But she tearfully identified the watch, signet ring, medallion, melted cell phone and driver’s license. The pathologist would sign an affidavit that these items had been removed from the corpse, and the traffic division would confirm that the body had indeed been the one retrieved from the gutted car that was provably the one owned by and being driven by Juan Cortez that evening. It was enough; bureaucracy was satisfied.
Three days later, the unknown American backwoodsman was buried in the Cartagena grave of Juan Cortez, welder, husband and father. Irina was inconsolable, Pedro sniffing quietly. Fr. Isidro officiated. He was going through his own private Calvary.
Had it been his phone call, he endlessly asked himself? Had the Americans let on? Betrayed the confidence? Had the cartel become aware? Presumed Cortez was going to betray them instead of himself being betrayed? How could the Yanquis have been so stupid?
Or was it just coincidence? A true, terrible coincidence. He knew what the cartel did to anyone they suspected, however feeble the evidence. But how could they have suspected Juan Cortez of not being their loyal craftsman, which in fact he had been to the end? So he conducted the service, saw the earth tumbling on top of the coffin, sought to comfort the widow and orphan by explaining the true love God had for them, even though it was hard to understand. Then he went back to his spartan lodgings to pray and pray and pray for forgiveness.
LETIZIA ARENAL was walking on clouds. A dull April day in the city of Madrid could not touch her. She had never felt so happy or so warm. The only way she could be warmer was in his arms.
They had met at a café terrace two weeks earlier. She had seen him there before, always alone, always studying. The day the ice was broken, she was with a group of fellow students, laughing and joking, and he was just a table away. Being winter, the terrace was glassed in. The door had opened, and the street wind blew some of her papers onto the floor. He has stooped to pick them up. She bent down, too, and their eyes met. She wondered why she had not noticed before that he was drop-dead handsome.
“Goya,” he said. She thought he was introducing himself. Then she noticed he was holding one of her sheets in his hand. It was a picture of an oil painting.
“Boys Picking Fruit,” he said. “Goya. Are you studying art?”
She nodded. It seemed natural that he should walk her home, that they should discuss Zurbarán, Velázquez, Goya. It even seemed natural when he gently kiss her wind-chilled lips. Her latchkey almost fell from her hand.
“Domingo,” he said. Now he really was giving her his name, not the day of the week. “Domingo de Vega.”
“Letizia,” she replied. “Letizia Arenal.”
“Miss Arenal,” he said quietly, “I think I am going to take you out for dinner. It is no use resisting. I know where you live. If you say no, I shall simply curl up on your doorstep and die here. Of the cold.”
“I don’t think you should do that, Señor Vega. So to prevent it, I shall dine with you.”
He took her to an old restaurant that had been serving food when the conquistadors came from their homes in the wild Estremadura to seek the favor of the King to send them to discover the New World. When he told her the story—complete nonsense, for the Sobrino de Botín in the Street of the Knife Grinders is old but not that old—she shivered and glanced around to see if the old adventurers were still dining there.
He told her he was from Puerto Rico, bilingual in English also, a young diplomat at the United Nations, intent one day to be an ambassador. But he had taken a three-month sabbatical, encouraged by his head of mission to study more of his true love, Spanish classical painting, at the Prado in Madrid.
And it seemed quite natural to get into his bed, where he made love as no man she had known, even though she had known only three.
Cal Dexter was a hard man, but he retained a conscience. He might have found it too cold-blooded to use a professional gigolo, but the Cobra had no such scruple. For him there was only to win or to lose, and the unforgivable option was to lose.
He still regarded with awe and admiration the ice-hearted spy-master Markus Wolf who had for years headed East Germany’s spy network that ran rings around the counterintelligence apparat of his West German enemies. Wolf had used honey traps extensively, but usually the opposite way from the norm.
The norm was to entrap gullible Western big shots with stunning call girls until they could be photographed and blackmailed into submission. Wolf used seductive young men; not for gay diplomats (although that was not beyond him at all) but for the overlooked, ignored-in-love spinster who so often toiled as the private secretaries of the high-and-mighty of West Germany.
