He was a relentless donor to good causes, all publicized. He endowed schools, hospitals, bursaries, scholarships; and always for the poor of the barrios.

He donated, but much more quietly, not to one political party but to all of them, including that of President Alvaro Uribe, who had sworn to crush the cocaine industry. In each case, he allowed these gifts to become known to those who mattered. He even paid for the raising of the orphans of murdered police and customs officers, even though their colleagues suspected who had ordered the killing.

And above all he ingratiated himself with the Catholic Church. Not a monastery or priest's house fell on hard times but he would not donate toward the restoration. This he made highly visible, as also his regular worship right among the peasant and estate workers in the parish church adjoining his country mansion, meaning his official rural residence, not the many and varied farms owned in false names where he met other members of the Brotherhood he had created to manufacture and market up to eight hundred tons of cocaine each year.

"He is," mused Devereaux admiringly, "a maestro." He hoped the Don had not also read the Ping-fa, the Art of War.

The Cobra knew that the litany of missing cargoes, arrested agents and ruined buyer networks would not be written off as coincidence for much longer. There are just so many coincidences that a clever man will accept, and the higher the level of paranoia, the fewer the number. The first cover, of nonexistence, would soon be disbelieved, and the Don would realize he had a new and much more dangerous enemy who did not play by the rules.

After that would come cover number two: invisibility. Sun-tzu had declared that a man cannot defeat an invisible enemy. The wise old Chinese man had lived long before the ultra-high technology of the Cobra's world. But there were new weapons that could keep the Cobra invisible long after the Don had realized that there was a new enemy out there.

A primary factor in the exposure of his existence was going to be the Rat List. To blow away 117 corrupt officials in a series of strikes across two continents in a single campaign would be too much. He would feed the Rats into the FLO mincer very slowly until the peso dropped somewhere in Colombia. And, anyway, sooner or later, there would be a leak.

But that week in August, he sent Cal Dexter to break the sad news to three governmental authorities under conditions, he hoped, of massive discretion.

In a hard week of traveling and conferring, Cal Dexter apprised the USA there was a bad one in the docks of San Francisco; the Italians learned they had a corrupt senior customs official in Ostia; and the Spanish should start to tail a dock master at Santander.

In each case, he begged for the arrangement of an accidental stumbling-upon of a cocaine consignment that could lead to the necessary arrest. He received his pledges.

The Cobra did not give a fig about the American and European street gangs. These scum were not his problem. But every time one of the cartel's little helpers left the stage, the interception rate would rise exponentially. And before handover at the dock gates, the loss would be taken by the cartel. And the orders would have to be replaced. And refilled. And that would not be possible. ALVARO FUENTES was certainly not going to cross the Atlantic to Africa in a smelly fishing boat like the Belleza del Mar. As first deputy to Alfredo Suarez, he went on a 6,000-ton general freighter, the Arco Soledad.

She was big enough to have a master's cabin, not large but private, and this was taken over by Fuentes. The unhappy captain had to bunk with the first mate, but he knew his place and made no demur.

As demanded by the Don, the Arco Soledad had been redirected from Monrovia, Liberia, to Guinea-Bissau, where the problem seemed to lie. But she still carried a full five tons of pure cocaine.

She was one of those merchant ships on which Juan Cortez had worked his skills. Below the waterline, she carried two stabilizers welded to her hull. But they had a dual purpose. Apart from stabilizing the vessel to make her more sea-friendly and give her crew a gentler ride in wild water, they were hollow, and each contained two and half tons of carefully packed bales.

The main problem with underwater panniers was that they could be loaded and emptied only if the boat was brought out of the water. This meant either the great complexity of a dry dock, with all its chances of witnesses, or beaching until the tide went out, which meant hours of waiting.

Cortez had fitted virtually invisible snap-release catches with which a scuba diver could quickly remove large panels in each stabilizer. With these gone, the bales, thoroughly waterproofed and roped together, could be drawn out until they floated to the surface for collection by the offshore "greeter" vessel.

And finally the Arco Soledad had a perfectly legitimate cargo of coffee in her holds and paperwork to prove it was paid for and expected by a trading company in Bissau city. That was where the good news ran out.

The bad news was that the Arco Soledad had long been spotted with Juan Cortez's description and photographed from above. As she crossed the 35th longitude, the cruising Global Hawk Sam picked up her image, made the comparison, clinched the identification and informed AFB Creech, Nevada.

Nevada told Washington, and the shabby warehouse in Anacostia told the MV Balmoral, which moved to intercept. Before Major Pickering and his divers even got onto the water, they would know exactly what they were looking for, where it was and how to operate the hidden catches.

For the first three days at sea, Alvaro Fuentes abided strictly by his instructions. Every three hours, night and day, he sent dutiful e-mails to his waiting "wife" in Barranquilla. They were so banal and so common at sea, that normally the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland, would not have bothered with them. But, forewarned, each one was plucked out of cyberspace and patched through to Anacostia.

When Sam, circling at 40,000 feet, could see the Arco Soledad and the Balmoral forty miles apart, she put on her jammers over the freighter, and Fuentes went into a blank zone. When he saw the helicopter fluttering above the horizon and then turning toward him, he made an emergency, out-of-sequence report. It went nowhere.

There was no point in the Arco Soledad attempting to resist the black-clad commandos when they came over the rail. The captain, with a fine show of indignation, brandished his ship's papers, cargo manifest and copies of the coffee order from Bissau. The men in black took no notice.

Still yelling "Piracy," the captain, crew and Alvaro Fuentes were shackled, hooded and herded to the stern. As soon as they could see nothing, the jamming ceased, and Major Pickering summoned the Balmoral. While she steamed toward the stationary freighter, the two divers went to work. It took just under an hour. The spaniels were not needed; they stayed on the mother ship.

Before the Balmoral was alongside, there were two skeins of roped bales floating in the water. They were so heavy, it took the derrick of the Arco Soledad to bring them on board. From the deck of the tramp, the Balmoral hoisted them into her guardianship.

Fuentes, the captain and five crew had gone very quiet. Even under their masks they could hear the derrick grinding and heavy thumps as a long series of objects sloshing water came aboard. They knew what they must be. Complaints of piracy ended.

The Colombians followed their cargo onto the Balmoral. They realized they were on a much bigger ship but could never name or describe it. From the deck, they were led to the forward brig and, with hoods removed, moved into quarters formerly occupied by the crew of the Belleza del Mar.

The SBS men came last, the divers streaming water. Ordinarily the sub-aqua men meeting the Arco Soledad would have replaced the removed panels underwater, but, bearing in mind where they were all going, they were allowed to take on water.