Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  Rod is staring outside the window as tourists are making their way back to their cars after a long day—children in a zombie state, parents worn to the bone. Theme parks have one theme in common: They wear you out.

  “You mind if we step outside?” Rod asks. “I need a smoke.”

  “Nope.” I watch his hand carefully as he reaches into the glove compartment for his smokes and a beat-up plastic lighter that I’m sure someone else tossed away. I’ve been around Rod now for months, but I never let my guard down. I’m always checking for weapons, in case he decides to permanently end his misery—or mine.

  Rod is looking up at a small airplane circling high above in the night sky, probably one of those sightseeing airplanes you can hire out of Kissimmee Airport. The plane’s anticollision light flickers on and off every other second, as we both lean against the hood of Rod’s taxi. I can sense his reticence, but there’s no tension, maybe because we’re enjoying this little outside venture and a breeze has come up.

  “You know I play chess?” Rod begins.

  “Of course, you told Agent Eways that the first day.”

  “My favorite game, though, is Dungeons and Dragons. I gave you that book . . . ”

  “I still have it,” I say. “You want it back?”

  He shakes his head no.

  “Clyde was never into D and D. He preferred chess. But games teach you what Clyde was always saying: You have to have a strategy always—for whatever you’re doing. You need to have a plan, a reason, options.”

  “It’s the same for me, Rod,” I say. “And for you. Lack of planning is courting failure.”

  “Conrad and I made so many plans. I was to be promoted and go to Heidelberg. I was going to have greater access and responsibility—Heidelberg is HQ for all of Central Europe—but I literally pissed it away.”

  I’m trying to dope out where Rod is going with this when he shifts direction on a dime.

  “Joe, be honest with me. Now that the Wall is down, does all of this matter? My helping you, my reports, do they even amount to a hill of shit?”

  “Rod, do you think for one minute that the Russians are going to be our friends? Other than North Korea, this is the most paranoid military power on Earth. They’ll never trust the West. Do you think the KGB is suddenly going to become a stalwart advocate for democracy? They won’t change, and let me tell you, it’s not over yet. The KGB and the military have a financial stake in distrusting the West. They may just put an end to this perestroika experiment. They thrive on acrimony and fear—not ‘Kumbaya’ hand-holding. When the novelty wears off, the knives will come out.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” he says, taking long drags on his cigarette.

  “Don’t overanalyze it, okay? Snakes don’t become less reptilian because they’re treated nicely.” More silence from Rod, which starts to bother me. I always use silence as a tool.

  “You like flying, Joe?” Rod asks, looking at a plane high above SeaWorld.

  “I do, but I’ve been kind of busy.”

  “You don’t mention your daughter anymore.”

  “I know, it’s tough when I’m on the road all the time.”

  Rod keeps staring at the sky, admiring his own smoke trail as it meanders with the breeze from the west. He’s setting the pace, orchestrating something. I’ve never seen him so pensive in an interview before.

  Suddenly, his head hangs forward as if he’s no longer able to hold it up. He pulls out another cigarette, lifts his head back up almost as if it were a burden, and says, “I hope you brought a pen. You’re going to need it.

  “Charming Gorilla, Lion Heart, Atomic Demolitions Munitions List, Flicker, Peacetime Rules of Engagement, Cold Fire, Wintex-Cimex, Able Archer, USEEUCOM Emergency Action Procedures, Champagne Gourmet, Seventh Infantry Division (M) CONPLAN 4200, Candid Honor, Op plan for Twelfth Panzer.” He machine-guns them at me. “Oops, sorry, let me repeat them for you.”

  I’m already writing in the margins of Rod’s torn book pages when he repeats the list, as near as I can say exactly the same as before.

  “Clyde and I clipped all of them, copied the plans, sold them to the Hungarians. Which one do you want to know about?”

  “Able Archer is the one that sticks most immediately in my mind.”

