Judas Horse

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 Washburn?” he says. “Talk to me.”

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 you in your undercover role, and you will be observed for signs of deceit that suggest you’re not who you say you are.” We get off the elevator at a subbasement. I follow the counselor down cinder-block corridors — near the indoor range, heavy with the smell of cordite — still trying to figure out what in hell he’s just said. We pass trolleys of laundered towels and stop at a pair of metal doors framed by girders of steel. The rivets are as big as saucers.

It is an old bomb shelter, the counselor tells me, built in the fifties to save our nation’s politicians. In case of nuclear attack, they were all supposed to get in their cars and drive down I-95.

I am too afraid to laugh.

The vault smells like a thrift store, like acres of musty crinoline, packed with racks of clothing for men and women. There are even a couple of dressing tables with mirrors framed in bulbs.

“Have a ball,” he says. “Create a person you’re not. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.” “And then what?”

“You will be challenged to demonstrate a lesson learned.”

And he leaves.

What is the “lesson learned”? I have been up almost thirty-six hours, am ravenously hungry, and tired of being hazed. Can’t we all be grown-ups? What is the point of not even telling us the rules? I stare at the racks. I am at a loss. The amber light is faint. Suits, dresses, handbags, hats — each piece of clothing holds a thousand identities.

And that, I realize finally, is the point. During the 7-Eleven scenario, the undercover identity Gail Washburn had cooked up for herself was “Ramona,” a working-class ghetto mom. She was tested on her hold over that identity, and she failed. When she walked out the door, they called, “Hey, Gail?” “Yes, sir?” “Good job.” And they cut her. The mistake was answering to “Gail.” She should have responded to “Ramona,” no matter what. She thought the gig was over, but that was not for her to judge. Believing it is over can get you killed. That is the lesson of the empty chair and the internal warning that caused me to think before answering to my own name. Gail’s mistake was a result of arrogance; an error made by a person who has always been a superstar and believes that she controls the game.

But uc work is different. It is the kind of game that possesses its own spontaneous intelligence. That is why they cannot tell you the rules. You make a move; the schematic changes. You change it. It changes with you. No past to revise, no future to predict, everything takes place in present time. Fluid. Treacherous. Addictive.

Hanging on a rack is a beat-up leather jacket from the sixties. Originally, it was a designer piece — creamy yellow, square pockets and a belt — but now it looks like Jackie Kennedy on the skids. Who would wear this jacket? From a single clue, I have seven minutes to invent another persona — someone criminal, the shadow side of me. Okay. She bought the jacket in a thrift shop. She doesn’t give a damn about the rules. Hates authority. Steals. She’s a soft touch for animals because she is a stray herself.

And more. She grew up in one of the older tracts in Long Beach, California (not far from Ana Grey) — cheap housing built in the forties for oil refinery workers, now a mixed ghetto of the unemployed. Her name is Darcy DeGuzman. Darcy because it is innocent and bouncy, although she is driven by the ruthlessness of a starving child. That’s the DeGuzman part. Ethnically ambiguous. (Filipina? Spanish?) Deserted by her parents, a pair of depressive alcoholics. Growing up, it was necessary to perform favors for boys. She learned how to use people. She’s streetwise and impulsive, lonely, young and foolish, and somewhere in a violent past, in a crumbling neighborhood where the working class has become obsolete, she killed somebody.