Frederic Forsyth - The Cobra

Finally, a senior DEA officer informed her she had the right to ask for a lawyer. She had not been formally interrogated, not yet. Her Miranda rights had not been infringed. She said she knew no New York lawyer. She was told a defense attorney would be appointed, but by the court, not by him.

She repeatedly said her fiance would be waiting for her outside. This was not ignored, not at all. Whoever was waiting for her might be her accomplice in crime. The crowds in the concourse beyond the doors of the customs hall were thoroughly vetted. No Domingo de Vega was found. Either he was a fiction or, if her accomplice, he had fled the scene. In the morning they would check for a Puerto Rican diplomat of that name at the UN.

She insisted on explaining all, waiving her right to an attorney being present. She told them everything she knew, which was nothing. They did not believe her. Then she had an idea.

"I am a Colombian. I want to see someone from the Colombian Embassy."

"It will be the consulate, ma'am. It is now ten at night. We will try to raise someone in the morning."

This was from the FBI man, though she did not know it. Drug smuggling into the USA is a federal, not state, offense. The Feds had taken over.

JFK Airport comes under the East District of New York, the EDNY, and is in the borough of Brooklyn. Finally, close to midnight, Letizia Arenal was lodged in that borough's federal correctional institution, pending a magistrate's hearing in the morning.

And of course a file was opened, which rapidly became thicker and thicker. The system needs a lot of paperwork. In her single, stiffling cell, odorous of sweat and fear, Letizia Arenal cried the night away.

In the morning, the Feds contacted someone at the Colombian Consulate, who agreed to come. If the prisoner expected some sympathy there, she was to be disappointed. The consular assistant could hardly have been more hatchet-faced. This was exactly the sort of thing the diplomats loathed.

The assistant was a woman in a severe black business suit. She listened without a flicker of expression to the explanation and believed not a word of it. But she had no choice but to agree to contact Bogota and ask the Foreign Ministry there to trace a private lawyer called Julio Luz. It was the only name Ms. Arenal could think of to turn to for help.

There was a first hearing at the magistrate's court, but only to arrange a further remand. Learning that the defendant had no representation, the magistrate ordered that a public defender be found. A young man barely out of law school was traced, and they had a few moments together in a holding cell before returning to the courtroom.

The defender made a hopeless plea for bail. It was hopeless because the accused was foreign, without funds or family, the alleged crime was immensely serious and the prosecutor made plain that further investigations were afoot into the suspicion that a much larger chain of cocaine smugglers could be involved with the defendant.

The defender tried to plead that there was a fiance in the form of a diplomat at the United Nations. One of the Feds slipped a note to the prosecutor, who rose again, this time to reveal there was no Domingo de Vega in the Puerto Rican mission at the UN nor ever had been.

"Save it for your memoirs, Mr. Jenkins," drawled the magistrate. "Defendant is remanded. Next."

The gavel came down. Letizia Arenal was led away in a flood of fresh tears. Her so-called fiance, the man she had loved, had cynically betrayed her.

Before she was taken back to the correctional institute she had a last meeting with her lawyer, Mr. Jenkins. He offered her his card.

"You may call me anytime, senorita. You have that right. There is no charge. The public defender is free for those with no funds."

"You do not understand, Mr. Jenkins. Soon will come from Bogota Senor Luz. He will rescue me."

As he returned by public transport to his shabby law office, Jenkins thought there has to be one born every minute. No Domingo de Vega, and probably no Julio Luz.

He was wrong on the second point. That morning, Senor Luz had taken a call from the Colombian Foreign Ministry that almost caused him to have a cardiac arrest.

JULIO LUZ, THE ADVOCATE FROM THE CITY OF BOGOTA?, flew into New York clothed in outward calm, but internally a thoroughly frightened man. Since the arrest of Letizia Arenal at Kennedy three days earlier, he had had two long and terrifying interviews with one of the most violent men he had ever met.

Though he had sat with Roberto Cardenas in the meetings of the cartel, that had always been under the chairmanship of Don Diego, whose word was law and who demanded a level of dignity to match his own.

In a room in a farmhouse miles off the beaten track, Cardenas had no such limitations. He had raged and threatened. Like Luz, he had no doubt his daughter's luggage had been interfered with and had convinced himself the insertion of cocaine had been accomplished by some opportunist lowlife in the baggage hall at Barajas Airport, Madrid.

He described what he would do to this baggage handler when he caught up with him, until Julio Luz felt nauseated. Finally, they concocted the story they would present to the New York authorities. Neither man had ever heard of any Domingo de Vega and could not surmise why she had been flying there.

Prisoners' mail out of U.S. correctional institutions is censored, and Letizia had not written any such letter. All Julio Luz knew was what he had been told by the Foreign Ministry.

The lawyer's story would be that the young woman was an orphan, and he was her guardian. Papers were concocted to that effect. Money traceable back to Cardenas was impossible to use. Luz would draw monies from his own practice, and Cardenas would reimburse him later. Luz, arriving in New York, would be in funds, entitled to see his ward in jail and seeking to engage the best criminal attorney money could buy.

And this he did, in that order. Faced with her fellow country-man, even with a Spanish-speaking woman from the DEA sitting in the corner of the room, Letizia Arenal poured out her story to a man she had met only for dinner and breakfast at the Villa Real Hotel.

Luz was aghast, not just at the story of the devilishly handsome pseudo-diplomat from Puerto Rico, nor at the incredibly stupid decision to disobey her father by flying the Atlantic, but at the prospect of the volcanic rage of that father when he heard, as hear he must.

The lawyer could add two and two and come up with four. The phony art-fan Vega was clearly part of a Madrid-based smuggling gang using his gigolo talents to recruit unsuspecting young women to act as "mules" by carrying cocaine into the U.S. He had little doubt that soon after his return to Colombia, there would be an army of Spanish and Colombian thugs coming to Madrid and New York to find the missing Vega.

The fool would be snatched, taken to Colombia, handed over to Cardenas and then God help him. Letizia told him there had been a photo of her fiance in her purse and a larger one in her flat in Moncloa. He made a mental note to demand the first back and have the larger one removed from the Madrid apartment. They would help in the search for the rogue behind this disaster. Luz calculated the young smuggler would not be hiding deep because he would not know who was coming for him, only that he had lost one of his cargoes.

He would, under torture, give up the name of the baggage handler who had inserted the bag of coke at Madrid. A full confession from him, and New York would have to drop the charge. So he reasoned.

Later, there was total denial of there being any photo of any young man in the purse confiscated at Kennedy, and the one in Madrid had already gone. Paco Ortega had seen to that. But first things first. Luz engaged the services of Mr. Boseman Barrow, of Manson Barrow, considered the finest advocate at the criminal bar of Manhattan. The sum involved for Mr. Barrow to drop everything and cross the river into Brooklyn was deeply impressive.