by April Smith
“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.
I slip my arms through the cool satin lining of the sleeves.
But I know it fits before I even have it on.
They put me in a van with blacked-in windows. We leave the Marine base and follow curving roads until we are at an outdoor mall. They give me forty dollars, a phone number, and an empty pistol secured with a plastic tie so it can be drawn but not fired.
I walk past a drugstore and a food mart. Normal citizens are wheeling carts filled with groceries, little kids in tow. It is 8:35 p.m. I intercept a pair of girls on their way into a fried chicken restaurant.
“I’m all turned around. How far is D.C.?”
“Oh,” says one, giving the stained-up jacket a stare, “you’re an hour and a half from D.C. If you exit here and go right, you’ll be on I-95.” I have my bearings. I’ve been deposited about thirty miles south of Quantico. Beautiful.
I sit outside a Dairy Queen and devour a milk shake and a double cheeseburger. A sign claims this franchise sells the most ice-cream cakes in Virginia.
I am having a wonderful time.
Two hours later, the mist has settled in but good, and I am shivering in a stupid tank top and miniskirt torn at the hem, which I chose to wear under the thin leather jacket. I cannot see anyone observing me, but the parking lot has been busy. Now it is deserted and everything has shut down except a twenty-four-hour gym. I walk over there and sit on a bench. I go in and use the restroom. I sit on the bench some more.
A woman trainer comes out of the gym. I noticed her when I ducked inside; she was working out with a man with a shaved head. The trainer is wearing a pink sweatsuit and carrying a workout bag. Black ponytail, military posture. An alarm goes off: She’s fit. She’s alert. She’s an agent.
“You haven’t seen a white truck circling around, have you?” she asks with a nasal twang.
“Haven’t seen one.”
“My husband’s supposed to pick me up.”
I nod. “I think I’m supposed to meet you.”
“Meet me for what?”
I don’t answer right away. We walk together.
“What’s your name and where are you from?” she asks.
I say it out loud for the first time: “Darcy, from California.” “California?” Her voice drops. “What are you doing here?” “Staying ahead of the cops.” I am making this up as I go along.
She seems to know it. “Crap,” she says.
“Why?”
She looks around nervously. I follow her gaze. A minivan of off-duty Marines has pulled into the entrance of the Days Inn motel. My grandfather stayed there when I graduated from Quantico as a new agent. As far as I knew, it didn’t have hookers cruising the parking lot then.
“You’ve come all the way from the West Coast? Where’s your car?” Car!
“I got a bunch of different rides.”
She lowers the bag between her feet, starts redoing her ponytail. A signal? I glance at the parking lot, but there is no movement.
“I know you’re not for real,” she hisses. “And life’s too short, honey.” It scares me. I feel Darcy falling away.
“There’s my husband,” she says, and now comes the white truck.
“We can do business.” I step along eagerly. “We’re here to do business, right?” “Give me a break,” she says contemptuously, and calls, “Lloyd!” as the truck noses up to the curb. “We can go now.” Game over?
Be cut? Never find the trash that killed Steve Crawford?
Not until they tell me to have a good trip home.
“Hey, bitch,” I call.
And Darcy DeGuzman, my new undercover identity, is born.
The woman turns on a dime, feet planted like a fuzzy pink ninja.
“Excuse me?”
“Get over here.”
“What?”
A shaved head sticks out of the truck. “Jennifer? We got a problem?” Right on cue. They’re wearing hidden microphones.
“Tell your old man to chill.” I swagger up to where she stands in the fluorescent wash of the drugstore window. “This is what I’m talking about.” I flash a twenty from the money I have been given, pretending it is counterfeit.
“So, Jennifer?” I say. “You got copies good as this? I know a buyer.” I feel ridiculous, acting out a role in the middle of real America. But she takes the bill and examines it closely. Maybe she is giving me a chance to be creative. Or, hell, maybe it really is counterfeit.
“Jennifer!” calls the guy in the truck.
The woman in pink raises her eyes and searches mine.
