The Cobra

CHAPTER 14

IT FELL TO THE BRITISH SERIOUS AND ORGANISED CRIME Agency and London's Metropolitan Police to carry out the raid. Both had been laying the groundwork for some time. The target was going to be a drug-smuggling gang called the "Essex Mob."

Scotland Yard's Special Projects Team had known for some time that the Essex Mob, headed by a notorious London-born gangster named Benny Daniels, was a major importer and distributor of cannabis, heroin and cocaine, with a reputation for extreme violence if crossed. The only reason for the gang's name was that Daniel had used crime's profits to build himself a large and very flash country mansion in Essex, east of London and north of the Thames Estuary, just outside the harmless market town of Epping.

As a younger hoodlum in the East End of London, Daniels had built both a reputation for brutality and a crime sheet. But with success came an end to successful prosecutions. He became too big to need to touch the product personally, and witnesses were hard to come by. The timid among them quickly changed their testimony; the brave disappeared, to be found very dead in the riverside marshes or never at all.

Benny Daniels was a "target" criminal and one of the Met's top ten desired arrests. The break the Yard had been waiting for resulted from the Rat List provided by the late Roberto Cardenas.

The UK had been lucky inasmuch as only one of its officials had appeared; he was a customs officer in the east coast port of Lowestoft. That meant that top men in customs and excise were brought in at a very early stage.

Quietly, and in extreme secrecy, a multiunit task force was assembled, equipped with state-of-the-art phone-tapping, tracking and eavesdropping technology.

The Security Service, or MI5, one of the partners of SOCA, loaned a team of trackers known simply as the "Watchers," reckoned among the best in the country.

As wholesale importing of drugs now rated as significant as terrorism, Scotland Yard's CO19 Firearms Command was also available. The task force was headed by the Yard's Cdr. Peter Reynolds, but the ones closest to the bribe taker were his own colleagues in customs. The few who were aware of his crimes now bore him a sincere but covert loathing, and it was they who were best placed to watch his every move. His name was Crowther.

One of the senior men at Lowestoft conveniently developed a serious ulcer and left on sick leave. He could then be replaced by an expert in electronic surveillance. Cdr. Spindler did not want only one bent official and one truck; he wanted to use Crowther to roll up an entire narcotics operation. For this, he was prepared to be patient, even if it meant allowing several cargoes to pass untouched.

With the port of Lowestoft being on the Suffolk coast, just north of Essex, he suspected Benny Daniels would have a finger somewhere in the pie, and he was right. Part of Lowestoft's facilities involved roll-on, roll-off juggernauts coming across the North Sea, and it was several of these that Crowther was apparently keen to assist unexamined through the customs channel. In early January, Crowther made a mistake.

A truck arrived on a ferry from Flushing, the Netherlands, with a cargo of Dutch cheese for a noted supermarket chain. A junior officer was about to request an examination of the cargo when Crowther hurried up, pulled rank and gave speedy clearance.

The junior was not in on the secret, but the replacement was watching. He managed to slip a tiny GPS tracker under the rear bumper of the Dutch truck as it rolled out of the dock gates. Then he made an urgent phone call. Three unmarked cars began to follow, switching places with one another so as not to be noticed, but the driver appeared unworried.

The lorry was tailed halfway across Suffolk until it pulled into a lay-by. There it was met by a group of men, who disgorged from a black Mercedes. A passing tracker car swept by, did not stop but took the number. Within seconds, the Benz was identified. It belonged to a shell company but had been seen weeks earlier entering the grounds of Benny Daniels's mansion.

The Dutch driver was taken in a perfectly friendly manner to the cafe behind the lay-by. Two of the gang stayed with him for the two hours his truck was missing. When it was returned to him, he was handed a fat wad of cash and allowed to proceed to the Midlands unloading bay of the supermarket. The whole procedure was a replica of that used to smuggle illegal immigrants into the UK, and the task force feared they might just end up with a clutch of bewildered and dejected Iraqis.

While the Dutchman sipped his coffee in the roadside cafe, the other two men from the Mercedes had driven his lorry away to unload its real treasure; not Iraqis looking for a new life but a ton of high-grade Colombian cocaine.

