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Gail and I look at each other. Is this some code? Another scenario entirely? She thrusts her report at me.

“Take it!” she says. “Run like the wind.”

I run my cappuccino ass back to the command post—over a road and up a hill—in under four minutes. I am not the only one jack-rabbiting it with a flashlight. Damn if Gail wasn’t right. They’d shut the damn computers down.

I deliver the reports and burst back into our room, sweating and exhilarated, to find her sitting on the bed, sobbing.

“I’m going home,” she gasps. “They cut me.”

“Why?”

“He wouldn’t say. I don’t understand. I have never failed anything in my life! Oh sweet Lord, my husband’s not gonna believe this.”

Even as a kid, Gail was always a standout—basketball, track, National Merit scholar. A poster girl for the FBI, she’s already been promoted to supervisor. Why wouldn’t they say how she messed up? Are we back to Hoover-era punishment?

“They’re wrong,” I say helplessly.

Fifteen minutes later, she is packed up and gone.

Next morning, 7:00 a.m. Sixteen of us now. We take our assigned seats in a lecture hall that smells like a chemistry class. Coffee is still steaming from paper cups and people are talking in shocked whispers about what happened to Gail, when Ring Diestal, LL.D., Ph.D., a broad-shouldered hulk in a tweed coat and tie, with luxurious gray hair and eyebrows thick as scrubbing brushes, mounts the podium and starts sprinting through the attorney general’s guidelines for FBI undercover work.

Backpacks unzip and notebooks open in a flurry. Three pages of text have flashed across the screen and there is no going back. Dr. Diestal is going at breakneck speed through the situations in which an undercover agent is justified to participate in illegal activity, like smoking weed and buying guns—important stuff on how not to get your case thrown out in court—but I am so burned-out from jet lag and freaked by the way my roommate vanished in the night, I can only stare in a haze at the empty chair that still bears the name Gail Washburn.

They keep it empty, and keep her name tag on it.

Remembering her wounded indignation—“I have never failed anything in my life!”—I am still fighting a sense of outrage that blocks my mind like the condensation on the windows as a cold fog settles over the campus.

“Nothing in the guidelines stops you from taking reasonable measures in self-defense,” Dr. Diestal explains. “But there is a tipping point. How quickly does self-preservation kick in? How smoothly can you shift your sense of what’s right in order to do what is required to complete the mission?”

My head jerks. Did I actually fall asleep? Did he see? But Dr. Diestal is already on to “authorization for purchase of contraband goods”—meaning when is it okay for an undercover to purchase drugs from a suspect? I sit up straight and reach for the coffee.

I’ll catch up later.

But there is no catching up. Just before dinner, they come for me.

I am on my way to the library when a counselor calls my name. I think twice before answering—yes, I am still Ana Grey.

“Sir?”

He gestures with his chin that I should follow.

“You are going into an undercover role-play,” he says.

“Now?”

Okay, that’s obvious.

We are winding quickly through the gerbil cages, in the opposite direction from the Board Room cafeteria, where I had been looking forward to the roast beef and mashed potato dinner I’d seen on the chalkboard that morning. There had been no break for lunch.

“May I ask what the operation is, sir?”

“It’s a counterfeiting case. The bad guys are printing U.S. currency using a high-tech copy machine. No inks, no plates, and therefore no evidence of what the machine is being used for. Your job is to catch them in the act.”

“Isn’t counterfeiting a crime that comes under the Secret Service?”

“Very good, Agent Grey.”

Right answer. Still alive.

“For the purpose of the exercise, let’s say it’s a joint undercover operation with the Secret Service. All you need to know is that you’ll be confronting someone who will be asking questions about