the next morning, after completing my three-hundred-meter sprint at Westwood Park in sixty seconds. It wasn’t as fast as I was hoping, but I still got a total of twenty-one points across all the tests, enough to put me in the same league physically as the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Mission accomplished.The white, twenty-story federal building looms less than a quarter mile from I–405, and the hum of the traffic is always audible from outside. The first nine floors of the building are taken up by Veterans Affairs and a few other smaller departments, with the FBI housed on floors ten to twenty. Level ten is accessible to the public and serves as our official reception point, but the rest of the FBI area is secured. Direct elevator access to floors eleven to twenty is via three clear portals in the building’s belly. The portals have two security doors—you step in and the door behind you closes, trapping you in the small space, the other door only opening after you’ve scanned your security card and entered the five-digit pin.
