The Cobra

CHAPTER 2

THE MAN THE PRESIDENT SOUGHT WAS NAMED PAUL Devereaux, and when he was finally traced, he was at prayer. He regarded prayer as profoundly important.

Devereaux was the scion of a long line of those families who come as near to being aristocracy as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has had since 1776. From his young manhood, he had always had private means, but what marked him out in those early days was his intellect.

He attended Boston College High School, the main feeder unit for one of the leading Jesuit universities in the USA. There he was tagged as a very high flier indeed. He was as devout as he was scholarly and seriously thought of entering the priesthood as a Jesuit. Instead he accepted an invitation to join another exclusive community, the CIA.

To the twenty-year-old who had swept through every exam his tutors could throw at him and was mastering foreign languages on a yearly basis, it was a question of serving his God and his country by fighting communism and atheism. He just chose the secular rather than the clerical road.

Inside the Company, he rose fast because he was unstoppable, and if his detached intellectualism did not make him Langley's most popular, he cared not a fig. He served in the three main divisions: Operations (Ops), Intelligence (Analysis) and Counterintelligence (Internal Security). He saw out the Cold War in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR, a goal to which he had devoted twenty hard years, and remained en poste until 1998, when Al Qaeda blew up two U.S. embassies, in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Devereaux had already become a skilled Arabist, holding that the Soviet division was too crowded and too obvious. Mastering Arabic in several different dialects, he was the right man for the job when the Company formed a Special Ops unit to concentrate on the new threat-Islamic fundamentalism and the global terrorism it would spawn.

His departure into retirement in 2008 fell squarely into the category of the old puzzle: did he jump or was he pushed? He, naturally, would maintain the former. A charitable observer would call it mutual. Devereaux was old school. He could recite the Koran better than most Islamic scholars and had absorbed at least a thousand of the leading Commentaries. But he was surrounded by bright young things whose ears appeared seam-welded to their BlackBerrys, a device he despised.

He loathed political correctness, preferring courtly good manners, which he practiced to all, save those who were clearly the enemies of the one true God and/or the United States. These he destroyed without qualm. His final departure from Langley was occasioned when the new director of Central Intelligence indicated most firmly that, in the modern world, qualms were a must-have.

So he took his leave with a quiet and insincere cocktail party-another convention he could not stand-and retired to his exquisite town house in the historic town of Alexandria. There he could immerse himself in his formidable library and collection of rare Islamic artworks.

He was neither gay nor married, a speculation that had once occupied much chatter around the watercoolers along the corridors of the Old Building at Langley-he had flatly refused to move into the new building. Eventually, the chatterers were forced to concede what was obvious. The Jesuit-trained intellectual and ascetic Boston Brahmin was not interested. That was when some clever fast-track boy had remarked that he had all the charm of a cobra. And the name stuck.

The young staffer from the White House went first to the residence at the junction of South Lee and South Fairfax streets. The housekeeper, the beaming Maisie, told the lad her employer was at church and gave him directions. When the young man returned to the car by the curb, he looked around and thought he might have regressed two centuries.

And well he might. Alexandria was founded by English merchants in 1749. It was "antebellum" not just in the sense of existing before the Civil War; it preceded the War of Independence. Once a river port on the Potomac, it had prospered from sugar and slaves. The sugar ships, creeping upriver from Chesapeake Bay and the wild Atlantic beyond, used old English building bricks for ballast, and it was of these the merchants built their fine houses. The effect was still more Old Europe than New World.

The man from the White House climbed back beside the driver and gave directions for South Royal Street and to look for St. Mary's Catholic Church. He eased open the door and left the hum of the streets for the silent calm of the nave, looked around and perceived a single figure kneeling up by the altar.

His feet made no sound as he crept the length of the nave past the eight stained-glass windows that were the only illumination. A Baptist, he caught the faint odor of incense and the wax of the burning votive candles as he approached the kneeling silver-haired figure praying before the white-clothed altar surmounted by a simple gold cross.

He thought he was quiet, but the figure raised a single hand to admonish him not to break the silence. When the praying man had finished his orisons, he rose, inclined his head, crossed himself and turned. The man from Pennsylvania Avenue tried to speak, but another hand was raised, and they proceeded calmly back down the nave to the vestibule by the door to the street. Only then did the older man turn and smile. He opened the main door and spotted the limo across the street.

