Conspiracy in Kiev (2 page)
A
s the same cold midwinter gripped the eastern United States, Alexandra LaDuca sat at her desk in Washington DC, at a few minutes past nine in the morning. Her desk, and her job, was at the main building of the United States Department of the Treasury on Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street.
She pondered the fraudulent document before her, received via the US mail by a citizen who had brought a complaint to the Treasury Department. It was not that Alex hadn’t seen thousands of similar pitches, and it was not that she hadn’t heard sob stories from people who had been similarly swindled. And it wasn’t that such chicanery so violated her sense of decency and fair play.
No, what bothered her most was that anyone would be so venal as to make a living through such outright crookery … and that any victim would be gullible enough to fall for it. The correspondence was on a fancy letterhead:
F
OREIGN
R
EMITTANCE
D
EPARTMENT
C
ENTRAL
C
REDIT
B
ANK OF
N
IGERIA
T
INUBU
S
QUARE
, V
ICTORIA
I
SLAND
L
AGOS
, N
IGERIA
There was the first duet of lies. There existed nowhere on the planet, Alex knew, any such department or any such bank. She sometimes wondered if Lagos existed, other than in her own bad dreams. But she knew Lagos did exist because she had spent a couple of weeks there a year earlier investigating a similar fraud. The only success of the previous trip had been in what
hadn’t
happened. She had successfully avoided getting killed.
The scam continued:
Dear Sir/Madam,
I
MMEDIATE
C
ONTRACT
P
AYMENT
C
ONTRACT
#: M
AV
/N
NPC
/F
GN
/ M
IN
/009 / N
EXT OF
K
IN
F
UND
/ US$16.3
M
From the records of outstanding Next of Kin Fund due for payment with the Federal Government of Nigeria, your name was discovered on the list of the outstanding payments who have not yet received their funds.
We wish to inform you that your payment is being processed. We will release said funds to you
immediately
as soon as you respond to this letter. Also note that from records in my file your outstanding payment is US$16,300,000. Kindly reconfirm to me the followings:
Your full name.
Phone, fax and mobile number …
Yeah, sure. Sixteen million bucks in an offer as phony as a unicorn with a three dollar bill on its nose. She simmered. She had seen enough of these to last a lifetime.
Alex LaDuca, at age twenty-nine, worked as a senior investigator with a little-publicized agency of the US Treasury: the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCen. The agency enforced laws against domestic and international financial crimes that targeted US citizens and corporations. She was actually a special agent of the FBI but on loan to FinCen to combat international financial fraud.
Her boss was a stocky little man named Mike Gamburian from Boston. His office featured a mural of a triumphant Fenway Park in October of 2004, a moment when the Red Sox finally won something. The New York employees who worked for him, in grudging good humor, claimed the mural created “a hostile work environment.” Aside from that, Gamburian was a genial fellow and not unpleasant to work for.
Alex was one of FinCen’s shrewdest investigators, as well as one of the toughest. She was also the youngest to have “senior” status. And she didn’t lack for assignments. With the proliferation of the Internet, fraud had gone global and high tech. Financial fraud was a growth industry.
The shameless scam continued …
As soon as this information is received, your payment will be made to you in A Certified Bank Draft or wired to your nominated bank account directly from Central Bank of Nigeria.
You can mail me on my direct email address …
Yeah, Alex thought, shaking her head. Don’t even try to phone because a phone call can be traced. She skipped ahead. It was signed,
Regards,
Dr. Samuel Ifraim
Executive Governor,
Central Credit Bank of Nigeria
(CCBN)
Right. Sure. A fake name with a fake doctorate. And the “CC” in the CCBN might just as easily stand for Crooks and Criminals.
The scam was known at FinCen as a 419, named after a widely unenforced section of the Nigerian criminal code. Millions of these stinky little con jobs circulated across the globe each year, most emanating from West Africa.
They were all the same. They claimed that due to certain circumstances—disbursement of will proceeds, sale of a business, sale of cheap crude oil, a winning email address in an Internet lottery, or something similarly unlikely—a bank needed help to transfer this money to the lucky recipient’s account in the United States. If the recipient assisted them he or she would be entitled to a percentage of the funds.
If contacted, the scam artists would request thousands of dollars for various costs that were required before the lucky winner got the share of the funds. Of course, the victim’s payment went through but—surprise—the transfer of riches never happened.
The scam was as widespread as it was shameless. In 2002 the US Department of Justice had gained a court order to open all mail from Nigeria passing through JFK airport in New York. Around seventy-five percent had involved scam offers. Much of it even bore counterfeit postage.
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.
T
he 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.
No one home. No pets. No alarms. The break-in trifecta!
She took stock quickly. It was a woman’s apartment. Normal kitchen and dining area. Living room filled with bookcases. This victim read a lot; maybe that was part of her problem and why she was getting a wire dropped on her. People who read a lot were always suspicious.
There were books in different languages and a travel poster in Russian with a picture of Gorbachev or Yeltsin. Janet could never tell those two eighties Russian guys apart. One had a weird bald head and looked like someone had smashed a strawberry on it; the other dude had too much white hair, like a polar bear. One stood on top of a tank to put down a coup and the other one did a Pizza Hut commercial. Who cared who was who? Why not a poster of Lenin saying,
Workers of the World
,
Shop Till You Drop!
?
Near the music system, under the Russian poster, there were scattered a ton of CDs. Many of them foreign. How much more subversive could it get?
There was a coffee table in the living room. Janet stuck her hand under its lower shelf, six inches above the floor. She positioned one of the bugs on the underside of the shelf and stuck it in place.
There! Done!
She went to the bedroom. She looked around quickly. She saw a few photos of the resident with a guy. She was wrapped up in his arms at some beach somewhere. Whoa! The lady looked good in a Speedo two-piece and the guy was six-pack hunky; she looked like a real estate agent and he looked like a lifeguard. Didn’t really look like subversives, but troublemakers frequently don’t. Keep it moving. These two must have done something or they wouldn’t be on the bug list.
Janet got to her knees in the bedroom.
The second transmitter fit perfectly under the headboard of the bed. Janet smirked as she fixed it in nicely. Bedroom bugs were endlessly entertaining.
She jumped back to her feet. Test time. Using her cell phone, Janet accessed both transmitters and primed them. They worked perfectly.
Great. Keep moving.
Another thirty-six seconds and she was out of the apartment and into the hall. Less than three minutes had passed. She gave a thumbs-up to Carlos, who was still standing guard.
No words were spoken.
Carlos went back to the elevators and turned them on. Janet popped into her uncle’s place and dropped off the DVDs. She’d get her feedback this evening as, again by coincidence, she was planning to come over for dinner and some tutoring on a graduate history course she was taking.
She retrieved her parka from the utility closet.
In another five minutes, she was crossing the lobby to leave. The doorman winked at her. She smiled and winked back. Secretly she was grossed out. He was probably three times her age.
A
rich
older man, well,
that
would be something else! But a doorman … ? No way!
Carlos was already back out to the street via the service entrance.
They rendezvoused in the car shortly thereafter. Their day was going well. They just had one other job that day. Considering they were funded by the taxpayers, they were an outstanding example of governmental efficiency.