The fact that when finally exposed as the dupes they had been, when it was clear to them the incalculable secrets they had taken from their masters’ files, copied and passed to their Adonis, they finished up, drab and ruined, in the dock of a West German court or ended their lives in pretrial detention, it did not worry Markus Wolf. He was playing the Great Game to win and he won.
Even after the collapse of East Germany, a Western court had to acquit Wolf because he had not betrayed his own country. So while others were jailed, he enjoyed a genteel retirement until he died of natural causes. The day he read the news, Paul Devereaux mentally doffed his hat and said a prayer for the old atheist. And he had no hesitation in sending the beautiful alley cat Domingo de Vega to Madrid.
JUAN CORTEZ drifted out of sleep by slow degrees, and for the first few seconds thought he might have gone to paradise. In truth, he was simply in a room such as he had never seen before. It was large, as was the double bed in which he lay, and pastel walled, with blinds drawn over windows beyond which the sun shone. In fact, he was in the VIP suite of the officers’ club on Homestead Air Force Base in southern Florida.
As the mists cleared, he observed a terry-cloth robe over a chair near the bed. He swung his rubbery legs to the floor and, realizing he was naked, pulled it on. On the bedside table was a telephone. He lifted the handset and croaked “¡Oiga!” several times, but no one answered.
He walked to one of the large windows, eased back a corner of the blind and peeked out. He saw tended lawns and a flagpole from which fluttered the Stars and Stripes. He was not in paradise; for him, the reverse. He had been kidnapped, and the Americans had got him.
He had heard terrible tales of special renditions in darkened planes to foreign lands, of torture in the Middle East and Central Asia, of years in the Cuban enclave called Guantánamo.
Although no one had answered the phone by the bed, it had been noted that he was awake. The door opened, and a white-jacketed steward came in with a tray. It contained food, good food, and Juan Cortez had not eaten since his packed lunch in the dockyard of Sandoval seventy-two hours earlier. He did not know it had been three days.
The steward put down the tray, smiled and beckoned him toward the bathroom door. He looked in. A marble bathroom for a Roman Emperor such as he had seen on TV. The steward gestured that it was all his—shower, lavatory, shaving kit, the lot. Then he withdrew.
The welder contemplated the ham and eggs, juice, toast, jam, coffee. The ham and coffee aromas filled his mouth with saliva. It was probably drugged, he reasoned, possibly poisoned. But so what? They could do with him what they wanted anyway.
He sat and ate, thinking back to his last memory; the policeman asking him to get out of his car, the steely arms around his torso, the stifling pad held up to his face, the sensation of falling. He had little doubt he knew the reason why. He worked for the cartel. But how could they possibly have discovered this?
When he had done, he tried the bathroom; used the lavatory, showered, shaved. There was a bottle of aftershave. He splashed it liberally. Let them pay for it. He had been raised in the fiction that all Americans were rich.
When he came back to the bedroom, there was a man standing there: mature, with gray hair, medium height, wiry build. He smiled a friendly grin, very American. And spoke Spanish.
“Hola, Juan. ¿Qué t
al?” Hi, Juan. How are you? “Me llamo Cal. Hablamos un ratito.” My name is Cal. Let’s have a chat.
A trick, of course. The torture would come later. So they sat in two armchairs, and the American explained what had happened. He told of the snatch, the burning Ford, the body at the wheel. He told of the identification of the body on the basis of the wallet, watch, ring and medallion.
“And my wife and son?” asked Cortez.
“Ah, they are both devastated. They think they have been to your funeral. We want to bring them to join you.”
“Join me? Here?”
“Juan, my friend, accept the reality. You cannot go back. The cartel would never believe a word you said. You know what they do to people they think have defected to us. And to all their family. In these things, they are animals.”
Cortez started to shake. He knew only too well. He had never personally seen such things, but he had heard. Heard and trembled. The cutout tongues, the slow death, the wiping out of the entire family. He trembled for Irina and Pedro. The American leaned forward.
