Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  “So?” I prod.

  “So I did what Clyde kept urging me to do. I showed some initiative. I became entrepreneurial.”

  As custodian of top-secret documents at the Eighth ID, Rod goes on to tell us, he occasionally had legitimate reason to visit the EAC, but even without (in this instance) Clyde’s guidance, Rod knew a good thing when he saw it, and he began ingratiating himself to the personnel in the EAC by doing favors for them—lots of favors, from running errands, to buying them cigarettes and helping fill other daily needs for guys who couldn’t venture far from their message center.

  This was all absolutely against the rule book, of course. Vault custodians are supposed to live like Trappist monks, but Rod, after all, had all the right clearances and was himself the custodian of classified material, so what risk was there?

  Eventually, Rod tells us, he settled on two guys in particular.

  “If they were working the overnight shift, I’d drop by on my way to work with sweet rolls. If they were doing 4 p.m. to midnight, I’d bring coffee. After all, we all had the same clearance, and I was the document custodian. Being vault custodian is one of those jobs you want to be excruciatingly boring. I wasn’t supposed to be in there, but in the end, I was in and out of there—basically, anytime.”

  This of course was kindness with a purpose, and indeed, Rod’s two marks quickly began satisfying Rod’s insatiable curiosity by explaining how procedures worked in the EAC: the two-man safe, for instance, and the treasure trove inside it. Anything involving nuclear weaponry was obviously time-crucial. If you’re told to activate the nuclear satchels, you definitely want to do it now, not in five minutes, or even one minute. To minimize any time gap between command and execution, both men kept their combination locks one digit, one tiny twist, away from completion.

  “How did you find that out?” I ask.

  “I bet ’em.”

  “Bet them what?”

  “Nothing. All I had to say was ‘Let’s see who is faster.’ Typical male bravado—they raced each other to see who could open it the fastest, right in front of me. Turns out, they both did the same trick—one digit off.”

  “Wow!”

  “Yeah, right? Amazingly stupid of them to show me.”

  “No shit,” I say, thinking about how dangerous this is.

  “Two days later I came back and hung out until they needed a smoke break. So I said, ‘I’ll cover for you’—they never took longer than seven minutes.”

  In fact, I’m sure he had their daily routine timed out perfectly.

  “I waited till they were out the door and, click, click, I had a PAL. It’s just like a credit card, basically. I slipped it in my wallet. Clyde was elated. The Hungarians were ecstatic. They probably danced a barynya at the Kremlin.”

  Using the same methodology, he tells us, he was able to clip not one but two SAS nuclear authenticators—redundancy. More approval from Clyde. More medals handed out in Budapest. More dancing in Red Square.

  I don’t want to break into his recitation, but finally I can’t help myself. “Rod,” I say, “you were stationed right there. Weren’t you concerned about your own safety, selling this stuff to the Soviets? Those missiles and satchels were defending you, too.”

  “You don’t get it, Joe,” he says. “It was never about the PALs and the cookies. For Clyde and me, it wasn’t about going to war. It was about alchemy—about turning the PAL and the cookie into gold. The Soviets would pay a fortune for anything having to do with nuclear material. It was like Clyde said: selling the most valuable thing in the world—information. These things were commodities.”

  He pauses for a minute to let that message sink in, then turns to Moody and lays another present at her feet.

  “What I didn’t tell Clyde was that I had another cookie, one I kept for myself.”

  “Of course, you didn’t,” Terry says, sounding like a mother who knows her own son.

  “I didn’t tell Clyde about the second cookie because I wanted to keep it for a rainy day.”

  “And you still have it?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, “I broke it apart the best I could, then burned the pieces behind Mom’s trailer, after the second interview with you and Lynn. I thought you were coming back with a search warrant.”

  As he’s saying this, all I can think about is how the Washington Field Office ordered us off this case for a year. What else did Rod destroy or sell while egos were preening in Washington?

