The Killing Hour Page 3

  The sound of running water came from her right; her roommate, Lucy, fresh off the PT course, was showering in the bathroom they shared with two other classmates. Behind her, came the sounds of gunfire and the occasional exploding artillery. The FBI Academy and National Academy classes were done for the day, but Quantico remained a busy place. The Marines conducted basic training just down the road. The DEA ran various exercises. At any given time on the sprawling 385-acre grounds, someone was probably shooting something.

  When Kimberly had first arrived here back in May, first stepped off the Dafre shuttle bus, she’d inhaled the scent of cordite mixed with fresh-cut lawn and thought she’d never smelled anything quite so nice. The Academy seemed beautiful to her. And surprisingly inconspicuous. The sprawling collection of thirteen oversized beige brick buildings looked like any kind of 1970s institution. A community college maybe. Or government offices. The buildings were ordinary.

  Inside wasn’t much different. A serviceable, blue-gray carpet ran as far as the eye could see. Walls were painted bone-white. Furniture was sparse and functional—low-slung orange chairs, short, easily assembled oak tables and desks. The Academy had officially opened its doors in 1972, and the joke was the decorating hadn’t changed much since.

  The complex, however, was inviting. The Jefferson Dormitory, where visitors checked in, boasted beautiful wood trim as well as a glass-enclosed atrium, perfect for indoor barbecues. Over a dozen long, smoked-glass corridors connected each building and made it seem as if you were walking through the lush, green grounds, instead of remaining indoors. Courtyards popped up everywhere, complete with flowering trees, wrought-iron benches, and flagstone patios. On sunny days, trainees could race woodchucks, rabbits, and squirrels to class as the animals bounded across the rolling lawns. At dusk, the glowing amber eyes of deer, foxes, and raccoons appeared in the fringes of the forest, peering at the buildings with the same intensity the students used to stare back. One day, around week three, as Kimberly was strolling down a glass-enclosed corridor, she turned her head to admire a white flowering dogwood, and a thick black snake suddenly appeared among the branches and dropped to the patio below.

  In the good news department, she hadn’t screamed. One of her classmates, a former Navy man, however, had. Just startled, he told them all sheepishly. Honestly, just startled.

  Of course, they had all screamed a time or two since. The instructors would’ve been disappointed otherwise.

  Kimberly returned her attention to the full-length mirror, and the mess that was her body now reflected there. Her right shoulder was dark purple. Her left thigh yellow and green. Her rib cage was bruised, both her shins were black and blue, and the right side of her face—from yesterday’s shotgun training—looked like someone had gone after her with a meat mallet. She turned around and gazed at the fresh bruise already forming on her lower back. It would go nicely with the giant red mat burn running up the back of her right thigh.

  Nine weeks ago, her five-six frame had been one hundred and fifteen pounds of muscle and sinew. As a lifelong workout junkie, she’d been fit, trim, and ready to breeze through physical training. Armed with a master’s degree in criminology, shooting since she was twelve, and hanging out with FBI agents—basically her father—all of her life, she’d strode through the Academy’s broad glass doors like she owned the joint. Kimberly Quincy has arrived and she’s still pissed off about September 11. So all you bad people out there, drop your weapons and cower.

  That had been nine weeks ago. Now, on the other hand . . .

  She’d definitely lost badly needed weight. Her eyes held dark shadows, her cheeks were hollowed out, her limbs looked too thin to bear her own weight. She looked like a washed-out version of her former self. Bruises on the outside to match the bruises on the inside.

  She couldn’t stand the sight of her own body. She couldn’t seem to look away.

  Inside the bathroom, the water shut off with a rusty clank. Lucy would be out soon.

  Kimberly raised her hand to the mirror. She traced the line of her bruised shoulder, the glass cool and hard against her fingertips.

  And, unbidden, she remembered something she hadn’t thought of for six years now. Her mother, Elizabeth Quincy. Dark, softly curling brown hair, fine patrician features, her favorite ivory silk blouse. Her mother was smiling at her, looking troubled, looking sad, looking torn.

  “I just want you to be happy, Kimberly. Oh God, if only you weren’t so much like your father . . .”

  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 wea
r 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.

  Recycled. It sounded so innocuous. Like some PC sports program—there are no winners or losers here, you’re just recycled.

  Recycling mattered. New agents feared it, dreaded it, had nightmares about it. It was the ominous word whispered in the halls. It was the secret terror that kept them going up over the towering Marine training wall, even now that it was week nine and everyone was sleeping less and less while being pushed more and more and the drills were harder and the expectations higher and each day, every day, someone was going to get awarded the Deadly Deed of the Day . . .

  Besides the physical training and academics, new agents worked on firearms. Kimberly had thought she’d have the advantage there. She’d been taking lessons with a Glock .40 for the past ten years. She was comfortable with guns and a damn good shot.

