Brian Freemantle - Charlie Muffin U.S.A.

The two men nodded.

‘Palm Beach is an island,’ pointed out Bertrano. ‘What’s to stop the bridges being sealed once the light cables are discovered cut?’

‘Time,’ said Chambine, confidently. ‘Before the true cause of the ground failure is discovered, we will have delivered the collection and you will have been paid off. Even if you were stopped – and it’s a million to one chance – any search of your car would show nothing.’

‘The stuff’s not leaving Palm Beach?’ asked Bertrano.

‘No,’ confirmed Chambine. ‘It’ll be in our possession for less than thirty minutes.’

Bertrano smiled. ‘Doesn’t look like being too difficult a job,’ he said.

‘Don’t think like that!’ snapped Chambine. ‘Start thinking it’s easy and you’ll relax, and when you relax, something will go wrong.’

‘I didn’t mean…’ Bertrano tried to protest, but the New Yorker interrupted him.

‘I’m not interested in what you meant. You’re all being paid a lot of money for something that has got to go without a hitch. I don’t want anyone celebrating or relaxing or thinking it’s easy until you’re all back home and the fifty grand is in your safe deposit boxes.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Bertrano.

‘It’s all right,’ Chambine replied. He was not unhappy at the episode. It had provided a way of stressing the importance of what they were attempting.

‘What if we are interrupted?’ demanded Saxby quietly.

Chambine sipped coffee, glad to have arrived at another point.

‘You’ve got guns?’ he asked.

Saxby, Boella and Petrilli nodded.

‘Ours are in the left luggage at the airport,’ said Saxby.

‘And mine’s at the Greyhound station,’ added Petrilli.

‘I’d prefer no violence,’ said Chambine. ‘Only if it can’t be avoided… it’ll foul up the escape and bring any police in far quicker

…’ He hesitated, caught by a sudden thought. ‘And if we do get away with it,’ he continued, ‘I want those guns dumped immediately we clear the hotel. I don’t want anyone seized for something as stupid as having a weapon on him, when there’s no other reason for suspicion…’

‘What about a diversion bigger than a few blacked-out lights?’ suggested Bertrano, trying to recover from their dispute.

Chambine shook his head vigorously. ‘A few fused lights is a hotel maintenance problem until it’s discovered otherwise. I don’t want anything dramatic that’s going to attract the attention of the police.’

There were various movements among those sitting before him, as they accepted the logic. Chambine studied them, deciding to emphasise the warning.

‘There’s no way that later you will be associated with this job,’ he began, ‘but I don’t want it coming back from your ends. No big spending… anything ridiculous that might attract the attention of people in cities where you live…’

The men started making gestures of assent, but Chambine continued: ‘If this comes off, as I intend it to, there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be other jobs, for the same fee. Maybe even higher.’

It was unlikely, he knew. But as outwardly respectable as they might appear, the men around him all possessed the essential ingredient of criminality: greed. The promise of more money would do more than any direct threat to instil in them the caution he wanted.

‘I think we’re all adult enough to avoid that,’ said Bertrano, speaking for the others.

‘I’m sure you are,’ said Chambine. ‘It was just something that needed saying.’

From his pocket Chambine took a key with an address label attached. He handed it across to Bulz and said, ‘That’s to the warehouse. I want the plan perfected in three days, okay?’

‘Guaranteed,’ said Bulz.

Chambine turned to Saxby and Boella.

‘I don’t want to know when you’re coming to the Breakers. All I want is something that won’t fail outlined to me when I come to see the other preparations.’

The men from Las Vegas nodded their heads in agreement, but said nothing.

‘That’s it, then,’ announced Chambine, standing. ‘I’ll see you all in Orlando.’

‘Going straight back?’ asked Bertrano.

‘Why?’

Bertrano looked at his watch. ‘The fireworks displav starts in half an hour,’ he said. ‘First over the Magic Kingdom and then out there on the lake.’

‘It’s spectacular,’ confirmed Boella. ‘You should stay and watch it.’

‘No time,’ said Chambine. ‘You enjoy it.’

Chambine moved quickly away from the identifying suite, descending one floor by the stairway before taking the lift. Within minutes he was in the lobby, through which ran the monorail train that completely encircles Disneyworld. He was alert to people boarding with him for the journey to the main gate but saw no one paying any particular attention to him. As the pneumatic doors hissed closed, one of Pendlebury’s men rose from behind his copy of Time magazine to telephone the call box near the main exit, to warn the man waiting there that Chambine was on his way.

It was because of the complete success of the surveillance operation that Pendlebury called his meeting within forty-eight hours. This meant more work than it had for Chambine. The F.B.I. man could not assemble all the agents over whom he had control because of the risk of attracting attention with so many, and so he had to journey from as far south as Miami, right up through the coastline to Lantana, Lake Worth, Boynton Beach and Fort Pierce. From each place he selected a man to be in charge of the groups gathered there, recognising the need to delegate responsibility, to ensure quickness of movement. With this smaller group of supervisors he held a final conference, after the others, moving to the mainland and taking rooms at the Howard Johnson hotel on Okeechobee Boulevard at West Palm Beach.

‘I’ll make no apologies for repeating what you’ve heard before,’ Pendlebury began. ‘More than anyone else in this operation, you people have got to know what you’re doing and do it right. If any one of you foul up, then the whole thing will fail.’

Behind him was a blackboard on which were thumb-tacked photographs of the six men with whom Chambine had had his meeting. The F.B.I. supervisor took up a pointer, announcing the identity of each man as he isolated each picture.

He turned back into the room. ‘Every one has a positive connection with organised crime,’ he declared. ‘Yet they are all brought from separate parts of the country. I think that shows a very careful selection of operators.’

‘What are they doing at the moment?’ asked a man called Harris, who had been appointed controller of the back-up group in Miami.

‘Nothing, except being ordinary vacationers,’ said Pendlebury. ‘We’ve got twenty men watching them, rotating every two days to avoid any recognition.’

‘Are they remaining in a group?’

The question came from Roger Gilbert, who was in charge of the Lake Worth squad and so would be immediately involved when the collection was stolen.

Pendlebury shook his head. ‘There was only the one occasion, when they gathered in the suite we followed Chambine to, when we were able to identify the whole team. Since then they’ve behaved like strangers to each other.’

‘What about that warehouse in Orlando to which we followed Saxby and Boella?’

‘I may try electronic monitoring, although the size and acoustics might defeat us. I’m not risking an entry,’ said Pendlebury positively. ‘It’s a good bet they’re using it for some kind of rehearsal, so there would be no point in our risking discovery by trying to get inside.’

‘There’s one thing that worries me,’ said Harris.