  “Oh, yes,” Rod says, “Able Archer. A good choice,” and with that the cadence and tone of his voice changes, reminding me of Walter Cronkite narrating a documentary:

  “1983: a perilous year in Cold War history. April: The US Navy sends forty ships, three hundred aircraft, and twenty-three thousand crew members, maybe the largest and most powerful fleet ever, into the North Pacific to test Soviet readiness in the region. Five months later, on September 1, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 is blown out of the sky near Sakhalin Island, over prohibited Soviet airspace. Among the 269 passengers and crew killed: Representative Larry McDonald, Democrat of Georgia. On September 26, with tensions already extremely high, the Soviet orbiting missile warning system incorrectly detects a single ICBM launch from the United States. This is followed by four more ICBM launches, also falsely logged. All that appears to keep the Soviets from responding in assumed kind is the very fortunate, cautionary restraint of a lone Soviet lieutenant colonel on duty at the time.

  “Do you need his name?” Rod asks, retreating to more or less his own voice. I shake my head no, and he goes back to Cronkite.

  “Seven weeks later, in early November 1983, NATO lays at the Soviets’ doorstep the largest simulated nuclear attack ever put together. Known as Able Archer, the exercise is widely believed to have brought Moscow closer to launching a preemptive nuclear strike than it came at any other point during the Cold War—and that includes the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the story is more complicated than that because—ta-da!—the Soviets already have the entire schematic for the NATO exercise at their fingertips.”

  Ramsay actually chortles in his boyish, narcissistic way as he tells me this. He’s transitioned from a more reserved and considerate personality at the beginning of this interview to his true character.

  “Courtesy of?” I ask, sure of the answer, which Rod immediately gives me by making a modest bow.

  “C’mon,” I tell him, “this is bullshit. If the Russians had the Able Archer plan, they wouldn’t have gotten in such a lather. They would have had proof in hand that it was an exercise, nothing more.”

  “Joe, Joe, Joe,” Rod answers, a benevolent smile now spreading across his face, “that’s the beauty of it.”

  “The beauty of what?”

  “The Russians bought the plans from us through the Hungarians, then became convinced that we’d sold them misinformation meant to provide cover for a real NATO-led attack. You know that paranoia you just talked about? We got the money. They got the ulcers. And of course, once they realized Able Archer was exactly what we’d told them it was, they knew they could trust us even more. It was beautiful!”

  Yeah, I’m thinking, and millions of people might have died while you and Clyde were polishing your bona fides and burying more Krugerrands in the wintry German countryside, you bastard. But there’ll be time for saying that later. For now, I’m pressing Rod to give me a gloss on some of the other plans he’s just named. The more detail work we have on these documents, the easier it’s going to be to make our case in court.

  “Start with the first one you remember clipping,” I suggest.

  Rod, still on his high, is only too happy to comply.

  “I can tell you exactly which one it was. I was still being tested. Clyde told me he wanted the latest update of CONPLAN 4200. These were updated all the time, and it’s what the Hungarians were interested in. So I copied it along with all the changes. I forgot what Conrad got paid, but it was a lot—at least twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Wait, what the hell is a CONPLAN?” I ask, not because I don’t know but because I want him to tell me that he knows.

  “These are the contingency plans, Joe,” Rod explains in his most patient voice. �
��I told you about this before, way back with Al Eways. If something unexpected happens, it details for all the troops from the generals in theater on down what everyone will do. CONPLANs are crucial for forward-deployed troops.”

  “I’m sorry,” I break in again, “but what was the classification of this document, just so I understand?”

  “Oh, secret,” Rod says, as casually as if were giving me the time of day, “although some of the CONPLANs did have top-secret annexes.”

  Me, with a third follow-up for courtroom purposes: “So how important was the information in the document, this CONPLAN 4200?”

  “Extremely. Everything is laid out precisely as to what we would do. Let’s say the space shuttle goes down in a foreign country, or a military jet veers off course and is forced to land behind the Iron Curtain, there are contingencies for that. It’s the bible of what to do when things get all snarled up. Weren’t you listening when I talked about this?”

  I ignore that—let him think I don’t remember. Instead, I try to drive another nail into Rod’s legal coffin: “And you copied it? Did you read it?”

  Rod, getting short with me now: “Of course I read it, I had to add the most recent additions. How could I know what was new and what old if I didn’t read it?”