  Then, as only a man with a steel-trap memory can do, Rod proceeds to describe his backyard bonfire to the nth detail—smells, smoke textures, and how the material degraded under heat. And all the while I’m saying to myself, Remember all this, remember every word, Navarro.

  * * *

  AT 1 A.M., I order Moody to bed, close the door behind her, and place a quick call to He-Moody, who must be wondering. (Not so many years ago, Luciana used to wait by the phone, too. Now she seems to know it won’t ring.) Terry and I had come up in two cars, thinking she could get an early start back home. Instead, I tell He-Moody, she’ll spend the night here and drive back in the morning. Besides, the room is already paid for. By the time Rod is through in the bathroom, I’ve got a cup of coffee for him, brewed in the suite’s two-cup pot.

  “Where’s Terry?” Rod asks.

  “Off to sleep,” I say, nodding toward the closed door of the suite’s bedroom. “She’s tired, so let’s hold it down.”

  “It was a game, Joe, a business. Clyde and I weren’t planning to fry the lederhosen off of all those German villagers.”

  “Games have consequences, Rod.”

  He contemplates that quietly for maybe five minutes, sipping at his coffee, a cigarette burning beside him, eyes again on his knees. Then he looks up and says one word, and shakes me to the core.

  “Crypto.”

  “Crypto?” I ask, although I already suspect where this is headed.

  “These guys—they were the guardians of the PALs, right, the nuclear cookies. They had to know how to decode cosmic top-secret docs, and do it damn fast. That’s how the army communicates about these things. I got them to teach me all these different elements of cryptography. It was fascinating. And then . . . ”

  “Then?”

  “I carted off as much information as I could about cryptography, and eventually I was trusted enough to be handed the keying material they stored for destruction because they didn’t want to go out in the cold and do it themselves at the fire pit we used for document destruction.”

  “And you and Clyde sold the cryptography materials to . . . ”

  “Of course, the Russians were thrilled.”

  Thrilled? Thrilled, for fuck’s sake. Here, I’m thinking, is when and where I finally lose it. This is where Moody wakes up to a loud noise and a bloody mess on the carpet. Only one other time have I wanted this badly to do serious physical harm to Rod. It was one of our fatten-Rod-and-Joe steak dinners. I’d had Rich Licht and Marc Reeser follow us to Orlando and take a table nearby so they could see the subject of our investigation in the flesh. Rod was at his worst—paternalistic to Moody, all but patting her on the head as he droned on; dismissive of me every time I tried to break into his soliloquy. I’m not sure what almost put me over the top, but at one point I glanced over at Rich and Marc and saw them both half rising from their seats, looking our way, and that’s when I realized I was gripping a steak knife in my right hand, almost ready to lunge at Rod.

  But I held it in that time, and I hold it in this time, too, and thank goodness I do because Rod isn’t quite through yet.

  “I have to tell you—at the secret apartment, there was crypto material that wasn’t coming from me. Clyde must have had another source because I definitely saw crypto stuff there that didn’t come from our EAC.”

  Jesus, I’m wondering, what else? But now I really have hit a wall, and Rod suddenly looks talked out.

  “It’s past two, Rod,” I say, “time for your beauty sleep.”

  I can’t
stop myself, though, when he puts his hand on the doorknob—old habits die hardest.

  “Anything else?” I ask.

  “Like I say, Joe, it was just clipping. It was about money, nothing else. I want you to know that.”

  Tired as I am right now, I’m still not over the urge to go after Rod. I don’t want to be in this room with him. I don’t want to touch him. When he turns my way for our departing abrazo, I have to choke down the disgust I feel raging inside me. I can’t allow myself the pleasure of being disgusted. I let the stomach acids do that for me.

  It’s almost three in the morning when I finish up my notes and sit back for a moment to contemplate what all this means. Unless I’m wrong, Ramsay and Conrad have rendered useless the very systems designed to keep communications safe and nuclear command and control inviolate. The whole underpinning of Cold War détente, mutually assured destruction, was anchored in surprise and secrecy—now there’s none. But that’s an assumption, and FBI agents learn early on that assuming makes an “ass” out of “u” and “me.”

