Finally, Special Agent Kazinsky took pity on her, and got the Quantico staff to pull her out before she became completely disoriented.
She reported back to the Academy the following day, in a worse physical and mental state than before, and with her resignation written down on a sheet of the Bureau's own memorandum paper.
Dan Kazinsky took it from her, read it slowly, then folded it and put it in his pocket.
'Agent Gravatt,' he said. 'I'm not concerned that you ran away, as taking evasive action is warranted. However, in the real event you are attempting to take control of, Miss Clegg obtained a witness description of the perpetrator that ensured his conviction and execution.
You did not. You
may take twentyfour hours' leave and report back here tomorrow at this time.'
'Thank you, sir,' Teresa said, and went home and called Andy. They were due to be married within two months. She told him what she had done, and what Kazinsky had said. Andy, who had already trained with extreme experience, was able to help her through this difficult time.
On her next visit to Cleveland, she did not run away but stood beside the door as Santiago rushed out, and tried to see his face clearly. He shot her.
Next time she tried to get a glimpse of Santiago, then threw herself facedown on the sidewalk.
Not only did she fail to get the description, she was shot in the back of the head as she lay there.
Next time she tackled Santiago, hurling herself at him and trying to force him to the ground.
She tried to use the disabling techniques in which she had been trained. There was a brief, violent scuffle, at the end of which she was shot again.
Each time the experience was worse, because although Teresa retained her own identity she never believed she had actually become Maryjo Clegg the fright, pain and trauma of being repeatedly shot and killed were almost impossible to handle. The hours of physical and mental recovery that followed the extreme experience were gradually extending to two days; this was not unusual for a trainee, but it used up expensive time. She knew she had to get this right or flunk the course.
On her next extreme, she did as Kazinsky had repeatedly advised, and tried to let Maryjo's own reactions control her behaviour. In the actual incident, which had really occurred as depicted, Maryjo of course had had no warning that an armed man was going to burst out of the bank, and she would not have reacted until something happened.
Teresa barely had time to adjust to the shift into Mary~ jo's identity. She took four steps along the street, then Santiago appeared in the doorway. Maryjo turned towards him in horror and surprise, saw the gun he was holding, and Teresa's instincts took over. She ducked away, and Santiago shot her. This time it took two bullets to kill her.
Teresa finally got it right on her seventh extreme. She allowed Maryjo to react as she would, turned in surprise as Santiago appeared, faced him, then raised an arm and stepped forward.
Santiago fired at her, but because the instin ctive attack by an unarmed passerby took him by surprise, he missed. Teresa felt the heat of the discharge on her face, was stunned by the loud report of the gun, but the bullet went past her. At last she ducked, and as she fell to the ground she saw Santiago sprinting away in the brilliant sunshine. A few moments later two bank security guards appeared: one of them stooped to help her. Shortly after this the extreme experience scenario ended, and Teresa had survived with her description.
Over the next few weeks the extreme experience course continued, and Teresa was steadily progressed by Kazinsky and the other instructors from one type of event participant to the next: from witness to nonwitnessing bystander, to victim, to security guard, to perpetrator, to police officer or federal agent. In one case she was a hostage; in another she had to negotiate.
The hardest cases to deal with were the ones in which the developing incident was not at all obvious, and the instructors set the scenario to run for a long time before the main event occurred. In one notable sequence Teresa was in the role of undercover police Officer, staking out a bar in suburban San Antonio in 1981. She had to sit in wait for nearly two hours, knowing that the first chance would be
the only one. When the gunman burst into the bar he was a man from Houston called Charles Dayton Hunter, who was at the time one of the Bureau's Ten Most Wanted Teresa got him with her first shot.
Later, she moved on to direct access with some of the surviving participants. For instance, she was taken to Cleveland to meet Maryjo Clegg a month after completing the Santiago extreme. Maryjo was by then in her late sixties, a retired city employee who clearly welcomed the opportunity to earn a few extra dollars working for the Bureau in this way. She appeared refreshingly untraumatized by her horrific experience back in 1962, and minimized her contribution to the arrest and execution of Willie Santiago, but Teresa found it disconcerting to have shared so intimately this woman 1 s terror and, several times, death.
CHAPTER 4
Nick Surtees was living in London at the time of the Bulverton massacre. In the trauma of subsequent events he later found it difficult to remember what he had been doing during the actual day, except that he knew he would have been working as usual at his office near Marble Arch.
At the end of the afternoon he was driving home along the elevated section of Westway, part of the A40, heading out of London towards his house in Acton. It was a sweltering day in early June, and he drove with the car windows open and the cooling fan blasting at him. The radio was on, the volume adjusted as he preferred it, just below the level of perfect audibility.
He liked to think when he was driving: not great or important thoughts, but a general state of reflectiveness, helping him wind down after the stresses of the day, half his mind turned inwards, the other half coping with the car and the traffic conditions. If the radio was loud it interfered with this, whether it was with music, the blathering of disc Jockeys or the more urgent tones of newsreaders. So he had just enough sound on for a relevant word or a phrase to catch his attention: 'drivers in West London' and 'the elevated section of Westway' were common ones anything that he was already mentally tuned into.
That evening one word came unexpectedly out of the background noise: 'Bulverton'.
He reached immediately across the dashboard to turn up
the volume, but another telling phrase struck before he could do so: 'the quiet seaside town in Sussex has been devastated . . .'
Then he heard it at full volume: the newsreader said news was coming in that a gunman had gone berserk in the centre of town, shooting at anyone he saw, or at any vehicle that moved.
The situation was still unclear: police had so far been unable to disarm the man, or prevent him from carrying on, and his present location was unknown. The death toll was thought to be high. The news was still breaking; more would be brought as soon as possible. Meanwhile, members of the public were warned to stay away from Bulverton.
Another presenter then launched into an obviously unscripted talk on the state of gun control in the country, the blanket prohibition on most types of gun, how sports shooters' lobby groups had failed to get the law changed, and the unsuccessful appeals that had been made to European courts. He was interrupted by a phonedin report from a BBC reporter described as 'on the spot'. In reality she was phoning from Hastings, several miles away, and in spite of her compelling tone of voice had little to add. She said she thought the number of dead had reached double figures. Several policemen were believed to be amongst the casualties. The presenter asked her if any children were thought to be involved, and the reporter said she had no information on that.