I'm X-rayed, patted down and photographed, and my mobile phone and laptop are placed into a secure locker, just in case they conceal secret recording devices.
An FBI agent in a crisp, black suit welcomes me at the ground floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. This fit, serious, square-jawed counter-terrorism specialist has been assigned the task of guiding me through the FBI museum, past evidence gathered at Ground Zero of the World Trade Centre attacks.
The museum is empty apart from us, and it is eerily quiet. The public have been kept out since the FBI itself became a terrorist target.
My mission here is to examine the FBI's fight against corporate crime, not terrorism, but in the FBI's world view, the two are closely intertwined. It believes the failure to curb corruption is one of the factors that fuels extremism, and prompted the Arab Spring. 
It's why the FBI's corporate corruption investigators act with a zealousness and urgency absent in Australia. Australia is leagues behind the United States when it comes to investigating corrupt multinational companies that bribe their way to success in Third-World countries.
This fact is even more concerning given that US prosecutors acknowledge that even they aren't getting it right, and need to do more to send home-grown corporate crooks to jail. If the US regime needs a jolt, Australia's system needs a triple bypass.
Recently, when the chief executive of the Australian Securities Exchange, Elmer Funke Kupper, stood down to deal with a police investigation over an alleged international bribery case, the corporate cop even said what a "sad loss" it was. Not one Australian executive has been jailed for paying a bribe overseas, despite the introduction in 1999 of specific laws banning this practice.
The impunity enjoyed by white-collar crooks in Australia will be highlighted for me a few weeks after my trip to the FBI.
Outside a European airport, I'll be met by a whistleblower in a black limousine and taken to a steak restaurant. There, I'll begin the second part of my overseas mission: exposing corporate corruption far worse than anything uncovered by the recent royal commission on union graft.
George "Ren" McEachern is the federal agent waiting for me in a sterile meeting room along with another FBI official who never says their name and writes down everything I say.
McEachern, an aggressive investigator who has led some of the FBI's highest-profile corporate crime cases, says his agency prioritises the fight against corporate bribery by drawing on the "parallels between national security and foreign bribery enforcement".
"Corruption leads to failed states, which leads to terrorism, which leads to [threats to] national security," he says.
For the FBI, foreign bribery investigations are "one tool of leverage we think is a powerful way" of driving reform and fighting corruption and therefore terrorism. "It's not just about fair markets. It's much bigger," he says. "Where does the bribe money go? It goes to terrorism and human rights abuses."
I'm reminded of his words several weeks later, when I meet my whistleblower in Europe. Months earlier, this informant had sent me an anonymous letter telling me to place an advertisement in French newspaper Le Figaro. My ad needed to include the code name Monte Christo. When my ad ran, I was contacted via a phone subscribed in a false SIM card. After weeks of negotiation, a rendezvous was arranged.
From the steak restaurant where we met, my informant directed me on a journey that involved more confidential sources and secret communication. Late last year, I was finally given access to hundreds of thousands of confidential documents from oil industry deals.
They reveal that many of the world's biggest energy companies paid millions of dollars to a corrupt Monaco firm. This firm, Unaoil, specialises in bribing public officials and middlemen to obtain huge taxpayer-funded contracts worth billions of dollars to Unaoil's clients.
Unaoil is a Robin Hood in reverse. On steroids. It robs the poor of oil-rich nations such as Iraq, Libya, Angola and Iran. The citizens own the resources beneath their feet, but the money from exploiting them ends up lining the pockets of executives and powerful, crooked officials.
Among the Australian firms exposed in the leaked trove of documents is Leighton Offshore, the overseas arm of construction giant Leighton Holdings (since renamed CIMIC).
The emails show that Leighton Offshore promised to pay tens of millions of dollars in bribes in 2010 and 2011. These kickbacks were allocated by Unaoil to high-ranking Iraqi officials and politicians. In return, Leighton Offshore wanted these corrupt officials to help them win pipeline construction projects worth more than $1 billion.
