Read The Company We Keep for Free Online Page B

looks at meblankly. He doesn’t move, and I look at the driver for help. Finally the guy grumbles and moves his leg. I squeeze in, but there’s no place for my duffel bag, and I hold it on my lap.
    As we drive away from the Marriott, someone in the back tells a crude joke. I don’t laugh, and no one else does, either. I can only think it was meant for me. I close my eyes; this is going to be a very long one-and-a-half-hour drive, and I don’t even want to think about the coming months. I try to occupy my mind by going through the list of things they told me to bring, from a web belt to polarized shooting glasses. I also brought one of those all-in-one pocket tools, a Leatherman. I’m definitely my father’s daughter, the civil engineer who never went far from home without some sort of tool.
    We drive west on Route 50 in silence until the driver starts flipping through radio stations, probably more to keep awake than anything else. Just as it turns light, he stops in front of a grim little McDonald’s in a mini-mall. I let the guys go ahead, watching them stretch and walk across the parking lot. Their patched and sun-bleached fatigues and scuffed desert boots make them look like stragglers from some defeated army heading home. In fact, many of them were in the Gulf War.
    I wince when I catch one of the guys studying my laced Timberlands. I bought them the day before at the Tysons Corner mall, and there’s not a scratch on them. I’m already self-conscious about my hair pulled back in a ponytail, my new black military-chic rollneck sweater, and my tan cargo pants. The darts I sewed in the butt to hold them up make it look like I’m auditioning for a slightly more rugged J. Crew catalog.
    After another thirty-minute drive, the van turns off Route 50 onto a two-lane rural road. We pass a few white clapboard houses with enclosed porches and American flags out front. It’s late October, the trees are bare, and piles of copper leaves blow across the road. The van startles a deer that bolts into the underbrush.We turn down a gravel road where there’s a neatly painted sign that says simply PRIVATE . A mile farther down, the van comes to a guard blockhouse with a ten-foot drop barrier, a spinning yellow light on top. On either side of the blockhouse runs a chain-link fence with razor wire on the top. You can’t mistake the place for anything other than a government base.
    A guard in a camouflage uniform opens the van’s panel door, and we hold up our blue badges for him to see. He first checks to make sure the badge numbers match the numbers on the paper on his clipboard. (There are no names on CIA badges.) Then he matches the pictures on our badges with our faces. From somewhere on the base I hear a slow, throaty
dah-dah-dah
. A heavy machine gun.
    We drive into some pine woods and stop in front of a rickety wooden building with dirt floors. A wooden overhang serves as a roof for an outdoor classroom set with high metal chairs and waist-high tables.
    There’s a clump of students out front talking, Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands. In the middle of them is a girl in faded camies, her boots as scuffed as the guys, with a pair of yellow range glasses on top of her head. The only thing that sets her off is a pair of pearl earrings. It’s the first familiar thing I’ve seen all morning, and my nerves ease up a bit.
    I walk over, and she sticks out her hand to me. “Hi, Sunshine, I’m Cheri.”
    I must look at her a little funny. “Oh, sorry,” she says. “I got ‘Walking on Sunshine’ stuck in my head. So, where’d you learn to shoot?”
    She walks over to the coffee urn to get me a cup of coffee, and I follow her.
    “I have no idea what I’m doing here,” I say, in a voice only Cheri can hear.
    Cheri puts her hand on my shoulder. “If you need help, just ask.”
    Cheri tells me she’s here only for a refresher. For the last three years she’s been overseas, training foreigners to shoot. This course is