The truck was tailed off the Suffolk lay-by and south into Essex. This time the driver and his companion were wary all the way, and it took the tailing cars all their skill to switch and pass each other to remain unsuspicious. As it crossed the county line, Essex police provided two more unmarked surveillance vehicles to help out.

Finally, the destination was reached, an old and seemingly abandoned aircraft hangar in the salt marches flanking the estuary of the Blackwater. The landscape was so flat and bleak that the watchers dared not follow, but a helicopter from the Essex traffic division spotted the doors of the hangar rolling closed. The truck remained in the hangar for forty minutes before it emerged and drove back to the waiting Dutch driver in the cafe.

By the time it left, the lorry had ceased to be of much interest, but there was a team of four rural surveillance experts hidden deep in the reedbeds with powerful binoculars. Then a call was made from the warehouse; it was recorded by SOCA and Government Communications HQ at Cheltenham. It was answered by someone inside Benny Daniels's mansion twenty miles away. It referred to the removal of "goods" the following morning, and Cdr. Reynolds had little choice but to mount the raid for that night.

In agreement with previous requests from Washington, it was decided that the raid should have a serious public relations angle, and a TV team from the program Crimewatch should be allowed to attend. DON DIEGO ESTEBAN also had a public relations problem, and a bad one. But his public was confined to his twenty major clients: ten in the U.S. and ten in Europe. He ordered Jose-Maria Largo to tour North America, reassuring the ten biggest buyers of the cartel's product that the problems that had dogged all their operations since the spring would be overcome and delivery resumed. But the clients were genuinely angry.

Being the big ten, they were among the privileged of whom only a fifty percent down payment was demanded. But that still ran into tens of millions of dollars per gang. They would be required to produce only the fifty percent balance on safe arrival of the consignment.

Every interception, loss or disappearance in transit between Colombia and the handover point was a loss to the cartel. But that was not the point. Thanks to the disaster of the Rat List, U.S. customs and state or city police had made scores of successful raids on inland depots, and the losses were hurting badly.

And there was more. Each giant importing gang had a huge grid of smaller clients whose needs had to be satisfied. There is no loyalty in this business. If a habitual supplier cannot supply and a different one can, the smaller dealer will simply switch his custom.

Finally, with safe arrivals running at fifty percent of expectations, a national shortage was developing. Prices were rising in accordance with market forces. Importers were cutting the puro not six or seven to one but up to ten to one, trying to spin out supplies and keep customers. Some users were snorting only a seven percent mix. The bulking-up materials were becoming more and more just junk, with the chemists throwing in insane quantities of substitute drugs like ketamine to try to fool the user that he was getting a high-quality sensation instead of a large dose of horse tranquilizer, which just happened to look and smell the same.

There was another dangerous spin-off from the shortage. The paranoia that is never really absent from professional criminality was moving to the surface. Suspicions arose between the big gangs that others might be getting preferential treatment. The very possibility that the secret depot of one mob might be raided by a rival crew threw up the chance of an extremely violent underworld war.

It was Largo's task to try to calm the shark pool with assurances of a speedy resumption of normal service. He had to start with Mexico.

Although the USA is assailed by light aircraft, speedboats, private yachts, airline passengers and mules with a full stomach, all smuggling cocaine, the gigantic headache is the three-thousand-mile meandering border with Mexico. It runs from the Pacific south of San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico. It borders California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

South of the border, northern Mexico has been virtually a war zone for years as rival gangs fight for supremacy or even a place in the scramble. Thousands of tortured and executed bodies have been thrown into the streets or tossed in the deserts as the cartel leaders and gang bosses have employed virtually insane enforcers to exterminate rivals, and thousands of innocent passersby have died in the cross fire.

Largo's task was to talk to the chiefs of the cartels known as Sinaloa, Gulf and La Familia, all in a state of rage at their nonarriving orders. He would start with the Sinaloa, covering most of the Pacific Coast. It was just his misfortune that, although the Maria Linda had got through, the day he flew north the successor to that freighter had simply disappeared without trace.

The task of Europe was given to Largo's deputy, the clever, college-educated Jorge Calzado, who spoke fluent English, apart from his native Spanish, and had a working knowledge of Italian. He arrived in Madrid the night the SOCA raided the old hangar in the Essex marshes. IT WAS a good raid, and it would have been even better if the whole Essex mob had been there to be arrested, or even Benny Daniels himself. But the gangster was too clever to be within miles of the drugs he imported into southern England. He used underlings for that.