This Australian-funded bribery is precisely the sort of illegal conduct McEachern says fuels inequality, anger and extremism.
The Australian Federal Police began investigating Leighton Offshore for its Iraqi corruption in 2011, but despite exhaustive efforts by a small team of talented investigators, the AFP is yet to lay a single criminal charge.
If the same case involved a US company and executives, FBI investigators would use more powerful legislative and investigative tools to drive an outcome. They would also have far greater resources, including more investigators working with embedded prosecutors and forensic accountants.
The AFP's white-collar teams are still viewed by many up-and-coming agents as a frustrating posting best avoided. In contrast, on casual dress days in the US, federal agents and prosecutors wear T-shirts emblazoned with "FCPA [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] team", like sports fans barracking for their side.
The man who designed the T-shirts was former senior prosecutor Chuck Duross. He recently headed a Justice Department team that had 25 dedicated prosecutors handling corporate bribery cases, and worked with some of the best investigators in the US.
"We went to the IRS, Customs, to get the best agents," he says. "They understood the case is in the paper chase, not in banging down the door. The best agents know this. They can be down in a room for weeks examining documents. If it is not staffed properly - which means staffing it long term - then it is not going to work. The international stuff takes years.
"You can't have four or five agents rotating through. You need continuity with investigations and prosecutions."
The US only started achieving major results with a significant increase in the number of investigators. McEachern's team has 23 dedicated federal agents among 36 staff, including lawyers and accountants. The US corporate watchdog, the Securities Exchange Commission, has its own large FCPA teams supplementing the FBI's work.
At Britain's Serious Fraud Office - an agency dedicated to exposing high-level bribery and corporate graft - there are 100 lawyers, 100 support staff, 100 investigators, 50 backroom people and many accountants working on cases. No such agency exists in Australia.
Both the US and Britain have comprehensive anti-foreign bribery frameworks. Companies and whistleblowers have strong incentives to report corruption and co-operate with the authorities.
In the US, individual informers can be paid millions of dollars for volunteering information. High-quality inside knowledge makes it easier for authorities to hold the corrupt to account. None of this applies in Australia.
The AFP has recently enhanced its focus on foreign bribery by trying to lift the skills of agents and foster multi-agency co-operation, but it's yet to make a significant impact. Since 1999, when foreign bribery laws were passed in Australia, there have been only two prosecutions, both still unresolved.
Two prosecutions in more than 15 years is a dismal record, although several more are expected, a welcome product of the shift in focus at the AFP and, to a lesser extent, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.
In the meantime, the AFP is still largely getting by, hamstrung by a lack of resources and support at a legislative, prosecutorial and business level.
Mark Bochetti, who investigated Australia's response to bribery when he worked for the US State Department, said when I interviewed him in Washington: "How can it be that there are almost 39 cases [investigated by the AFP] and almost all have come up dry?
"Our experience is, in half the cases the US gets, they successfully worked up a case ... I had an impression they [Australian agencies] would investigate a case until they had a reason to kill it, and then they would kill it."
Justice Minister Michael Keenan said this week that he was committed to making improvements in the anti-corruption framework, and that the government takes the issue seriously.
Labor senator Sam Dastyari dismissed these comments as simply rhetoric. He is planning to launch a series of public Senate committee hearings this month in an attempt to embarrass the government and highlight the issue.
The Australian public and corporate leaders are blase on the subject. But the number of cases continues to grow.
Last month, The Age revealed that the chief of the Australian Securities Exchange, Elmer Funke Kupper, was at the helm of gaming giant Tabcorp when it made a suspected bribe payment in Cambodia in 2010.
A series of tough questions about the Cambodian deal sent by The Age to Funke Kupper and the ASX board, which is responsible for ensuring the integrity of Australia's stock exchange, prompted his resignation. But the fact that he was the subject of a criminal probe did not stop the head of corporate watchdog the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Greg Medcraft, from giving him a ringing public endorsement.
"It's very unfortunate. Elmer is a really creative, talented CEO. I think he's brought great vision to the ASX. It's actually a sad loss," Medcraft said.
