And then there had been her nightmarish trip to Lagos the previous year. A mission from the United States Treasury had sought to present evidence that much of the swindling was being done with the apparent complicity of the Nigerian government.

The hosts in Lagos didn’t take well to that theory. While the Americans were meeting with representatives of the government, their hotel rooms were sacked and trashed. Their clothes were taken, their suitcases slashed, and death threats scrawled on the walls. Of five staff cars used by Treasury representatives and belonging to the US Embassy, three were stolen and one was chopped apart with a chain saw while their meeting was in progress. A fifth blew up, killing their Nigerian chauffeur.

So much for a little international fieldwork. Most members of the delegation felt lucky to touch down again physically unharmed on American soil.

Alex filed the paperwork before her. The 419s would be around for as long as people would fall for them. The fight against them would continue. But in the absence of follow-up at the source-when a foreign government might be aiding the perpetrators-they could only be contained, not defeated. Not that she was going to ignore them. She wasn’t above a personal vendetta or two for criminals who deserved to be put out of business. She had a long memory for such things and could be stubborn as a bulldog once she got her teeth into a case.

But she had more immediate dragons to slay. There was a messy business involving untaxed wine imports from France. There was a perplexing matter about some art stolen by the Nazis from a wealthy Jewish collector who had died in the Holocaust; a Swiss bank denied culpability despite the fact that a looted Pissarro had been hanging in the New York office of the bank president for the last thirty years. And then there was a whole sheaf of various non-419 Internet frauds that seemed to be associated with an online casino operation in Costa Rica.

If human beings invested the same ingenuity in eradicating disease and hunger that they did in swindling each other, the world might be a better place… and she might happily be in another line of work, one that would have put her on the front lines in the fight against worldwide oppression, ignorance, disease, hunger, and poverty, causes she felt were compatible with her guiding principles. Sometimes she thought she should have become a doctor. She would have been an excellent one and could easily have become one.

But human beings didn’t manifest such ingenuity and Alex hadn’t become a doctor. So she did what she could. She enjoyed sticking up for victims. Out in the field, she had several teams of investigators who worked for her. The day was young. It was time to see what cases were shaping up for arrests or prosecution. She dug in for a day of combat, matching wits with various crooks across the world and on the Internet.

The electronic surveillance team in Washington was a perfect combination of four elements: speed, efficiency, intelligence, and the refusal to ask questions. And today they even had one convenient coincidence tossed in.

Carlos was the tech guy and the lookout. He turned up in a uniform that bore the markings of one of the local cable companies. Janet was his cohort, but she arrived independently and in street clothes, which in this weather meant a parka, a denim mini, and woolen leggings. She looked like any other pretty young twenty-something. Their target this morning was an apartment in a residential complex on Calvert Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, opposite the sprawling art deco Shoreham Hotel, now the Omni Shoreham, and just a few blocks from the Woodley Park Metro station.

There was nothing special about the bugging. It was a routine job as long as the victim was at work. Tuesdays were good for this sort of thing.

Carlos arrived first, at about ten in the morning. He had the proper paperwork-routine maintenance on the cable system-and got a free pass from the building’s superintendent. He went to work in the basement, checking the cable lines, the phone lines, the power. He located the setups for the targeted apartment on the fifth floor.

Duck soup. This was easy.

On a previous visit Carlos had stolen a passkey that worked for all apartments. The black-bag keepers back at his agency congratulated him on his good work and made a copy. Carlos returned the original before anyone knew it was out of the building.

They had files back at the agency’s headquarters for hundreds of buildings and hotels in DC, completely legal under the classified sections of the Homeland Security Act of 2005. So this would be a snap as long as no one who really did work for the cable people turned up. But that didn’t happen this morning.

Carlos’s specialty was rigging radio frequencies to go through the main electrical wiring of the building. Then, from a car within two blocks, a tuner could hone in on the specific apartment and the “easy listening” was officially “on the air.” Carlos was never a listener. That was done by higher-ups.

Carlos moved quickly from the electric grid to the junction box for the telephones in Calvert Arms Apartments. He could see from the electronic blowback on the phone lines that most people used cordless phones, including his target. So Carlos dropped a chip on the fifth floor apartment he wanted.

Job done. He flipped open his cell phone and called Janet.

“I’m just about finished,” he said. “Got ten minutes?”

Two blocks away, she was sitting in a car cheerfully working Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 2 on her PSP. “Sure,” she said. “See you on the flip side.”

Here was today’s happy coincidence: Janet’s uncle lived in the building. He was an overeducated but charming old coot who had worked for the State Department for the better part of three decades as a foreign service officer. He had served in numerous embassies in Europe and Latin America, as well as in the department’s building in Washington’s “Foggy Bottom” district, again alternating between European and Latin American affairs.

Janet was used to coming by unannounced, sometimes to drop off DVDs or groceries. Her uncle never minded and rather liked the young skirt rustling by, even if it was look-don’t-touch.

Janet moved fast. Her whole job was about working fast.

She was in the lobby seven minutes later, carrying a small bag with two new DVDs for her uncle. She blew past the doorman with a big smile and a crack of Juicy Fruit. She zipped up to the fifth floor. She found Carlos in the utility closet near the elevator, studying the cable wires.

“Ready?” she said.

“Let’s go,” he said. He handed her a pair of mini-transmitters. She tossed off her parka and stashed it with him in the closet.

The baby transmitters were the size of old-style soda bottle caps. They were stick-ons, marvelous little instruments, imported from Singapore by the US government at a cost of five bucks each. They could monitor conversations in the apartment in one file. At the same time, in another file they could eavesdrop on the data from even a perfectly configured-and supposedly secure-wireless computer network. They could also pick off the radio emissions of a computer monitor. Their operational life was one year. They had an ultrahigh-pitched whine, which only a few people could hear. Otherwise, they were fine. Unless discovered. Unless someone’s dog went nuts-o.

In addition to the work Carlos had done in the basement, he reckoned he might as well drop these babies on the victim. They were a safety net. If one system of electronic ears failed, the other would likely be up.

Now Carlos and Janet set to work. They slipped latex gloves onto their hands. Carlos killed the elevators and stood lookout. Janet used the passkey to enter the target apartment.