by Tracy Walder
After dinner, Victor convinced Bernard and me to go to a local amusement park. Like most kids who grow up in Southern California, Disneyland was part of my life, a familiar, seasonal joy. So I never say no to an amusement park.
This one was prettier than I imagined. More park than amusement. There were over a thousand Christmas trees covered in twinkling lights. In fact, the whole place was lit up: every building, ride, bush, and tree outlined with glittery lights, like a three-dimensional scene from a Lite-Brite toy. Or like the Main Street Electric Parade at Disney, where every float was lit the way the gardens were. The three of us walked around for a bit before Bernard decided to take a cab back to the hotel. He was worried about our presentation the next morning and wanted to get some sleep. Victor and I split up as he wanted to grab a drink in one of the many restaurants, and I preferred to continue walking through what felt like a magical wonderland.
Holiday shops had been set up along the walks, and behind them was what looked to be an illuminated mosque. It was like an Arabian Christmas village (there is a very small Orthodox Christian minority in some Arab countries, so it’s not totally off base!). I’d already grown to love Islamic designs and architecture: the Hershey kiss–shaped building tops, the pointed arches in doorways, the complex patterned tilework. It is a highly mathematical aesthetic that I find deeply appealing. I admired the lit mosque for a good long time. Its presence in the park seemed wonderfully fitting for my life at the time: a Jewish American intelligence officer hunting Islamic extremists, wandering through a Christmas market with illuminated minarets in the background in Europe.
When the cold began biting through my down jacket, I went to one of the warming stations, which looked to me to be a giant trash can with a fire burning in it. I scooted in with the crowd, then saw Victor on the other side of the fire. We laughed when we spotted each other. Victor and I walked around a bit more, taking in all the sights until the park closed at midnight.
By the time I was brushing my teeth in the hotel room, it was after 1:00 a.m. The next morning we were to give our presentation, but I knew the material as well as I’d ever known anything in my life. Better even. I could have given you the date of birth and exact geo-coordinates for X and YY before I could have given you my mailing address in Virginia. Sleep, or lack of it, wasn’t going to change that.
* * *
Early in the morning, a page led the three of us down a long, empty corridor to the room where we were to make our presentation. No one spoke. I was going over what I would say and assumed Bernard and Victor were doing the same.
We were all three in suits. Victor, who was one of the sharpest dressers at the agency, looked especially crisp that day, with a stiff pocket handkerchief and gold knot cuff links on his glowing white shirt.
We entered the conference room near the stage. I looked up at the stadium seating, at all the faces staring down at us. I felt shaky, outnumbered, like an outsider in the worst sense. I stood out. And not in a way that they—the crowd—would think was good. I was certain that what I had to offer was as valuable as what anyone else in the spy world had to offer. But after the dinner in the hotel last night, I was acutely aware of the three strikes against me. They were big strikes, too. Glowing red neon Xs on my forehead. 1. I was young. 2. I was American. 3. I was female.
Victor barely glanced at the crowd, they weren’t intimidating to him. He confidently held his head high, and walked to the stage with Bernard and me following. Victor introduced himself and then told the group about the progress the CIA was making and the reliability of our sources. Next he introduced me with flowery praise, citing my work in bringing down two WMD plots and the fact that I had identified and charted the key leaders for each poison cell around the globe. Victor stepped aside and I approached the podium. My hands were shaking, so I pushed them into the slanted top of the podium. I had to get over my fear, my “otherness,” quickly if I wanted to do my job right. I closed my eyes, for just a second, then opened them and let my vision go out of focus, eliminating the audience as I spoke. Within seconds I forgot that I was of a category that everyone seemed to dismiss. I forgot my fear. I forgot how much Americans were resented just then. And I said what I needed to say with the immense power of all my hard work and the work of the Poison Trio behind me. For a few moments, I felt unstoppable.
