Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History

by Ben Mezrich

  Hell, it had been almost three days, and nobody at NASA had yet noticed a six-hundred-pound safe missing from the lab of one of Building 31’s premier scientists. He doubted any newspaper reporters would be sent out because a co-op had been getting a little too friendly with a few hundred computer-controlled shower nozzles.

  He finally opened his eyes, shaking the water from his hair. As he stepped out of the cubicle—and watched with his regular sense of awe as the folded hot towel slid out of the wall in front of him—he reminded himself that whatever tension he was feeling, he knew that the girls were probably in much worse shape. He had been living with the heist as a mental image for more than a year; Rebecca and Sandra were probably neurotic messes by now.

  Thad had spent as much time as possible calming them down via telephone and through protracted lunches; he had gotten them both to the point where they were no longer staring at the door, expecting armed police to come barreling in at any moment. But he was still extremely glad he had planned the trip to Florida for such a close date. He doubted either of them would’ve been able to handle another week like this.

  Wrapping a towel around his waist, he crossed to his locker and was about to reach for his clothes when there was a rush of air behind him, followed by the sound of skidding footsteps.

  “Did you hear the news?”

  Brian was halfway into the doorway of the locker area, an excited look on his face. He was still wearing his wet suit, slung down around his waist, his bone communicator hanging over one shoulder. He’d obviously just come from the NBL deck, though they had both gotten out of the water at the same time almost an hour ago.

  “I haven’t heard anything. I’ve been in the shower—”

  “You look like you just stepped out of a pizza oven. You never heard the story about the frog and the pot of water—you know, he doesn’t realize he’s boiling until it’s too late?”

  “Is that the news? They’re boiling frogs over in the NBL?”

  Brian shook his head, stepping all the way into the locker room.

  “You’re not gonna believe it. Someone stole six hundred pounds of moon rocks.”

  Thad’s stomach dropped. He was glad he was sitting down. He was also glad that his skin was still bright red from the hot water, because he was certain that otherwise, his cheeks would have turned as pale as Rebecca’s.

  He’d prepared for this moment—sooner or later someone was going to notice the missing safe—but it was still terrifying to hear it out loud. He didn’t quite know what to say in response, but it didn’t matter, because Brian was still going at a million miles per hour.

  “I wish I was the smart motherfucker who thought of that. Six hundred pounds of moon rocks? You have any idea how much that’s worth?”

  Thad pulled a corner of the oversized towel over his head, as if he were drying his hair. Beneath the towel he was grinning. It was amazing to hear a comment like that from his friend, because it was something he would never have expected Brian to say. Brian was as straitlaced as they came. He almost wanted to tell Brian the truth. But there were already enough people involved in the situation; he wasn’t going to risk adding one more.

  “I’m sure it’s a lot,” he finally answered, his voice muffled by the towel.

  “We were calculating it out over on the NBL deck. Six hundred pounds of rock—it’s like over one trillion dollars.”

  Thad wanted to correct Brian; of course, it wasn’t six hundred pounds of moon rock. It was just a six-hundred-pound safe. And it wasn’t a trillion dollars, but it sure as hell was worth a lot. Then more of what Brian had just said made its way into his jumbled thoughts.

  Obviously, it wasn’t just Brian who knew about the missing safe. And if it had made its way to the NBL, which was ten minutes away from the campus …

  “Everyone is talking about it,” Brian continued, putting words to Thad’s thoughts. “They stole the safe from Everett Gibson’s lab. Gibson is still out of town, so nobody yet knows for sure what else was in the thing, but the rumors are flying. Nothing like this has ever happened at NASA before.”

  Thad was about to say something in response, maybe ask some more questions to get some more information, when he realized that his cell phone was ringing from within his locker. Keeping his heart rate under control, he nonchalantly retrieved the phone from the pocket of his jeans and checked the number. Rebecca.