The intercepted phone call had mentioned a pickup and transfer of the contents of the hangar "in the morning." The raiding party moved silently into position, lights out, black on black, just before midnight and waited. There was a complete ban on speech, flashlights, even coffee flasks in case of a tinkle of metal on metal. Just before four a.m., the lights of a vehicle came down the track to the darkened building.

The watchers heard the rumble of the doors rolling open and saw a dim light inside. As there was no second vehicle coming, they moved. The CO19 Firearms officers were first to secure the warehouse. Behind them came amplifiers booming commands, dogs straining, snipers squinting in case of armed defense, searchlights bathing the target in a harsh white blaze.

The surprise was total, considering that there had been fifty men and women crouching in the reeds with their equipment. The catch was satisfying in terms of drugs, rather less so in criminals.

There were three of the latter. Two had come with the truck. They were, at a glance, low-level errand runners, and they belonged to a Midlands gang for whom part of the cargo was destined. The other part would have been distributed by Benny Daniels.

The night watchman was the only Essex Mob member caught in the net. He turned out to be Justin Coker, late twenties, a bit of a babe magnet, with dark good looks, and a long criminal record. But he was not a main player.

What the truck had come to collect was piled on the open concrete floor where the light aircraft of the long-departed flying club had been serviced. There was about a ton, and it was still in its jute wrapping, held together with crisscrossed cords.

The cameras were allowed to enter, one for TV and one press photographer for a major agency. They photographed the square pile of bales and watched as a senior customs man, masked to preserve his anonymity, sliced through some cords to rip the jute away and expose the polyethylene-encased blocks of cocaine inside. There was even a paper label on one of the blocks with a number on it. Everything was photographed, including the three arrested men with blankets over their heads, only handcuffed wrists visible. But more than enough to make prime-time TV and several front pages. A pink midwinter dawn eventually began to steal across the Essex marshes. For the senior police and customs officers, it was going to be a long day. ANOTHER PLANE went down somewhere east of the 35th longitude. On instructions, the desperate young pilot, who had defied the advice of older men not to fly, had been uttering short and meaningless blips on his radio to indicate "sign of life." He did this every fifteen minutes after leaving the Brazilian coast. Then he stopped. He was heading for an upcountry airstrip in unpoliced Liberia, and he never arrived.

With an approximate indication of where he must have gone down, the cartel sent a spotter aircraft in broad daylight to fly the same route, but low over the water, to look for traces. It found nothing.

When an aircraft hits the sea in one piece, or even several, various bits float until finally, waterlogged, they drift down. They may be seat cushions, items of clothing, paperback books, curtains, anything lighter than water, but when an airplane becomes one huge fireball of exploding fuel at 10,000 feet all that is flammable is consumed. Only the metal falls to the sea, and metal sinks. The spotter gave up and turned back. That was the last attempt to fly the Atlantic. JOSE-MARIA LARGO flew out of Mexico to the U.S. via private charter airplane; just a short hop from Monterrey to Corpus Christi, Texas. His passport was Spanish and quite genuine, obtained for him through the good offices of the now-defunct Banco Guzman. It should have served him well, but the bank had let him down.

That passport had once belonged to a genuine Spaniard with a reasonable resemblance to Largo. A mere facial comparison might have fooled the immigration officer at the Texas airport. But the former passport holder had once visited the U.S. and had thoughtlessly stared into the lens of the iris-recognition camera. Largo did the same. The iris of the human eye is like a DNA sample. It does not lie.

The face of the immigration officer did not move a muscle. He stared at the screen, noted what it told him and asked the visiting businessman if he would step into a side room. The procedures took half an hour. Then Largo was profusely apologized to and allowed to go. His inner terror turned to relief. He was through, undetected after all. He was wrong.

Such is the speed of IT communication that his details had gone through to the ICE, the FBI, the CIA and, bearing in mind where he was coming from, the DEA. He had been covertly photographed and flashed onto a screen at Army Navy Drive, Arlington, Virginia.