  Except firearms training didn’t involve just standing and firing at a paper target. They also practiced firing from the sitting position—as if surprised at a desk. Then there were running drills, belly-crawling drills, night-firing drills, and elaborate rituals where they started out on their bellies, then got up and ran, then dropped down, then ran more, then stood and fired. You fired right-handed. You fired left-handed. You reloaded and reloaded and reloaded.

  And you didn’t just use a handgun.

  Kimberly got her first experience with an M-16 rifle. Then she fired over a thousand rounds from a Remington Model 870 shotgun with a recoil that nearly crushed her right cheek and shattered her shoulder. Then she expelled over a hundred rounds from a Heckler & Koch MP5/10 submachine gun, though that at least had been kind of fun.

  Now they had Hogan’s Alley, where they practiced elaborate scenarios and only the actors actually knew what was going to happen next. Kimberly’s traditional anxiety dreams—leaving the house naked, suddenly being in a classroom taking a pop quiz—had once been in black and white. Since Hogan’s Alley, they had taken on vivid, violent color. Hot-pink classrooms, mustard-yellow streets. Pop quizzes splashed with purple and green paint. Herself running, running, running down long endless tunnels of exploding orange, pink, purple, blue, yellow, black, and green.

  She awoke some nights biting back weary screams. Other nights, she simply lay there and felt her right shoulder throb. Sometimes, she could tell that Lucy was awake, too. They didn’t talk those nights. They just lay in the dark, and gave each other the space to hurt.

  Then at six A.M. they both got up and went through it all over again.

  Nine weeks down, seven to go. Show no weakness. Give no quarter. Endure.

  Kimberly wanted so desperately to make it. She was strong Kimberly, with cool blue eyes just like her father’s. She was smart Kimberly, with her B.A. in psychology at twenty-one and her master’s in criminology at twenty-two. She was driven Kimberly, determined to get on with her life even after what happened to her mother and sister.

  She was infamous Kimberly, the youngest member of her class and the one everyone whispered about in the halls. You know who her father is, don’t you? What a shame about her family. I heard the killer nearly got her, too. She gunned him down in cold blood . . .

  Kimberly’s classmates took lots of notes in their eagerly awaited profiling class. Kimberly took none at all.

  She arrived downstairs. Up ahead in the hall, she could see a cluster of green shirts chatting and laughing—National Academy students, done for the day and no doubt heading to the Boardroom for cold beer. Then came the cluster of blue shirts, talking up a storm. Fellow new-agent trainees, also done for the day, and now off to grab a quick bite in the cafeteria before hitting the books, or the PT course, or the gym. Maybe they were mentoring each other, swapping a former lawyer’s legal expertise for a former Marine’s firearms training. New agents were always willing to help one another. If you let them.

  Kimberly pushed her way through the outside doors. The heat slammed into her like a blow. She made a beeline for the relative shade of the Academy’s wooded PT course and started run
ning.

  Pain, Agony, Hurt, the signs read on the trees next to the path. Suck it in. Love it!

  “I do, I do,” Kimberly gasped.

  Her aching body protested. Her chest tightened with pain. She kept on running. When all else failed, keep moving. One foot in front of another. New pain layering on top of the old.

  Kimberly knew this lesson well. She had learned it six years ago, when her sister was dead, her mother was murdered and she stood in a Portland, Oregon, hotel room with the barrel of a gun pressed against her forehead like a lover’s kiss.

  CHAPTER 3

  Fredericksburg, Virginia

  6:45 P.M.

  Temperature: 92 degrees

  TWENTY-YEAR-OLD TINA KRAHN had just stepped out the front door of her stifling hot apartment when the phone rang. Tina sighed, doubled back into the kitchen and answered with an impatient hello while using her other hand to wipe the sweat from the back of her neck. God, this heat was unbearable. The humidity level had picked up on Sunday, and hadn’t done a thing to improve since. Now, fresh out of the shower, Tina’s thin green sundress was already plastered to her body, while she could feel fresh dewdrops of moisture trickle stickily down between her breasts.

  She and her roommate Betsy had agreed half an hour ago to go anyplace with air-conditioning. Betsy had made it to the car. Tina had made it to the door, and now this.

  Her mother was on the other end of the line. Tina promptly winced.

  “Hey, Ma,” she tried with forced enthusiasm. “How are you?” Her gaze went to the front door. She willed Betsy to reappear so she could signal she needed a minute longer. No such luck. Tina tapped her foot anxiously and was happy her mother was a thousand miles away in Minnesota, and couldn’t see her guilty expression.

  “Well, actually I’m running out the door. Yeah, it’s Tuesday. Just the time zones are different, Ma, not the days.” That earned her a sharp rebuke. She grabbed a napkin from the kitchen table, swiped it across her forehead, then shook her head when it immediately became soaking wet. She patted her upper lip.