Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner [11]
Kimberly’s roommate, Lucy Dawbers, was a thirty-six-year-old former trial lawyer who’d had her own two-thousand-dollar-a-month Boston brownstone. She’d taken one look at their spartan quarters that first day and groaned, “Oh my God, what have I done?”
Kimberly had the distinct impression that Lucy would kill for a nice glass of Chardonnay at the end of the day. She also missed her five-year-old son horribly.
In the good news department, especially for new agents who didn’t share particularly well—say, perhaps, Kimberly—somewhere around week twelve, new agents became eligible for private rooms in “The Hilton”—the Jefferson Dormitory. These rooms were not only slightly bigger, but entitled you to your very own bathroom. Pure heaven.
Assuming you survived until week twelve.
Three of Kimberly’s classmates already hadn’t.
In theory, the FBI Academy had abandoned its earlier, boot camp ways for a kinder, gentler program. Recognizing how expensive it was to recruit good agents, the Bureau now treated the FBI Academy as the final training stage for selected agents, rather than as a last opportunity to winnow out the weak.
That was in theory. In reality, testing started week one. Can you run two miles in less than sixteen minutes? Can you do fifty push-ups in one minute? Can you do sixty sit-ups? The shuttle run must be completed in twenty-four seconds, the fifty-foot rope must be climbed in forty-five seconds.
The new agent trainees ran, they trained, they suffered through body-fat testing and they prayed to fix their individual weaknesses—whether that was the shuttle run or the rope climb or the fifty push-ups, in order to pass the three cycles of fitness tests.
Then came the academics program—classes in white-collar crime, profiling, civil rights, foreign counterintelligence, organized crime and drug cases; lessons in interrogation, arrest tactics, driving maneuvers, undercover work, and computers; lecture series on criminology, legal rights, forensic science, ethics, and FBI history. Some of it was interesting, some of it was excruciating, and all of it was tested three times over the course of the sixteen weeks. And no mundane high-school scale here—it took a score of 85 percent or higher to pass. Anything less, you failed. Fail once, you had an opportunity for a make-up test. Fail twice, you were “recycled”—dropped back to the next class.
Recycled. It sounded so innocuous. Like some PC sports program—there are no winners or losers here, you’re just recycled.
Recycling mattered. New agents feared it, dreaded it, had nightmares about it. It was the ominous word whispered in the halls. It was the secret terror that kept them going up over the towering Marine training wall, even now that it was week nine and everyone was sleeping less and less while being pushed more and more and the drills were harder and the expectations higher and each day, every day, someone was going to get awarded the Deadly Deed of the Day . . .
Besides the physical training and academics, new agents worked on firearms. Kimberly had thought she’d have the advantage there. She’d been taking lessons with a Glock .40 for the past ten years. She was comfortable with guns and a damn good shot.
Except firearms training didn’t involve just standing and firing at a paper target. They also practiced firing from the sitting position—as if surprised at a desk. Then there were running drills, belly-crawling drills, night-firing drills, and elaborate rituals where they started out on their bellies, then got up and ran, then dropped down, then ran more, then stood and fired. You fired right-handed. You fired left-handed. You reloaded and reloaded and reloaded.
And you didn’t just use a handgun.
Kimberly got her first experience with an M-16 rifle. Then she fired over a thousand rounds from a Remington Model 870 shotgun with a recoil