After the impounding at Nogales of bales of cocaine that were supposed to have disappeared from his go-fasts in the Caribbean, he was convinced he had been comprehensively cheated by one of his principal clients. The motive was easy—greed.

The identity could be deduced from the place and nature of the interception. Nogales is a minor town right on the border and the center of a small zone whose Mexican side is exclusively the territory of the Sinaloa cartel. Across the border, it is the home of the Arizonan street gang who call themselves the “Wonderboys.”

Don Diego had become convinced, as the Cobra had intended, that the Sinaloa cartel had hijacked his cocaine at sea and were thus doubling their profits at his expense. His first reaction was to instruct Alfredo Suárez that all Sinaloa orders were now canceled and not a further gram should be sent to them. This caused a crisis in Mexico, as if that unhappy land did not have enough already.

The chiefs of the Sinaloa knew they had stolen nothing from the Don. In others, this might have provoked a sense of bewilderment, but cocaine gangs have only one mood other than satisfaction and that is rage.

Finally, the Cobra, through DEA contacts in northern Mexico, put it about among the Mexican police that it was the Gulf cartel and their allies La Familia who had betrayed the Nogales border crossing to the American authorities; the opposite of the truth—that the Cobra had invented the entire episode. Half the police worked for the gangs and passed on the lie.

It was, for Sinaloa, a declaration of war, and they duly declared it. The Gulf people and their friends in La Familia did not know why, since they had shopped nobody, but had no choice other than to fight back. And for executioners they brought in the Zetas, a mob that hired itself out for the business of the most gruesome murders.

By January, the Sinaloa hoodlums were being slaughtered by the score. The Mexican authorities, Army and police simply stood back and tried to pick up the hundreds of bodies.

“What exactly are you doing?” Cal Dexter asked the Cobra.

“I am demonstrating,” said Paul Devereaux, “the power of deliberate disinformation, which some of us learned the hard way over forty years of the Cold War.”

All intelligence agencies during those years realized that the most devastating weapon against an enemy agency, short of a real mole inside the fabric, was the enemy’s belief that he had one. For years the obsession of the Cobra’s predecessor, James Angleton, that the Soviets had a mole inside the CIA nearly tore that agency apart.

Across the Atlantic, the British spent years fruitlessly trying to identity the “Fifth Man” (after Burgess, Philby, Maclean and Blunt). Careers were broken when suspicion fell on the wrong man.

Devereaux, working his way up from new college boy to CIA mandarin over those years, had watched and learned. And what he had learned over the previous year, and the only reason he had thought the task of destroying the cocaine industry might be feasible where others had quickly given up, was that there were marked similarities between the cartels and gangs on one side and spy agencies on the other.

“They are both closed brotherhoods,” he told Dexter. “They have complex and secret rituals of initiation. Their only diet is suspicion amounting to paranoia. They are loyal to the loyal but ferocious to the traitor. All outsiders are suspect by the simple fact of being outside.

“They may not confide even in their own wives and children, let alone social friends, so they tend to socialize only with one another. As a result, rumors move like wildfire. Good information is vital, accidental misinformation regrettable, but skillful disinformation deadly.”

From his first day of study, the Cobra had realized that the situations of the USA and Europe were different in one vital regard. Europe’s points of entry for the drug were numerous, but ninety percent of the American supply came via Mexico, a country that actually created not one gram of it.

As the three giants of Mexico and the various smaller cartels fell upon one another, competing for the diminished quantities and avenging scores constantly repeated by fresh onslaughts on one another, what had been a product shortage north of the border became a drought. Until that winter, it had been an abiding relief to the American authorities that the insanity south of the border stayed there. That January, the violence crossed the border.

To disinform the gangs of Mexico, all the Cobra had to do was feed the lie to the Mexican police. They would do the rest. North of the border, that was not so easy. But in the USA, there are two other vehicles for spreading disinformation. One is the network of thousands of radio stations; some are so shady they actually serve the underworld, others feature young and fiercely ambitious “shock jocks” desperate to become rich and famous. These have scant regard for accuracy but an insatiable appetite for sensational “exclusives.”