  Then, and this is when it becomes truly scary, Ramsay closes his eyes as if blocking me out and begins to quote verbatim from one of the more interesting parts of the document, telling me the page number and even noting that the information can be found on the bottom third of the page on the left side.

  I’m blown away by this, but I’m not going to let the moment go untested.

  “I bet you can’t repeat that,” I say, pulling out more of the book pages to write on. Unfazed, Rod sits there silently, almost as if he’s expecting a kiss, then repeats every word down to the last syllable. Then, for good measure, he tells me what copier he used and how he had to struggle with the oversized staples that bound the document.

  “Okay, genius,” I say when he’s through, “I’m going to check this out one of these days to see how accurate you are.”

  As I fold the pages and stuff them in my pocket, Rod calmly steeples his fingers as if he were chairman of the Federal Reserve—Annoying Habit #22, by the way—and says simply and decisively, “You’ll find it’s accurate in its entirety.”

  Rod drives me back to the Embassy Suites pretty much in silence. He’s got the radio on, maybe because he doesn’t want to hear me lecture him once again about hygiene, household finances, keeping a tidy cab, the usual stuff. Rod has told me several times in different ways that he wishes he’d met me earlier. “If someone like you had been my father,” he once said, “things might have turned out differently for me.” Maybe. But sometimes I feel more like the henpecker in a worn-out marriage. Still, something powerful happened in that SeaWorld parking lot, something deep. A barrier came down. In a way the quiet between us as we creep along International Drive is honoring that.

  At the hotel, Rod spots my Bu-Steed off to the left and pulls up behind it while I fish $146 out of my wallet and wonder how I’m going to expense this. “All this for a cab ride?”—I can already hear the Bu-Accountant moaning. Rod walks around to my side with arms outstretched, as if he’s relieved, and gives me a hug. For once, I don’t bother to check him for weapons as we embrace. He could have shot me hours ago if he wanted to.

  “Thanks for your help, Rod,” I say, relieved at how the evening has turned out.

  “There’s one more thing, Joe.”

  “Yes, of course, I’ll tell She-Moody you miss her.”

  “No, it’s not that. There’s more. That apartment was knee-deep in paper.”

  “What apartment, Rod?”

  “The secret one,” he says. “The one Clyde rented so we could process all the stuff I was clipping.”

  16

  JOSEF SCHNEIDER PLAZA #4

  Conrad and Ramsay’s “secret apartment” hits the national security community like a Johnny Carson monologue: It’s a riot!

  “Rented an apartment?” one guy at the Washington Field Office says with a tone of absolute incredulity when he phones to talk about my FD-302 on the subject. “Maybe word hasn’t gotten to Tampa yet, Joe. Spies Don’t Rent Apartments.”

  “Knee-deep in stolen documents?” another guy at FBIHQ faxes me back. “C’mon, Navarro, you make it sound like these guys were running an Espionage Sam’s Club—‘Pile ’em high! Watch ’em fly!’ ”

  When I relay the news that Rod had started videotaping “clipped” documents right in the middle of Disney movies, they tell me that he’s probably watched one too many Disney specials himself, and maybe I have, too, if I’m going to accept such nonsense at face value. Word that Rod had perfected (though never actually built) a briefcase that could erase the same videotapes in a pinch by dropping them between two magnets—“degaussing” is the proper term—only earns further heaps of derision: “Oh, the guy’s a regular Edison.”

  One might think the army would be upset in the extreme when I let them know that Rod once saw a Black Book on the floor in the apartment. The Black Book, after all, is the army’s equivalent of the President’s Daily Intel Brief—the latest satellite imagery, intercepts, and other vital information for theater commanders around the world, top-top-top-secret stuff. Instead, no one seems to be perturbed in the least. Black Books, I’m told, don’t disappear, and they don’t end up on the floor of an apartment rented by spies.

  When I inform Langley that Ramsay and Conrad used their rich harvest of stolen documents to scam other intelligence services, they laugh at the possibility of a spy working with multiple services. When I further tell Langley about the DAVID Scam in which, according to Rod, Conrad posed as a Czech intelligence officer and sold some of that excess harvest to the CIA for $120,000, they explode in righteous indignation.

