Sex on the Moon (26 page)
Authors: Ben Mezrich
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Criminals & Outlaws, #Science & Technology, #True Crime, #Hoaxes & Deceptions, #Science, #Space Science, #History, #United States, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #General, #Nature, #Sky Observation
“Houston, we have a problem.”
This time, the words were followed by a moment of wicked laughter; whoever was speaking into the intercom was having a grand old time. Thad looked around, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And then he saw the muscled black man approaching his bunk.
It was the guy who had introduced himself as “Graveyard Serious,” and he was holding something in his left hand. For a brief second, Thad’s mind whirled through every prison movie he’d ever seen, and he fully expected a steel shank to be driven through his throat. But instead, Graveyard tossed the item at his chest, where it landed with a soft thud. It wasn’t a shank. It was a newspaper. And the banner headline across the top of the front page was all about Thad.
“‘Moon Rock Heist,”’ Thad whispered, reading the words as he saw them.
He looked up and saw that the other prisoners were all out of their bunks now, gathering around him. Graveyard was pointing a long finger at the newspaper.
“One of the hacks gave me that. You’re the fucking talk of Orient County. Boys, we’ve got ourselves a celebrity.”
Thad felt his cheeks flush as he read the article. It was all there, in black and white. The arrest of Thad, Gordon, and Rebecca. And Sandra—according to the article, she had been arrested, too, dragged right out of her job in handcuffs. The newspaper was calling it the most significant heist in NASA’s history. Everett Gibson, whose lab had been robbed, had actually been taken in for questioning upon returning from a trip to Australia.
Before Thad could read any deeper into the article, Graveyard grabbed the newspaper out of his hands and waved it in front of the other prisoners.
“That’s right, say hello to Moon Rock!”
And just like that, the name stuck.
Moon Rock
. Thad laid his head back against the hard steel bunk as the intercom continued to bray in his ears.
“Houston, we have a problem.”
38
“Moon Rock, you’re up.”
Thad was only on his seventh push-up, and he owed Graveyard three more—but the guard standing by the open cage door looked serious, and even Graveyard wouldn’t have ignored a hack’s offer to get out of the claustrophobic cell, even if the reason was still completely unknown.
Thad pulled himself to his feet and pointed at the face card that was on the picnic table between him and the other prisoner.
“I’ll finish my ten when I get back.”
“
If
you get back, Moon Rock. Maybe they’re about to let you go.”
Graveyard bared his yellow teeth, amused by his own statement. It was still only a few hours into the second day, so there was no chance in hell that Thad was going anywhere. But he was happy to get out of that cell, even for a moment. None of the inmates had made any attempt to kill him yet, but there was such an undercurrent of anger and subverted violence in that place; it probably had something to do with the shared, open toilets, or the incessant caterwauling of the Teletubbies. The jail was so infused with bad feelings, Thad would have done just about anything to get out of there.
He crossed to the door and held out his arms for the proffered handcuffs. After the cuffs came the shackles, and then the guard led him down the long hall. The next thing he knew, he was being brought into a small room with cement walls and no windows. There was a steel table in the middle of the room, and four metal chairs. Thad was handcuffed to one of the chairs, then left alone with his frightened thoughts.
Five minutes later, Thad’s court-appointed attorney entered the room, followed by two women. One of the women identified herself as the OIG—a federal officer from the office of the inspector general, attached to NASA. The other woman—with severe-looking eyes and a tight bun of brown hair—introduced herself as the prosecutor assigned to Thad’s case.
The truth was, the two women were about as familiar to Thad as his lawyer. The man in a stiff blue suit had been little more than a name on a sheet of paper Thad had been asked to sign when he’d first been checked into the county jail. His first name was John, and to Thad, he seemed like he was just out of law school. Maybe he would one day be a wonderful lawyer, but Thad had the feeling that at the moment, he was just trying to get through the day.
