Judas Horse

school?” “It won’t affect your job, or the operation. Someone else will qualify. And you’ll come back and go on being Ana.” He pats my arm reassuringly, as if that would be perfectly okay.

Three

The road to undercover school cuts a straight line through a hundred square miles of dense Virginia forest. The raw-faced young Marines who stand in the rain, M16s over their shoulders, have zero tolerance for speeding, so I keep the rental car to thirty-five miles per hour — although my heartbeat is racing with the same giddy excitement as the first time I made this drive, when I arrived for training as a new agent, twelve years before.

This is everything I’ve ever wanted! That’s how I was thinking way back then, until the road went on and on at the same monotonous crawl, and a deep apprehension grew. What am I doing? Why did I leave home? The force of life is greedy here. Oak and hickory crowd the macadam, and the tall, wet grass is heavy with ticks. Drawing closer to the FBI Academy at the heart of the base, you come to the uneasy realization there is nothing else around you — no houses, no gas stations, no options — just deep fields with rifle targets and Quonset huts set far away in the smoky mist. It seems as if you are in danger of being swallowed up by your own dream.

I met Steve Crawford on the same driver-training course I am now passing, where they taught us how to stop a felon. We drove safety cars with popped-out wheels. All the guys love this part, but Steve was an ace. In the Board Room cafeteria, a bunch of us rookies sat around drinking beer, and Steve said if he did become an FBI agent, he’d have to sell his 1978 Mustang GT. Not likely he’d be drag racing anymore. He’d just painted it a “raspberry and gold dust color,” which sounded kind of luscious. This was before I had bought my ’71 Barracuda, but I piped up about loving muscle cars. He told how he’d hang out in a parking lot in San Bernardino, listening to the old guys talk hot rods; how he’d raced the Bonneville salt flats. By midnight, we were back at the driver-training course, testing out the fast track.

We were two Southern California kids crazy for cars and baseball, high every day on the adrenaline of being at the Academy, working our butts off, entwined in a heroic vision of serving a better world. Made for each other, it seemed.

A sudden coldness hits the rental car and I put on the heat. As I pass the final Marine checkpoint, a thunderstorm that has been on my tail since the D.C. airport breaks with almost comic intensity. Rain plays on the windshield like a cuckoo Caribbean band of tin pots and garbage cans. Cold fog curls up close and puts its lips on the window glass. When lightning forks across the lurid purple sky, again and again, I laugh out loud, for the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover must surely be upon me.

The old man has been dead for decades, but down in Quantico it’s still “Get off Hoover’s grass,” as if he owns our souls in perpetuity. All that stuff about him running around in a woman’s red dress and heels, that’s nonsense, although Hoover did make a fetish out of “cleanliness”—of body and mind, supposedly — fashioned after his own psychosexual obsessions. What a way to run a company.

Hoover liked white shirts, but he did not like homosexuals (although he almost certainly was one). Secretaries could make the coffee, but it was indecorous to be seen carrying a naked coffee cup across the office, so they would place the steaming mugs inside those wooden boxes made for index cards, pretending it was not coffee they were delivering to their white-shirted, not-gay bosses.

Laugh about it now (we don’t), but how far is a mad secret coffee ritual from compliance in a cover-up of dirty tricks? Or a bollixed siege? Hoover’s drive to avoid any sort of personal or bureaucratic shame created a culture of repression and fear that haunts us still. As I pull into the austere brick complex stained dark by the rain, I hear the grim, omniscient voice of the director, years ago embedded in my head: “Never embarrass the Bureau.” The groundhog! I just remembered! He used to live in a grass quadrangle outside the administration building. Steve and I would set out crackers while pretending to study and he’d taunt me about shooting it on sight, detailing the effect of different-caliber bullets. It was considered good luck if you happened to spot the little guy from one of the glass passageways that connect the towers. We called them “gerbil cages,” scurrying to our classes through the glass tunnels like scores of frantic mice. For fourteen weeks, we lived inside a sealed environment with no fresh air and people always getting sick. That is why we went gaga over the groundhog: He was our brother, and he was free.

Now as I enter the lobby, water tracking from my soaking shoes, something clicks inside my chest, as if Steve is saying, as he always said, You’ll be great, and I have answered, This is for you, buddy.

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 cafe. 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