The Unexpected Spy

by Tracy Walder

  The March 11 bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack on European soil since the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

  This felt more personal than either 9/11 or the altered al-Qaeda poison chart. I took it as a great failure in my career.

  * * *

  Sometime after the Madrid bombings, I dug up that FBI application I’d had lying around my apartment. On a Sunday when I wasn’t working, I filled it out and mailed it in. Again, I put it entirely out of my mind and left to work for a few weeks overseas. When I was home again I was interviewed by the FBI.

  It was only a few days later when I got the call: I’d been accepted to the FBI and needed to show up at Quantico, Virginia, on May 1.

  I loved the CIA. I had, and still have, incredible respect for the agency and the women and men who work there. I believe in what they do and know, for a fact, that they are saving lives every day. But I needed to save myself, too. I needed to have a home where I felt settled, safe, nested. Where I could see my family more regularly and date someone who wasn’t undercover. And more than that, I needed to let go of feeling responsible for every act of terror in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

  It was a heartbreaking choice. But I made it.

  THIRTEEN

  TRIGGER ALERT

  Quantico, Virginia May–August 2004

  It was like going to boot camp and law school while also studying human behavior and psychology. An all-or-nothing deal, too. In or out. Win or lose. If you could make it through the four and a half months of training at Quantico, there was a position with the FBI waiting.

  We were always referred to by our last names. I had ceased to be Tracy and was now Schandler. A name that sounds more masculine than feminine, but that was just as well, as getting through the training took a lot of … well, it took guts and other things normally associated with men but easily summoned up by women, too. As a group we were called NAC 04-13. This meant we were the thirteenth New Agent Class to start the FBI academy in the year 2004.

  I had given up the lease on my apartment near Langley. My mother had flown out and helped me sort, pack, and put the few things I was keeping in storage. My furniture was passed on to my cousin, who had recently moved to D.C. for his new job. When I drove to Quantico—an hour and a half straight into Virginia—I felt unburdened. I was hopeful and forward looking. Light, both emotionally and physically. With the radio turned up and the windows rolled down, I sang the whole way there. It was the first week of May, and the trees were lush and leafy; a continuous green blur going by. The wind whipped my hair into my face, into my eyes; I wished I’d pulled it into a ponytail. But not much could bother me right then. I was thrilled to be joining the FBI.

  Before parking the car, I circled the facilities so I could get a quick mental map of where I was. There were open fields, sniper ranges, and military barracks. The U.S. Marines train at Quantico, too. Surrounding it all were acres and acres of woods, trees, streams, and ponds. You could get easily lost there if you weren’t good with directions.

  I showed up at the exact time assigned to me for check-in. A woman gave me a map of the facilities and a key to my room. I would be housed on the second floor of the dorms with everyone else in my class. It was a multistory building, but trainees were forbidden to use elevators. I didn’t mind taking the stairs, but I knew there’d be some intense physical training and figured I wouldn’t want to march up eight or nine floors at the end of each day. At that moment, a room on the second floor felt like a great start to this new iteration of a career in counterterrorism. My first stroke of good luck.

  My roommate, Amelia, had already arrived. She had taken the bed by the window, which was fine with me. The place was set up like a typical dorm room: two single beds, two desks, one closet, and a little walking space in between.

  Amelia jumped off the bed and grabbed my bag as I entered. She had a big smile, big white teeth, and straight blond hair. She looked like she belonged on the campus of USC, like a Delta Gamma girl to the core. She had a Southern accent, Southern charm, and talked to me like we’d known each other forever. Or more like we would know each other forever. Good luck stroke number two: the best possible roommate.

  In the free time before the whole class was to meet up, Amelia and I sat on our beds, high-speed chatting as we caught each other up on our lives so far. I told her about the CIA; she thought that was the coolest thing ever. She mentioned that she had been working in the Park Service. And then she told me about a woman, Lisa, whom she referred to as her wife (gay marriage wasn’t legal then). They’d been together seven years, and Amelia was missing Lisa like mad already. She would keep her wife a secret, Amelia let me know, until she had sussed out the rest of our class. Based on the people I’d worked with in the CIA, I didn’t think this was going to be a problem. Though, what did I know?