The ever-helpful Colonel Dos Santos of Bogota had provided facial pictures of all the high members of the cartel of which he could be certain, and Jose-Maria Largo was one of them. Even though the man in the archive at Arlington was younger and slimmer than the visitor kicking his heels in southern Texas, feature-recognition technology identified him in half a second.

Southern Texas, by far the biggest campaign zone for the USA's anti-cocaine struggle, teems with DEA men. As Largo left the concourse, picked up his rental car and rolled out of the parking lot an unmarked coupe with two DEA men in it slid in behind him. He would never spot them, but trailing escorts would follow him to all his client meetings.

He had been instructed to contact and reassure the three biggest all-white biker gangs importing cocaine into the U.S.: the Hell's Angels, the Outlaws and the Bandidos. He knew that while all three could be psychopathically violent and loathed one another, none would be stupid enough to harm an emissary of the Colombian cartel if they ever wanted to see another gram of the Don's cocaine.

He also had to contact the two main all-black gangs; the Bloods and the Crips. The other five on his list were fellow Hispanics: the Latin Kings, the Cubans, his fellow Colombians, the Puerto Ricans and, by far the most dangerous of all, the Salvadoreans, known simply as MS-13 and headquartered mainly in California.

He spent two weeks talking, arguing, reassuring and sweating profusely before he was finally allowed to escape back from San Diego to the sanctuary of his native Colombia. There were some extremely violent men there also, but at least, he comforted himself, they were on his side. The message he had received from the cartel's clients in the U.S. was clear: profits were plunging and the Colombians were responsible.

His private judgment, which he relayed to Don Diego, was that unless the wolves were satisfied with successfully arriving consignments, there would be an intergang war to make northern Mexico look like a barn dance. He was glad he was not Alfredo Suarez.

The Don's conclusion was slightly different. He might have to dispense with Suarez, but that was not the solution. The point was that someone was stealing vast quantities of his product, an unforgivable sin. He had to find the thieves and destroy them or be himself destroyed. THE CHARGING of Justin Coker at Chelmsford Magistrates Court did not take long. The charge was being in possession with intent to supply a Class A drug, contrary to etc., etc.

The legal adviser to the magistrates read out the charge and asked for remand in custody on the grounds, as Your Worships will well understand, that police investigations were continuing etc., etc. Everyone knew it was all a formality, but the Legal Aid lawyer rose to ask for bail.

A nonprofessional justice of the peace, the magistrate flicked through the terms of the Bail Act of 1976 as she listened. Before agreeing to become a magistrate, she had been headmistress of a large girls' school for years and had heard just about every excuse known to the human race.

Coker, like his employer, had come from the East End of London, starting in petty crime as a teenager and graduating to "a likely lad" until he had caught the attention of Benny Daniels. The gang leader had taken him on as a general dogsbody. He had no talent as muscle-Daniels had several truck-built thugs in his entourage for that sort of thing-but he was streetwise and a good runner of errands. That was why he had been left overnight in charge of a ton of cocaine.

The defense lawyer-the "dock brief "-finished his hopeless application for bail, and the magistrate offered a quick smile of encouragement.

"Remand in custody for seven days," she said. Coker was removed from the dock and down the steps to the cells beneath. From there he was led to a closed white van, accompanied by four outriders from the Special Escort Group just in case the Essex Mob had any clever ideas of getting him out of there.

It seemed that Daniels and his crew were satisfied that Justin Coker would keep his mouth shut for they were nowhere to be found. They had all gone on the run.

In earlier years it was the custom of British mobsters to take refuge in southern Spain, buying villas on the Costa del Sol. With a rapid-extradition treaty between Spain and the UK, the Costa was no longer a safe haven. Benny Daniels had built himself a chalet in the enclave of northern Cyprus, an unrecognized mini-state that had no treaty with the UK. It was suspected he had fled there after the raid on the hangar to let things cool down.

Nevertheless, Scotland Yard wanted Coker under their eye in London; Essex had no objection, and from Chelmsford he was driven to Belmarsh Prison in London.