  As Brian continued to ramble on about the enormity of what had just happened, Thad put the phone to his ear, cupping it slightly with his hand to make sure that Brian couldn’t hear the voice on the other end. Before he could get even a word out, Rebecca was half shouting at him, her voice high-pitched and obviously filled with real fear.

  “Everyone knows that the safe is gone. I’ve gotten, like, dozens of e-mails, from people all over the campus.”

  She sounded frantic. Her voice was cracking at the edges, and Thad could tell she’d been crying. He wanted to tell her to remain calm, that of course people were going to find out about the missing safe, that there was no way they were going to link it to the three of them—but with Brian standing right in front of him, he had to be extremely careful.

  “Yeah, I just heard from Brian. Pretty crazy. Nobody has any idea who could’ve pulled something like this off. Hell, they’ll probably never catch whoever did this.”

  “Thad, I don’t want the stuff in my apartment. We need to move it now.”

  Thad realized that the reason Rebecca was so terrified wasn’t just that the rumors were flying—but that the moon rocks were in her apartment. They had left them there because that’s where they had spent the past few nights.

  “Okay, yeah, that’s something we can deal with—”

  “Sandra says she has the perfect place. A buddy who’s gone to Europe for the rest of the summer gave her a key to a storage unit. Get over here as soon as you can, and we’ll move the stuff there.”

  With that, Rebecca hung up. Thad placed the phone back in his pants and started to get dressed. Brian sat down on the bench next to him, still alive with thoughts of the stolen safe.

  “Goddamn, man, you steal something that valuable, you never go to jail. Because you can just buy off anyone who wants to turn you in.”

  Thad smiled at the joke, but inside, the spring had just tightened another few notches. No space-age shower would be hot enough to help him now.

  31

  The rumors were still swirling three days later as Thad fought his way through a perfectly typical day at the JSC; the morning spent at the NBL, scuba till noon, shower, lunch, scuba till the late afternoon, shower, then get the doctor’s okay to check out—and finally, he was outside, waving good-bye to Brian for the weekend, the sun flashing against his face, curls of his still-damp hair bouncing across his forehead. He rushed back to Rebecca’s car, which he’d borrowed to replace the Toyota—which had been acting funky—started up the engine, and headed across town to pick up Rebecca for the fourteen-hour drive to Orlando. Thad had calculated it all in his spare time at the NBL, leaning low over the computer as he used a variety of mapping Web sites to find the optimum route. About 950 miles, most of it highways, maybe the longest car trip he had ever taken without stopping—but there wouldn’t be time to stop, and besides, and more important, he didn’t have enough money to plan out any stops. Crazy, that there were many millions of dollars’ worth of moon rocks in his trunk, but he couldn’t afford a hotel room, or even a real, upscale restaurant. He’d just have to rely on what was in the trunk—and the memory of how it got there—to impress his girlfriend along the way.

  He was smiling as he made the fifteen-minute trip over to Rebecca’s apartment. The thought of fourteen hours alone with her in the car was thrilling; the fact that Sandra was unexpectedly going to be staying behind in Houston seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. She had wanted to come along, but her scuba certification test had happened to fall that particular weekend—so there really wasn’t any choice. She needed the scuba cert to contin
ue her quest to become a NASA employee, and despite what they had just done, she still intended to go about her business as usual. As Thad had spent the past week convincing both girls that business as usual had to be their primary demeanor until the heat and rumors had blown over, he hadn’t been able to argue with her. And truthfully, he wouldn’t have anyway.