"I have come from the White House, sir," said the staffer.

"Many things change, my young friend, but not the haircuts or the cars," said Devereaux. If the staffer thought "White House," which he adored using, would have the usual effect, he was wrong.

"And what does the White House wish to say to a retired old man?"

The staffer was perplexed. In a society paranoid about youth, no one called themselves old, even at seventy. He did not know that in the Arabic world, age is revered.

"Sir, the President of the United States wishes to see you."

Devereaux remained silent, as though thinking it over.

"Now, sir."

"Then I think a dark suit and a tie is in order, if we can pause by my house. And as I do not drive, I have no car. I trust you can bring me there and home again?"

"Yes, sir. Of course."

"Then let us go. Your driver knows where I live. You must have been there to see Maisie."

At the West Wing, the meeting was brief and took place in the office of the chief of staff, a hard-nosed Illinois congressman who had been with the President for years.

The President shook hands and introduced his most trusted ally in all Washington.

"I have a proposition to put to you, Mr. Devereaux," said the Chief Executive. "In a way, a request. No, in every way a request. Right now I have a meeting I cannot butt out of. But no matter. Jonathan Silver will explain everything. I would be grateful for your reply when you feel able to give it."

And with a smile and another handshake, he was gone. Mr. Silver did not smile. It was not a habit of his except rarely, and then only when he heard an opponent of the President was in deep trouble. He took a file off his desk and proffered it.

"The President would be grateful if you would first read this. Here. Now." He gestured to one of the leather armchairs at the back of the room. Paul Devereaux took the file, sat, crossed his elegantly suited legs and read the Berrigan Report. When he was done, ten minutes later, he looked up.

Jonathan Silver had been working on papers. He caught the old secret agent's gaze and put down his pen.

"What do you think?"

"Interesting, but hardly innovative. What do you want of me?"

"The President wishes to know this. Would it be possible, with all our technology and Special Forces, to destroy the cocaine industry?"

Devereaux gazed at the ceiling.

"A five-second answer would be valueless. We both know that. I will need time to conduct what the French call a projet d'etude."

"I don't give jackshit what the French call it" was the reply. Jonathan Silver rarely left the USA except for his beloved Israel, and when he was away, he loathed every minute of it, especially Europe, and even more especially France.

"You need study time, right? How long?"

"Two weeks, minimum. And I will need a letter of empowerment requiring every authority in the state to answer my questions frankly and truthfully. Otherwise the answer will still be valueless. I presume neither you nor the President wish to waste time and money on a project doomed to failure?"

The chief of staff stared back for several seconds, then rose and strode from the room. He returned five minutes later with a letter. Devereaux glanced at it. He nodded slowly. What he held was enough to overcome any bureaucratic barrier in the country. The chief of staff also held out a card.

"My private numbers. Home, office and cell. All encrypted. Totally secure. Call me anytime, but only for a serious reason. From now on, the President is out of this. Do you need to keep the Berrigan Report?"

"No," said Devereaux mildly. "I have memorized it. Ditto your three numbers."

He handed the card back. Privately, he mocked the "totally secure" boast. A few years earlier, a British computer geek with mild autism had gone through all the firewalls of NASA and the Pentagon databases like a hot knife through marshmallow. And that was from a cheap gizmo in his bedroom in North London. The Cobra knew about real secrecy; that you can keep a secret between three men only if two are dead; that the only trick is to be in and out before the bad guys have woken up. A WEEK AFTER the Devereaux-Silver conference, the President was in London. It was not a state visit but the next level down, an official one. Still, he and the First Lady were welcomed by the Queen at Windsor Castle, and an earlier and genuine friendship was refreshed.

That apart, there were several working discussions with a stress on the ongoing problems of Afghanistan, two economies, the EU, global warming/climate change and trade. On the weekend, the President and his wife had agreed to spend two relaxing days with the new British Prime Minister at the official country retreat, a magnificent Tudor mansion called simply Chequers. Saturday evening found the two couples taking coffee after dinner in the Long Gallery. As there was a chill in the air, a roaring log fire sent the light of its flames flickering off the walls of hand-tooled, morocco-bound antique books.

Whether two heads of government will ever get on as people, or develop the empathy of true friendship, is completely unforeseeable. Some do, others do not. History records that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, while never entirely without their differences, liked each other. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were genuine friends despite the gulf between the Englishwoman's steely convictions and the Californian's folksy humor.