The story of a ton of cocaine in a marshland warehouse was a good one for the national press and even bigger one for the local media. The Essex Chronicle had a large front-page picture of the haul. Standing beside the pile of cocaine briquettes was Justin Coker, face blurred to protect his anonymity according to the law. But the stripped-down jute packaging was clearly visible, as were the pale bricks beneath it and the wrapping paper with the batch number. JORGE CALZADO'S tour of Europe was no more agreeable than Jose-Maria Largo's experience in North America. On every side he was met with angry reproaches and demands for a restoration of their regular supply. Stocks were low, prices were rising, customers were switching to other narcotics, and what the European gangs did have left were being cut ten to one, almost as weak as it could get.

Calzado had no need to visit the Galician gangs who had already been reassured by the Don himself, but the other main clients and importers were vital.

Though over a hundred gangs supply and trade cocaine between Ireland and the Russian border, most acquire their stocks from the dozen giants who deal directly with Colombia and sub-franchise once the product has safely arrived on European land.

Calzado made contact with the Russians, Serbians and Lithuanians from the east; the Nigerians and Jamaican "Yardies"; the Turks, who, although originally from the southeast, predominated in Germany; the Albanians, who terrified him; and the three oldest gang groups in Europe-the mafia of Sicily, the camorra of Naples and the biggest and most feared of them all, the Ndrangheta.

If the map of the Republic of Italy looks like a riding boot, Calabria is the toe, south of Naples, facing Sicily across the Strait of Messina. There were once Greek and Phoenician colonies in that harsh and sun-scorched land, and the local language, hardly intelligible to other Italians, derives from Greek. The name Ndrangheta simply means "the Honorable Society." Unlike the highly publicized mafia of Sicily or the more recently famous camorra of Naples, the Calabrese pride themselves on an almost invisible profile.

Yet it is the biggest in number of members and the most internationally far-flung of them all. As the Italian state has discovered, it is also the hardest to penetrate, and the only one in which the oath of utter silence, the omerta, is still unbroken.

Unlike Sicily's mafia, the Ndrangheta has no "Don of All Dons"; it is not pyramid shaped. It is not hierarchic, and membership is almost entirely based on family and blood. Infiltration by a stranger is absolutely impossible, a renegade from inside virtually unheard of and successful prosecutions rare. It is the abiding nightmare of Rome's Anti-Mafia Commission.

In its traditional homeland, inland of the provincial capital of Reggio de Calabria and the main coast highway, is a shuttered land of villages and small towns running into the Aspromonte Range. In its caves, hostages were until recently kept pending ransom or death, and here is the unofficial capital of Plati. Any stranger proceeding here, any car not recognized at once, is detected miles away and made very unwelcome. It is not a tourist magnet.

But it was not here that Calzado had to come to meet the chiefs, for the Honorable Society has taken over the entire underworld of Italy's biggest city, its industrial powerhouse and financial motor, Milan. The real Ndrangheta had migrated north and created in Milan the country's, and perhaps the continent's, cocaine hub.

No Ndrangheta chieftain would dream of bringing even the most important emissary to his home. That is what restaurants and bars are for. Three southern suburbs of Milan are dominated by the Calabrese, and it was at the Lion's Bar in Buccinasco that the meeting took place with the man from Colombia.

Facing Calzado to listen to his excuses and assurances were the capo locale and two officeholders, including the contabile, the accountant, whose profit figures were bleak.

It was because of the Honorable Society's special qualities, its secrecy and unforgiving ruthlessness in imposing order, that Don Diego Esteban had accorded it the honor of being his primary European colleague. Through this relationship, it had become the single biggest importer and distributor continentwide.

Apart from its own wholly run port of Gioia, it acquired a large part of its supplies from the land trains coming up from West Africa to the North African coast opposite Europe's southern shore and from the seafaring Galicians of Spain. Both supplies, it was made plain to Calzado, had been badly disrupted, and the Calabrese expected the Colombians to do something about that.

Jorge Calzado had met the only dons in Europe who dared speak to the head of the Hermandad of Colombia as an equal. He retired to his hotel-like his superior, Largo, looking forward to a return to his native Bogota. COLONEL DOS SANTOS did not often take journalists, even senior editors, out for lunch. It ought to have been the other way around. Editors were the ones with the fat expense accounts. But the lunch bill usually arrives in the lap of the one who wants the favor. This time it was the head of the intelligence division, Policia Judicial. And even he was doing it for a friend.

