The Cobra

“I don’t think you should do that, Señor Vega. So to prevent it, I shall dine with you.”

He took her to an old restaurant that had been serving food when the conquistadors came from their homes in the wild Estremadura to seek the favor of the King to send them to discover the New World. When he told her the story—complete nonsense, for the Sobrino de Botín in the Street of the Knife Grinders is old but not that old—she shivered and glanced around to see if the old adventurers were still dining there.

He told her he was from Puerto Rico, bilingual in English also, a young diplomat at the United Nations, intent one day to be an ambassador. But he had taken a three-month sabbatical, encouraged by his head of mission to study more of his true love, Spanish classical painting, at the Prado in Madrid.

And it seemed quite natural to get into his bed, where he made love as no man she had known, even though she had known only three.

Cal Dexter was a hard man, but he retained a conscience. He might have found it too cold-blooded to use a professional gigolo, but the Cobra had no such scruple. For him there was only to win or to lose, and the unforgivable option was to lose.

He still regarded with awe and admiration the ice-hearted spy-master Markus Wolf who had for years headed East Germany’s spy network that ran rings around the counterintelligence apparat of his West German enemies. Wolf had used honey traps extensively, but usually the opposite way from the norm.

The norm was to entrap gullible Western big shots with stunning call girls until they could be photographed and blackmailed into submission. Wolf used seductive young men; not for gay diplomats (although that was not beyond him at all) but for the overlooked, ignored-in-love spinster who so often toiled as the private secretaries of the high-and-mighty of West Germany.

The fact that when finally exposed as the dupes they had been, when it was clear to them the incalculable secrets they had taken from their masters’ files, copied and passed to their Adonis, they finished up, drab and ruined, in the dock of a West German court or ended their lives in pretrial detention, it did not worry Markus Wolf. He was playing the Great Game to win and he won.

Even after the collapse of East Germany, a Western court had to acquit Wolf because he had not betrayed his own country. So while others were jailed, he enjoyed a genteel retirement until he died of natural causes. The day he read the news, Paul Devereaux mentally doffed his hat and said a prayer for the old atheist. And he had no hesitation in sending the beautiful alley cat Domingo de Vega to Madrid.

JUAN CORTEZ drifted out of sleep by slow degrees, and for the first few seconds thought he might have gone to paradise. In truth, he was simply in a room such as he had never seen before. It was large, as was the double bed in which he lay, and pastel walled, with blinds drawn over windows beyond which the sun shone. In fact, he was in the VIP suite of the officers’ club on Homestead Air Force Base in southern Florida.

As the mists cleared, he observed a terry-cloth robe over a chair near the bed. He swung his rubbery legs to the floor and, realizing he was naked, pulled it on. On the bedside table was a telephone. He lifted the handset and croaked “¡Oiga!” several times, but no one answered.

He walked to one of the large windows, eased back a corner of the blind and peeked out. He saw tended lawns and a flagpole from which fluttered the Stars and Stripes. He was not in paradise; for him, the reverse. He had been kidnapped, and the Americans had got him.

He had heard terrible tales of special renditions in darkened planes to foreign lands, of torture in the Middle East and Central Asia, of years in the Cuban enclave called Guantánamo.

Although no one had answered the phone by the bed, it had been noted that he was awake. The door opened, and a white-jacketed steward came in with a tray. It contained food, good food, and Juan Cortez had not eaten since his packed lunch in the dockyard of Sandoval seventy-two hours earlier. He did not know it had been three days.

The steward put down the tray, smiled and beckoned him toward the bathroom door. He looked in. A marble bathroom for a Roman Emperor such as he had seen on TV. The steward gestured that it was all his—shower, lavatory, shaving kit, the lot. Then he withdrew.

The welder contemplated the ham and eggs, juice, toast, jam, coffee. The ham and coffee aromas filled his mouth with saliva. It was probably drugged, he reasoned, possibly poisoned. But so what? They could do with him what they wanted anyway.

He sat and ate, thinking back to his last memory; the policeman asking him to get out of his car, the steely arms around his torso, the stifling pad held up to his face, the sensation of falling. He had little doubt he knew the reason why. He worked for the cartel. But how could they possibly have discovered this?

When he had done, he tried the bathroom; used the lavatory, showered, shaved. There was a bottle of aftershave. He splashed it liberally. Let them pay for it. He had been raised in the fiction that all Americans were rich.

When he came back to the bedroom, there was a man standing there: mature, with gray hair, medium height, wiry build. He smiled a friendly grin, very American. And spoke Spanish.

“Hola, Juan. ¿Qué t

al?” Hi, Juan. How are you? “Me llamo Cal. Hablamos un ratito.” My name is Cal. Let’s have a chat.

A trick, of course. The torture would come later. So they sat in two armchairs, and the American explained what had happened. He told of the snatch, the burning Ford, the body at the wheel. He told of the identification of the body on the basis of the wallet, watch, ring and medallion.

“And my wife and son?” asked Cortez.

“Ah, they are both devastated. They think they have been to your funeral. We want to bring them to join you.”

“Join me? Here?”

“Juan, my friend, accept the reality. You cannot go back. The cartel would never believe a word you said. You know what they do to people they think have defected to us. And to all their family. In these things, they are animals.”

Cortez started to shake. He knew only too well. He had never personally seen such things, but he had heard. Heard and trembled. The cutout tongues, the slow death, the wiping out of the entire family. He trembled for Irina and Pedro. The American leaned forward.

“Accept the reality. You are here now. Whether what we did was right or wrong, probably wrong, does not matter anymore. You are here and alive. But the cartel is convinced you are dead. They even sent an observer to the funeral.”

Dexter took a DVD from his jacket pocket, switched on the big plasma screen, inserted the disc and pressed Play on the remote. The film had clearly been made by a cameraman on a high-rise roof half a kilometer from the cemetery, but the definition was excellent. And enlarged.

Juan Cortez watched his own funeral. The editors of the movie zeroed in on Irina weeping, supported by a neighbor. On his son Pedro. On Fr. Isidro. On the man at the back in black suit and tie and wraparound black glasses, he of the grim face, the watcher sent on the orders of the Don. The film cut.