She sighed. The elevators were slow and there weren’t enough of them. Finally an elevator door opened, and a young man came out, smiling, hand extended.

“Hi,” he said, “I’m Pete Wilkins, with the Treasury Attaché’s Office. I’m your control officer. The Regional Security Office asked me to give you this. I guess you found the standard welcome in your room. But this is something different. It’s your temporary embassy ID. Your data for laser eye scans has already been sent from Washington.”

When another elevator arrived, Alex and her “control officer” rode up to the eighth floor. The Political Section was on the eighth floor, which is as high as the elevator rose. And yet, also from her previous assignments, she knew that there was also a ninth floor, or, as one diplomat once drunkenly put it to her, “the Felliniesque 8½ floor.” This was where the black arts of espionage were practiced by the American faction in Madrid, the stuff that took place off the record and in the back alleys. An armada of microwave antennas were on the roof just above this intelligence section. Despite access from the Political Section it had nothing to do with the latter, whose business was traditional diplomacy.

On the eighth floor they turned to the left and walked down a corridor with offices on either side. They came to the room assigned to her morning briefing: Sala/Room 821.

Wilkins departed and Alex stepped in.

Small groups of conversation stopped. All heads in the room turned her way. Her eyes did a quick count. Nine players, all men, aged from their twenties to their fifties. Suits all around. Grave expressions breaking into smiles at the arrival of a woman. She didn’t mind. She had long since gotten used to being the only women in a room. She had also learned how to use it to her advantage.

But at some time on some day at some point in the future, couldn’t she walk into a room like this and see at least one other female?

She did a quick scan. Only one man did she recognize, and she didn’t know if she should acknowledge him. Before she had to decide, a handsome young man with fair skin and black hair smiled and stepped toward her.

“United States Department of Treasury?” he asked. “Alejandra LaDuca?”

“That would be me,” she answered.

“I’m José Diego Rivera, the chief curator of the Museo Arqueológico Nacional,” he said. “Thank you for being here and my deep appreciation to your government for sending you.”

“De nada,” she said. “I hope I’m able to help.”

“Let me introduce you around,” he said. “¿La molesta si hablamos español?”

“No me molesta,” she answered. It didn’t bother her at all if they all spoke in Spanish.

The eight other participants present were each in some branch of international law enforcement. Rivera introduced Alex first to a man named Miguel Torres who stood to his immediate left. Torres was in the green uniform of La Guardia Civil, the paramilitary Civil Guard of Spain. These were the police brigades that mostly guarded rural areas, highways, country roads, and national buildings, but who were still remembered by some for an attempted coup in 1982. At that time, rogue members of La Guardia Civil burst into the parliament, firing shots in the air, then held the members at gunpoint. Even though it was las Fuerzas Armadas, the Spanish army, who had attempted the coup, not the Civil Guard, the guard was widely remembered as embracing the assault on the new democracy. In recent years, however, the Guardia Civil had also played a greater role of combating terrorism within Spain, mostly in the more remote areas and the borders.

Torres was tall and thin, dark-haired with grayish-white temple patches in a Paulie Walnuts style. His uniform hung on him as it might on a clothes hanger. His nose was out of joint, looking as if it had been broken and reset more than once.

To Rivera’s right stood Carlos Pendraza, a representative of another division of the Spanish police, the Policia Nacional. Alex guessed he was the alpha-cop present, the most powerful person in terms of local authority.

The Policia Nacional were the units that dealt mostly with national security, major crime, and potential terrorism in the larger cities. Pendraza was regally featured with gray hair and a very light complexion. When he spoke, his accent carried the inflections of Madrid. He made no attempt to speak any language other than Spanish. Alex wondered if he was uncomfortable with other languages or just holding back. He also possessed a certain intelligence and dignity. He was, she guessed, in his mid-fifties and easily the oldest man in the room.

Though the two Spaniards were of competing police agencies, both were perfectly gracious when introduced. Spaniards, like most Europeans, tended to like Americans personally even if they disagreed with various aspects of American foreign policy. Both men were near the top in their divisions, but not right at the top. They were colonels, not generals.

Further to the curator’s right, and to Alex’s left, stood a trio of men in dark suits, all with ID tags that pegged the service they were here to represent. Like the Spaniards, they were high up in their respective organizations. Alex also knew that the representatives of the other police agencies would have been chosen with an eye to their fluency in Spanish and their familiarity with Spanish culture and law.

Closest to Rivera was a heavy-set balding man named Maurice Essen, a Swiss-German who was a representative of the International Criminal Police Organization. The latter was better known by its telegraphic address, Interpol, and was currently headquartered in a set of gray modern buildings in Saint-Cloud, France, just outside of Paris and not far from the world-class racetrack.

Next to Essen was a very youthful Englishman of Scotland Yard, Rolland Fitzgerald, and next to him was a stocky dark-haired Frenchman named Pierre LeMaitre, who had been sent by the Gendarmerie Nationale de France, the French National Police.

Fitzgerald was bright-eyed and hollow-cheeked and hawklike in the sharp quirky way he turned his head from side to side to follow conversation. He was about thirty-five. LeMaitre was small, almost chubby, his dress dowdy and his expression dour. His accent, which Alex overheard when he spoke briefly in French with Fitzgerald, had the almost rube-like inflections of Normandy. He was as unglamorous a Frenchman as she had ever seen, and she guessed that he was probably a pretty good investigator. In her experience, it always turned out that way. He hadn’t gotten to where he was on looks or charm.

The introductions proceeded in Spanish, yet all the Europeans other than Colonel Pendraza were careful to say a few words to her in English. First, they wished to be courteous, but second, and more importantly, they wished to make her aware of their fluency in her native language in case it proved important later. It was the proper gesture.

Arriving last was the one other American who would be in the room, a jowly man with thick glasses, pink lips, and a clipped gray moustache. His name was Floyd Connelly. He bore an unflattering resemblance to an aging Orson Welles and moved with the speed and grace of a sea tortoise.

Connelly, however, represented the United States Customs Service. Customs people in the US, she knew from experience, tended to be plodders, more mulish and stubborn than innovative, more bureaucratic than maverick. But they also had unending access to federal records. So he was a contact she would nurture if she could.

The one man in the room whom she did know loitered outside the introductions. He was an Italian national, tall and trim with short dark hair. His name was Gian Antonio Rizzo. He was immaculately dressed in a Via Condotti suit. Rizzo was recently retired from the municipal police in Rome after having put in a quarter century on the job in that city, often with distinguished results. He also had had a less-evident employer over those years, off the books and off the record, one based in Langley, Virginia, which was how Alex happened to know him.