The Cobra

He should have made a run for safety after the destruction of Eberhardt Milch in Hamburg. He knew it; his ante

Like a jungle creature, he moved constantly from refuge to refuge, even in his own forest. He had fifty bolt-holes, mainly within the zone around Cartagena, and he bought use-and-throw prepaid cell phones like candies, never making more than one call before heaving the communicator into a river. He was so elusive that sometimes the cartel took a day or so to find him. And that was something the highly effective Colonel Dos Santos, head of intelligence in the anti-drug division of the Policia Judicial, could not do.

His bolt-holes tended to be working cottages, obscure, plainly furnished, even spartan. But there was one indulgence he cherished; he loved his TV. He had the best and newest model of plasma screen, the sharpest aerial dish, and they traveled with him.

He liked to sit with a six-pack of beer flicking through the satellite cha

And he loved one taped newscast that he played over and over again. It showed a lovely but haggard young woman on a pavement at Ke

While most of the unloading of enormous quantities of oil to keep Europe functioning is accomplished at sea islands of pipes and pumps far out of reach of the city, Rotterdam's second specialty is its container port; not quite as large as Hamburg but just as modern and mechanized.

Dutch customs, working with the police and, in the time-honored phrase "acting upon information received," had exposed and arrested a senior customs officer by the name of Peter Hoogstraten.

He was clever, devious and intended to beat the charge. He knew what he had done and where he had banked the payoff money, or, more precisely, where the cartel had banked it for him. He intended to retire, and he intended to enjoy every pe

Ultra-liberal though the Netherlands prides itself on being, it plays host to an enormous criminal underworld, and, perhaps because of the extreme permissiveness, a very large part of that underworld is in the hands of European foreigners and non-Europeans.

Hoogstraten worked primarily for one such gang, and they were Turks. He knew the rules of the cocaine trade. The product belonged to the cartel until it rolled out of the sea-container port onto the highways of the European Union. Then it belonged to the Turkish mafia, who had paid fifty percent up front, with fifty percent on delivery. A consignment intercepted by Dutch customs was going to hurt both parties.

The Turks would have to re-place their order, while refusing to pay any further money. But the Turks had customers who had also placed orders and demanded delivery. Hoogstraten's skill at clearing sea containers and other cargoes was invaluable and paid extremely well. He was only one asset in a procedure that, between Colombian jungle and Dutch di

The mistake occurred because of Chief Inspector Van der Merwe's private problem. He had been in the Royal Dutch Customs all his working life. He had joined the criminal investigation division within three years of entering the profession and had intercepted a mountain of contraband over the years. But the years had taken their toll. He had an enlarged prostate and drank far too much coffee, which exacerbated his weak bladder. It was the source of smothered grins among his younger colleagues, but, as a sufferer, he could not see the joke. Halfway through the sixth interrogation of Peter Hoogstraten, he simply had to go.

It should not have been a problem. He nodded to the colleague beside him that they would all take a break. The colleague intoned, "Interview suspended at…," and switched off the digital recording machine. Hoogstraten insisted he wanted a cigarette and that meant he had to go to the "Smoking Permitted" area.

Political correctness forbade it, but civil rights allowed it. Van der Merwe longed for his retirement to the country house outside Groningen, with his beloved vegetable garden and orchard, where he could do what he damn well liked for the rest of his life. All three men rose.

Van der Merwe turned, and the tail of his jacket disturbed the file that lay in front of him on the table. The buff file turned ninety degrees, and a paper inside peeked out. It had a column of figures on it. In a second it was back inside the folder, but Hoogstraten had seen it. He recognized the figures. They were from his bank account in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Nothing crossed his face, but a light came on inside his head. The swine had penetrated banking secrecy details. Apart from him, only two sources could know those figures and which bank, half of whose name had been showing for a fraction of a second. One source was the bank itself; the other was the cartel who filled that account. He doubted it was the bank, unless the American DEA had broken through the computer firewalls protecting the accounts.

That was always possible. Nothing was truly impregnable anymore, not even the firewalls of NASA and the Pentagon, as had been proved. Either way, the cartel should be alerted that there was a leak, and a bad one. He had no idea how to contact the Colombian cartel, whose existence he had read about in a long cocaine article in De Telegraaf. But the Turks would know.

Two days later at a bail hearing, Dutch customs had their second piece of bad luck. The judge was a notorious civil rights fanatic who privately favored the legalization of cocaine, which he used himself. He granted bail; Hoogstraten walked out and made his call. IN MADRID, Chief Inspector Paco Ortega finally pounced, and with the full blessing of Cal Dexter. The money-laundering lawyer Julio Luz was of no further use to him. A check on reservations at Bogota Airport indicated he was flying to Madrid on his regular run.

Ortega waited until he was emerging from the bank while behind him two members of staff handed over a pair of heavy Samsonite hard-framed suitcases. Suddenly it rained armed Guardia Civil, led by plainclothes UDYCO men.

In the alley behind the bank, directed by UDYCO's man on a rooftop five hundred meters away, two men later shown to be hired muscle working for the Galician gangs were snatched along with the bank staff and the suitcases. These contained the fortnightly "settlement of accounts" between the combined underworld of Spain and the Colombian cartel.