  I write a note for Moody, letting her know that I’ve called home for her, and am about to start for Tampa myself when the enormity of the night finally gets to me and all I can think of is another blackout at the wheel and what I’d be carrying to the grave with me if the worst were to happen. With that thought in mind, I stretch out on the sofa, cover myself with a couple of bath towels for a blanket, and turn the light out behind me.

  * * *

  IT’S 10:59 A.M. THE next morning when I walk into Koerner’s office, say, “Holy shit!” and drop my FD-302 on his desk.

  “Holy shit?” he says, reaching instinctively for his Rolaids bottle.

  “I’m just saving you the trouble of reacting on your own,” I say, and I’m out his door.

  Thirty minutes later, I’m sitting in my office with the door wide open and can hear Koerner’s distinctive walk from his six-three frame. I steady myself as he pokes his head in. “Holy shit, Navarro. Son . . . of . . . a . . . bitch!”

  * * *

  ALL THIS NEW INFORMATION is driving everyone crazy, not because people necessarily believe what Rod has told us—resistance in certain quarters is still epic—but because anything involving nuclear command and control has to go to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and now they, too, want to know what the hell is going on.

  Terry and I have gone back to Rod several times, trying to corroborate his “clipping” and whether EAC personnel at Eighth ID actually helped him intentionally as he said—and if so, were there others who also might have been compromised? Meanwhile, Rich Licht has been putting on his attorney hat, trying to see how we might compel Rod to reveal who else is involved by using a grand jury or granting “limited-use immunity” or something else legalese.

  He’s describing various schemes to us one morning when I say no.

  “Why?” he asks, a little put out.

  “Because, even if this does work, it will take too long and has too many moving parts.”

  Terry Moody, still helping out on the case but no longer traveling, throws in her two cents next.

  “Rod is simply not going to mention names,” she says. “I’m sure he realizes at some level that he’s going to jail, but he doesn’t want anyone else to go with him, at least on his testimony. Every time Joe and I ask about other people he worked with, he talks about their lifestyle—they’re drug abusers, they were Clyde’s poker-poker pals, they’re this, they’re that—but he almost never names someone unless it’s a long-ago minor infraction like selling fuel coupons. He might have a distorted sense of right and wrong, but he seems to be loyal to his friends.”

  Reeser is next up at the plate. “Moody’s right. If Rod was going to name names, he already would have.”

  “So?” I ask impatiently. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

  “So,” Marc says, “if he won’t tell us, why don’t you use that voodoo body-language shit to get it out of him?”

  Rich, I can see, is suppressing a smile at the very thought of this, and Marc for all I know has come up with this body-language suggestion just so he can end the meeting and get to his four-thirty hockey game. But I’ve been validating these techniques ever since I graduated from the Utah Police Academy in 1975, and if there was ever a time to use them, it’s now.

  “Marc,” I say, “get hold of the army. Now. Stat. I want a list of everyone who worked in the EAC during Rod’s time at Eighth Infantry in BK, and I want a list of anyone known to have closely associated with Ramsay.”

  “What are you going to do, Joe?” Moody asks. “He’s not going to hand anyone up.”

  “I agree,” I say. “Conscious Rod won’t.”

  “So?”

  “But Subconscious Rod will.”

  * * *

  BETWEEN THE ARMY AND the encyclopedic Marc Reeser, we come up with thirty-two names in all. I write each on a separate three-by-five index card, in big letters so it is easy to read, and then I ask Rod to join me for a quick game before dinner. The “before” part throws Rod for a bit of a loop—we eat, then we talk—but I want him a little unmoored, and I’m counting on his intellectual competitiveness to make my job easy.

  “A game?” he asks on the phone, already warming to the idea.

  “Trust me. You’ll like it.”

  By the time Rod arrives, I have the coffee table pulled up in front of his place on the sofa and my own swivel chair pulled up closer to him than usual.