Between the British and the Europeans at that level, there has rarely if ever been more than formal courtesy, and often not even that. On one occasion the German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, brought over a wife so formidable that Harold Wilson, descending for dinner, gave vent to one of his rare barbs of humor, remarking to the assembled staff, "Well, wife-swapping's out."

Harold Macmillan could not abide Charles de Gaulle (mutual) while having affection for the much younger John F. Kennedy. It may have to do with the common language, but not necessarily.

Considering the gulf between the backgrounds of the two men sharing the warmth of the log fire that autumn evening, as the shadows deepened and the Secret Service patrolled with the British SAS outside, it was perhaps surprising that in three meetings-one in Washington, one at the UN and now at Chequers-they had developed a friendship on a personal level.

The American had the disadvantaged background: Kenyan father, Kansas-born mother, Hawaii and Indonesia raising, the early struggles against bigotry. The Englishman came from a stockbroker married to a county magistrate, a nanny as a baby, private education at two of the most expensive and prestigious junior and senior schools in the country. That kind of background can endow with the sort of easy charm that may or may not mask inner steel. With some it does, with others it does not.

At a more superficial level, there was much more in common. Both men were still under fifty, married to beautiful women, fathers of two children still school-aged, both men with top college degrees and an adult lifetime spent in politics. And both with the same almost obsessional concerns for climate change, Third World poverty, national security and the plight, even at home, of those whom Frantz Fanon called "the wretched of the earth."

While the Prime Minister's wife showed the First Lady some of the earliest books in the collection, the President murmured to his British opposite:

"Did you have time to glance at that report I gave you?"

"Certainly. Impressive… and worrying. We have a massive problem over here. This country is the biggest user of cocaine in Europe. I had a briefing two months ago from SOCA, our own Serious Crime people, about the spin-off crime that derives from it. Why?"

The President stared into the fire and chose his words.

"I have a man at the moment looking into the sheer feasibility of an idea. Would it be possible, with all our technology and the skill of our Special Forces, to destroy that industry?"

The Prime Minister was taken aback. He stared at the American.

"Your man, has he reported yet?"

"Nope. I expect his verdict momentarily."

"And his advice. Will you take it?"

"I guess I will."

"And if he advises it is feasible?"

"Then I think the USA may go with that."

"We both spend huge amounts of treasure trying to combat narcotic drugs. All my experts say complete destruction cannot be done. We intercept cargoes, we catch the smugglers and the gangsters, we send them to jail, long-term. Nothing changes. The drugs keep flooding in. New volunteers replace the jailbirds. The public appetite continues to increase."

"But if my man says it can be done-would Great Britain come in with us?"

No politician likes to be hit way below the belt, even by a friend. Even by the President of the USA. He played for time.

"There would have to be a real plan. It would have to be funded."

"If we go ahead, there will be a plan. And funds. What I would like are your Special Forces. Your anti-crime agencies. Your secret intelligence skills."

"I would have to consult my people," said the Prime Minister.

"You do that," said the President. "I'll let you know when my man says what he says, and whether we are going ahead."

The four prepared for bed. In the morning they would attend matins at the local Norman church. Through the night the guards would patrol, watch, check, survey and check again. They would be armed and armored, with night-vision goggles, infrared scanners, movement sensors and body-heat detectors. It would be extremely unwise to be a patrolling fox. Even the specially imported U.S. limousines would be under guard all night so that they could not be approached.

The American couple, as always with heads of state, had the Lee Room, named after the philanthropist who had donated Chequers to the nation after total restoration in 1917. The room still contained its huge four-poster bed, dating, perhaps not very diplomatically, from the time of George III. During the Second World War, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, had slept in that bed with a pistol under his pillow. That night in the fall of 2010, there was no pistol. TWENTY MILES down the coast south of the Colombian port and city of Cartagena is the Gulf of Uraba, a shore of impenetrable and malarial mangrove swamps. As Air Force One was lining up for its final approach bringing the presidential couple back from London, two strange crafts slipped out of an invisible creek and turned southwest.

They were of aluminum, pencil-slim, up to sixty feet long, like needles in the water, but at the stern of each were four Yamaha 200 outboard engines side by side. The cocaine community called them "go-fasts," and both their shape and power were designed to enable them to outstrip anything else on water.