* * *
Several days after our presentations, Victor, Bernard, and I had dinner at a charming restaurant not far from the hotel. Like just about everything in this city, the small brick building was outlined in tiny white lights. We sat by the window, and I held the menu close to the lit candle on the table to better read it. From what I’d seen so far, these people ate a lot of pork, which was something I’d never eaten in my life. This was a point of commonality for me and the terrorists I was tracking. I was feeling slightly self-conscious about my no-pork diet and was hoping there’d be something else offered on the menu.
There was a fish dish with a complicated name. Victor translated it for me—it sounded like the title of a love song—I laughed and decided that that was what I’d have. Victor and Bernard ordered pork.
As soon as the waitress walked away with our orders, we started talking. And we didn’t stop. For over three hours, we cross-referenced and built up our collective intelligence. We uncovered and filled in holes for one another until we had clearly mapped an entire system with names, cities, and intentions. The only thing that made this more thrilling, more glorious than usual, was the fact that I was getting this information along with one of the best meals I’d ever had abroad. You’d think it would be hard to have these two experiences simultaneously: unraveling terrorist cells while biting into steamed whitefish, along with breaded and fried whitefish, on buttered toast with shrimp, cucumber, caviar, and lemon. But it wasn’t hard at all. Instead, it was a joyful confluence of new, fresh tastes along with new, fresh intelligence that almost made me want to push back my chair and applaud.
The morning we were to fly back to Langley, I set my alarm for 4:30 a.m., got up, showered, and put on warm running clothes. By 5:00 a.m., I was on the dark street in the below-zero temperature, with a hotel map in my hand and a mental route in my mind. My breath chugged out little white clouds and the cold zapped my nose like little electric shocks.
Just as I was about to turn back, I came across a statue of a winged woman with claws for feet, perched on the edge of a rock. I stopped to look at her, my hands on my knees, panting as the wind blew tears from my eyes that quickly froze on my cheeks. I had read about this statue before and knew that she had suffered multiple attacks and abuses over the years. Everything from being declawed, to being decapitated (twice!), to being decorated with a hijab and spray-painted a new color.
I examined her face. She looked a little sad, or anxious. Though maybe that look was determination: the courage to persist.
It didn’t occur to me until later, when I was on the flight home, that the statue represented a version of me. She was one girl—woman—on whom some people projected their beliefs, ideas, anger, conceptions, and misconceptions. But she was impervious to it all; she appeared steadfast in spite of the bullying she’d endured. And no matter what people did to me—dismiss me because of my nationality or gender, refuse to speak to me at dinner, ignore my requests to arrest someone—I would carry on. I would endure it all. In fact, I’d do better than endure it. I’d move forward and push it behind me, rendering all those people, all those obstacles, all those judgmental words, utterly irrelevant. I’d show up in countries where America, Americans, and Jews were hated. I’d show up in countries where armies of terrorists wanted to kill Westerners.
I’d wear red lipstick, curl my hair, and stand firmly on the rock of my convictions.
EIGHT
CRASH AND BANG
Undisclosed Location, USA March 2003
It was like camp. But maybe more fun. And with far fewer campers: ten guys and two women. Oh, and the only singing that happened was when I was alone in my
car, listening to the scratchy radio that barely got a signal at the remote location where the CIA trained operatives in everything from firearms to surveillance.
I did bring a blow dryer, mascara, and lipstick, but I didn’t bring a curling iron or any nice clothes. Just jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, and sweatpants. This would be my first stay at what is commonly called The Farm. Because of the urgency and intensity of my work following the September 11 attacks, I wasn’t doing things in the agency’s usual order. Rather than the normal three-month residency at The Farm, I’d be dropped in a week here and a week there, accumulating the skills I needed when there were breaks in my work schedule.
It took a while to get to The Farm from my apartment in Virginia. The entrance was guarded by a gate and a guard with a machine gun strapped across his chest. Gravel crunched and popped under the tires as I drove into the facility. The dense woods and towering trees created a dark and shadowy canopy.
I parked the car outside the main building and walked inside. An efficient woman in a small office gave me my room number in the dorm and a map of The Farm. Everything was so spread out that to get from one building to the next, you had to drive.
