• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The rooms in the dorm are spartan and smaller than I remember—still no recreation areas, one TV to a floor. An hour after checking in, I am back in training uniform—stiff cargo pants, boots, short-sleeved polo shirt with the FBI seal, and a thick belt made of saddle leather better suited for a horse—falling in with identically dressed crowds of muscular men and women powering through the gerbil cages like rush hour in the Tokyo subway.

All sizes and ethnicities, we are the law-enforcement elite—plucked from the Bureau or police departments around the world for advanced courses like undercover school, wearing the same rictus smiles and carrying backpacks like aging college students, snobbishly throwing them in piles on the floor. There is plenty of eye contact, at once smug and scared. We have been invited to the rush—but will we make the fraternity?

When they cut you, they do it fast, anytime, anyplace, even the last night of training. By dinnertime, everyone has heard about the “adios speech,” in which a counselor dressed in black takes you aside and basically says, “Thanks for coming and trying out. Just because you didn’t make it doesn’t mean you’re not still an agent, and being an agent is the greatest thing in the world. Have a good trip home.”

Have a good time in the trash heap of failure the rest of your life.

Just go on being Ana.

My roommate’s name is Gail Washburn. We are in a class of seventeen. She is maybe thirty-five, from the Chicago field office, African-American, with sly, narrow eyes like an egret and short hair twisted and pinned into two tiny pigtails. I discover her unpacking a bag of mini doughnuts, and like her immediately. She is an upbeat lady, married to another agent, funny about “my black ass,” which could mean her deepest sense of self or athletic rump; teases me about being a “venti cappuccino ass” when I say I am half Salvadoran—“with whole milk, baby”—referring to my pure white skin. It is a promising friendship, but way too brief, as I will end up knowing Gail Washburn less than twelve hours.

By 9:00 p.m. on the same day as my arrival from Los Angeles, we are deeply into a “7-Eleven scenario” in Hogan’s Alley, a phony Main Street, like a movie set, with false storefronts, apartment buildings, a bank and café. We are to assume an undercover identity, enter the convenience store, and purchase a loaf of bread. That’s it. We are armed with paint-ball guns and wear protective gear. We do not know that the counselors, playing customers and clerks, will turn the scene into a violent hostage situation when the owner of the store is held at gunpoint by a shopper.

One by one, we enter the store and play it out. Some of us are shot by the bad guy, some—oops!—kill the victim, some blow their cover and yell, “Freeze! FBI!” but most take correct action, which is to do nothing and be a good witness. We are not told the results, just shunted out the back and warned that we have thirty minutes to file a report.

Gail has already gone through the test when I dash back to our room and find her staring at the computer in bewilderment.

“The system went down.”

I pound the keys. The screen is frozen with green hieroglyphics. Gail hands me the bag of doughnuts and we share a moment of sugary dread.

“I’ll bet this is part of their damn game,” she whispers.

“They shut the system down on purpose? Even for the Bureau, that’s perverse.”

“Real life, girl. What do you do in a hostage situation when Rapid Start crashes?”

“Sister, I don’t know what’s real.” I am starting to feel flushed and panicky. “But we have fifteen minutes to get our shit over there.”

We start scribbling by hand in spiral notebooks and ripping out the pages. Pounding at the door! We both jump. It is spooky all right: Standing in the hallway is a training counselor wearing black—even a black hood—with a knife at the belt. He has a trimmed white beard and compact wrestler’s body, and is not smiling. He looks like the Agent of Death.

“Agent