Colonel Dos Santos had good working relationships with the senior men of both the American DEA and the British SOCA posted in his city. Cooperation, so much easier under President Alvaro Uribe, bought mutual dividends. Even though the Cobra had kept the handover of the Rat List to himself, since it did not concern Colombia, other gems discovered by the cameras of the ever-circling Michelle had proved extremely useful. But this favor was for the British SOCA.

"It's a good story," insisted the policeman, as if the editor of El Espectador could not recognize a story when he saw one. The editor sipped his wine and glanced down at the new item he was being offered. As a journalist, he had his doubts; as an editor, he could foresee a return favor coming his way if he was helpful.

The item concerned a police raid in England on an old warehouse where a newly arrived shipment of cocaine had been discovered. All right, it was a large one, a full ton; but discoveries were being made all the time and were becoming too ordinary to make real news. They were so much the same. The piled-up bales, the beaming customs officers, the glum prisoners paraded in handcuffs. Why was the story from Essex, of which he had never heard, so newsworthy? Colonel Dos Santos knew, but he dared not say.

"There is a certain senator in this city," murmured the politician, "who frequents a very discreet house of pleasure."

The editor had been hoping for something in exchange, but this was ridiculous.

"A senator likes girls?" he protested. "Tell me the sun rises in the east."

"Who mentioned girls?" asked Dos Santos. The editor sniffed the air appreciatively. At last he smelled payback.

"All right, your gringo story goes on page two tomorrow."

"Front page," said the policeman.

"Thanks for lunch. A rare pleasure not to pick up the tab."

Privately, the editor knew his friend was up to something but he could not fathom what. The picture and caption came from a big agency, but based in London. It showed a young hoodlum called Coker standing beside a pile of cocaine bales with one of them ripped open and the paper wrapper visible. So what? But he put it on the front page the next day.

Emilio Sanchez did not take El Espectador, and, anyway, he spent much of his time supervising production in the jungle, refinement in his various laboratories and packing ready for shipment. But two days after publication, he was passing a newsstand on his drive back from Venezuela. The cartel had established major laboratories just inside Venezuela where the poisonous relations between Colombia and the fiefdom of Hugo Chavez protected them from the attentions of Colonel Dos Santos and his police raids.

He had ordered his driver to stop at a small hotel in the border town of Cucuta so that he could use the lavatory and take a coffee. In the lobby was a rack with the two-day-old copy of El Espectador. There was something about the picture that jolted him. He bought the only copy on the stand and worried all the way back to his anonymous house in his native Medellin.

Few men can retain everything in his head, but Emilio Sanchez lived his work and prided himself on this methodical approach and his obsession with keeping good records. Only he knew where he kept them, and for security reasons they took an extra day to visit and consult. He took with him a magnifying glass, and, having pored over the picture in the paper and his own dispatch records, he went white as a sheet.

Once again the Don's passion for security slowed the meeting down. It took three days shaking off surveillance before the two men could meet. When Sanchez had finished, Don Diego was extremely quiet. He took the magnifying glass and studied the records Sanchez had brought him and the picture in the paper.

"There can be no doubt about this?" he asked with deadly calm.

"None, Don Diego. That dispatch note refers only to a consignment of product that went to the Galicians on a Venezuelan fishing boat called the Belleza del Mar months ago. It never arrived. It vanished in the Atlantic without trace. But it did arrive. That is its cargo. No mistake."

Don Diego Esteban was silent for a long time. If Emilio Sanchez tried to say something, he was waved to silence. The head of the Colombian cartel now knew at last that someone had been stealing his cocaine in transit and lying to him about its nonarrival. He needed to know many things before he could act decisively.

He needed to know how long it had been going on; who exactly among his clients had been intercepting his vessels and pretending they had never arrived. He had no doubt his ships had been sunk, his crews slaughtered and his cocaine stolen. He needed to know how wide the conspiracy had spread.

"What I want you to do," he told Sanchez, "is prepare me two lists. One contains the dispatch numbers of every bale that was on a vessel that went missing and was never seen again. Tramps, go-fasts, fishing boats, yachts, everything that never arrived. And another list of every vessel that got through safely and every bale, by batch number, that they were carrying."

