Charlie Muffin U.S.A.

25

The idea of quietly but simply leaving Pendlebury’s control room had come quite spontaneously to Charlie. At the beginning of the robbery he had been as intent as everyone else on what was silently unfolding before him, and it was not until almost half way through that his attention faltered and he realised the absolute concentration of those around him; and saw it as an advantage. The thieves in the exhibition room didn’t know how they had been manipulated: Charlie did. And he wanted it to stop. It made him feel stupid.

He had risen slowly, remaining with his hands against the chair back for several seconds, then he gradually made his way towards the door leading into the corridor, all the time tending towards the bathroom, to provide an excuse if there should be a sudden challenge. The monotone commentary had continued uninterrupted and the heads stayed fixedly towards the television monitor. At the doorway there had been the final hesitation as Charlie had tensed against the sound of its opening and then, quickly, he had passed through and drawn it closed behind him.

Still without any clearly formulated idea of what he was going to do, his desire to run was overwhelming. But he had seen and learned enough about Pendlebury’s operation to be impressed by its efficiency and so he had walked instead, aware that a hidden observer might become suspicious of any unusual behaviour. It would only take seconds with the electronic equipment available to rescind that order against his assassination. And he needed all the time he could get to protect himself from discovery.

Throughout an operational career as extensive as his, there had obviously been attempts on Charlie’s life. Those that had arisen during assignments, people reacting against detection or arrest, he had regarded as nothing more than to be expected, considering the profession he had chosen, and confronted them – always succeeding in that confrontation – in a detached, impersonal way. They weren’t trying to destroy him, Charlie Muffin: they were fighting his department and the country he represented. Charlie thought that was fair.

But there had been other, isolated occasions which he had not accepted. Very early in his association with the Department, before Sir Archibald Willoughby had been appointed its head, Charlie had been infiltrated into Poland and half way through the mission realised that he was the front, the man to be exposed for identification for the benefit of the real operatives, in the hope of detecting an informant in the British Embassy. Two men he had drunk with in the Red Lion near the old Scotland Yard building and with whom he had supported Queen’s Park Rangers on a Saturday afternoon had suffered that time, neither knowing even now how it was that they came to be recognised and snatched off a deserted Warsaw street, each to face ten years’ imprisonment. After the Burgess and Maclean fiasco, when Charlie had been sent to Washington to close stable doors after the horses had gone to the knacker’s yard, a First Secretary at the Embassy there had so resented the justifiable criticism of laxity that he had invoked family relationship to complain through the Foreign Secretary to Sir Archibald, in the expectation of getting Charlie fired; and had never been able to convince anyone that he had no knowledge of how classified documents from the Ambassador’s personal safe came to be in his briefcase during a cocktail party at his Georgetown brown-stone which was why he had never risen further in the diplomatic service and had served his last eight terms in African embassies. And then there was the episode during the east-west border crossing in Berlin, when Charlie had been offered up for sacrifice for those who had succeeded Sir Archibald. Resignation had been the only recourse for both the English and American Directors after their humiliating capture and trade-off in exchange for the Russian spy-master. And not just the Directors. Nearly a hundred operatives were exposed and identified and were now only good for filing clerk duties at Langley or Whitehall.

Charlie regarded each of these incidents as personal. But there was something more; worse to him, in his bizarre idiosyncrasy, than the attempt at physical harm. Each time there had been people treating him as a fool. Perhaps only Edith had come near to guessing the cause of that; the resentment of someone whose apparently widowed mother had charred and sometimes offered the men of the household additional services to earn the extra money to keep her son at the grammar school. He had never been able to lose his conviction that the university graduates who were his constant companions were unable to regard him as an equal.

Sir Archibald had come near, too. ‘ You’re so good because each time you’ve proving yourself,’ the old man had said.

But he hadn’t proved himself this time, reflected Charlie, entering the lift and pressing the button for the first floor.

‘Prick,’ Charlie accused himself, as the lift descended. ‘Made to look a thorough prick.’

The first positive idea had come as Charlie had emerged on the first floor, turned immediately left and gone down the last storey by the fire stairs, which had an exit to the back as well as the front of the hotel. He had learned enough from the importance attached to timing in the control room to utilise it to his advantage. In one of the passages leading past the Alcazar lounge towards the beach, he’d checked his watch. Twelve-eighteen. Quite obviously, to avoid any confrontation with the security guards, the operation had to be completed within the next twelve minutes: probably within five, to enable them to get clear of the hotel before the theft was detected.

Five minutes, then, before his disappearance was discovered. What would be Pendlebury’s reaction? Radio first. Instructions to seize and maybe even eliminate; there might be just enough time to plant a body, to obtain the second, more serious indictment.

What next? Pendlebury was a professional and the professional response would be to attempt immediately to assess the damage Charlie could cause and then move to prevent it interfering with what still had to be done when the collection was delivered to Terrilli’s house.