Despite their length, there was little room on board. Huge extra fuel tanks took up most of the space. Each also carried 600 kilograms of cocaine in ten large white plastic drums, which were themselves hermetically sealed against damage by seawater. To enable them to be handled, each drum was encased in nets of blue polyethylene cord.

Between the drums and the fuel tanks, the crew of four crouched uncomfortably. But they were not there to be comfortable. One was the helmsman, a highly skilled operator who could handle the go-fast easily at its forty-knot cruise speed and take her up to sixty knots, sea permitting, if she was pursued. The other three were muscle, and all were going to be paid a fortune by their standards for seventy-two hours of discomfort and risk. In fact, their combined rewards were a tiny fraction of one percent of the value in those twenty drums.

Clearing the shallows, the captains opened up to forty knots over a flat sea to begin their long cruise. Their target was a point on the ocean seventy nautical miles off Colon, Republic of Panama. There they would make sea rendezvous with the freighter Virgen de Valme, who would be coming west out of the Caribbean heading for the Panama Canal.

The go-fasts had three hundred nautical miles to make rendezvous, and even at forty knots they could not make it by sunrise. So they would spend the next day hove to, bobbing in the sweltering heat under a blue tarpaulin, until darkness enabled them to continue. Then they could accomplish the transshipment of cargo at midnight. That was their deadline.

The freighter was there as the go-fasts approached, showing the right sequence of lights in the right pattern. Identification was confirmed with preagreed but meaningless sentences shouted across the darkness. The go-fasts came alongside. Willing hands hauled the twenty drums upward onto the decks. These were followed by empty fuel tanks which were soon lowered back down, brimful. With a few Spanish salutations, the Virgen de Valme proceeded toward Colon, and the go-fasts turned for home. After another day bobbing invisibly on the ocean, they would be back in their mangrove swamps before dawn of the third day, sixty hours after they left them.

The $5,000 each crewman received-$10,000 for the skippers-regarded as a king's ransom. What they had carried would sell from dealer to user in the USA for around $84 million.

By the time the Virgen de Valme entered the Panama Canal, she was just another freighter waiting her turn, unless someone had ventured down to the bilges below the floor of the lowest hold. But no one did. A man would need breathing equipment to survive down there, and the crew passed off their equipment as firefighting gear.

Clearing Panama on the Pacific side, the freighter turned north. She slid past Central America, Mexico and California. Finally, off Oregon, the twenty drums were brought to deck level, prepared and hidden under canvas covers. On a moonless night, the Virgen de Valme turned at Cape Flattery and headed down the Juan de Fuca Strait, bringing her cargo of Brazilian coffee to Seattle for the discriminating palates of America's coffee capital.

Before she turned, the crew heaved twenty drums overboard, suitably weighted with chains, enough to cause each drum to sink gently to the bottom in a hundred feet of water. Then the captain made a single cell phone call. Even if the monitors of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, were listening (which they were), the words spoken were aimless and harmless. Something about a lonely seaman seeing his girlfriend in a few hours.

The twenty drums were marked by small but brightly colored buoys that bobbed on the gray water at dawn. That was where the four men in the crab boat found them, looking exactly like markers for lobster pots. No one saw them haul the drums out of the deep. Had their radar showed them any patrol boats within miles, they would not have gone near. But the GPS position of the cocaine was accurate to a few square yards, so they could pick their moment.

From the Fuca Strait, the smugglers headed back into the patchwork of islands north of Seattle and made landfall at a point on the mainland where a fisherman's track led down to the water. A large beer truck awaited. After transfer, the drums would head inland to become part of the three hundred tons brought into the USA each year. Everyone involved would be paid later in agreed accounts. The crabmen would never know the name of the ship nor the owner of the beer truck. They did not need to know.

With the landing on U.S. soil, the ownership of the drug had changed. Until then it belonged to the cartel, and all involved would be paid by the cartel. From the beer truck, it belonged to the U.S. importer, and he now owed the cartel a staggering amount of money that would have to be paid.

A price for 1.2 metric tons of pure had already been negotiated. Small fry had to pay a hundred percent on placement of the order. Big players paid fifty percent, with the balance on delivery. The importer would sell his cocaine with impressive markups between the beer truck and the human nostril in Spokane or Milwaukee.

He would "settle" with the layers of middlemen and cutouts that kept him out of the grip of the FBI or the DEA. And it would all be in cash. But even when the cartel had been paid its outstanding fifty percent of purchase price, the American gangster would still have a vast ocean of dollars to launder. These would filter outward from himself into a hundred other illegal enterprises.