“Accept the reality. You are here now. Whether what we did was right or wrong, probably wrong, does not matter anymore. You are here and alive. But the cartel is convinced you are dead. They even sent an observer to the funeral.”
Dexter took a DVD from his jacket pocket, switched on the big plasma screen, inserted the disc and pressed Play on the remote. The film had clearly been made by a cameraman on a high-rise roof half a kilometer from the cemetery, but the definition was excellent. And enlarged.
Juan Cortez watched his own funeral. The editors of the movie zeroed in on Irina weeping, supported by a neighbor. On his son Pedro. On Fr. Isidro. On the man at the back in black suit and tie and wraparound black glasses, he of the grim face, the watcher sent on the orders of the Don. The film cut.
“You see?” said the American, tossing the remote on the bed. “You cannot go back. But they will not come after you either. Not now, not ever. Juan Cortez died in that blazing car crash. Fact. Now you have to stay with us, here in the U.S. And we will look after you. We will not harm you. You have my word, and I do not break it. There will be a change of name, of course, and maybe some small changes in features. We have a thing called the ‘Witness Protection Program.’ You will be inside it.
“You will be a new man, Juan Cortez, with a new life in a new place; a new job, a new home, new friends. New everything.”
“But I do not want new everything!” shouted Cortez in despair. “I want my old life back!”
“You cannot go back, Juan. The old life is over.”
“And my wife and son?”
“Why should you not have them with you in the new life? There are many places in this country where the sun shines, just like in Cartagena. There are hundreds of thousands of Colombians here, legal immigrants, now settled and happy.”
“But how could they . . . ?”
“We would bring them. You could raise Pedro here. In Cartagena, what would he be? A welder like you? Going every day to sweat in the dockyards? Here he could be anything in twenty years. Doctor, lawyer, even a senator?”
The Colombian welder stared at him openmouthed.
“Pedro, my son, a senator?”
“Why not? Any boy can grow up to become anything here. We call it the American dream. But for this favor, we would need your help.”
“But I have nothing to offer.”
“Oh yes you do, Juan my friend. Here in my country, that white powder is destroying the lives of young people just like your Pedro. And it comes in ships, hidden in places we can never find it. But remember those ships, Juan, the ones you worked on . . .
“Look, I have to go.” Cal Dexter stood and patted Cortez on the shoulder. “Think things over. Play the tape. Irina grieves for you. Pedro cries for his dead papá. It could all be so good for you if we bring them out to join you. Just for a few names. I’ll be back in twenty-four hours.
“I’m afraid you cannot leave. For your own sake. In case anyone saw you. Unlikely but possible. So stay here and think. My people will look after you.”
THE TRAMP STEAMER Sidi Abbas was never going to win any beauty prizes, and her entire value as a small merchantman was a pittance compared to the eight bales in her hold.
She came out of the Gulf of Sidra, on the coast of Libya, and she was heading for the Italian province of Calabria. Contrary to the hopes of tourists, the Mediterranean can be a wild sea. The huge waves of a storm lashed the rusty tramp as she plodded and wheezed her way east of Malta toward the toe of the Italian peninsula.
The eight bales were a cargo that had been unloaded a month earlier with the complete agreement of the port authorities at Conakry, capital of the other Guinea, out of a bigger freighter from Venezuela. From tropical Africa the cargo had been trucked north, out of the rain forest, across the savannah and over the blazing sands of the Sahara. It was a journey to daunt any driver, but the hard men who drove the land trains were accustomed to the rigors.
They drove the huge rigs and trailers hour after hour and day after day over pitted roads and tracks of sand. At each border and customs post, there were palms to be greased and barriers to be lifted, as the purchased officials turned away with fat rolls of high-denomination euros in their back pockets.
It took a month, but with every yard nearer to Europe the value of each kilo in the eight bales increased toward the astronomical European price. At last the land-trains ground to a halt at a dusty shack stop just outside the major city that was the true destination.
Smaller trucks, or more likely rugged pickups, took the bales from the roadside around the city to some noisome fishing village, a huddle of adobe huts, by an almost-fishless sea where a tramp like the Sidi Abbas would be waiting at a crumbling dock.