  “Here’s the way it works,” I tell him. “I’m going to flash these cards in front of you very fast. As I do, all I want you to do is come up with a word or two that describes the personality of the person named on the card. I know a little bit about each of them, and basically I want to test your recall. And remember, keep it short and quick, the first thing that comes to mind: nice guy, asshole, uptight, snob, white trash, or whatever you want to say, but just a word or two. Just personality traits or quirks, not involvement. Got it?”

  “Got it,” he says. “Let’s do it,” as if this is a schoolyard race between two eager boys.

  I’m eager, all right, but for a different reason. I’ve chosen my words carefully, knowing Rod always uses “involvement” as a euphemism for espionage. I’ve told him not to think about involvement, but in fact by doing that I’ve primed him to think about that very thing. The mind focuses more easily on what it’s told not to do than on what it’s told to do.

  “Okay,” I tell him, “here we go.”

  I flash each card just long enough for him to read the name—perhaps no more than a second. I’m no more than two feet away, so I can see his face clearly, and in particular his eyes. For Rod it’s just another game: how well can he remember, how accurate is his recall—his focus is on speed. Not mine.

  My focus goes way back to 3.5 million years ago and early hominids on the plains of Africa. When our ancestors saw a threat in the distance—a lion or a pack of hyenas, any threat—their pupils would constrict. Today, we still share this involuntary reaction with all mammals for one good reason: the smaller the pupil or aperture, the clearer and more defined things become. That’s why people who need reading glasses can, if in need, punch a pinhole in a piece of paper and look through it. Do that, and you’ll see as clearly as if you’re wearing glasses. Photographers use the same technique to increase the depth of field on their cameras.

  What most people don’t know is that the threat can also be written. The brain uses shortcuts—heuristics—and doesn’t differentiate between the thing itself and the representation of the thing, i.e., the word that describes it. A threat is a threat, and the faster you deal with a threat, even if it turns out to be false, the greater the chance of survival and passing on your genes. If any of these names represent a threat to Rod—because they conspired with him, because they could testify against him, because they saw something, or because they somehow participated with him—his pupils will show it.

  For thirty of the names I present to Rod, in a very short period of time,
there is absolutely no eyeball response. He seems to know all of the individuals, and his comments range from “cool dude” to “real pecker-head” to “dumber than dirt.” For two, though—Jeffery Gregory and Jeffrey Rondeau—Rod’s eyes squint when I hold up the card, and his dilated pupils constrict just enough for me to register the change. I don’t even listen to what he says about them—the pupil constriction is enough for me.

  * * *

  BACK IN TAMPA, I ask the army to pull the files on Rondeau and Gregory and send me their ID photos. A few days later, in suite 316, where this all began, I take the fight to Rod.

  “Do you think you’re the only one helping us?” I say as I lay down photos of both Gregory and Rondeau. Rod looks at those photos for a moment, his eyes squinting with disdain, and then it’s like someone has turned on a fire hose to maximum pressure.

  “Those sons of bitches!” he shouts, and proceeds to tell me everything: how he’d used them to help gather secrets, sign for things so his signature wasn’t always on the checkout list for documents, serve as lookouts, and help carry documents out or conceal them for him.

  “These,” he says, “are the guys who helped me carry out a ton of documents because they were too heavy in a duffel bag.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, AS Marc Reeser comes into the office, I drop the news on him—Gregory and Rondeau signed, sealed, and delivered.

  “Thanks, by the way,” I add.

  “For what?”

  “For suggesting I use that ‘voodoo shit.’ I guess you won’t be calling it that anymore.”

  “Only behind your back, Navarro, only behind your back.”

  18

  FRENCH CUFFS AND SUSPENDERS

  For a moment as the four of us sweep into the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, I find myself thinking of old westerns—the good guys (us, naturally, in white hats) at one end of a dusty street, ready to take on the whole corrupt town. Why not? We’re all packing heat, as FBI agents are expected to do when they travel. But the fact is, we’ve come in peace.