And across America, more lives would be ruined by the white powder. PAUL DEVEREAUX found he needed four weeks to complete his study. Jonathan Silver called him twice, but he would not be hurried. When he was ready, he met the presidential chief of staff in the West Wing again. He bore a slim folder. Disdaining computers, which he regarded as thoroughly insecure, he memorized almost everything, and, if he had to deal with a lesser brain, wrote succinct reports in elegant if old-fashioned English.

"Well?" demanded Silver, who prided himself on what he called his no-nonsense approach and hardball attitude but which others referred to as sheer rudeness. "You have come to a view?"

"I have," said Devereaux. "Subject to certain conditions being rigorously fulfilled, the cocaine industry could be destroyed as a narcotic mass industry."

"How?"

"First, how not. At the point of source, the creators are beyond reach. Thousands of dirt-poor peasants, the cocaleros, growing their weed in thousands of patches of scrub under the canopy of the jungle, some patches no larger than an acre. So long as there is a cartel prepared to buy their wretched paste, they will produce it and bring it to the buyers in Colombia."

"So smacking the peasants is out?"

"Try as one may, and the present Colombian government really does try, unlike certain of its predecessors and most of its neighbors. But Vietnam ought to have taught us all some home truths about jungles and the people who live in them. Trying to wipe out ants with a rolled-up newspaper is not an option."

"So, the refining laboratories? The cartels?"

"Again, not an option. Like trying to take a moray with your bare hand inside its own hole. This is their territory, not ours. Inside Latin America, they are the masters, not we."

"Okay," said Silver, already running short of his severely limited patience. "Inside the U.S., after the shit has landed in our country? You have any idea how much treasure, how many tax dollars, we spend nationwide on law enforcement? Fifty states, plus the Feds? It's the national debt, goddammit."

"Exactly," said Devereaux, still unruffled despite Silver's rising irritation. "I believe the federal government alone spends fourteen billion dollars a year on the narcotics war. That does not even begin to touch the holes in the budgets of the states, all fifty of them. That is why suppression onshore will not work either."

"So where is the key?"

"The Achilles' heel is water."

"Water? You want to put water in the coke?"

"No, water under the coke. Seawater. Apart from one single land route up from Colombia to Mexico via the narrow spine of Central America, which is so easily controllable that the cartels do not use it, every gram of cocaine heading for the USA or Europe…"

"Forget Europe, they're not in," snapped Silver.

"… has got to travel over, across or under the sea. Even from Colombia to Mexico, it goes by sea. That is the cartel's carotid artery. Cut that, the patient dies."

Silver grunted and stared across his desk at the retired spy. The man stared calmly back, seeming not to care a damn if his findings were accepted or not.

"So, I can tell the President his project is 'go' and you are prepared to take it on?"

"Not entirely. There are conditions. I fear they are not negotiable."

"That sounds like a threat. No one threatens the Oval Office. Back off, mister."

"It is not a threat, it is a warning. If the conditions are not met, the project would simply fail, expensively and embarrassingly. These are they."

Devereaux pushed his slim file across the desk. The chief of staff opened it. Just two sheets that looked as if they had been typed. Five paragraphs. Numbered. He read the first.

"'1. I will need total independence of action within the ambit of absolute secrecy. None but the tiniest group around the commander in chief need know what is happening or why, no matter how many feathers are ruffled or noses put out of joint. Everyone below the Oval Office need know only what they need to know; and that shall be the least to accomplish the task required of them.'

"The federal and military structure does not leak," snapped Silver.

"Yes, it does," said the imperturbable Devereaux. "I have spent half my life trying to prevent them or repairing the damage later."

"'2. I will require presidential authority giving me powers plenipotentiary to require and receive without demur complete cooperation from any other agency or military unit whose cooperation is vital. That must begin with automatic patch through of every scrap of information reaching any other agency in the anti-narcotics campaign to the HQ of what I wish to call "Project Cobra."'

"They'll go crazy," growled Silver. He knew information was power, and no one willingly ceded even one smidgen of their power. That included the CIA, DEA, FBI, NSA or the Armed Forces.

"They all now come under Homeland Security and the Patriot Act," said Devereaux. "They will obey the President."

"Homeland Security is about the terrorism threat," snapped Silver. "Narc smuggling is crime."

