrying under his arm. Then the man handed him a similar envelope and walked out of the restaurant. After that, Clyde came over to my table, handed me the envelope, and told me I’d be carrying it as we traveled by train back to Germany.”

  “What was in it?” Moody asks.

  “Cash, about twenty thousand dollars in US dollars.”

  “Did you see it?” I chime in, for legal reasons as much as out of curiosity.

  “Of course, Clyde made sure I saw it. He wanted me to feel the money and smell it. That was the most cash I’d ever seen.”

  “What was in the envelope Conrad gave the other man?” Moody asks.

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “Rod, help us imagine the scene. Put us in the restaurant you’re talking about. What did it look like inside? You’ve got such a great memory.”

  Moody, I can tell, is wondering how in the hell I got started on this tangent when we were making such progress, but the point is important, and I make a mental note to tell her about it on the way back to Tampa. We’ll need more than Rod’s word that he was in that restaurant. If he can give us some convincing interior landmarks, our job is going to be a lot easier, and as I suspected he would, he comes through in spades.

  “It was the Gasthaus Elsass; there was a mirror across the back of the room,” he says, with his eyes half-shut. “I actually watched Clyde and the man exchange the envelopes in the mirror. The mirror was surrounded by a kind of gilded filigree, and what looked like a family crest of some kind was hanging above it—crossed spears, I think, and an elk—there was a lot of dark wood paneling.”

  “That’s great, good details,” I tell him. “You sure abou
t the name?”

  Rod looks at me with that look I have seen before, the one that says “My memory never fails.” So I move on.

  “Now, about Agent Moody’s question—the documents Clyde passed?”

  “He’d taken them from G-3, he said, but they were of little importance.”

  “Did you actually see them?”

  “No, but Clyde made me carry them on the train till we got to Vienna—they stayed sealed the whole time.”

  “I don’t get it,” I say, even though I think I get it very well. “What’s the purpose of you carrying the money and the documents?”

  “Like I said, he was always testing me. Just to see how I’d handle crossing the border with hot items. I was nervous but not too much. When we got back to Bad Kreuznach, he gave me a couple of hundred dollars and thanked me. The whole experience was a high, like a drug. I was hooked.”

  “Did he tell you who gave him the money?”

  “At some point he said, ‘My Hungarian friends.’ ”

  “Were you ever worried that you wouldn’t be able to pass one of Conrad’s tests?” Moody asks, with what sounds like genuine concern.

  “The second test,” Rod says. “The second test was a real son of a bitch.”

  “Why?” Moody asks, knowing when to lead as well as when to follow.

  “It was after hours,” Rod says. “Clyde took me into the G-3 vault, where all the documents are stored.”

  “After hours?” I interrupt. “Who’s around?”

  “Some guards near the front door. That’s all. We often had to prepare plans for higher-ups on short notice. They were used to us being in there at all hours.”

  “So, you’re inside . . . ”

  “We’re inside, and Clyde points to some documents and says, ‘I want you to clip those.’ So I go, ‘Okay, but what do I do then?’ And he shows me how to roll the documents around my arm, put a couple rubber bands around them, then pull my sleeve back down and button it up again. ‘I’ll be back for you in five minutes,’ he tells me, and he lets himself out the vault door.”

  “And?” I’m keeping my voice as bland as I can, but I can feel my pulse rate climbing toward triple digits. We’ll almost certainly never get Clyde Conrad on the witness stand in a US court, but now we’re hearing his voice through Ramsay—and every bit of what Rod tells us Clyde said will be admissible.

  “And he must have talked the guards into taking a piss break, because four minutes later he starts pounding on the vault door as hard as he can and shouting in German, in a voice I don’t even recognize.”

  “I don’t understand,” Moody says. “Why would he do that?”

  “To test me. To see how I’d react.”

  “And how did you?” I ask.

  “Well, at first I almost shit my pants, but I got through it. I passed. Afterward, we went to the bowling alley there on the base, and I slid the documents down my sleeve and gave them to Clyde, and he said, ‘Good. These are really valuable. Now we can sell them.’ All we had to do was make copies and get them ready for the brothers.”

  “The brothers?”

  “You know, the guys in Sweden. The Kercsiks. We would turn the documents over to them. Then, they hid them inside medical journals—Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, that kind of thing—so if someone checked their medical bags as they were crossing into Austria or Hungary, it would look just like the sort of stuff doctors are supposed to carry. According to Conrad, it was the perfect cover. Everyone respects medical doctors.”

  At this point I want to jump up and dance a jig. Intentionally or not, Rod has moved from “he” and “I” to “we.” Collusion is getting easier to prove by the minute, but collusion to what end? That’s the question I am still waiting to get answered. It is nearing midnight by now. One last push, I tell myself, watching Moody stifle a yawn. By this point, we’ve both been on duty nearly eighteen hours.

  “Rod,” I say, “not to puncture any balloons, but how do you know that Clyde wasn’t just bullshitting you about how valuable the documents were? After all, you just clipped them, right? You didn’t have time to actually read them.”

  “I had time enough to see what they were.”

  “How could you have? You said yourself you almost shit your pants you were so scared.”