  Rebecca was already outside her apartment, sitting on the front steps, when he pulled to a stop by the curb. She grabbed a backpack from next to her feet and slung it over her shoulder, then headed toward him. She looked so fresh and happy, like it really was the first day of the rest of their lives. She was wearing shorts, like him, and a T-shirt with some rock band’s logo emblazoned across the chest. She looked even younger than she was, some sort of gorgeous, sable-haired sprite infusing life into everything she got near. The fear and tension that had been visible in her for the entire past week seemed to be gone, now that they were on their way to Florida, and as she yanked open the passenger-side door, tossed her backpack into the backseat, and slid inside, Thad wanted to grab her in both hands and tear off her clothes. Of course, there would be plenty of time for that later. Instead, it was she who leaned toward him, planting a fierce kiss on his lips, running a hand down his chest to his pants, giving him a foreshadowing little squeeze. Then she got busy putting on her seat belt with one hand while unfolding a printed-out map from her pocket with the other. Her face was all business, and Thad realized he couldn’t stop smiling, watching her.

  It was exactly what he had thought—the experience they’d had, the secret they’d shared, had accelerated their relationship, bonding them together. It was like they’d been in love for years, even though it had actually been only weeks.

  “Too bad about Sandra,” she said as he started up the car. “But it’s kind of nice, isn’t it? Just me and you? Through to the end?”

  Obviously, she had been thinking along the same lines as he—and that excited him even more. But though the drive down to Florida would just be the two of them, it wasn’t going to be that way through to the end. Thad decided, for the moment, to leave her in the dark about the accomplice who would be taking Sandra’s place when they reached Orlando; Thad wasn’t exactly thrilled about the substitution himself, and he wasn’t even sure the dude would show up.

  Thad had sent Gordon an e-mail shortly after the heist, more as a courtesy than anything else. Although Gordon had been instrumental in finding a buyer, he was still little more than a drugged-out acquaintance, a link to an underworld that Thad could only picture in his fantasies. Thad had assured Gordon, time and again, that he would get his 10 percent of whatever they got in the deal—$10,000 for finding an e-mail, which seemed like a pretty good bargain to Thad. But having Gordon actually there, with him—that had never really been part of the plan.

  In fact, he was still pretty sure that Gordon had no real idea what Thad had actually been up to. After all, this was the same kid who scoffed at the idea that man had made it to the moon—and it was doubtful, even now, that he knew Thad worked at NASA. Having Gordon in the same room as Rebecca seemed unnecessary and unpleasant. But Thad had sent the e-mail anyway, expecting little more than a congratulations.

  When he hadn’t immediately heard back, he’d sent a follow-up e-mail, fully assuming that Gordon was leaving the exchange to Thad:

  I haven’t heard from you, so I’m going to assume that you are not going to Florida. So just to catch you up. The Items have been quired. There are approximately 100 samples with an average mass of .8 grams …

  This time, Thad did get a response, but it was so strange—even for Gordon—that he had assumed it was just getting bounced back to him, the message some sort of recorded amusement that would make sense only in Gordon’s fractalized mind:

  Vertical vacationing. Look high in the sky if you are to find me. Off fishing. Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.

  But a phone call after that had cleared things up—much to Thad’s dismay. Gordon was indeed planning to come to Florida, and the previous e-mail hadn’t been some sort of bounce-back message. It had just been Gordon being Gordon. “Vertical vacationing” had meant he was going to go flying. “High in the sky” referred to the airplane. “Off fishing” and “wild horses” meant he would be doing stuff that he enjoyed.

  Gordon was going to follow up the phone call with an e-mail with his flight details, so there was no avoiding it, Gordon was going to be part of the story. Thad wasn’t sure why the kid wanted to be there physically; it was definitely more dangerous for him to get involved to that degree. All he’d really done so far was send out a bunch of e-mails. But Gordon was insistent. Deciding not to argue the situation, Thad had instead found a way to make use of his buddy once again. Gordon had gotten his mother to pay for the plane ticket to Florida by telling her he was on his way to an interview for graduate school. Thad had him also tell his mom that he needed a hotel room in Orlando. There was a Sheraton pretty close to the restaurant on International Drive, which seemed perfect.

  Thad would have rather it had just been himself and Rebecca all the way, but Gordon would be the third accomplice—and there would also be a new staging area where they could make their final arrangements. Thad planned to leave the goods in the hotel when he went to the restaurant, for security’s sake.

