Frederic Forsyth - The Cobra

The next morning, Cal Dexter took the breakfast shift. He watched Luz take a table for two by the wall. The girl joined him, handing over her own letter, which Luz placed in his inside breast pocket. After a quick coffee, the girl smiled her gratitude and left.

Dexter waited until the Colombian departed, then, before the staff could reach the vacated table, he himself passed it and stumbled. He brought the Colombian's almost-empty coffeepot to the carpet. Cursing at his own clumsiness, he took a napkin from the table to dab the stain. A waiter rushed up to insist that that was his job. As the young man bent his head, Dexter slipped a napkin over the cup the girl had used, enveloped it and stuffed both into his trouser pocket.

After more apologies and assurances of "De nada, senor," he walked out of the breakfast room.

"I wish," said Paco Ortega as they sat and watched Julio Luz disappear into the Banco Guzman, "that you would let us pick them all up."

"The day will come, Paco," said the American. "You will have your hour. Just not yet. This money laundering is big. Very big. There are other banks in other countries. We want them all. Let us coordinate and grab the lot."

Ortega grunted his assent. Like any detective, he had carried through stakeout operations that had lasted months before the final pounce. Patience was essential but hugely frustrating.

Dexter was lying. He knew of no other laundering operations like the Luz-Guzman linkage. But he could not divulge the whirl-wind that Project Cobra was going to unleash when the cold-eyed man in Washington was ready.

And now he wanted to get home. He had read the letter in his room. It was long, tender, concerned for the young woman's safety and well-being and signed simply "Papa."

He doubted Julio Luz would now be parted from the reply letter all day or night. Perhaps when he was in the first-class cabin back to Bogota, he might fall asleep, but to do a "lift" of the attache case above his head with the cabin crew looking on was out of the question.

What Dexter wanted to discover before any pounce was made was simply this: who was Letizia Arenal and who was Papa? WINTER was loosening its grip on Washington when Cal Dexter returned at the beginning of March. The forests cloaking those parts of Virginia and Maryland next to the capital were about to clothe themselves in a haze of green.

From the Kapoor yard south of Goa, a message had come from McGregor, who was still sweating it out among the stench of toxic chemicals and malarial heat. The two grain ships were close to their transformation. They would be ready for handover in their new role in May, he said.

He presumed their new role would be what he had been told. This was that a mega-wealthy American consortium wished to enter the treasure-hunting world with two ships equipped for deep-sea diving and wreck recovery. The accommodation would be for the divers and surface crew, the workshops for the servicing of their rigs and the large hold for a small spotter helicopter. It was all very plausible; it was just not true.

The final completion of the transformation from grain merchant to Q-ship would take place at sea. That was when heavily armed marine commandos would fill the berths, and the workshop/ armories would contain some seriously dangerous kit. He was told he was doing a great job, and the two merchant marine crews would fly in at handover.

The paperwork was long since in place, should anyone search. The former ships had disappeared, and the two about to sail were the reconditioned MV Chesapeake and the MV Balmoral. They were owned by a company based in a law office in Aruba, flew the (convenience) flag of that tiny island and would be chartered to carry grain from the wheat-rich north to the hungry south. Their real ownership and purpose were invisible.

The laboratories of the FBI had produced a perfect DNA profile of the young woman in Madrid who had handled the coffee cup in the Villa Real. Cal Dexter had no doubt that she was Colombian, already confirmed by Inspector Ortega. But there were hundreds of Colombian youngsters studying in Madrid. What Dexter craved was a matcher to that DNA.

In theory, at least fifty percent of the DNA should have derived from the father, and he was convinced "Papa" was in Colombia. And who was he who could ask a major player in the cocaine world, albeit a "technical," to play postman for him? And why could he not use the mails? It was a long shot, but he put the request to Colonel Dos Santos, intelligence chief of the anti-drug division of the Policia Judicial. While waiting for a response, he made two quick journeys.

Off the northeast shore of the coast of Brazil is an obscure archipelago of twenty-one small islands of which the main one gives its name to the group: Fernando de Noronha. It is only ten kilometers by three and a half, its total area twenty-six square kilometers. The only town is Vila dos Remedios.

It was once a prison island like France's Devil's Island, and the thick native forests were cut down to prevent the prisoners building rafts to escape. Shrub and scrub replaced the trees. Some wealthy Brazilians had away-from-it-all holiday villas there, but it was the airfield that interested Dexter. Built in 1942 by the U.S. Army Air Force Transport Command, it would make a perfect site for a USAF unit operating Predator or Global Hawk drones, with their amazing capacity to loiter for hours aloft, looking down with cameras, radars and heat sensors. He flew in as a Canadian tourist resort developer, had a look, confirmed his suspicion and flew back out again. His second visit was to Colombia.

By 2009, President Uribe had effectively crushed the FARC terrorist movement which really specialized in kidnap and ransom demands. But his anti-cocaine efforts had been mainly offset by Don Diego Esteban and the mightily efficient cartel he had created.

In that year, he had offended his hard-left neighbors in both Venezuela and Bolivia by inviting American forces into Colombia to lend their superlative technology to help him. Facilities were offered at seven Colombian military bases. One of these was at Malambo, right on the northern coast by Barranquilla. Dexter went in as a serious defense writer with Pentagon approval.

Being in the country, he saw the chance to fly up to Bogota and meet the formidable Colonel Dos Santos. The U.S. Army ran him up to Barranquilla Airport, and he caught the shuttle up to the capital. Between the still-warm tropical coast to the city in the mountains, the temperature dropped twenty degrees.

Neither the chief of the American DEA operation nor the leader of the British SOCA team in Bogota knew who Dexter was or what the Cobra was preparing, but both had been advised, from their HQs on Army Navy Drive and the Albert Embankment, to cooperate. They all spoke fluent Spanish, and Dos Santos had perfect English. He was surprised when it was the stranger who mentioned a DNA sample that had been submitted a fortnight earlier.

"Strange that you should call at this moment," said the youthful and dynamic Colombian detective. "I got a match this morning."

His explanation of how the match was made was stranger than Dexter's arrival, which Dos Santos viewed as a mere coincidence. DNA technology had come late to Colombia due to the parsimony of governments prior to the presidency of Alvaro Uribe. He had increased the budgets.

But Dos Santos read feverishly every publication dealing with modern forensic technology. He had realized earlier than his colleagues that one day DNA would be an awesome weapon in identifying bodies, living and dead (and there were a lot of the latter). Even before his department's laboratories could cope, he had begun to collect samples as and when he could.

Five years earlier, a member of the Drug Squad's rogues' gallery had been in a car crash. The man had never been charged, never convicted, never imprisoned. Any New York civil rights lawyer would have had Dos Santos's badge for what he did.