Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  “The State Department?”

  “Yeah, State. You know, Germany, NATO, missiles, all those little issues. Our friends abroad might like a teensy heads-up on tomorrow’s events.”

  “I’m ahead of you on that one. Jane, your new best friend at FBIHQ, is handling that. As soon as the affidavit is signed, the message will fly.”

  “Speaking of affidavits, tomorrow,” he continues, waving the draft over his head, “you’ll need to go before Judge Elizabeth Jenkins and swear to this. Good thing your boy isn’t showing up until noon, eh?”

  * * *

  I LEAVE FOR HOME at 4:30 a.m., kiss Stephanie a tardy good night—or good morning?—without waking her, spend half an hour under the hottest shower I can stand, shave, dress in something comfortable (a standard dress shirt and tie would scare Rod to death even if I had the tie at half-mast), and look longingly at my bed, wondering when I’ll ever share it again. In the kitchen, I stare inside the refrigerator for a few minutes, hoping I’ll be inspired to eat something but knowing that, even if I do, I won’t be able to hold it down.

  Luciana is on her side, facing the door, breathing gently and evenly, when I check on her in the den.

  “Soon,” I whisper into the dark. “It’s almost over. We can be real people again.”

  I have a feeling her eyes are open, but there’s no way to tell.

  I’m back in my office by 6 a.m., reviewing Rod’s case and firing off the few briefings I didn’t get off late last night before my vision went almost double. By eight o’clock, I’ve sent off the last of those—to our FBI legal attachés in all major European cities, who’ll shortly have to brief their law-enforcement and counterintelligence counterparts as well as deal with local press queries, all of which will henceforth be directed to the US Attorney’s Office in Tampa. I’ve also left a message for Jane, who’s probably still out on her morning run, assuring her that she’ll have a copy of the affidavit as soon as possible after it’s signed. Once that happens, the FBI loses all authority over the case. DOJ runs the show and the ball is squarely in Greg’s office.

  I spend part of the next hour taking a physical inventory, and the results aren’t promising. My chest is pounding, I have trouble breathing, the room seems to spin around me at times, and now both sides of my mouth on the underside are sore. When I try to calm things down with some yogurt, the cold hurts my mouth too much to go on.

  A little before nine o’clock an anonymous caller from the 202 area code thanks me for an unidentified heads-up about an unmentioned subject and then proceeds to tell me in a very clipped shorthand how the early-morning meeting with President Bush had gone:

  “When POTUS was told about the PALs and SNAs, he looked like a ghost had walked across the Oval Office.” There’s a surprise. Apparently, the national security people didn’t have him fully in the loop. Ouch.

  “ ‘What are we going to tell the Germans?’ he asked Scowcroft.

  ‘As little as possible.’ ”

  Click.

  Poor Germans. “As little as possible” is exactly what I gave up at Conrad’s trial, so much so that the judges doubted anyone could have stolen the keys to the nuclear castle. Will Bonn ever know how naked we left them? In any event, it pays to have friends at HQ even if they have to remain secret.

  Half an hour later, I’ve just set up radio contact with our campground surveillance unit when Terry Moody pokes her head in my office, waves a tentative good morning, says, “Joe, I think you’ll want to see this,” and leads me to a south-facing window that conveniently looks out on the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida. We’re in steamy June, but outside the sun is coming up on a beautiful day, one of those picture-perfect advertisements for the Sunshine State Gulf Coast.

  “Nice,” I say to Terry, longing to be out in my kayak and knowing I don’t have the strength to paddle more than a few minutes. “Thanks.”

  And that’s when I follow her eyes down to street level and see three TV news trucks parked at the curb in front of the courthouse, with “ABC” blazed boldly on their sides.

  “Not local,” Moody tells me. “I checked them out on my way into the office. License plates are all from Washington, DC.”

  “Bamford,” I say. “Shit!” But it comes out so tamely that Terry immediately turns her focus to me.

  “You holding it together, Joe?”