That April, the tramp was heading on the last stage of the journey, to the Calabrian port of Gioia, which was wholly under the control of the Ndrangheta mafia. At that point, ownership would change. Alfredo Suárez in faraway Bogotá would have done his job; the self-styled “Honorable Society” would take over. The fifty percent debt would be settled, the enormous fortune laundered through the Italian version of Banco Guzman.
From Gioia, a few miles from the office of the state prosecutor in the capital of Reggio di Calabria, the eight bales in much smaller packets would be driven north to Italy’s cocaine capital, Milan.
But the master of the Sidi Abbas neither knew nor cared. He was just glad when the harbor mole at Gioia slid past and the wild water was behind him. Four more tons of cocaine had reached Europe, and many miles away the Don would be pleased.
IN HIS comfortable but lonely jail, Juan Cortez had played the DVD of the funeral many times, and each time he saw the devastated faces of his wife and son he was brought to tears. He longed to see them again, to hold his son, to sleep with Irina. But he knew the Yanqui was right; he could never go back. Even to refuse to cooperate and send a message would be to sentence them to death or worse.
When Cal Dexter came back, the welder nodded his agreement.
“But I also have my terms,” he said. “When I hold my son, when I kiss my wife, then I will remember the ships. Until then, not one word.”
Dexter smiled.
“I asked for nothing else,” he said. “But now we have work to do.”
A recording engineer came and a tape was made. Though the technology was not new, neither was Cal Dexter, as he occasionally joked. He preferred the old Pearlcorder, small, reliable and with a tap so tiny it could be hidden in many places. And pictures were taken. Of Cortez facing the camera, holding a copy of that day’s Miami Herald with the date clearly visible, and of the welder’s strawberry birthmark, like a bright pink lizard, on the right thigh. When he had his evidence, Dexter left.
JONATHAN SILVER was becoming impatient. He had demanded progress reports, but Devereaux was infuriatingly noncommittal. The White House chief of staff bombarded him constantly.
Elsewhere, the official forces of law and order cont
inued as before. Huge sums from the public purse were allocated, and still the problem seemed to worsen.
Captures were made and loudly acclaimed; interceptions happened, the tonnages and prices—always the street price, rather than the at-sea price, because it was higher.
But in the Third World, confiscated ships miraculously slipped their moorings and vanished out to sea; accused crews were bailed and disappeared; worse, impounded shipments of cocaine simply went missing while in custody, and the trade went on. It seemed to the frustrated myrmidons of the DEA that everyone was on the payroll. This was the burden of Silver’s complaint.
The man taking the call in his Alexandria town house as the nation packed up for the Easter break remained icily courteous but refused any concession.
“I was given the task last October,” he said. “I said I needed nine months to prepare. At the right moment, things will change. Have a happy Easter.” And he put the phone down. Silver was enraged. No one did that to him. Except, it seemed, the Cobra.
CAL DEXTER flew back into Colombia via the Malambo air base again. This time, with Devereaux’s assistance, he had borrowed the CIA Grumman executive jet. It was not for his comfort but for a fast getaway. He rented a car in the nearby town and drove to Cartagena. He had brought no backup. There are times and places where stealth and speed alone bring success. If he heeded muscle and firepower, he would have failed anyway.
Though he had seen her in the doorway, kissing her husband farewell as he left for work, Señora Cortez had never seen him. It was Semana Santa, and the district of Las Flores was a-bustle with preparations for Easter Sunday. Except Number 17.
He cruised the zone several times, waiting for dark. He did not want to park by the curb for fear of being spotted and challenged by a nosy neighbor. But he wanted to see the lights go on just before the curtains were drawn. There was no car on the hard pad, indicating no visitors. When the lights went on, he could see inside. Señora Cortez and the boy; no visitors. They were alone. He approached the door and rang the bell. It was the son who answered, a dark, intense lad whom he recognized from the funeral film. The face was sad. It did not smile.
The Cobra Page 12