If the boss of the US corporate watchdog said the same of an American chief executive who was under investigation for allegedly criminal conduct, their job would be in peril.
Medcraft went further, publicly querying whether the AFP investigation would ever produce a result in court. "These are very difficult cases to prosecute, so I guess we'll just have to see how this evolves."
Given the lack of success prosecuting alleged corporate crime in Australia, it's hard to fault the accuracy of Medcraft's observation. But what was missing was the call to arms to the Turnbull government for an overhaul to the system.
How can the government sit idle when its top corporate cop outlines the hurdles an important bribery case will face before the police have even gathered a scrap of evidence? How can the government tip the bucket (in the form of a royal commission) over allegedly corrupt union bosses while their counterparts in the corporate world seem to get a free pass?
Tabcorp is just one of a number of recent cases. Australia's leading defence supplier, Tenix, is under AFP investigation for allegedly bribing officials in Asia. Our top mining company, BHP Billiton, has been sanctioned by US authorities for spending thousands of dollars wining and dining African mining officials at the Beijing Olympic Games. The AFP is also investigating allegations that BHP bribed Asian officials.
Anti-corruption authorities are examining why Football Federation Australia transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to a football stadium controlled by a notoriously corrupt football chief whose World Cup bid vote was being sought by the FFA.
A Gold Coast phosphate firm has been accused of bribing senior members of the Nauru government. Subsidiaries of Australia's Reserve Bank allegedly bribed officials around the world to win banknote printing contracts.
Australia is, meanwhile, in danger of becoming a dumping ground for dirty money from Asia. Funds stolen from government projects in Papua New Guinea, Malaysia and China via bribery and fraud are invested with relative ease in Sydney, Melbourne and other key property markets.
"I suspect you have more of a problem than you realise," says the joint head of the International Corruption Unit at Britain's National Crime Agency, Jon Benton, who believes a large amount of corrupt Chinese money is flowing into Australian property.
The Unaoil scandal, revealed this week by The Age and The Huffington Post, sparked joint investigations by the FBI, Department of Justice, Australian Federal Police and British authorities.
This is likely to give the AFP the international reach and teeth it needs to finally make its case against Australia's Leighton Offshore and the former executives who are allegedly corrupt, including Russell Waugh and Peter Cox.
But it is unclear whether the Turnbull government will listen to the consensus inside the world's leading anti-corruption agencies that Australia can and must do more.
"Australia has the potential to make a considerable difference," says former British Serious Fraud Office director Richard Alderman. "Australia has awareness and legislation. It is a question of making the jump to real action."
The US Securities and Exchange Commission's top anti-corruption official, Kara Brockmeyer, believes now is the time for Australia to make this leap: "I really want to see Australia change."
Tomorrow in The Sunday Age: How Korean giants Samsung and Hyundai got caught up in The Bribe Factory.
The story so far . . .
In one of the most significant investigations of its kind, The Age and The Huffington Post have for the first time exposed the true reach of corruption in the oil industry.
A massive cache of confidential documents reveals that firms including British icon Rolls Royce, US giant Halliburton and Australia's Leighton Holdings won billions of dollars of government contracts by paying bribes through a Monaco-based company called Unaoil.
Headed by patriarch Ata Ahsani and his sons, Cyrus and Saman, Unaoil is effectively a global ''bribe factory'' greasing the way for foreign companies to exploit the resources of poor countries in cahoots with corrupt politicians and others.
Corruption in Australia
Tabcorp is just one of several recent corporate bribery cases.
&#183; Australia's leading defence supplier, Tenix, and BHP Billiton are accused in separate cases of bribing officials in Asia.
&#183; Football Federation Australia made payments to a notoriously corrupt football chief during its bid for the 2022 World Cup.
&#183; A Gold Coast phosphate firm has been accused of bribing senior members of the Nauru government.
&#183; Subsidiaries of Australia's Reserve Bank allegedly bribed officials across the globe to win banknote printing contracts.