  “No,” I want to say, “I’m really not,” but at least I’m beyond shock that someone at HQ would have tipped ABC to this, the final scene in the Ramsay story. I’m asking myself how different this kind of institutional sellout is from espionage itself when the hand radio I’ve carried over to the window crackles alive and I hear a disembodied voice saying, “Iris 9 to Gunga Din. Iris 9 to Gunga Din,” words designed to get your attention in the middle of a tornado.

  “Over,” I answer.

  “Eyeball on the package, and he’s moving.”

  “Shit! Moody, we gotta get going!” I say, running for the stairs with Moody right behind me.

  We planned on noon. Even if Rod dawdles all the way down I-4 and misses the Tampa turnoff, he’ll be here no later than eleven o’clock.

  “Go!” I shout to Moody, pointing in the general direction of the downtown Hyatt, her choice for the best place to rendezvous with Rod. Simultaneously, I break for Greg’s office. A clean affidavit, approved by ISS, is just rolling off the fax when I bust through his door.

  “No time to explain,” I tell his secretary as I grab the still-warm stack of papers and do what I can to bust a move to the street below. We have time, I tell myself. We have time. We have time. And short of disaster, we absolutely do.

  * * *

  “YOU CAN’T GO IN there,” the courthouse guard says to me.

  “Sure I can,” I say. “You know me. I’m FBI.” I flash my credentials just to put him at ease.

  “You’re carrying a gun,” he explains. “No guns, you understand? Them’s the rules.”

  “But this is an emergency.” It’s a sweaty June day, despite the pristine view from the window ten minutes ago. The affidavit in my hand is going limp with the heat and humidity.

  “What part of ‘can’t’ don’t you understand?” the guard asks.

  “Look, I only have minutes. How about I leave the gun with you?”

  “Can’t do that.”

  I get it, actually. The senior judge has forbidden FBI agents to enter the courthouse with guns. Sensible, surely. This guard is powerless. Yet, if there’s an assault on a federal judge, the FBI has to investigate, and we’re not going to walk in the courthouse door stripped of any protection. You have to be schizophrenic to understand these rules, but I don’t have time to argue.

  “Can I lock my service pistol up somewhere?” I ask, cajole, beg.

  With that, the guard casts me a fishy look and walks us over to a bank of new lockers at a pace that tells me he’s never been in the trenches or anywhere close to them, but we still haven’t gotten to “enter.” After I secure the weapon, he tells me I have to walk through the magnetometer before I can go upstairs. Here is another humanoid I will always remember as a speed bump on the road to success.

  “She’s in her chambers,” the guard says with a sour smile as I enter the elevator. I just hope there isn’t a line of other federal agents waiting to have their criminal complaints authorized. For once, things go well—sort of. Judge Jenkins welcomes me in, her morning courtiers are nonexistent, but then she launches into an examination of the document that I can describe only as pedantically thorough.

  By the time she asks me to raise my right hand and swear that the details herein are accurate and the full circumstances made known to me so help me God, we’re down to twenty-seven minutes, less if Rod has the pedal to the metal. As I race to the Hyatt, I can barely read my own watch I’m breathing so hard. What’s more, there’s no time to rest once I do get to the room. Within seconds, it seems, I have three radios going: the command post, the surveillance unit following Ramsay, and
the arrest team—each feeding me updates and each update ratcheting up the tension I’m already feeling.

  Just to add to the fun, Dorothy Ramsay’s worried calls to my office switchboard are being helpfully patched through to the Hyatt front desk and up to me. Each time one comes in (every four minutes, by my count), I have to rush around and mute all three radio connections so Dorothy doesn’t glom on to the full extent of my treachery. Apparently, there’s a news reporter at her house. No wonder she’s questioning my attempts to assuage her fear.

  “Dorothy,” I tell her, “that’s what reporters do when they have nothing real to report on. They go on expeditions. They fish. They try to manufacture a story. Don’t—”

  “I don’t want to know anything more, Mr. Navarro,” she interrupts. “Rod is burden enough.” And she, too, hangs up on me. A morning for rejection, all richly earned.

  Moody, meanwhile, is trying to calm me down, but even she acknowledges what I’ve been through and all the commotion going on.