“I don’t know,” she says warily.
Great acting.
“I need a million dollars.” My confidence is building. “Top-quality.” Jennifer nods slowly. “I have a friend.”
I press the advantage. “One condition. I have to see the operation.” “No way. Are you nuts?”
I shrug. “That’s what my boss wants. He said to check out the source, make sure the bills aren’t traceable.” “They’re not traceable.”
“I can’t take your word.”
I give her apologetic. She understands. We are both in the same fix: men.
She shakes her head. “They’d never agree to something like that.” “Ask. Nicely.”
She hesitates. “Wait here.”
She confabs with the guy in the truck and comes back and tells me the “friend” wants $100,000 in cash, for the million in fakes.
We are inching toward a deal, but where to get the money? There is one more clue, waiting in my pocket.
I say I have to make a call.
She accompanies me to a pay phone, where I dial the number I was given in the van. A voice I do not recognize says, “Yeah?” I do not break character as I tell my “contact” to bring a hundred grand in cash to the mall. Twenty-five minutes later, a low-rider Chevrolet, driven by a black man I have never seen, pulls up and parks away from the lighted rim of stores. A hip-hop bass seems to fill the empty space of the parking lot.
“Be right back,” I tell Jennifer, aware that I am approaching an unknown individual alone.
The window is down. He watches with glittering eyes, fingers flicking the wheel. He is thirty, taut, wearing a do-rag and chewing gum. When I get close, I see his nose is running, and his hand trembles as he draws it across chapped lips.
“You it?” he says.
“Guess so.”
“You guess? Who sent you?”
He is out of the car. So we were to play another scene for Jennifer and her husband?
“Hey, motherfucker,” I muster. “What’s your problem?”
He is wired and I am slow. He slams my chest against the door and cracks my neck in a reverse chokehold.
“No disrespect,” I gasp.
“Don’t make me nervous.”
“It’s cool, it’s cool.”
I am feeling nauseous, seeing sheets of light.
His cell phone goes off. He glances at the number. “Fuck!” He lets me go, spins back inside the car, and hands a gold-embossed Gucci briefcase through the window.
“You best not be fucking with us.”
“No way, bro.”
My throat aches from where he brutally compressed the trachea. When I get back to the Academy, I am going to find out who this asshole is.
“It better be righteous blow, or I’m coming to get your kids.”
Blow? Wait a minute. The deal is counterfeit money, not cocaine. Wrong scenario. Right?
I stare at him.
“I know where you live.”
Then he is gone.
So are Jennifer, the white truck, and the man with the shaved head.
I stand in the middle of the deserted shopping center, gripping the Gucci briefcase the brother thrust at me, which is allegedly stuffed with cash. I’m hatching a brand-new plan: I will hop a ride down the highway and disappear into the Blue Ridge Mountains, marry a coal miner with large spadelike hands, and live in a hollow with a clan of hill people, who distrust and despise the U.S. government almost as much as I do.
My head is swimming with fatigue. What is the “lesson learned”? Did I learn it yet? From deep in the gnarly undergrowth surrounding the now-dead shopping center comes the croaking of toads. No counselors have stepped out of the shadows to bring me in. The game is on. Pick up the thread. Find Jennifer. Connect with the counterfeiters.
I go back to the pay phone, but nobody answers the number I just dialed.
Someone taps my shoulder. “Darcy?”
I take my time responding because I have to run a mental check and the gears are running slowly. Yes, I am Darcy. Darcy from California. A criminal — remember that.
I turn to face Jennifer. “Where the fuck were you?” “I wasn’t a hundred percent about your nigger friend,” she replies.
You redneck jerk! But, no. She’s pushing my multiracial buttons. Fight it.
“That fool is down.” I pat the Gucci case. “It’s all here.”
Then we are in the cab of the truck, with me between the two of them.
“Open it,” suggests the man with the shaved head. (Forty, weathered — Special Ops?) Jennifer has trained him well; his shoulders and biceps are huge, neck tattoo, and he must be local, because all he has on in the misty cold is a “wife beater” undershirt.
