That, thought Manhire, was most of the problem. Tiny resources and no retribution for the smugglers. Even if they were caught.
A WEEKLATER, the U.S. President sat alone with his director of Homeland Security, the super-agency that collated and overlorded the thirteen primary intelligence-gathering agencies of the USA. He stared at his commander in chief in astonishment.
“Are you serious, Mr. President?”
“Yes, I believe I am. What do you advise?”
“Well, if you are going to try to destroy the cocaine industry, you will be taking on some of the most vicious, violent and ruthless men in the world.”
“Then I guess we are going to need someone even better.”
“I think, sir, you mean even worse.”
“Do we have such a man?”
“Well, there is a name, or rather a reputation, that comes to mind. He was for years head of counterintelligence at the CIA. Helped trap and destroy Aldrich Ames when he was finally allowed to. Then he headed Special Ops for the Company. Almost trapped and assassinated Osama bin Laden, and that was before 9/11. Released two years ago.”
“Released?”
“Fired.”
“Why?”
“Too ruthless.”
“Against colleagues?”
“No, sir. I believe against our enemies.”
“There’s no such thing. I want him back. What was his name?”
“I forget, sir. Out at Langley, they just referred to him by his nickname. They called him the Cobra.”
CHAPTER 2
THE MAN THE PRESIDENT SOUGHT WAS NAMED PAUL Devereaux, and when he was finally traced, he was at prayer. He regarded prayer as profoundly important.
Devereaux was the scion of a long line of those families who come as near to being aristocracy as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has had since 1776. From his young manhood, he had always had private means, but what marked him out in those early days was his intellect.
He attended Boston College High School, the main feeder unit for one of the leading Jesuit universities in the USA. There he was tagged as a very high flier indeed. He was as devout as he was scholarly and seriously thought of entering the priesthood as a Jesuit. Instead he accepted an invitation to join another exclusive community, the CIA.
To the twenty-year-old who had swept through every exam his tutors could throw at him and was mastering foreign languages on a yearly basis, it was a question of serving his God and his country by fighting communism and atheism. He just chose the secular rather than the clerical road.
Inside the Company, he rose fast because he was unstoppable, and if his detached intellectualism did not make him Langley’s most popular, he cared not a fig. He served in the three main divisions: Operations (Ops), Intelligence (Analysis) and Counterintelligence (Internal Security). He saw out the Cold War in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR, a goal to which he had devoted twenty hard years, and remained en poste until 1998, when Al Qaeda blew up two U.S. embassies, in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
Devereaux had already become a skilled Arabist, holding that the Soviet division was too crowded and too obvious. Mastering Arabic in several different dialects, he was the right man for the job when the Company formed a Special Ops unit to concentrate on the new threat—Islamic fundamentalism and the global terrorism it would spawn.
His departure into retirement in 2008 fell squarely into the category of the old puzzle: did he jump or was he pushed? He, naturally, would maintain the former. A charitable observer would call it mutual. Devereaux was old school. He could recite the Koran better than most Islamic scholars and had absorbed at least a thousand of the leading Commentaries. But he was surrounded by bright young things whose ears appeared seam-welded to their BlackBerrys, a device he despised.
He loathed political correctness, preferring courtly good manners, which he practiced to all, save those who were clearly the enemies of the one true God and/or the United States. These he destroyed without qualm. His final departure from Langley was occasioned when the new director of Central Intelligence indicated most firmly that, in the modern world, qualms were a must-have.
So he took his leave with a quiet and insincere cocktail party—another convention he could not stand—and retired to his exquisite town house in the historic town of Alexandria. There he could immerse himself in his formidable library and collection of rare Islamic artworks.
He was neither gay nor married, a speculation that had once occupied much chatter around the watercoolers along the corridors of the Old Building at Langley—he had flatly refused to move into the new building. Eventually, the chatterers were forced to concede what was obvious. The Jesuit-trained intellectual and ascetic Boston Brahmin was not interested. That was when some clever fast-track boy had remarked that he had all the charm of a cobra. And the name stuck.
The young staffer from the White House went first to the residence at the junction of South Lee and South Fairfax streets. The housekeeper, the beaming Maisie, told the lad her employer was at church and gave him directions. When the young man returned to the car by the curb, he looked around and thought he might have regressed two centuries.
And well he might. Alexandria was founded by English merchants in 1749. It was “antebellum” not just in the sense of existing before the Civil War; it preceded the War of Independence. Once a river port on the Potomac, it had prospered from sugar and slaves. The sugar ships, creeping upriver from Chesapeake Bay and the wild Atlantic beyond, used old English building bricks for ballast, and it was of these the merchants built their fine houses. The effect was still more Old Europe than New World.