  “I don’t know how you do it, Navarro,” she allows. “I really don’t—this is turning into a carnival.”

  For my part, I sit on the couch trying to steal whatever rest I can, but there’s no time for that either. My chest is heaving just from the exertion of getting here. This is ridiculous. I can run two miles with all my SWAT gear on, for crissake, or—correct that—once could. I don’t know what the room temperature is set at—meat-locker cold, maybe—because I’m soaked clear through from my running and shivering like a leaf in a gale when surveillance makes one last call upstairs to say that Rod is on his way. The Eagle has landed, I’m thinking, when he knocks on the door for the very last time and Moody lets him in.

  “Mother Moody,” he says with a big grin. She does her best to grin back, but you don’t have to be a body-language expert to see how hard she’s trying.

  “And Joe,” he says, now turning toward me and giving me a good once-over. “Man, you look like dog poop.”

  “Thanks, Rod. Nice to see you, too.” And that’s when I notice: We’re wearing almost exactly the same thing: khakis, penny loafers, and salmon-colored polo shirts. In a way, I’m not surprised. Rod is a master of mimicry, but as this showdown nears, Rod and I have also been drawing nearer to one another in a multitude of ways. More and more, he’s been echoing the terms I use, my syntax, the general tone of my voice. He’s even held me up as a role model to his mother. Clothes, I suppose, are just a natural extension of that, even if at the moment we happen to look like a textbook example of evil twins.

  In the professional literature, this is known as “transference and countertransference”—whenever you spend this much time with another person, you begin to take on each other’s characteristics and even bond subconsciously. This is the main reason FBI deep-cover agents have to be pulled out before they succumb to the antisocial behaviors they’ve been sent undercover to root out. I think I’m well short of that with Rod—I have no urge toward espionage—but I also can’t ignore the fact that he’s infinitely interesting, highly intelligent, incredibly fragile, overwhelmingly pathetic, and soon to start a second life behind bars. How could I call myself human if I simply hated such a man? What’s more, hate takes energy. I have no energy left and certainly not for that.

  The three of us have spent about fifteen minutes on the usual introductory chitchat—how he’s eating, cab fares, what books he’s been reading (and tearing apart as he goes through), today’s traffic report on I-4, Moody’s infant girl (a robust eight pounds fourteen ounces at birth), my incompetence in forgetting the promised bottle of Riesling from Germany—when even Rod has had enough.

  “Well,” he says, a serious look spreading across his face, “I’ve heard the rumors about an arrest.” His lips and chin are quivering.

  Just as seriously, I reply, “Rod, I have no intention of arresting you. Mrs. Moody certainly isn’t going to either.”

  Maybe the “I” should have been a little more emphasized, but what I’ve just said is the absolute truth. Making the arrest is a big, big deal in the FBI. You lead the perp walk with your FBI jacket on; you’re the one in front of the cameras when the media gather for the follow-up press conference. Get credited with a collar as big as Rod, and your career is pretty much golden. But this morning I informed our Tampa bureau, HQ, and everyone else that I wouldn’t do the arrest, and I meant it.

  My rhetoric was lofty and heartfelt: “A lot of people worked on this case, and they need credit,” I told Koerner, who disagreed but in the end acquiesced to letting Rich Licht lead the arrest team along with Susan Langford, an honor richly earned by both. What I didn’t tell Jay was that I didn’t want to be anywhere near the Hyatt parking lot when the arrest happened. And Moody agreed. The joy of finally putting this guy in cuffs was taken from us piece by piece months ago. This is no sporting event to celebrate, no trophy to hold up. This is a tragedy.

  Our little white lie behind us, Terry, Rod, and I try to get back to the conversation, but I think all of us know this just isn’t right. Moody is trying to be cheerful, but she looks closer to tears. I’m worse than exhausted. Transference expert that he is, Rod is slipping into our own miserable moods. We’re just on the short end of testy and grumpy when I decide to end it. None of us is in a mood to talk.