Charlie smiled, coming out near the oddly darkened pool area and turning back around the hotel. He was moving north towards the private highway leading out on to the South County Road.

Had the situation been reversed, Charlie knew he would guess that Pendlebury had made for Terrilli’s house. It was the only natural, logical conclusion to make: and Pendlebury was a natural, logical person.

Charlie took a short cut across the lawn, gained the harder surface of the private road and sprinted down towards the better lighting of the public thoroughfare. He arrived at the junction panting, checking the time again. Twelve-twenty-two. His chest hurt, but he forced himself to hurry, wanting the telephone kiosk near the junction with Cocoanut Walk. Breath was groaning from him when he reached it and he leaned out, grabbing at it and trying to recover. Twelve-twenty-five.

He wedged himself into the box, aware for the first time of the perspiration running across his back and chest and even down the inside of his legs.

He started up at movement from the Breakers’ drive. A Ford station waggon with four men in it came out carefully. The driver checked for traffic in both directions and then turned left. Immediately behind was a second vehicle, a Chrysler compact, with three occupants. That too stopped for any cars on South County Road before turning left and putting on a spurt to get into convoy.

His breath easier now, Charlie stood waiting, hand outstretched towards the telephone, his eyes not moving from the driveway.

‘Come on, you bastard,’ he said, in quiet impatience. The sweat felt wet and uncomfortable. He shivered despite the warmth of the Florida night.

The first F.B.I. car came out at twelve-twenty-seven. It was a Dodge Colt. Behind it came a Plymouth, low against the ground because of the equipment Charlie guessed it carried. A thick-bodied radio antenna waved from the roof and there were two more aerials mounted at the rear. A white Plymouth Fury was the third car. It was quite easy to see Pendlebury in the passenger seat.

Charlie had dialled police emergency before the lead car had come on to the highway. The police receptionist replied in a measured calm voice.

‘There’s a robbery, at the house of Giuseppe Terrilli,’ said Charlie, speaking carefully but refusing to give any identi fication.

Charlie replaced the telephone before Pendlebury’s car cleared the driveway. He remained in the booth, watching it turn towards Terrilli’s castle. He seemed to have failed to get any response from an anonymous telephone call to the Russians and wondered if he would have better luck with a warning involving one of Palm Beach’s most respected residents.

As the tail-light of the F.B.I. squad turned towards Bethesda, Charlie saw the taxi flag and waved.

Four Cubans deputed as Charlie’s protectors had been positioned in the foyer of the Breakers in the belief that it would be around there that any violence would occur, but one had been positioned on the corridor of Pendlebury’s second room, and so Charlie had been identified as soon as he had emerged. Charlie’s disembarkation on the first floor, to walk down the last stairway, had caused a few seconds of confusion, but it had enabled the tail to alert Ramirez and through him Williamson. They had located Charlie again by the time he had reached the private road. Three stayed with him, while Ramirez returned to the Breakers for transport. Williamson took a second car and was actually driving slowly southwards, along South County Road when he recognised the surveillance team in Ramirez’s parked vehicle. Then he saw Charlie get into the taxi and move off ahead of him. Williamson slowed further, letting Ramirez interpose himself between him and the taxi, checking the timing from the dashboard clock.

It was twelve-thirty.

At precisely that moment, Tony Santano turned his 350SL Mercedes off Ocean Boulevard into the private roadway leading to Terrilli’s mansion. Ahead of him, unseen, waited fourteen Russian-trained Cuban guerrillas. One minute behind and only four hundred yards away came Robert Chambine, in the station waggon, with Saxby following in the Chrysler. Pendlebury, prevented from following too closely by the radio reports being constantly fed into his vehicle, estimated that he was at least three minutes behind the Chrysler.

Pendlebury had evolved a codeword which would activate the one hundred agents he had grouped within five miles of Terrilli’s castle, pleased with the ambiguity of it. Everyone would move when he opened his radio channel and said ‘Stamp’.

At twelve-thirty-one, Chambine went by the last of the F.B.I. monitoring spots, placed one hundred yards away from the entrance to the private road to avoid detection. Pendlebury, who had been riding with his finger on the transmission button, depressed it and said, in a consciously controlled voice, ‘Stamp. I repeat, Stamp.’

He turned the radio off, turned to Gilbert beside him and added, ‘And I hope to Christ I find that Englishman, to stamp him, too.’

A mile away, twenty-five Palm Beach policeman were activated in eight cars, with two back-up vehicles, to investigate an anonymous allegation of robbery at the home of one of their leading citizens. For Palm Beach, where there is rarely violent crime, it constituted a major response, reflecting the importance of Giuseppe Terrilli.

It was twelve-thirty-two and fifty seconds.