The other vehicle is the Internet and its bizarre offspring, the blog. With the genius-level technology of Jeremy Bishop, the Cobra created a blog whose source could never be traced. The blogger portrayed himself as a veteran of the complex array of gangs that infest the USA. He purported to have contacts in most of them and sources even inside the forces of law and order.

Using the patched-through information lines from the DEA, CIA, FBI and another dozen agencies that the Presidential Order had given him, the blogger was able to reveal genuine tidbits of information that were enough to stun the main gangs of the continent. Some of these gems were about themselves, others about their rivals and enemies. In and among the true material went the lies that provoked the second civil war—among the prison gangs, the street gangs and the biker gangs who, among them, controlled cocaine from the Rio Grande to Canada.

By the end of the month, young shock jocks were perusing the gang blog on a daily basis, elevating the items found to gospel truth and broadcasting them state by state.

In a rare flicker of humor, Paul Devereaux called the blogger “Cobra.” And he started with the biggest and most violent of the street gangs, the Salvadorean MS-13.

This giant gang had started as a residue of El Salvador’s vicious civil war. Young terrorists, immune to pity or remorse, found themselves unemployed, and unemployable, and named their gang “La Mara” after a street in the capital San Salvador. As their crimes became too much for such a small country, they spread to neighboring Honduras, recruiting over thirty thousand members.

When Honduras passed draconian laws and imprisoned thousands, the leaders left for Mexico, and, finding even that country too crowded, moved to Los Angeles, adding the “13” of 13th Street to their name.

The Cobra had studied them intensively—their all-over tattooing; the pale blue-and-white clothing, after the colors of the Salvadorean flag; their taste for hacking up their victims with machetes; and their reputation. This was such that even in the patchwork quilt of American gangs, they had no friends or allies. Everyone feared and hated them, so the Cobra began with MS-13.

He went back to the Nogales confiscation, telling the Salvadoreans that the cargo had been intended for them until it was stopped by the authorities. Then he inserted two pieces of information that were true and one that was not.

The first was that the crew in the truck had been allowed to escape; the second was that the confiscated cocaine had vanished between Nogales and the capital, Flagstaff, where it was due for incineration. The lie was that it had been “liberated” by the Latin Kings, who had thus stolen it from MS-13.

With the MS-13 having branches, known as “cliques,” in a hundred cities in twenty states, it was impossible that they did not hear this, even though it was only broadcast in Arizona. Within a week, MS-13 had declared war on the other giant Latino gang in the USA.

By the beginning of February the biker gangs had ended a long truce: the Hell’s Angels had turned on the Bandidos and their allies, the Outlaws.

A week later, the bloodletting and chaos had enveloped Atlanta, the new cocaine hub of the U.S. Atlanta is Mexican controlled, with the Cubans and Puerto Ricans working alongside but under them.

A network of great interstate highways lead from the U.S.-Mexican border northeast to Atlanta and another grid runs south to Florida, where access from the sea had been virtually ended by the DEA operation out of Key West, and north to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New York and Detroit.

Fed by disinformation, the Cubans turned on the Mexicans, whom they were convinced were cheating them out of the diminished consignments arriving from the border zone.

The Hell’s Angels, taking terrible casualties from the Outlaws and Bandidos, called for help from their friends, the all-white Aryan Brotherhood, and triggered a rash of slayings in jails across the country where the Aryans hold sway. This brought in the Crips and Bloods.

Cal Dexter had seen bloodshed before, and he was not squeamish. But as the death toll rose, he again queried what the Cobra was doing. Because he respected his executive officer, Paul Devereaux, who habitually confided in no one, invited him to dinner in Alexandria.

“Calvin, there are about four hundred cities, large and small, in our country. And at least three hundred of them have a major narcotics problem. Part of this concerns marijuana, cannabis resin, heroin, methamphetamine, or crystal meth, and cocaine. I was asked to destroy the cocaine trade because it was the vice growing completely out of control. Most of that problem derives from the fact that, in our country alone, cocaine has a profit value of forty billion dollars a year, almost double that worldwide.”