  “That was at the end, when Clyde started pounding on the door.”

  “Okay, what were they, then?”

  At that point Rod proceeds to rattle off two operational plan numbers—33001 and the OPLAN 33001 annexes—that couldn’t have been more meaningless for Moody or me.

  “Rod,” I say, throwing up my hands in surrender, “help us here. Agent Moody might have made it to Girl Scouts . . . ”

  “I stopped at Brownies,” she says. “Too much pressure.”

  “Okay, Agent Moody never even got her baking merit badge, and I served my country chasing terrorists all over the coast of Puerto Rico. What the hell do all those numbers you just spouted off mean?”

  “Well, the first,” he says, “was an update of the NATO go-to-war plan.”

  “The go-to-what?”

  “War, Joe. You know, bang-bang. Where this division goes and that one goes when the bad guys with red stars on their tanks come rumbling through the Fulda Gap. You don’t think that’s important?”

  “Well,” I say, once again suppressing a “holy shit” gawk, “it sounds like it could be important, depending. How about you, Agent Moody?”

  “I agree. Could. The proof is in the pudding,” whatever the hell that means, and by the look that passes fleetingly across She-Moody’s face, I think she’s wondering exactly what in the hell she meant, too. I’m just wondering if we’re both going to remember the nomenclature Rod just rattled off when it’s time to reconcile our notes.

  “How about if the pudding were classified?” he asks, and suddenly I realize how much easier it is for him to talk about a pudding than an op plan. “How about if parts of the pudding were classified top-secret? How about—”

  I interrupt him here. “How about if this pudding could screw the United States and our allies to the wall?”

  “Yes,” Rod agrees, “how about that? If our enemies know our war plans, they have first-strike capacity, not us.”

  And I’m thinking: Thank God for cooking metaphors, however attenuated, because Rod Ramsay has just satisfied the part of the espionage statute that requires foreknowledge of grievous harm to America. But why stop there?

  “But here’s the other thing, Rod.”

  “Yes?”

  “You say all this, but—and I don’t mean to pour sour milk on the pudding . . . ”

  This draws a wince from Moody and sparks an indulgent chuckle all around.

  “Okay, I’m not Julia Child. But the point is that you sort of bullshitted about the advanced computer chips, and on national television, and now we’re being asked to take your word about these documents being, you know, the Armageddon Papers.”

  “Joe,” he says, that same damn “Joe.” He’s going to pay a price for that eventually. “If these documents were, as I think you indicated, the sour milk on the pudding, why would the Kercsik brothers have returned from Hungary with fifty thousand American for Clyde and me?”

  “That could be more Conrad bullshit.”

  “Except,” Rod says, “I saw that money, too. And I was there when the Kercsiks told Clyde how excited the Hungarians were to have such excellent intelligence.”

  “Let me ask you this, so I can understand this, because as you know I went to school in a small yellow bus, not a big one like you. If we had the equivalent to these documents from the Soviets, OPLAN 33001 and the 33001 annexes [intentionally repeating the official names so that my mind doesn’t forget them and Moody hears them one more time for when we write our notes], what advantage would we have?”

  “Total advantage. You would know everything needed to win the war.”

  “You mean the battle?”

  “No, I mean the
war.”

  We all pause for a second at that line.

  “Rod,” I say, looking at my Seiko watch, by now as giddy with fatigue as triumph, “we’ve covered one heck of a lot this evening, but we have a long drive back, you have to work tomorrow, and Mrs. Moody, well, she has to rest.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, looking at Moody’s belly. “But you’re absolutely right. She needs her rest so that little one will be born strong.”

  “We’d like to meet again tomorrow, or technically later today [ha-ha all around], if we can?”

  “Of course, no problem.”

  In fact, it’s going to take all day to write up what transpired this evening, and Moody and I both have other things already scheduled—I’ll call Rod in the morning to cancel—but I needed to see his reaction and willingness to come back of his own will, and here, too, he hasn’t disappointed.

  “In any event,” I say, hedging the obligation. “Let’s see how Moody is doing after her beauty sleep.”

  “I understand completely,” Rod says magnanimously, “just let me know.”

  “I will. But if for some reason we can’t make it, I want you to eat well. That’s an order! No more candy for supper.” The truth is, I mean it. Moody chimes in with a wagging finger—she means it, too.

  “I know, I know,” Rod says. He sounds and looks like a chastened teenager as he leaves the room, and I’m thinking he’s probably just as reliable as one, too.

  * * *

  MOODY AND I ARE both exhausted—how could we be otherwise?—but as we sit there in the hotel room writing notes furiously, we’re both smiling like kids headed to Disney World (which happens to be only four miles away), and why not? We have a valid confession now, and details to boot.

  In my haste to write things down, I forget to send surveillance the beeper code (11, for two legs walking) that Ramsay is on his way to his car. No sweat, though. Surveillance has planted a backup—an empty can behind Rod’s rear tire. The crunch is enough to wake our agent out of a semi-sleep. When he calls in on the secure radio, Rod isn’t heading directly for his camper park, but that could be for a host of reasons. “Stay with him,” I instruct, as Moody and I head off on our own eighty-minute drive back to the office, where Moody has left her Bureau car.