"Boss, we will never outrun them. If we try, we just give ourselves away."

Bianco glanced at the hovering Little Bird, the racing RHIBs and the rifle pointed at his head from fifty yards. There was nothing for it but to brazen it out. He nodded.

"Cut engines," he said, and stepped outside. The wind ruffled his hair, then died away. He spread a big, expansive smile and waved, as one delighted to cooperate. The SEALs were aboard in five minutes.

Lt. Cdr. Casey Dixon was scrupulously polite. He had been told his target was carrying, and that was good enough. Declining offers of champagne for him and his men, he had the owner and crew shepherded aft and held at gunpoint. There was still no sign of the Chesapeake on the horizon. His diver donned his Drager unit and went over the edge. He was down there half an hour. When he came up, he reported no trapdoors in the hull, no blimps or blisters and no dangling nylon cords.

The two rummage men began to search. They did not know that the short and frightened cell phone call from a parish priest had mentioned only "a great quantity." But how much was that?

It was the spaniel that got the scent, and it turned out to be a ton. The Orion Lady was not one of those vessels into which Juan Cortez had built a virtually undiscoverable hideaway. Bianco had thought to get away with it through sheer arrogance. He presumed such a luxurious yacht, well known in the most expensive and famous watering holes of the world, from Monte Carlo to Fort Lauderdale, would be above suspicion, and he with it. But for an old Jesuit who had buried four tortured bodies in a jungle grave, he might have been right.

Once again, as with the British SBS, it was the spaniel's ultra-sensitivity to the aroma of air texture that caused it to worry a certain panel in the floor of the engine room. The air was too fresh; it had been lifted recently. It led to the bilges.

As with the British in the Atlantic, the rummage men donned breathing masks and slithered into the bilges. Even on a luxury yacht, bilges still stink. One by one, the bales came out, and the SEALs not on prisoner guard duty hauled them topside and stacked them between the main salon and the helipad. Bianco protested noisily that he had no idea what they were… It was all a trick… a misunderstanding… He knew the governor of Florida. The shouting sank to a mumble when the black hood went on. Cdr. Dixon fired his maroon rocket upward, and the circling Global Hawk Michelle switched off her jammers. In fact, the Orion Lady had not even tried to transmit. When he had comms again, Dixon summoned the Chesapeake to approach.

Two hours later, Nelson Bianco, his captain and crew, were in the forward brig with the seven surviving men from the two go-fasts. The millionaire playboy did not usually mix with such company and he did not like it. But these were to be his companions and dining partners for a long time, and his taste for the tropics was to be fully indulged but in the middle of the Indian Ocean. And party girls were off the menu.

Even the explosives man was regretful.

"We really have to waste her, sir? She is such a beauty."

"Orders," said the CO. "No exceptions."

The SEALs stood on the Chesapeake and watched the Orion Lady erupt and sink. "Hooyah!" said one of them, but the word, normally the SEALs' sign of jubilation, was said somewhat regretfully. When the sea was empty again, the Chesapeake steamed away. An hour later, another freighter went past her, and the merchant skipper, looking through his binoculars, saw just a grain ship going about her business and took no notice. RIGHT ACROSS GERMANY, the FLO were having a field day. In his copious confession, Eberhardt Milch, now buried under layers of official secrecy to keep him alive, had named a dozen major importers whose cargoes he had eased through the container port of Hamburg. They were all being raided and closed down.

Federal and state police were hitting warehouses, pizza parlors (the favorite front of the Calabrian Ndrangheta), food stores and craft shops specializing in ethnic carvings from South America. They were cutting open shipments of tinned tropical fruit for the pouch of white powder in each can and shattering Mayan idols from Guatemala. Thanks to one man, the Don's German operation was in ruins.

But the Cobra was very aware that if the cocaine imports had passed the point of handover, the loss was sustained by the European gangs. Only before that point was the loss down to the cartel. That included the false-backed sea container in Hamburg that had never left the docks and the cargo of the Orion Lady that was destined for the Cuban gang of South Florida and which was supposed to be still at sea. The nonarrival in Fort Lauderdale had not been noticed. Yet.

But the Rat List had proved itself. The Cobra had selected the Hamburg Rat at random, one of the 117 names, the odds were too long that it had all been invented.

"Shall we set the girl free?" asked Dexter.

Devereaux nodded. Personally, he could not have cared. His capacity for compassion was virtually nonexistent. But she had served her purpose.

Dexter set the wheels in motion. Due to quiet intervention, Inspector Paco Ortega of the UDYCO in Madrid had been promoted to chief inspector. He had been promised Julio Luz and the Guzman bank anytime soon.

Across the Atlantic, he listened to Cal Dexter and planned his deception. A young undercover officer played the part of the baggage handler. He was noisily and publicly arrested in a bar, and the media were tipped off. Reporters interviewed the barman and two regulars, who concurred.

Acting on further nonattributable information, El Pais ran a big feature on the breaking of a gang attempting to use baggage handlers to smuggle drugs in the luggage of unsuspecting travelers from Barajas to Kennedy, New York. Most of the gang had fled, but one such baggage handler had been taken and was naming flights on which he had opened suitcases after the usual screening in order to insert cocaine. In some cases, he even recalled the suitcases by description.

Mr. Boseman Barrow was not a betting man. He had no taste for casinos, dice, cards or horses as a way of throwing money away. But if he was, he had to admit, he would surely have placed a large wager on Senorita Letizia Arenal going to jail for many years. And he would have lost.

The Madrid file reached the DEA in Washington, and some unknown authority ordered that a copy of those sections concerning Mr. Barrow's client go to the District Attorney's Office in Brooklyn. Once there, it had to be acted upon. Lawyers are not all bad, unfashionable though that view may be. The DA's Office apprised Boseman Barrow of the news from Madrid. He at once entered a motion to dismiss charges. Even if innocence had not been conclusively proved, there was now a doubt the size of a barn door.

There was an in-chambers hearing with a judge who had been at law school with Boseman Barrow, and the motion was granted. The fate of Letizia Arenal passed from the Prosecutor's Office to the ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They decreed that even though she was no longer to be prosecuted, the Colombian was not to stay in the USA either. She was asked where she wished to be deported to, and she chose Spain. Two ICE marshals took her to Kennedy. PAUL DEVEREAUX knew that his first cover was running out. That cover had been his nonexistence. He had studied with every scrap of information he could glean the figure and character of a certain Don Diego Esteban, believed to be but never proved to be the supreme head of the cartel.

That this ruthless hidalgo, this postimperial, Spanish-descended aristocrat, had remained untouchable for so long derived from many factors.

One was the absolute refusal of anyone to testify against him. Another was the convenient disappearance of anyone who opposed him. But even that would not have been enough without enormous political clout. He had influence in high places, and a lot of it.