As the three of them took their chairs, Thad began feeling incredibly self-conscious. He was still handcuffed, chained up like he was going to kill somebody, like he was this dangerous criminal—and not a NASA scientist who had done something stupid. Before he could say anything, his lawyer placed a tape recorder in the center of the table and started asking questions. About the heist, about the planning, about Gordon and Rebecca and Sandra, about Everett Gibson and the moon rocks—about everything. He was doing all of this right in front of the prosecutor and the federal officer, and Thad just stared at him, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, trying to understand if this was how it was supposed to work.
When it became time for him to answer, Thad shook his head, giving his lawyer a plaintive look. The man seemed to understand, and he quickly asked the two women to give them a moment alone.
After the women had left, shutting the door behind them, the lawyer started over. He explained to Thad that NASA, the prosecutor, and the FBI had a lot of questions they wanted answered—and there was a chance that because of this, Thad would be able to make some sort of deal. NASA wanted to know exactly how the heist had happened: how Thad had been able to get inside Gibson’s lab, how he had known about the moon rocks—everything that wasn’t already on tape from the sting operation at the restaurant. And most important of all—Everett Gibson had told the FBI that the safe had contained his life’s work, a number of green notebooks that were filled with thirty years of his scientific research. He had intended to use those notebooks to write a book after he retired, and they were considered invaluable.
Thad shook his head, his mind whirling. He didn’t remember seeing any green notebooks in the safe. As far as he knew, they hadn’t thrown anything out, other than the safe itself, so if there were notebooks, they’d still be either in Sandra’s storage shed or in the suitcase that had been with them in the Sheraton. But Thad didn’t really want to talk about some phantom notebooks; he wanted to talk about Rebecca.
He wanted to know what was going to happen to her. His lawyer seemed shocked that this would be Thad’s first concern—but he did his best to explain the situation. He said the way the system worked, there was a certain amount of mandatory time a judge could give someone for taking part in a crime like this—based mostly on the value of the stolen items, since there hadn’t been any acts of violence committed. That value was still to be determined, and much of any trial would be about figuring out exactly how much 101.5 grams of moon rock was really worth.
Each level upward from the minimum sentence was called a “departure.” For the crime Thad and his friends had committed, they were currently looking at a maximum of three departures—or, roughly, three years in prison.
Thad’s stomach dropped as he heard those words—
three years
. Picturing the cell he had just come from, the open toilets, the steel bunk beds, the guards and the inmates—he couldn’t imagine how he would survive that. Then he pictured Rebecca—there had to be something else, something he could do.
Thad’s lawyer admitted that there was, in fact, another way—for the girls, Rebecca and Sandra, at least. They could claim that they had been coerced into the crime, and had taken a minor role, led astray by a criminally intent “leader.” John guessed that this was something their lawyers would probably advise them to do—but he assured Thad that this was something he would fight, tooth and nail, because if Thad took the role of the leader, he would be looking at an even longer sentence.
Thad stopped him right there, his handcuffs clanging together as he tried to raise his hands. That was exactly what he wanted to happen. Not the longer-sentence part—but for Rebecca, he would admit the role of the leader. If she stayed free, she would be his lifeline. He didn’t have anyone else.
The lawyer looked at him, rubbing a hand over his tired eyes. He asked again if Thad was sure that this was what he wanted to do—basically lie down and let the girls argue that they were coerced or seduced into this crime. Thad nodded. The lawyer asked a third time—reminding Thad that from what Rebecca had told the FBI, Thad had only known this girl for a month. He was willing to throw away years of his life for someone he had known only four weeks?
Thad nodded again. He didn’t think of Rebecca as someone he had only known for a month. She had filled something inside of him, something he’d needed; whether that was something his mind had invented or something real—it didn’t matter. Her life had to continue.
Finally, the lawyer shrugged. Thad was his client, appointed by the court. He wasn’t a friend or a family member. It was Thad’s life. If Thad cooperated with NASA and the FBI, they would maybe go lenient on him, but if he was the leader, the self-admitted ringleader—well, he was looking at three years in federal prison, maybe even more.
Thad nodded, willing his brain to ignore the thought of all those years—and told the lawyer that he would do what he had to. The man shrugged again, and signaled the guards to send the prosecutor and the federal officer back into the room.