  “I realize we haven’t even started training yet,” Amelia said. “But I’m already thinking about graduation, when you’ll meet Lisa. Y’all will love each other.”

  “Can’t wait!” I said, and the conversation was stopped as our suitemates, whose bedrooms were on the other side of the bathroom, popped in and introduced themselves.

  Donna and Molly were both CPAs. Donna was from Connecticut and Molly was from Seattle. Both sported deep tans, as if they’d just returned from a vacation in the Caribbean. I wondered just then if roommates were assigned according to how they looked: Amelia and I were blonds; Donna and Molly were well-tanned, well-toned women in their thirties.

  Donna and Molly seemed friendly. There were only six women in my class of 40, so the other two must have been down the hall somewhere. I’d meet them soon enough, but if these three turned out to be as good as they seemed, the female corps should prove to be pretty darn fabulous. This I considered the third stroke of great luck.

  Amelia was friendly and chatty with Donna and Molly, but I could tell she didn’t trust them yet as she never mentioned Lisa. Even when Donna and Molly each revealed that they were engaged to be married, Amelia didn’t say she was in a relationship. The suitemates didn’t ask me any questions about the CIA—they didn’t appear to be interested the way Amelia had been. This was fine with me. After living a secret life for so many years, I felt uncomfortable talking about myself and rarely did unless I was asked a direct or specific question.

  Just before we had to meet in the lecture hall, the last two women joined the party in our room. Betsy was blond and wore powder blue eye shadow, like someone from a seventies disco film. She bore a vague resemblance to Tonya Harding, the skater. She talked loudly about her life back home, the boyfriend she left behind, how cheap the sheets on the dorm bed seemed. All the while, Betsy never looked at me or even turned her body toward me. Josie, Betsy’s roommate, was quiet and watchful. Maybe she was dreading the fact that Betsy, the talker, was her roommate. Josie was Asian, which didn’t strike me as unusual until the six of us walked to the lecture hall to meet the other recruits.

  As a group, these trainees resembled a predominately white USC fraternity more than they did the people of any American city where they might soon be placed.

  Amelia and I sat and then realized there were name tags on the seats. We got up and each moved to where we’d been placed alphabetically in the amphitheater. Overhead were fluorescent lights and ceiling panels. I couldn’t help but wonder if there were cameras up there. I sat next to a guy named Ralph who was friendly and kind. He had the face of a former boxer: beaten-in looking. On the other side of me was Jay, from Kansas. He was laser focused on the instructor at the front of the room, as if he were already being judged on his performance.

  Cliches are rarely interesting, but that’s what the instructors at Quantico seemed like. They were what you’d expect: middle-aged, stocky white men with short hair who barked orders. Even the one female instructor mostly fit that stereotype. (She certainly never looked out for the six women trainees.)

  The first order barked was from Troy. We were instru
cted to stand up, one by one, and state our names and what we’d been doing—career wise—before we joined the FBI. Some people answered in a sentence. Many answered in a paragraph. A few answered in several paragraphs, as if they were Atticus Finch in the courtroom, showing the world their brilliance and commitment to doing good. When all that palaver was boiled down to single words, it sounded something like this: Lawyer, accountant, lawyer, accountant. Police officer. Lawyer, lawyer, lawyer. Accountant, accountant, accountant. Police officer. Park Service (Amelia). Lawyer, accountant. Former professional football player(!). Lawyer, accountant. Police officer. Lawyer, lawyer, lawyer.