“I have read the figures,” muttered Dexter.

“Excellent, but you asked for an explanation.”

Paul Devereaux ate as he did most things, sparingly, and his favorite cuisine was Italian. The dinner was wafer-thin piccata al limone, oil-drizzled salad and a dish of olives, helped down by a cool Frascati. Dexter thought he might have to pause on the way home for something out of Kansas, broiled or fried.

“So these staggering funds attract the sharks of every stripe. We have around a thousand gangs purveying this drug and a total national gang membership of around seven hundred fifty thousand, half of them active in narcotics. So your original question: what am I doing and how?”

He refilled both glasses with the pale yellow wine and sipped as he chose his words.

“There is only one force in the country that can destroy the twin tyranny of the gangs and the drugs. Not you, not me, not the DEA or the FBI or any other of our numerous and staggeringly expensive agencies. Not even the President himself. And certainly not the local police, who are like that Dutch boy with his finger in the dike trying to hold back the tide.”

“So the single force is?”

“Themselves. Each other. Calvin, what do you think we have been doing for the past year? First we created, at considerable expense, a cocaine drought. That was deliberate, but it could never be sustained. That fighter pilot in the Cape Verdes. Those Q-ships out at sea. They cannot go on forever, or indeed much longer.

“The instant they let up, the trade flow will resume. Nothing can impede that level of profit for more than a heartbeat. All we were able to do was cut the supply in half, creating a raging hunger among the clients. And when ferals are starved, they turn on each other.

“Second, we established a supply of bait, which we are now using to provoke the ferals into turning their violence not against lawful citizens but against each other.”

“But the bloodletting is disfiguring the country. We are becoming like northern Mexico. How long will the gang wars have to last?”

“Calvin, the violence was never absent. It was only hidden. We kidded ourselves it was all on TV or on the movie screen. Well, it is out in the open now. For a while. If they let me provoke the gangs into destroying each other, their power can be shattered for a generation.”

“But in the short term?”

“Alas, many terrible things will have to happen. We have visited these things upon Iraq and Afghanistan. Do our rulers and our people have the fortitude to accept it here?”

Cal Dexter thought back to what he had seen inflicted on Vietnam forty years earlier.

“I doubt it,” he said. “Abroad is such a convenient place for violence.”

The slaughter between the Bandidos and Outlaws on one side and the Hell’s Angels with the racist Aryan Brotherhood on the other scattered corpses from coast to coast in the USA.

Bewildered passersby saw the word “ADIOS” daubed on walls and bridges. It stands for “Angels Die in Outlaw States.” All four gangs have enormous chapters in the USA’s hardest jails, and the killing spread to these as flame to kindling. In Europe, the revenge of the Don was just beginning.

The Colombians arrived by air on different flights over three days, and a small advance party provided them with a fleet of camper vans and mobile homes. With these, the avengers motored northwest to Galicia, ravaged in the February custom with rain and gales.

It was not far off Valentine’s Day, but the meeting between the Don’s emissaries and their unsuspecting hosts took place in a warehouse in the pretty and historic town of Ferrol. The newcomers approvingly inspected the arsenal provided for them, smacked in the magazines, turned and opened fire.

When the last thunder of automatic fire ceased to echo off the warehouse walls, most of the Galician mob had been wiped out. A small, baby-faced man known in his own country as El Animal, the Colombian leader stood over a Galician still alive and looked down at him.

“It is nothing personal,” he remarked quietly, “but you just cannot treat the Don that way.” Then he blew the dying man’s brains out.

There was no need to remain. The killer party embarked in their vehicles and motored thorough the border into France at Hendaye. Both Spain and France are members of the Schengen Agreement that provides for open, no-control borders.

Spelling each other at the wheel, the Colombians motored east across the foothills of the Pyrenees, over the plains of the Languedoc, through the French Riviera and into Italy. The Spanish-registered vehicles were not stopped. It took thirty-six hours of hard driving to reach Milan.