The dorm was much more spartan than the one in which I had lived at USC the year before I moved into the Delta Gamma house, but at least here I had my own bathroom. There was a toilet, a plastic-molded shower, and a dingy little sink with a mirror that was chipped in the corner. I stood in the bathroom, glanced at myself in the mirror, and shrugged. This was a rare moment, maybe the first since my freshman year in college, when I had nothing to do. As was my habit, I had arrived early, the first person to show up for the weeklong course called Crash and Bang.
Classes wouldn’t officially be starting until the next day. That afternoon I hung out in my box of a room, with its cot, dresser, and pocked tiled ceiling, and unpacked the few things I had brought. Then I changed my clothes so I could go for a run.
The air was cool and felt good on my cheeks as I ran down a dirt road through the woods. I took a turn, ran for a while, and then stopped. The trees all looked alike, and the vines and shrubs growing on the damp, loamy ground all looked alike. It would be easy to get lost. I looked back to where I’d turned, marked it in my memory, and then kept running. The runner’s high set in, and I started to float above myself, envisioning a map of the woods, me a moving dot along the path. I was my own drone, tracking myself, so I could see myself safely back to the dorm.
It wasn’t easy to sleep with the scratching sound of rats scurrying between the walls and behind the ceiling tiles. I startled awake several times, just waiting for a square of the ceiling to come sailing down on me, being ridden by a rat as if on a surfboard. When the twelve of us met in the mess hall for breakfast, talk of the rats dominated the conversation. I felt like one of the lucky ones, as there weren’t any rat droppings in the corners of my room.
After the rat chat, we settled around a couple of tables to eat. I rarely talk when in a group and didn’t here as usual. Instead I ate my eggs and toast and studied the 11 people with whom I was to take this course. All of them had been stationed at Langley, and not one of their faces was familiar to me. They all looked older than me—that was often the case then. If we hadn’t been sitting at the mess hall at The Farm, you might have thought this was the softball team for a bank: tellers, bank managers, the slightly overweight man who does investing for the people with big accounts. One guy may have been gay, but nobody ever asked, nobody ever cared. Because of the importance of what we were doing, because of the intensity of the work, the CIA felt like a true meritocracy. If you could do a brilliant job, then you were necessary. Nothing outside of that—not race, religion, or sexual orientation—mattered.
After breakfast we assembled in a classroom with Buck, the director of Crash and Bang. Buck was short and stocky, with a shaved head. He had to have been around fifty years old, but I imagined he could tackle and kill a team of armed men charging him. Along the length of his forearm was a ropey pink scar the width of my wrist. It looked like he’d been skinned with a dull razor blade.
“See this?” Buck held up his arm and waved it slowly from side to side. “That’s what you get when you let your arm dangle out the window of a car.” Buck laughed, and we did, too.
“Seriously?” Annie, the only other woman, asked. I liked Annie. She had short hair, spoke in short sentences, and seemed as direct as a pointed arrow.
“Yes, seriously. So, don’t ever dangle your arm out a window.” Buck nodded and went on.
We watched some movies that day. It felt a bit like junior high or high school when your teacher turned off the lights and you watched a movie in class. No matter what grade you were in, there were the kids who sat in the back who felt they were undetectable in the dark as they whispered, or passed notes, or doodled in their notebooks. I wasn’t one of them. Always the good girl, I did what the teacher expected. And no one in this group was one of those kids, either—or at least not now. We were all grown up, working to save the world.
After lunch that day, we were each handed the keys to the cars we’d drive during our week at The Farm. All were white Ford Focuses. Buck instructed us to meet at the track—an actual full-sized car racing track—where we’d do a few speed laps and sudden stops. Most people got in their cars and drove off. Buck got in the passenger side of a car belonging to a guy named Nick. I ran to the window. Buck’s arm was hanging out. I pointed at his forearm, and he laughed and pulled it in.
