Yet everything so perfectly planned. Nothing left to chance, from the moment of the Pasha's departure from Nassau to the night of the faked kidnapping at Mama Low's. The arrival of the cruise guests and their children ― the bloodstock English girls of twelve with lolling faces, eating crisps and drawling about gymkhanas, the confident sons with whiplash bodies and the side-of-mouth slur that tells the world to go to hell, the Langbourne family with sullen wife and over-pretty nanny ― all had been secretly welcomed, trailed, housed and hated by Amato's watchers, and finally seen aboard the Pasha, nothing left to chance.
"You know something? Those rich kids had the Rolls pull up at Joe's Easy, just so they could buy their grass!" Arnato the proud new father protested to Strelski over his handset. The story duly entered the legend of the operation.
So did the story of the seashells. On the eve of the Pasha's departure, one of Ironbrand's bright young men ― MacArthur, who had made his debut with a nonspeaking part at Meister's ― was heard telephoning a dubious banking contact on the other side of town: "Jeremy, in God's name, help me, who sells seashells these days? I need a thousand of the bloody things by yesterday. Jeremy, I'm serious."
The listeners became unusually vocal. Seashells? Literally seashells? Shell ― like missile? Sea-to-air projectile perhaps? Nowhere in the lexicon of Roper's weaponspeak had anyone before referred to seashells. They were put out of their misery later the same day when MacArthur explained his problem to the manager of Nassau's luxury store: "Lord Langbourne's twin daughters are having a birthday on the second day of the cruise. The Chief wants to hold a shell hunt on one of the uninhabited islands and give prizes for the best collections, but last year nobody found any shells, so this year the Chief is taking no chances. He intends to have his security staff bury a thousand of the things in the sand the night before. So please, Mr. Manzini, where can I get hold of shells in bulk?"
The story had the team in stitches. Frisky and Tabby, launching a night raid on a deserted paddling beach, armed with duffel bags of seashells? It was too rich.
For the kidnapping, every step of the way had been rehearsed. First Flynn and Amato had disguised themselves as yachties and made a field reconnaissance of Hunter's Island. Back in Florida, they reconstructed the terrain on a tract of dune set aside for them in the training compound at Fort Lauderdale. Tables were laid. Tapes marked the paths. A shack was erected to denote the kitchen. A cast of diners was assembled. Gerry and Mike, the two bad guys, were professional toughs from New York with orders to do what they were told and shut up. Mike the kidnapper was bearish. Gerry the bagman was lugubrious but agile. Hollywood could not have done better.
"Are you gentlemen fully conversant with your orders, now?" Irish Pat Flynn enquired, eyeing the brass rings on each finger of Gerry's right hand. "We're only asking for a couple of friendly belts now, Gerry. More in the line of a cosmetic alteration to the appearance is all that is required. Then we ask you to withdraw with honour. Am I making myself plain, Gerry?"
"You got it, Pat."
Then there had been the fallbacks, the what ifs. All covered. What if, at the last minute, the Pasha failed to put in at Hunter's? What if she put in at Hunter's, berthed, but the passengers decided to have dinner on board? What if the adults came ashore to dine, and the kids ― perhaps as punishment for some prank ― were made to stay aboard?
"Pray," said Burr.
"Pray," Strelski agreed.
But they were not really putting their trust in Providence. They knew that the Pasha had never yet passed Hunter's Island without putting in, even if they knew there was bound to be a first time and this would probably be it. They knew that Low's Boatyard in Deep Bay held top-up stores for the Pasha, and they knew the skipper stood to take a piece of the stores bill and of the dinner bill at Low's, because he always did. They placed great faith in Daniel's hold upon his father. Daniel had conducted several painful phone calls with Roper in recent weeks about the hellishness of adjusting to divided parents and had singled out the stopover at Hunter's Island as the high point of his forthcoming visit.
"I'm really going to get the crabs out of the basket this year, Dad," Daniel had told his father from England only ten days ago. "I don't dream about them anymore. Mums is really pleased with me."
Both Burr and Strelski had had similar upsetting conversations with their children in their time, and their guess was that Roper, though not of the English class that places children high in its priorities, would walk through fire rather than let Daniel down.