Seeing the unmistakable batch numbers of the cocaine sent across the Atlantic on the Belleza del Mar turning up in the Essex marshes, Don Diego had quickly learned that the whole consignment had reached Essex not via the Netherlands but from the Ndrangheta, who were supplying the Essex mob. Thus the Calabrians, to whom he had given the overlordship franchise for Europe, had also turned on him. Retribution could simply not be avoided.

The party sent to visit that retribution upon the guilty had spent hours en route studying the geography of Milan and the briefing notes sent by the small resident liaison team from Bogotá that lived there.

They knew exactly how to find the three southern suburbs of Buccinasco, Corsico and Assago that the Calabrese had colonized. These suburbs are to the southerners from the deep south of Italy as New York’s Brighton Beach is to the Russians: home away from home. Even the language is different.

And the immigrants have brought Calabria with them. Shop signs, bars, restaurants, cafés—almost all bear names and serve meals from the south. The state’s Anti-Mafia Commission estimates that eighty percent of Colombian cocaine entering Europe arrives at Calabria, but the distribution hub is Milan and the cockpit these three boroughs. The assassins came by night.

They had no illusions about the ferocity of the Calabrese. No one had ever attacked them. When they fought, it was among one another. The so-called second Ndrangheta war between 1985 and 1999 left seven hundred bodies on the streets of Calabria and Milan.

Italy’s history is a litany of wars and bloodshed, and behind the cuisine and the culture the old cobbles have run red many times. Italians consider the Black Hand of Naples and the mafia of Sicily fearsome, but no one argues with the Calabrese. Until that night when the Colombians came.

They had seventeen residential addresses. Their orders were to destroy the head of the serpent and leave before the hundreds of foot soldiers could be mobilized.

By morning, the Naviglio Canal was red. Fifteen of the seventeen chiefs were caught at home and died there. Six Colombians took the Ortomercato, site of the King, the young generation’s favorite nightclub. Walking calmly past the Ferraris and Lamborghinis parked by the entrance, the Colombians took down the four minders on the door, entered and opened fire in a series of long, raking fusillades that wiped away all those drinking at the bar and four tables of diners.

The Colombians took one casualty. The barman, in a gesture of self-sacrifice, pulled a gun from beneath his bar top and fired back before he died. He fired at a small man who seemed to be directing the fire and put a bullet through his rosebud mouth. Then he himself choked on three slugs from a MAC-10 machine pistol.

Before dawn, the Special Ops group of the carabinieri in Via Lamarmora was on crisis alert, and the citizens of Italy’s commercial and fashion capital were wakened to the screams of ambulances and the wailing of police sirens.

It is the law of the jungle and of the underworld that when the king is dead, long live the next king. The Honorable Society was not dead, and in due course the war with the cartel would visit terrible revenge on the Colombians, the guilty and the innocent. But the cartel of Bogotá had one incomparable ace: reduced though cocaine availability may have been to a trickle, that trickle was still in the hands of Don Diego Esteban.

American, Mexican and European strong-arms might seek to establish fresh sources in Peru or Bolivia, but west of Venezuela the Don was still the only man to deal with. After resumption, whoever he designated as the one to receive his product would receive it. Every gang in Europe, as in the U.S., wanted to be that someone. And the only way to prove worthiness to be the new monarch was to wipe out the other princes.

The six other giants were the Russians, Serbs, Turks, Albanians, Neapolitans and Sicilians. The Latvians, Lithuanians, Jamaicans and Nigerians were ready and willing and violent but smaller. They would have to wait for an alliance with the new monarch. The native German, French, Dutch and British gangs were clients, not giants.

Even after the Milanese slaughter, the remaining European cocaine traffickers might have held their fire save that the Internet is completely international and studied worldwide. The unidentified and untraceable source of seemingly infallible information about the cocaine world, which the Cobra had established, published a supposed leak out of Colombia.

It purported to be an inside tip from within the intelligence division of the Policía Judicial. The insider claimed Don Diego Esteban had admitted in a private meeting that his future favor would fall upon the eventual clear winner of any settlement of accounts in the European underworld. It was pure disinformation. He had said no such thing. But it triggered the gang war that swept the continent.