  With very few exceptions, these were the law-and-order people of the world; the ones who want to make sure all the rules have been followed and everything adds up. I’m saying this in praise of them, in gratitude. We need these people to keep the country safe and running smoothly. But as I listened to the voices in the room, I couldn’t help but wonder if the system, the way things work in the United States, might be enhanced—problems more easily addressed—by bringing in people with more varied backgrounds who might better understand the multifabric, patchwork quilt that is the United States.

  The letter S is in the last third of the alphabet, so it wasn’t until this exercise was almost over that my turn came.

  “My name’s Tracy Schandler, and I was a counterterrorism operative in the CIA,” I said.

  “Where were you posted?” Troy asked.

  “War zone, overseas.” I paused for a second and then added, “I can’t be more specific.”

  I looked down at my desk to avoid the eyes staring at me. There was a moment of silence before I heard a grumbling male voice in the corner of the room say, “Yeah, and I worked as Superman on the planet Krypton.” A smattering of laughter followed, and then the lawyer next to me started speaking and I was able to disappear again.

  Once the introductions were over, Bart took the stage. He was our supervisory special agent, meaning we’d work directly with him throughout training.

  Bart had a throaty New York accent. The gold chain around his neck was thick enough that if someone grabbed it and twisted, Bart might be choked to death before the chain broke. With fat, jeweled fingers punctuating the air, Bart detailed how things were going to work over the next four months. It was clear he was in the final stretch of his career in the FBI, and he wanted no glitches, no burps, no hangnails, not even a hiccup.

  “Most of you understand order. You’re cops, lawyers. You know that if we don’t all play by the same rules, chaos ensues.” Then Bart looked at me. “This isn’t the CIA, Schandler. No going rogue.”

  I smiled; my usual reaction to adversity.

  “Everything we do here,” Bart continued, “we do right. There are no undercover SNAFUs. In the FBI, unlike the CIA, we get the job done.”

  I started making a mental list: all the poison plots and bombing plots the CIA had stopped. Operations that the public never had and never would hear about. It was enough for me to know about them. I didn’t feel the need to prove anything to Bart.

  Next Bart splattered the room with blathering misogyny. He said it was going to be hard for the ladies in the room to keep up with the men, but that’s what they’d have to do if they were to make it through the academy. The more Bart spoke, the more I imagined that he believed that women should not be a part of the FBI.

  I felt sorry for Bart’s wife and kids, whom he’d mentioned earlier, who’d had to tolerate—and probably obey—this man for years. Following orders isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But following orders from someone with less than stellar intelligence is painful. I kept smiling, and Bart kept talking. He wrapped it all up with a simple declaration that the CIA was responsible for September 11.

  After Bart’s baffling speech, we were issued computers, backpacks, and our uniforms. For daily work, cargo pants and a blue polo shirt. For physical training, blue elastic-waist shorts and a gray t-shirt. The only items of clothing we’d been instructed to bring were suits, the kind of thing we’d wear on the job once we’d graduated. And footwear: boots and running shoes. I brought the boots I’d been wearing at the last war zone where I’d been stationed. When I packed them, I couldn’t help but look at the tread on the bottom, still caked with golden sand and rust-colored dirt from a faraway and dangerous place.

  Once we’d collected our uniforms, we were each given an FBI baseball hat, a bulletproof vest, a holster, handcuffs, and an orange dummy gun that was the same size and weight as the gun we’d carry as agents.

  “Your gun is part of your body now,” Bart said. “You walk, eat, piss, and shit with that gun. Get used to it. Learn how to sit and move so that no one notices it’s there. And ladies—” Bart looked directly at me. “I don’t care if doesn’t match your outfit. I don’t care if it doesn’t match your hairdo. Wear the gun!”

  I glanced two rows down toward Amelia. She widened her eyes at me, I rolled mine. Did Bart really think that someone who voluntarily joined the FBI would even think about their orange fake gun matching or not matching the FBI-issued training uniform? And hairdo? How do you match a gun to a hairdo anyway? Also, who says “hairdo”?