"Read on," murmured the CIA veteran.

"'3. I will need to recruit my own staff. Not many, but the ones I need must be seconded to the project without query or refusal.' "

The chief of staff raised no objection until he came to number four.

"'4. I will need a budget of two billion dollars, to be disbursed without check or examination. I will then need nine month to prepare for the onslaught and a further nine months to destroy the cocaine industry."

There had been covert projects before and secret budgets, but this was huge. The chief of staff could see red lights flashing. Whose budget would be raided? FBI? CIA? DEA? Or would the Treasury be asked for fresh funds?

"There has to be supervision of expenditure," he said. "The money men won't bear the departure into a clear blue sky of two billion dollars because you want to go shopping."

"Then it won't work," Devereaux replied calmly. "The whole point is that when action is taken against the cocaine cartel and industry, they must not see it coming. Forewarned is still fore-armed. The nature of the acquired equipment and personnel would betray the game plan, and that will assuredly leak to some investigative reporter or blogger the moment accountants or book-keepers take over."

"They don't have to take over, just monitor."

"Same difference, Mr. Silver. Once they get involved, cover is blown. And once your cover is blown, you're dead. Trust me. I know."

It was an area the Illinois ex-congressman knew he could not dispute. He passed to condition five.

"'5. It will be necessary to recategorize cocaine from a Class A drug whose importation is a crime in law to a national threat whose importation or intended importation is an act of terrorism.' "

Jonathan Silver came out of his chair.

"Are you crazy? This changes the law."

"No, that would need an act of Congress. This simply alters the category of a chemical substance. That needs only an Executive instrument."

"What chemical?"

"Cocaine hydrochloride is only a chemical. It happens to be a banned chemical, whose importation contravenes U.S. criminal law. Anthrax is also a chemical, as is VX nerve gas. But the first is classed as a 'bacteriological weapon of mass destruction' and VX as a 'chemical weapon.' We invaded Iraq because what passes for our intelligence service since I left was persuaded that it possessed them."

"That was different."

"No, it was exactly the same. Reclassify cocaine hydrochloride as a threat to the nation, and all the dominoes topple in sequence. Throwing a thousand tons a year at us isn't a crime anymore: it's a terror threat. Then, we can lawfully respond in kind. All the law is already in place."

"Everything we have in the locker?"

"The lot. But deployed outside our territorial waters and airspace. And invisibly."

"Treat the cartel as we would Al Qaeda?"

"Crudely but effectively put," said Devereaux.

"So what I have to do…"

The silver-haired Bostonian rose.

"What you have to do, Mr. Chief of Staff, is decide how squeamish you are, and, more important, how squeamish the man down the hall is. When you have decided that, there is not much more to say. I believe the job can be done, but these are the conditions without whose fulfillment it cannot be done. At least not by me."

Without being bidden to leave, he paused in the doorway.

"Please let me know the response of the commander in chief in due course. I shall be at home."

Jonathan Silver was not accustomed to being left gazing at a closed door. IN THE USA, the highest administrative decree that can be issued is the Presidential Executive Order. They are habitually made public, for they can hardly be obeyed if they are not, but a PEO can be completely secret, known simply as a "finding."

Although the old mandarin from Alexandria could not know it, he had convinced the abrasive chief of staff who in turn convinced the President. After consultation with a much surprised professor of constitutional law, cocaine was quietly recategorized as a toxin and a national threat. As such, it came within the ambit of the war against threats to the safety of the nation. WELL WEST of the Portuguese coast and almost abreast of the Spanish frontier, the MV Balthazar ploughed her way north with a declared general cargo for the Euro port of Rotterdam. She was not large, a mere 6,000 tons, with a captain and a crew of eight, and they were all smugglers. So lucrative was the criminal side of their labors that the captain was going to retire a wealthy man to his Venezuelan homeland within two years.

He listened to the weather forecast for Cape Finisterre, which lay only fifty nautical miles ahead. It was for a wind at strength four and a choppy sea, but he knew the Spanish fishermen with whom he had a sea rendezvous were hardy mariners and could work in a lot more than a brisk chop.

Portuguese Oporto was well behind him and Spanish Vigo lay unseen to his east when he ordered his men to bring the four large bales up from the third hold where they had lain since being taken aboard from a shrimper a hundred miles off Caracas.

