Lisa Gardner: The killing hour

Kimberly’s fingers remained on the mirrored glass. She closed her eyes, however, for there were some things that even after all these years she still could not take.

Another sound from the bathroom; Lucy raking shut the curtain. Kimberly opened her eyes. She moved hastily to the bed and grabbed her clothes. Her hands were trembling. Her shoulder ached.

She pulled on FBI-issued nylon running shorts and a light blue T-shirt.

Six o’clock. Her classmates would be going to dinner. Kimberly went to train.

Kimberly had arrived at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, the third week of May as part of NAC 03-05-meaning her class was the fifth new agent class to start in the year 2003.

Like most of her classmates, Kimberly had dreamt about becoming an FBI agent for most of her life. To say she was excited to be accepted would be a little bit of an understatement. The Academy accepted only 6 percent of applicants-a lower acceptance rate than even Harvard’s-so Kimberly had been more like giddy, awestruck, thrilled, flabbergasted, nervous, fearful, and amazed all in various turns. For twenty-four hours, she’d kept the news to herself. Her own special secret, her own special day. After all the years of educating and training and trying and wanting…

She’d taken her acceptance letter, gone to Central Park, and just sat there, watching a parade of New Yorkers walk by while wearing a silly grin on her face.

Day two, she’d called her father. He’d said, “That’s wonderful, Kimberly,” in that quiet, controlled voice of his and she’d babbled, for no good reason, “I don’t need anything. I’m all set to go. Really, I’m fine.”

He’d invited her to dinner with him and his partner, Rainie Conner. Kimberly had declined. Instead, she’d sheared off her long, dirty-blond hair and clipped down her fingernails. Then she’d driven five hours to the Arlington National Cemetery, where she sat in silence amid the sea of white crosses.

Arlington always smelled like a freshly mowed lawn. Green, sunny and bright. Not many people knew that, but Kimberly did.

Arriving at the Academy three weeks later was a lot like arriving at summer camp. All new agents were bundled into the Jefferson Dormitory where supervisors rattled off names and crossed off lists, while the new trainees clutched their travel bags and pretended to be much cooler and calmer than they really felt.

Kimberly was summarily handed a bundle of thin white linens and an orange coverlet to serve as her bedding. She also received one threadbare white towel and one equally threadbare washcloth. New agent trainees made their own beds, she was informed, and when she wanted fresh sheets, she was to pack up the old bunch and go to the linen exchange. She was then given a student handbook detailing all the various rules governing life at the Academy. The handbook was twenty-four pages long.

Next stop the PX, where, for the bargain-basement price of $325, Kimberly purchased her new agent uniform-tan cargo pants, tan belt, and a navy blue polo shirt bearing the FBI Academy logo on the left breast. Like the rest of her classmates, Kimberly purchased an official FBI Academy lanyard, from which she hung her ID badge.

ID badges were important at the Academy, she learned. For one thing, wearing ID at all times kept students from being summarily arrested by Security and thrown out. For another thing, it entitled her to free food in the cafeteria.

New agents must be in uniform Monday through Friday from eight A.M. to four-thirty P.M., they learned. After four-thirty, however, everyone magically returned to being mere mortals and thus could wear street clothes-excluding sandals, tube tops, or tank tops. This was, after all, the Academy.

Handguns were not permitted on Academy grounds. Instead, Kimberly checked her Glock.40 into the Weapons Management Facility vault. In return, she received what the new agents fondly referred to as a “Crayola Gun” or “Red Handle”-a red plastic gun of approximately the same weight and size as a Glock. New agents were required to wear the Crayolas at all times, along with fake handcuffs. In theory, this helped them grow accustomed to the weight and feel of wearing a handgun.

Kimberly despised her Red Handle. It seemed childish and silly to her. She wanted her Glock back. On the other hand, the various accountants, lawyers, and psychologists in her class, who had zero firearms experience, loved the things. They could knock them off their belts, drop them in the halls, and sit on them without shooting themselves or anyone else in the ass. One day, Gene Yvves had been gesturing so wildly, he whacked his Crayola halfway across the room, where it hit another new agent on the head. Definitely, the first few weeks, it was a good idea that not everyone in the class was armed.

Kimberly still wanted her Glock back.

Once piled high with linens, uniforms, and toy handguns, the new agent trainees returned to the dorms to meet their roommates. Everyone started out in the Madison and Washington dormitories, two people to a room and two rooms sharing a bath. The rooms were small but functional-two single beds, two small oak desks, one big bookshelf. Each bathroom, painted vivid blue for reasons known only to the janitor, had a small sink and a shower. No tub. By week four, when everyone’s bruised and battered bodies were desperate for a long, hot soak, several agents rented hotel rooms in neighboring Stafford purely for the bathtubs. Seriously.

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.