  For a while, it’s almost amusing, but before long, the “secret apartment” is being hung like a millstone around my neck, proof that Rod has been gaming me, dropping these bread crumbs so that I’ll keep coming back, keep buying him dinners, keep being his best little buddy in the world.

  It doesn’t help either that Rod’s otherwise no-fault memory isn’t doing us a hell of a lot of good when it comes to locating his and Clyde’s little hideaway. Part of the problem is lack of resources. When we asked WFO to supply us with a street map of Bad Kreuznach, they responded with a tattered, twenty-five-year-old tourist flyer put out by whatever the German equivalent is of a chamber of commerce: a teeny map surrounded by large banner ads for what I’m sure were overpriced tourist traps. I just can’t believe this is the best the Bureau can do. Actually, it is the best WFO can do.

  Then there’s the human resource issue on our end. There’s no missing Rod’s devotion to Terry Moody, but as Terry’s delivery date nears, she’s traveling out of town less and less and eventually won’t be leaving the office at all on her ob-gyn’s orders. Susan Langford has been filling in for Terry and doing a damn good job of it. For one thing, Susan can be gut-roaringly funny, comic relief when the tension gets too thick between Rod and me. She’s also first-office-agent young and full of energy, but every time Susan lets loose her heavy Southern twang, Rod and I both, I think, grow a little sentimental for Terry’s flat midwestern accent and the common sense that seems to go along with it. Bottom line: Susan is no Mrs. Moody in Rod Ramsay’s eyes, and that’s a big deal. For the first time, I think I’m seeing some target fixation when it comes to preferences from Rod.

  All things being equal, Rich Licht would probably be a better fit than Susan for the interviewing. Rich is so new to our office that he’s still commuting from Orlando, where he broke into the FBI. That could be a real advantage the next time Rod calls with, say, the clap and needs instant, on-site attention. What’s more, in addition to being a really sharp young guy, Rich has a law degree, and you don’t get through law school without learning how to ask questions, and especially follow-ups.

  But Lynn Tremaine and es
pecially Terry Moody have offered more than enough proof that Rod prefers to have at least one woman present when we meet. Besides, I need Rich in the office, following up leads. In practical terms, too, I’d be risking insurrection if I started dragging Rich up and down the highway to Orlando with me. The head of the steno pool tells me that the ladies in the office have declared Rich the “most dreamy agent going.” Even out-of-it Navarro has noticed how heads turn when he walks by. If I robbed the stenos of their eye candy, my FD-302s would start getting typed up at a snail’s pace or worse.

  There’s also the possibility that Rod is doing just what the chorus in DC says he’s doing: playing with me, screwing me over, dragging this whole thing out to what sometimes seems to be the end of time.

  Whatever the reasons, or combinations of them, time and again Susan and I have asked Rod to envision himself walking from the front gate of the Eighth ID base to the apartment, and time and again, Rod has missed a turn or gone up a wrong alley and taken us instead to the ruins of the castle of the Counts of Sponheim, or to the medieval Saint Nicholas’s Catholic Church, or some obscure spot along the ancient town wall—where, of course, he has to deliver a half-hour lecture on the old Roman Road or the Frankish Empire or the famed Rabbi Ephraim bar Elieser ha-Levi, who was broken on the wheel in this very spot seven centuries ago, etc. Worst of all is when Rod leads us out of town on these meandering virtual tours to one of his favorite Riesling or Silvaner wineries and we have to suffer through yet another dissertation on grape varieties, soil types, and God knows what else. Susan is enough of an oenophile to find these diversions amusing, but she’s not the one getting beat over the head to solve this little puzzle or, alternatively, to prove that the puzzle is a Rod Ramsay red herring.

  The few “remembered” addresses we’ve teased out of Rod so far have managed nothing more than to piss off several respectable property owners once we convinced the German authorities to check them out. Now the Germans are starting to join the WFO and FBIHQ chorus, claiming that virtually everything Rod has “admitted to” has been invented. One recent communiqué from Bonn said that “according to the Germans, ‘it is incontrovertible that this apartment does not exist.’ ”