The Slavs, in the form of the three main Russian gangs and the Serbs, formed an alliance. But they are hated by the Balts of Latvia and Lithuania, who allied to be available to help the Russians’ enemies.

The Albanians are notionally Muslims and ally with the Obshina (the Chechens) and the Turks. The Jamaican Yardbirds and the Nigerians are both black and can work together. In Italy, the Sicilians and Neapolitans, habitually antagonists, formed a very temporary partnership against the outsiders, and the bloodletting began.

It swept Europe as it was sweeping the U.S. No country in the European Union was exempt, even though the biggest, and thus the richest, markets took the brunt.

The media struggled to explain to their readers, listeners and viewers what was going on. There were gang killings from Dublin to Warsaw. Tourists hurled themselves screaming to the floor in bars and restaurants as submachine carbines executed settlements of accounts across dining tables and office parties.

In London, the nanny of the Home Secretary, taking her toddler charges for a walk on Primrose Hill, found a body in the shrubbery. It had no head. In Hamburg, Frankfurt and Darmstadt, cadavers appeared on the street every night for a week. Fourteen corpses were pulled out of French rivers in a single morning. Two were black, and dental work established the rest were not French but from the East.

Not everyone in the gunfights died. The ambulance and emergency surgeries were overwhelmed. All talk of Afghanistan, Somali pirates, greenhouse gases and bloated bankers was banished from the front pages as the headlines screamed impotent outrage.

Police chiefs were called in, shouted at and dismissed to go and shout at their subordinates. Politicians from twenty-seven parliaments in Europe and the Congress in Washington and the fifty states of the Union tried to strike an impressive pose but failed as their complete impotence became ever clearer to their constituents.

The political backlash started in the United States but Europe was not far behind. The phone lines of every mayor, representative and senator in the U.S. were jammed with callers, either outraged or fearful. The media sprouted solemn-faced experts twenty times a day, and they all disagreed with one another.

Iron-faced police chiefs were subjected to press conferences that caused them to flee back behind the curtains. Police forces were overwhelmed, and that applied also to ambulance facilities, morgue space and coroners. In three cities, meatpacking halls had to be commandeered to take the cadavers being pulled off streets, out of riddled cars and from freezing rivers.

No one seemed to have realized the power of the underworld to shock, frighten and disgust the peoples of two indulged and risk-averse continents when that underworld went insane with violence fueled by greed.

The aggregate body count rose past the five hundred mark, and that was on each continent. Gangsters were hardly mourned save by their kith and kin, but harmless civilians were caught in the cross fire. That included children, causing the tabloid newspapers to root through the dictionaries for fresh superlatives of outrage.

It was a quiet-spoken academic and criminologist on television who explained the causal origin of the civil war that seemed to have scarred thirty nations. There is, he said gently, a total dearth of cocaine out there, and it is over the remaining miserable supplies that the wolves of society are fighting.

The alternatives—skunk, crystal meth and heroin—cannot fill the gap. Cocaine had been too easy, too long, the old man said. It has become not a pleasure but a necessity for great swathes of society. It has made too many vast fortunes, and promised many more. A $50 billion-a-year industry on each major Western continent is dying, and we are witnessing the ultra-violent death throes of a monster that has lived among us unrebuked for too long. A thunderstruck newscaster thanked the professor as he left the studio.

After that, the message surging up from the populace to the rulers changed. It became less confused. It said: Sort this out or resign.

Crises may occur in societies at various levels, but there is no level more catastrophic than that politicians may have to forgo their plump employments. At the beginning of March, the phone in an elegant antebellum town house in Alexandria rang.

“Don’t hang up,” shouted the chief of staff at the White House.

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Mr. Silver,” said Paul Devereaux.

Each man had retained the habit of using the formal “Mr.” address toward the other, almost unheard of in modern Washington. Neither had any talent for bonhomie, so why pretend?

“Would you please get your”—to any other subordinate Jonathan Silver would said “sad ass,” but he changed it to—“presence up to the White House at six this evening? I speak on behalf of you know who.”

“My pleasure, Mr. Silver,” said the Cobra. And hung up. It would not be a pleasure. He knew that. But he also supposed it had always been inevitable.