Captain Goncalves was careful. He refused either to enter or leave port carrying contraband, least of all this one. He would take aboard only far out at sea and off-load in the same manner. Short of being denounced by an informant, his caution made it unlikely he would be caught. Six successful Atlantic crossings had given him a fine house, raised two daughters and put Enrique through college.

Just after Vigo, the two Spanish fishing boats appeared. He insisted on the harmless-sounding but crucial exchange of greetings as the trawlers bucked in the chop beside him. It was always possible Spanish customs men had penetrated the gang and were now masquerading as fishermen. Realistically, if that had happened, they would be storming aboard by now, but the men half a cable away from his bridge were the men he had come to meet.

Contact made, identities confirmed, the trawlers slipped away into his wake. Minutes later, the four bales tumbled over the taffrail into the sea. Unlike those dropped off Seattle, these were designed to float. They bobbed on the water as the Balthazar headed north. The trawler men hauled them on board, two each, and bundled them into the fish holds. Ten tons of mackerel were poured over them, and the fishing boats headed for home.

They came from the small fishing town of Muros on the Gallaecian coast, and when they cruised in the dusk past the mole into the inner harbor, they were "clean" again. Outside the harbor, other men had hauled the bales out of the sea to the beach where a tractor and trailer waited. No other wheeled vehicle could manage the wet sand. From the tractor trailer, the four bales went into a panel van advertising "Atlantic Scampi" that set off for Madrid.

A man from the Madrid-based importing gang paid them all off in cash, then went to the harbor to settle with the fishermen. Another ton of Colombian pure had entered Europe. IT WAS a phone call from the chief of staff that brought the news and a messenger who brought the paperwork. The letters of authority gave Paul Devereaux more power than anyone beneath the Oval Office had had in decades. The money transfers would come later, when he decided where he wanted his $2 billion lodged.

Among the first things he did was look up a telephone number he had kept for years but had never used. He used it now. It rang in a small bungalow in a side street of a modest town called Pennington, New Jersey. He was in luck. It answered at the third ring.

"Mr. Dexter?"

"Who wishes to know?"

"A voice from the past. My name is Paul Devereaux. I think you will remember it."

There was a long pause, as by one who has just been hit in the solar plexus.

"Are you there, Mr. Dexter?"

"Yes. I'm here. And I well recall the name. How did you get this number?"

"Not important. Discreet information used to be my stock-in-trade, as you will also recall."

The man in New Jersey recalled extremely well. Ten years earlier he had been the most successful bounty hunter the U.S. ever produced. Unwittingly, he had crossed the Boston Brahmin working out of CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia, and Devereaux had tried to have him killed.

The two men were as unalike as chalk and cheese. Cal Dexter, the wiry, sandy-haired, friendly, smiling, small-town attorney of Pennington, had been born in 1950 in a roach-infested Newark slum. His father had been a construction worker fully employed through World War II and Korea creating new factories, dockyards and government offices along the Jersey Shore.

But with the ending of the Korean War, work had dried up. Cal was five when his mother walked out of the loveless union and left the boy to be raised by his father. The latter was a hard man, quick with his fists, the only law on many blue-collar jobs. But he was not a bad man and tried to live by the straight and narrow, and to raise his toddler son to love Old Glory, the Constitution and Joe DiMaggio.

Within two years, Dexter Senior had acquired a trailer home so that he could move where the work was available. And that was how the boy was raised, moving from construction site to site, attending whichever school would take him, and then moving on. It was the age of Elvis Presley, Del Shannon, Roy Orbison and the Beatles, over from a country Cal had never heard of. It was also the age of Kennedy, the Cold War and Vietnam.

His formal education was fractured to the point of near nonexistence, but he became wise in other ways: streetwise, fight-wise. Like his departed mother, he did not grow tall, topping out at five feet eight inches. Nor was he heavy and muscular like his father, but his lean frame packed fearsome stamina and his fists a killer punch.

By seventeen, it looked as if his life would follow that of his father, shoveling dirt or driving a dump truck on building sites. Unless… In January 1968 he turned eighteen, and the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive. He was watching TV in a bar in Camden. There was a documentary telling him about recruitment. It mentioned that if you shaped up, the Army would give you an education. The next day, he walked into the U.S. Army office in Camden and signed on.

The master sergeant was bored. He spent his life listening to youths doing everything in their power to get out of going to Vietnam.