“Hey,” I said. “I had back surgery a while ago, so I’m going to drive back to the dorm and put on a brace. That okay?”
“Yup. But hurry,” Buck said. “And there’re no speed limits and no other cars but ours, so you can hustle down that dirt road as fast as you want.” Buck smiled, then he and Nick took off after everyone else who had already left.
I got in my car, stuck the key in the ignition, and then glared down at the stick shift. I’d never driven a stick. Never even tried.
My heart thumped a single knock, like a fist on a door. I whispered and muttered to myself as I examined the three pedals. Brake. Gas. And … oh yeah, the clutch. This had to be the clutch. I ran though movies, TV shows, afternoons with friends in Los Angeles, trying to re-create the image of someone driving a stick shift. I put my foot on the brake and started the car. Then I tried to move the stick shift into first. It wouldn’t go.
“Clutch?” I said aloud, then pushed it in with my left foot and wiggled that stick and ball until I’d moved it into first. I pushed the gas, with my foot still on the clutch, and nothing happened. I pulled my foot off the clutch, and the car jerked once and then died. After about five tries, I figured out that you ease off the clutch while you ease onto the gas. I stalled out three more times before I figured out how to get to second gear. Third came easily, and by the time I had reached the dorm, I was okay with moving forward, but I wasn’t sure how to stop. I cruised in a couple circles and then swerved to miss the single car parked near the dorm. Next, I pulled onto the small patch of grass in front of the dorm, where I pushed the clutch in, threw the stick into neutral, and slammed on the brakes so that I suddenly stopped. I felt triumphant!
I left the keys in the car, ran into the dorm, and pulled out the black Velcro-bound brace that I’d removed from my glovebox and shoved into my suitcase for use at The Farm. I’d rarely worn it the past year, but now seemed like a wise time to put it on.
The brace was barely noticeable under my black Gap t-shirt. It felt and looked sort of like a corset. I rushed out of the dorm, my torso firm, and got back in the car. I was parked on the lawn facing the dorm. With my foot on the clutch, I started the car. Then I stared at the stick shift. R had to be reverse, of course. But, no matter how hard I pushed, no matter how hard my foot was on that clutch, I couldn’t get the stick to slide into R. Buck didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would tolerate more than a couple minutes of delay. I had no choice. I pushed the gear into first, hit the gas, and tore across the lawn, rele
asing a spray of shredded grass in my wake. I shifted all the way up to fifth gear on that bumpy, gravelly road and came to a screeching stop on the track, where the other Fords were lined up. I was only a few minutes late.
That afternoon we raced around the track, two cars at a time so we wouldn’t hit each other. The goal for the day was to go from zero to … well, as fast as you could, before coming to a complete stop. I was thrilled there was no reverse involved, and so I happily stomped on the gas, zooming fast enough to shift into fifth, before I’d boot the clutch, throw the shift into neutral, and brake so hard that the car would spin in circles. It was like a roller coaster and the Mad Tea Party ride at Disneyland at once.
Each time I stopped, when the car finally stilled, I’d burst out laughing. After so much serious work, after focus so intense that I sometimes forgot to eat or even drink water, it felt great to spin circles in a Ford Focus. It was a relief to feel like I was just playing.
When Annie and I were sitting with a few others, including Buck, on the side of the track watching two guys zoom and stop, Annie said, “It doesn’t look as scary as it feels.”
“I wasn’t scared,” I said. I had figured the CIA wasn’t going to invest all this time and money into me and then let me die on a racetrack in the middle of the woods.
“Buck,” Annie said. “Anyone ever die doing this?”
“Not on my watch,” Buck said.
If I was fearless before, I was even more so now. Buck made me feel immortal, even in a car I had yet to master.
The next day there were more movies and classroom work. We met the other Crash and Bang instructors, Judy, Larry, and Mo. They were each just as tough looking as Buck. Defensive driving must be a skill that attracts a certain kind of person: the kind who seems to be made of hard rubber and doesn’t mind a few gaping, visible scars.