  First, there would be the fourteen-hour drive, with plenty of opportunities to let Rebecca know about Gordon—and also plenty of time for him to just enjoy being with her. Two people fully in love, sharing a secret, on their way to a historic event. In four short weeks, they had lived what most couples wouldn’t experience in a lifetime.

  …

  “I have to admit, it feels a little wrong.”

  Rebecca snuggled into Thad’s chest as he wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her tightly into the spoon of his body. His right leg rested against her thigh as they both stared out through the rear window of the car, his gaze in sync with her own. Although they were parked at the very back of the empty parking lot, he had no trouble making out the two-story Baptist church, especially the cross, which rose out of one of two humble steeples, casting a shadow—backlit by the moon—that ended just a few feet from where they were lying across the backseat of the car.

  “Okay, I get your point. But you know, these places aren’t just about worship. They’re also supposed to be about forgiveness, peace, love, asylum. And really, we don’t have that much of a choice. It’s either here, or the parking lot of a Waffle House.”

  Rebecca playfully smacked her palm against his face. Then she turned so that she was looking past the church, to the moon behind the cross.

  “Asylum I get, but we’re not really asking for forgiveness, are we?”

  “There’s nobody to ask forgiveness from. NASA? We took a quarter pound of moon rock. They’ve got eight hundred and fifty more pounds locked away in the vault. The Apollo astronauts? Heck, the theft will probably bring more attention to what they did, and what NASA hopes to do next, than those rocks ever would locked away in a garbage safe. Science? With the money we’re going to get, we’ll be able to travel the world, build our own lab, become better scientists, maybe even astronauts ourselves.”

  Thad was pretty sure he sounded naive, and a little foolish, but he felt that the words were sincere. An outsider might call it all attempts at rationalization, trying to explain himself in ways that went beyond the crassness of money or the cliché of love, but in that moment, camped out in the parking lot of a Baptist church because they didn’t have a hundred dollars between them to rent a hotel room—even though there were millions of dollars in moon rocks in the trunk—it was probably okay to sound a little foolish.

  “And what about Everett Gibson? I mean, we stole his safe. There were papers inside that probably meant something to him. He’d been working on those samples for thirty years. He was kind of a mentor of yours—”

  “Dr. Gibson is going to be just fine. I’m sure he’s got duplicates of anything that ended up in that safe. And if not �
� well, science is a living, moving thing. It’s not something to be shoved away in a corner. Gibson was a part of the greatest scientific adventure in human history. He had his moment, he lived his moment, and now we’re taking that baton. Plus, we boxed up everything else to mail back to NASA, so he will get back what we don’t sell.”

  Rebecca went silent in his arms. Maybe she was contemplating what he was saying, or maybe she was just looking at the moon. He was pretty sure that she wasn’t asking these questions because she felt guilty—just nervous. They were really close now; when the sun came up they were going to meet Gordon in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel.

  During the long drive, he and Rebecca had talked about what would happen if somehow things went wrong, and Thad had been clear about one thing. No matter what happened, Rebecca would not get into any trouble for any of this. If Thad got caught, she would tell the authorities that she had known nothing about what was in the trunk of her car. She would play dumb, and Thad would back her up.

  In return, she would be there to bail him out of jail—and even if he got in real trouble, went to trial, she would stay safe. He knew they had stolen something valuable, but they hadn’t hurt anyone; it was really just a big college prank. NASA wouldn’t see it that way, but Thad wasn’t going to be spending the rest of his life in jail because of four ounces of moon rock.

  There was no reason for Rebecca to feel guilty or afraid. She was his catalyst, he loved her—but it was his mental game that had turned real, his plan that they had followed. And he was ready to see it to its conclusion.

  “We don’t need to say anything,” he whispered in her ear. “Or do anything. We’ll just lie here and watch the moon, until the sun takes its place.”