  “I’m sorry to have brought you all the way over here, Rod,” I say. “I just don’t feel well. Correction: I feel shitty, and your mom has been calling me and she’s concerned. Would you mind if we got together another day?”

  “Please go see your mom as long as you’re here,” Terry adds. “Let her know you’re okay. She’s been so worried.”

  With that, Terry and I both get up and give Rod a hug, covering between us as much of his body as we can to make sure he isn’t carrying a weapon—a last Judas moment to end our forty-two interviews.

  “Well, see you later,” Rod says at the door, with a small wave. He lingers with his hand on the knob, almost as if he’s trying to will me to ask “Anything else?” one more time.

  Almost before he’s gone, I collapse on the sofa while Moody radios the arrest team waiting in the parking lot: “Target leaving hotel.” Around us the three radio frequencies, now back to life, are blaring away, but I’m not listening. The chatter on all three frequencies has turned to an almost unbearable cacophony.

  “Come on, Joe,” Terry finally says, “we have to go.” But I don’t move. I can’t. Moody is just lifting me to my feet when I hear cheering in the background from the command post and Rich Licht radios in his report: “Rod is in custody without incident.” And with those words communications start flying to FBIHQ, Justice, everyone involved. Within seconds, the Germans and Swedes know, too, and no doubt the Russians as well.

  I’m still frozen in place when Rich calls back and tells me to “squawk Delta 3,” a code phrase for switching to an alternate, little-used SWAT frequency no one else in the Bureau is monitoring. Terry has to help me, but we finally get the frequency up and working.

  “You know what Ramsay’s first words were, Joe, when we cuffed him?” Rich asks.

  All I can do is stare at Moody. I can’t even imagine what the answer might be.

  “ ‘Does Joe Navarro know about this?’ ”

  24

  STAYING ALIVE

  Moody and I sit in that room at the Hyatt Hotel for what seems like an hour after Rod has walked out the door one last time. It might be only twenty minutes really, but when you’re too exhausted to move, when you’re sweating profusely in an air-conditioned room, when you feel a fever burning up through your head, when you’re shaking uncontrollably, minutes seem like hours.

  Terry offers to have an agent pick us up for the trip back to the office, but once she gets me on my feet, I want to walk, to feel my body moving. Maybe whatever is wrong with me will just go away now that Rod is in custody. It doesn’t. What is usually a ten-minute walk turns into a forty-minute trudge with She-Moody supporting me every step of the way.

  Spirits are high
when the elevator finally opens onto the fifth floor of the Tampa office. Most of my colleagues have been in the dark about the Ramsay case. Now word is out, and the mood is celebratory—an arrest! a perp walk!—but I feel just the opposite. I sit in my office for as long as I can stand it. The room is swirling around me. People talk but it isn’t registering. I make sure I thank everyone involved, then go into the bathroom and lock myself in a stall, just to decompress.

  By then, I’ve discovered a swollen lymph node in each underarm to go along with the odd, bilateral swelling beneath my chin. That is part of it—I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me, but the signs are scaring the hell out of me. Worse, though, is a sense of disconnect with everything going on around me. Moody, of course, knows what I’ve been through over the last year and a half. Koerner, too. Kehoe, Licht, Susan Langford, and a few others have seen some of the worst of it, too. But somehow, happy talk and high fives seem the wrong way to end it, and not only because my mind is fogged in.

  What I need is rest, bottomless amounts of it, but there’s more work to be done on Rod’s case. I have to testify the next day at his detention hearing, and it’s going to be a zoo—the first opportunity for the public to hear what’s been going on, defense counsel’s first crack at me and our case as well. At this moment, I’m not sure I can hold up to an attack. Sleep is almost out of the question—I’ll be rehearsing my courtroom answers all night long—and I’m far from in top form in any event, mentally or physically. After hiding in the bathroom for almost an hour, shivering from the fever, I talk myself back into the game.

  “Where have you been?” Moody asks.

  “Resting my head.”

  “The boss is looking for you. They want you to attend the press conference.”

  “You go.”

  “Not me,” says Moody. “If I want to go to a circus, I’ll wait until Ringling Brothers comes back to town.”