  * * *

  Amelia and I were instantly inseparable. She could do a perfect imitation of Bart that never failed to make me laugh. Donna and Molly, on the other hand, seemed entirely unbothered by the daily insults hurled at the women in our group by Bart and the two other instructors, Ted and Marge. Josie never spoke, so I couldn’t figure out how she felt about any of this. And Betsy, with the daily smear of shimmering blue across her eyes, also appeared unbothered by the blatant misogyny. In fact, she’d adopted Bart’s apparent dislike of me and often brought up the CIA with a condescending eye roll as if I had simply invented my past.

  “We’ve just got to get through this,” Amelia said on day five, as we were getting ready for our first physical fitness test (PFT).

  “Yup,” I said. “As long as we have each other as venting partners, this will be fine.” I double-knotted my running shoes.

  “It’s like prison,” Amelia said. “Just have to do the time and then we’ll be free.”

  I laughed. “Uh, yeah, it’s really nothing like prison.” I’d seen plenty of prisons and prisoners in the Middle East and Africa. If you took the time I had to pee in a bucket in a closet, added unexpected beatings and intermittent rape, and then a continuous fear for one’s life (like an unending, high-stress fever), then you might be approaching what I’d seen in prisons.

  Amelia smiled. “Well, it’s close!”

  “Nope.” I smiled back and stood at the door, waiting for her to tie her shoes. “Not even close.”

  “Okay.” Amelia yanked her laces tight. “But I’m really effing miserable and feel like they are really effing nasty to us.”

  “I’ll agree to that,” I said.

  As we walked to the field where we were to take the PFT, I told Amelia about the ideas that had been percolating in my mind since our first encounter with Bart. I started with the story of having been bullied in school by girls. That experience, in part, had instilled a desire to be a teacher as a way to change the way women treat each other, change how they’re treated by others, and, in that way, change the world. Within the agency, I was able to thrive and achieve with little resistance to the fact that I am a woman (yes, foreign agencies were rattled by my presence, but the people in the CIA were not). This gave me a sense of myself, of my power; it was something I’d never felt before. Now, in the FBI, the cycle of meanness and oppression was up and running again. This time, I wouldn’t stand for it. I would resist. And I was determined to find a way to change it.

  “What if you taught in a school, like you’d always planned?” Amelia asked. We had reached the field and needed to shut down the conversation soon.

  “I was thinking about that,” I said. “I’d want to teach girls. Empower them to change the world so that places like this are packed with women who—”

  Like a movie sce
ne, Marge pointed toward me at that very moment and shouted, “Schandler! This isn’t a coffee klatch, shut your trap and get over here!”

  Amelia burst out laughing. I held it in, and we jogged to get in our places.

  The first part of the PFT was sit-ups. With someone kneeling at our feet—hands on the tongues of our shoes—we had to do as many sit-ups as possible in a minute. This was no problem for me. It wouldn’t be a problem for me still, today. After sit-ups we did the 300-meter sprint. I was running every day at the time, but I just couldn’t sprint very well. Fortunately, I was able to pass the sprinting test, though by a hair. Push-ups were next. If I stopped typing right now and dropped to the floor, I wouldn’t be able to do a single one. But at that time, by dint of determination and maybe rage at Bart, Ted, and Marge, I did 19. This was the minimum number required to pass the push-up test. The 1.5-mile run was next. I wasn’t worried about it and just ran as I usually did, though with a little more fire under my feet. Amelia passed everything but the run. She would be on lockdown at Quantico, unable to leave the premises—even on the weekend—until she passed the test. And if she failed again, she was out.

  “I won’t let you fail,” I told her as we walked to the showers. “Just come running with me every morning before classes start.” This was more of a sacrifice than she knew, as I needed that running time, those long stints when there were no voices around and just the gentle ch-ch-ch sound of my feet on the ground, for peace of mind. In the CIA, there was no stress, worry, or anxiety that couldn’t be temporarily quelled by a long run. The rhythm, like an external heartbeat, puts everything in my mind and body at rest.