After that it was almost as if the gods were at last smiling on him. He had two lucky breaks. On the Mexican-U.S. border, U.S. customs, working in Arizona near the town of Nogales, intercepted a truck that had penetrated the border in the dark of a moonless night. There was a large seizure, and it was lodged locally pending destruction. There was publicity. There was also slack security.

It cost Don Diego a huge bribe, but a renegade official secured the batch numbers on the cargo. Some had been on the Maria Linda that had arrived safely and discharged her bales into the possession of the Sinaloa cartel. Other bales had been in two go-fasts that had disappeared in the Caribbean months earlier. They, too, had been heading for the Sinaloa Canal. And now they had shown up in the Nogales intercept.

Another stroke of luck for the Don came out of Italy. This time it was a juggernaut-load of Italian men's suits of a very fashionable Milan-made brand seeking to cross the Alps into France, destination London.

It was just bad luck, but the truck took a puncture in the Alpine pass and caused a ferocious tailback. The carabinieri insisted the rig be lifted out of the way, but that meant lightening the vehicle by off-loading part of the cargo. A crate split and disgorged jute-wrapped cargo that was definitely not going to adorn the backs of trendy young bond traders in Lombard Street.

The contraband was immediately impounded, and as the source of the cargo had been Milan the carabinieri did not need the services of Albert Einstein to work out the name Ndrangheta. The local warehouse was visited in the night; nothing was taken, but batch numbers were noted and e-mailed to Bogota. Some of the cargo had been on the Bonita, which had safely been delivered to the Galician coast. Other bales had been in the hull of the Arco Soledad, which had apparently gone down with all hands including Alvaro Fuentes on its way to Guinea-Bissau. Both cargoes had been due to go north to the Galicians and the Ndrangheta.

Don Diego Esteban had his thieves, and he prepared to make them pay.

Neither the U.S. customs at Nogales nor the carabinieri at the Alpine crossing had paid much attention to a soft-spoken American official whose papers said he was with the DEA and who had appeared with commendable lack of delay at both situations. He spoke fluent Spanish and halting Italian. He was slim, wiry, fit and gray-haired. He carried himself like an ex-soldier and took notes of all the batch numbers on the captured bales. What he did with them, no one asked. His DEA card said he was called Cal Dexter. A curious DEA man also attending at Nogales rang Arlington HQ, but no one had heard of any Dexter. It was not particularly suspicious. Undercover men are never called what their cards say.

The DEA man at Nogales took it no further, and in the Alps the carabinieri were happy to accept a generous token of friendship in the form of a box of hard-to-get Cuban Cohibas and let an ally and colleague enter the warehouse containing their impounded triumph.

In Washington, Paul Devereaux listened to his report attentively.

"Both ruses went down well?"

"It would appear so. The three so-called Mexicans at Nogales will have to spend a little time in an Arizona jail, then I think we can spring them. The Italian-American truck driver in the Alps will be acquitted because there will be nothing to link him to his cargo. I think I can have them back with their families, and a bonus, in a couple of weeks."

"Did you ever read about Julius Caesar?" asked the Cobra.

"Not a lot. My schooling was part in a trailer, part on a series of construction sites. Why?"

"He was once fighting the barbarian tribes in Germany. He surrounded his camp with large pits covered with light brushwood. The bases and sides of the pits were studded with sharpened stakes pointing up. When the Germani charged, many of them took a very sharp stake right between the cheeks."

"Painful and effective," observed Dexter, who had seen such traps prepared by the Vietcong in 'Nam.

"Indeed. Do you know what he called his stakes?"

"No idea."

"He called them 'stimuli.' It seems he had a rather dark humor, did old Julius."

"So?"

"So let us hope our stimuli reach Don Diego Esteban, wherever he may be."

Don Diego was at his hacienda in the ranch country east of the Cordillera, and, despite its remoteness, the disinformation had indeed reached him. A CELL DOOR in Belmarsh Prison opened, and Justin Coker looked up from his trashy novel. As he was in solitary, he and the visitor were not to be overheard.

"Time to go," said Cdr. Peter Reynolds. "Charges dropped. Don't ask. But you'll have to come in from the cold. You'll be blown when this gets out. And well done, Danny, well done indeed. That comes from me and from the very top."

So Detective Sergeant Danny Lomax, after six years undercover infiltration of a London drug gang, came out of the shadows and to a promotion to detective inspector.