"I want to volunteer," said the youth in front of him.

The master sergeant drew a form toward him, keeping eye contact like a ferret that does not want the rabbit to get away. Trying to be kindly, he suggested the boy sign for three years, as opposed to two.

"Good chance of better postings," he said. "Better career choices. With three years you could even avoid going to Vietnam."

"But I want to go to Vietnam," said the kid in the soiled denims.

He got his wish. After boot camp, and with his noted skill driving earthmoving equipment, he was sent to the Engineer Battalion of the Big Red One, the First Infantry Division, based right up in the Iron Triangle. That was where he volunteered to become a Tunnel Rat and enter the fearsome network of scary, black and often lethal tunnels dug by the Vietcong under Cu? Chi.

In two tours of nearly suicidal missions in those hellholes, he came back to the States with a hatful of medals, and Uncle Sam kept his promise. He was able to study at college. He chose law, and got his degree at Fordham, in New York.

He had neither the backing, the polish nor the money for the big Wall Street firms. He joined the Legal Aid Society, speaking up for those destined to occupy the very lowest reaches of the legal system. So many of his clients were Hispanic that he learned fluent and rapid Spanish. He also married and had a daughter, on whom he doted.

He might have spent all his working life among the unrepresented destitute, but when he was just over forty, his teenage daughter was abducted, forced into prostitution and sadistically murdered by her gangster pimp. He had to identify her battered body on a marble slab at Virginia Beach. The experience brought back the Tunnel Rat, the one-on-one man killer.

Using his old skills, he tracked down the two pimps behind his daughter's death and gunned them down, with their bodyguards, on a pavement in Panama City. When he returned to New York, his wife had taken her own life.

Cal Dexter abandoned the courts and appeared to retire to become a civil attorney in the small New Jersey town of Pennington. In fact, he took up his third career. He became a bounty hunter, but, unlike the great majority of his trade, he operated almost exclusively abroad. He specialized in tracking down, snatching and bringing back for due process in the USA those who had committed evil crimes and thought they had got away with it by seeking sanctuary in a non-extradition country. He advertised extremely discreetly under the pseudonym "Avenger."

In 2001, he had been commissioned by a Canadian billionaire to find the sadistic Serbian mercenary who had murdered the old man's aid-worker grandson somewhere in Bosnia. What Dexter did not know was that a certain Paul Devereaux was using the killer Zoran Zilic, now a freelance arms trader, as bait to lure Osama bin Laden to a rendezvous where a cruise missile could wipe him out.

But Dexter got there first. He found Zilic holed up in a filthy South American dictatorship, slipped in and hijacked the killer at gunpoint, flying him back to Key West, Florida, in his own jet. Devereaux, who had tried to have the interfering bounty hunter eliminated, found his two years of planning in ruins. It soon became irrelevant; a few days later, 9/11 would ensure that Bin Laden was not going to attend any unsafe meetings outside his caves.

Dexter vanished back into the persona of the harmless little lawyer from Pennington. Devereaux later retired. Then he had the time, and he used it to trace the bounty hunter called simply the Avenger.

Now they were both retired: the ex-Tunnel Rat who came up from the ranks and the dandified aristo from Boston. Dexter looked down at the handset and spoke.

"What do you want, Mr. Devereaux?"

"I have been summoned out of retirement, Mr. Dexter. By the commander in chief himself. There is a task he wishes performed. It affects our country quite grievously. He has asked me to accomplish it. I will need a first deputy, an executive officer. I would be most grateful if you would consider taking the post."

Dexter noted the language. Not "I want you to…" or "I am offering…" but "I would be most grateful…"

"I would need to know more. A lot more."

"Of course. If you could drive over to Washington to visit with me, I would be happy to explain almost everything."

Dexter, standing in the front window of his modest house in Pennington, looking out at the fallen leaves, thought it over. He was now in his sixty-first year. He kept himself in shape, and, despite several very clear offers, had declined to marry for a second time. All in all, his life was comfortable, stress-free, placid, small-town bourgeois. And boring.

"I'll come over and listen, Mr. Devereaux. Just listen. Then decide."

"Very wise, Mr. Dexter. Here is my address in Alexandria. May I expect you tomorrow?"

He dictated his address. Before he hung up, Cal Dexter had a question.

"Bearing in mind our mutual past, why did you pick me?"

"Very simple. You were the only man who ever outwitted me."