I flip the catch. The case appears to be filled with packets of real hundred-dollar bills. I smile complacently, but my heart is pumping. A narrow miss. I should have checked it right away; we could be looking at Monopoly money.
We pick up an access road that parallels the highway, then turn off, heading east through a maze of country lanes. The windows are tinted, but we seem to pass a development of modest homes separated by swatches of black woods before the truck pulls into the graveled driveway of a house with a sign that says NOTARY PUBLIC. Mr. Bodybuilder gets out fast.
“Make it quick.”
In the blur, I notice a magnetic picture stuck on the dashboard: a shot of Jennifer and three young children. “I’m coming to get your kids,” the black man said. Was he a real drug dealer who had gotten our phony identities mixed up?
Before I can ask about those kids, I am taken around the back and hustled down some steps to a basement where a counterfeit-printing operation is in full display.
They have a sweet high-definition laser color printer turning out leaves of counterfeit checks. There are shrink-wrapped packages of birth certificates and marriage licenses, piles of magazines in brown paper. For a moment, I am genuinely elated, as if we have actually busted a big interstate operation.
The guy who allegedly runs the show looks like a nerdy bean counter; he is wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a saggy red cardigan sweater. Balding. Potbelly. Sallow face moist with sweat.
Jennifer says, “This is Darcy, from California.”
He scans my getup, says in a taunting voice, “You look like shit from California.” A couple of lowlifes working the copier snicker.
“How about the bogus?” I ask impatiently.
Nobody answers. I notice Jennifer becoming agitated. She is stamping her foot and redoing the ponytail.
“We’re out of here,” says the man with the shaved head.
“Relax.”
“Sure.”
He exchanges a look with Jennifer.
Something has changed. Some note of tension has started to wail.
Addressing her, I say, “What’s the d
eal?”
But the guy with the shaved head answers. “Jennifer has to get home to the kids.” “Past their bedtime,” I agree. It is 3:00 a.m. “Can we cut to the chase?” The accountant indicates plastic bins lined up against the wall. A million bucks takes up a lot of room. I can tell just by looking they are down by half.
“You’re a little short there, dude.”
“When we finish this job, we’ll print more,” he assures me. “That’s the beauty of it. Sit down. This is pure Colombian. Free samples, limited time only.” The plastic bag is out. He cuts some lines on the cover of a pornographic magazine.
“Oh man.” I laugh. “I just did some.”
“More is better.”
“Go for it,” I say. “I’m done.”
“Bullshit,” he replies. “You’re a cop.”
“Get a life.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
I stare at the lines of coke. What is the parameter for—“Just because I politely decline your hospitality doesn’t mean I’m a cop. I hate cops.” Jennifer says, “Just do it, honey.”
— illegal activity?
“See,” I vamp, “we just met. So how do I know it’s not rat poison?” The accountant snorts a line and offers up the rest.
If I do it, will I be breaking the law?
“My boyfriend said I gotta keep my head clear—”
Will that invalidate — what did Diestal say about authorizing — The accountant whips a.38 automatic from an ankle holster and holds it to my head.
“Fuck you. I’ve never seen a cop do dope. You’re a cop.”
The hammer pulls back with a sound like rolling thunder. The steel barrel presses against my brain stem and at that moment I stop trying to figure out who is who, and what is true, and why I am falling through this cruel labyrinth.
Enlightenment at gunpoint.
“Jesus Christ,” pleads Jennifer.
“I’m doing it, okay?”
Cocaine — real cocaine — burns the lining of my nose and drips down my throat, and shortly my mind begins to hum a distracted tune while my heartbeat soars into the red zone: dreaming in bed and sprinting to the finish line at the same time.
Things have shifted again. Is it the drug, or is everyone else melting down also? I see a briefcase open on top of the copier. It is empty. But it is not the briefcase I brought. I hear the guy with the shaved head trying to explain.
