The Cobra

American, Mexican and European strong-arms might seek to establish fresh sources in Peru or Bolivia, but west of Venezuela the Don was still the only man to deal with. After resumption, whoever he designated as the one to receive his product would receive it. Every gang in Europe, as in the U.S., wanted to be that someone. And the only way to prove worthiness to be the new monarch was to wipe out the other princes.

The six other giants were the Russians, Serbs, Turks, Albanians, Neapolitans and Sicilians. The Latvians, Lithuanians, Jamaicans and Nigerians were ready and willing and violent but smaller. They would have to wait for an alliance with the new monarch. The native German, French, Dutch and British gangs were clients, not giants.

Even after the Milanese slaughter, the remaining European cocaine traffickers might have held their fire save that the Internet is completely international and studied worldwide. The unidentified and untraceable source of seemingly infallible information about the cocaine world, which the Cobra had established, published a supposed leak out of Colombia.

It purported to be an inside tip from within the intelligence division of the Policia Judicial. The insider claimed Don Diego Esteban had admitted in a private meeting that his future favor would fall upon the eventual clear wi

The Slavs, in the form of the three main Russian gangs and the Serbs, formed an alliance. But they are hated by the Balts of Latvia and Lithuania, who allied to be available to help the Russians' enemies.

The Albanians are notionally Muslims and ally with the Obshina (the Chechens) and the Turks. The Jamaican Yardbirds and the Nigerians are both black and can work together. In Italy, the Sicilians and Neapolitans, habitually antagonists, formed a very temporary partnership against the outsiders, and the bloodletting began.

It swept Europe as it was sweeping the U.S. No country in the European Union was exempt, even though the biggest, and thus the richest, markets took the brunt.

The media struggled to explain to their readers, listeners and viewers what was going on. There were gang killings from Dublin to Warsaw. Tourists hurled themselves screaming to the floor in bars and restaurants as submachine carbines executed settlements of accounts across dining tables and office parties.

In London, the na

Not everyone in the gunfights died. The ambulance and emergency surgeries were overwhelmed. All talk of Afghanistan, Somali pirates, greenhouse gases and bloated bankers was banished from the front pages as the headlines screamed impotent outrage.

Police chiefs were called in, shouted at and dismissed to go and shout at their subordinates. Politicians from twenty-seven parliaments in Europe and the Congress in Washington and the fifty states of the Union tried to strike an impressive pose but failed as their complete impotence became ever clearer to their constituents.

The political backlash started in the United States but Europe was not far behind. The phone lines of every mayor, representative and senator in the U.S. were jammed with callers, either outraged or fearful. The media sprouted solemn-faced experts twenty times a day, and they all disagreed with one another.

Iron-faced police chiefs were subjected to press conferences that caused them to flee back behind the curtains. Police forces were overwhelmed, and that applied also to ambulance facilities, morgue space and coroners. In three cities, meatpacking halls had to be commandeered to take the cadavers being pulled off streets, out of riddled cars and from freezing rivers.

No one seemed to have realized the power of the underworld to shock, frighten and disgust the peoples of two indulged and risk-averse continents when that underworld went insane with violence fueled by greed.

The aggregate body count rose past the five hundred mark, and that was on each continent. Gangsters were hardly mourned save by their kith and kin, but harmless civilians were caught in the cross fire. That included children, causing the tabloid newspapers to root through the dictionaries for fresh superlatives of outrage.

It was a quiet-spoken academic and criminologist on television who explained the causal origin of the civil war that seemed to have scarred thirty nations. There is, he said gently, a total dearth of cocaine out there, and it is over the remaining miserable supplies that the wolves of society are fighting.

The alternatives-skunk, crystal meth and heroin-ca

After that, the message surging up from the populace to the rulers changed. It became less confused. It said: Sort this out or resign.

Crises may occur in societies at various levels, but there is no level more catastrophic than that politicians may have to forgo their plump employments. At the begi

"Don't hang up," shouted the chief of staff at the White House.

"I wouldn't dream of it, Mr. Silver," said Paul Devereaux.

Each man had retained the habit of using the formal "Mr." address toward the other, almost unheard of in modern Washington. Neither had any talent for bonhomie, so why pretend?

"Would you please get your"-to any other subordinate Jonathan Silver would said "sad ass," but he changed it to-"presence up to the White House at six this evening? I speak on behalf of you know who."

"My pleasure, Mr. Silver," said the Cobra. And hung up. It would not be a pleasure. He knew that. But he also supposed it had always been inevitable.

CHAPTER 16

JONATHAN SILVER HAD THE REPUTATION OF POSSESSING the most abrasive temper in the West Wing. He made it plain as Paul Devereaux entered his office that he did not intend to restrain it.

He held a copy of the Los Angeles Times and waved it in the face of the older man.

"Are you responsible for this?"

Devereaux examined the broadsheet with the detachment of an entomologist surveying a mildly interesting larva. The front page was largely occupied by a picture and the ba

Among the seven dead, said the text, were four now identified as major underworld figures, one passerby who had been leaving as the gunmen entered and two waiters.

"Personally, no," said Devereaux.

"Well, there are a lot of people in this town who think otherwise."

"Your point, Mr. Silver?"

"My point, Mr. Devereaux, is that your goddamn Project Cobra seems to have achieved a form of underworld civil war that is turning this country into the kind of charnel house that we have seen in northern Mexico for the past decade. And it has got to stop."