I know that you will never read these words, but I still need to write them down. I need some way of expressing your effect on me. I need to shape the tears into words. You once asked me why I love you … a question that has no answer on this side of the horizon. I can no more explain “why” than I can explain why I am self-aware. Every thought I have, every sensation and emotion comes laced with the knowledge that I love you, that I desire you, that I long to know your happiness, but questioning why gets beneath the question of my very existence. Still there is another question that you deserve an answer to—the question of “what” I love about you. To be fair, this question is also impossible to answer, but only because it is impossible to exhaust. Each brushstroke, however, belongs to the same painting, every detail reflects the whole
.
39
Thad had always been a quick study.
At NASA, being quick to pick up how things worked had been important because it had caught the attention of the people Thad needed to impress, and it had given him that extra edge so that he could construct the person he wanted to be, right from day one.
In county jail, being quick to pick up how things worked was important because it kept Thad alive. Not only in that clichéd, late-night prison-movie sense—although there was always the very real risk of looking at someone the wrong way, saying the wrong thing, getting inadvertently involved in something that could easily have gotten him killed—but also in the sense that if he wasn’t able to get his head around the new reality of his life, he was going to be lost in a place where even his fantasies couldn’t protect him.
It was conventional jailhouse wisdom that it took about two years for a man to reach empty, to finally let go of his old life—hopes, dreams, expectations, family, real contact with the outside world—two years to reset at rock bottom, to become that empty, unimprinted shell. By the end of his first year of being locked up, awaiting sentencing, Thad knew that the jailhouse wisdom was probably correct. He was halfway to becoming that nowhere, nothing man, and if he had to endure another year, the time would shatter him and cause him to shed whatever was left of his old self.
The worst moment of each day usually came when he lay down on his hard steel bunk, listening to the incessant buzz from the brightly lit ceiling, waiting for the
clump clump clump
of the hacks’ boots as they walked along the catwalk, often trying to ignore the horrifying, muted groans of men in nearby cells being abused, beaten, sometimes even raped by other inmates. It was a half-awake, half-asleep kind of place, where it was impossible to shut down his senses but equally impossible to digest what he was seeing, hearing, smelling.
The best time of the day was when he found himself alone in the shower, because it was the only time he could let go and cry.
In between, there were moments, good and bad, that marked the monotony of life in a cage. Meals, almost always grits, served on plastic trays that had to be returned and counted. Exercise, in a yard barely fit for a dog, fetid and hot and dangerous, where Thad usually stood in a corner trying not to catch the attention of anyone who might do him harm. TV time, usually those damn
Teletubbies
, sometimes the news, other times a Christian station spouting Scripture. And then, the card games with his cell mates—during which Thad was often asked to retell the story of the Moon Rock Heist—which inevitably morphed into a discussion of the sort of sentence he was probably going to receive, now that he had pleaded guilty and cooperated with the FBI.
Like everything else in prison, the topic of his sentence had become something the prisoners were eager to gamble on; not just Thad’s cell, but all of the surrounding pods got involved, inmates choosing sentences they thought Thad would receive; anyone who missed by more than a year was going to have to do fifty push-ups, one of the few forms of currency allowed in the jail.
Although Thad’s lawyer was still convinced that the highest penalty that Thad could receive—no matter how much NASA and the court’s experts finally decided that 101.5 grams of moon rock and the little Martian meteorite were worth—was about three years, a handful of prisoners had guessed as high as five. Thad knew that there was no way he could survive being caged up that long, but even so, he never once regretted pleading guilty, or disallowing his lawyer to argue against his being in the leadership role of the heist.
His shouldering that weight had allowed Rebecca and Sandra to plead that they had been misled, coerced, and taken minor roles in the theft. When Rebecca’s sentencing day finally came—a year after the heist—Thad was engulfed by a mixture of feelings. He hadn’t had any contact with her since the day of their arrest, and every passing minute without that contact had been sheer torture. Every time he’d spoken to his lawyer—his only real link to the outside world—he had begged the man to get him in touch with her, to give him a phone number, an address, anything, but the lawyer had explained that it was impossible. Rebecca had been preparing for her own day in court—and as she had said, her father had banned her from speaking to Thad ever again.
