Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer
  to a man who is deprived of freedom.
  If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled,
  even though he cannot spend it.
  Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevskiy (1821-1881)
  (tr. Constance Garnett)

  Never ask of money spent
  Where the spender thinks it went.
  Nobody was ever meant
  To remember or invent
  What he did with every cent.
  Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963)

A sparkling carpet clothed the beach, throwing back the rising sun cleanly from silver and with an added ruddy glow from gold. Death sprawled without grace, but beyond care, on the richness of the morning of September 22nd, 1588. Freshly splintered wreckage from a galley, and older fragments of a treasure ship from the New World, were mingled with dead Dons and the bodies of their slaves, who had been chained to the galley's oars. Fleeing with other demoralized shreds of the Spanish Armada, the galley had sailed up the eastern coast of England, driven on ahead of the English fleet by gales and storms. It had negotiated Scottish rocks and islands and circled Ireland to the west before being caught in an Atlantic gale of overwhelming violence while heading for home.
  The treasure ship that now mingled its wreckage with the galley had been on its way home from Yucatan years earlier. It had been forced to run before another violent storm until, dismasted and rudderless, it too had struck the huge rock at the mouth of Farnescombe Bay. Its heavy cargo had gone straight to the bottom, not to be seen again for thirty years.
  There was a clean, invigorating tang to the sea air on the morning after the great storm, a legacy of the night's frenzy. All-powerful Nature had made North Devon's population cower in low, stone houses and fear for their safety. Fierce gusts of wind had scooped seaside roofs into the air, dropping them as fragments miles inland. The spire of Farne village church had become rubble across the road.
  There was more than enough storm damage to divert the village's inhabitants from the beach. Some, however, climbed the low hill that sheltered the village slightly from a north wind. They wanted to check that their beached fishing boats were still there and to find out if the sea had surrendered anything useful in the night. The beachcombers were able to gather and hide a rich harvest before the local magistrate learned of the Spanish wrecks and claimed the treasure in the Queen's name; after taking an appropriate commission for his trouble.
  Tales of lost caches of Spanish gold and silver abounded in the area as fishermen, who could have gathered a share of the sea's bounty and buried it, met death prematurely at sea without sharing their secret with relatives or friends. Sixty-nine years later, in 1657, when another great storm threw hundreds of Spanish coins and sea-scoured bones onto Farne beach, the locals revived and polished their traditions of gold and death.
  A carpet of gold and silver appeared two generations later, at the end of November of 1703, when the greatest storm in recorded history blew itself out after two days of destruction. More gold and wreckage, in much smaller quantities, appeared after violent storms in 1735, 1782, 1841, 1892 and 1927. The people of Farne marked each gift from the sea with donations to their village church. Twenty generations on from the wrecks in the time of the first Queen Elizabeth, eye-witness accounts of the latest example of the sea's bounty were fading in the memories of Farne's twentieth-century pensioners.
  Treasure hunters visited the area from time to time, but most of them were hunting a Royalist payroll, which was supposed to have been buried in 1648, toward the end of the English Civil War, to prevent it from falling into Roundhead hands. In that part of Devon, the small areas favoured for human habitation were surrounded by miles of rugged, lonely countryside. Treasure hunters had plenty of isolated sites to search unobserved for payrolls, the weapons and armour buried with the dead of the battle of Candren Marsh in Saxon times, the lost cache of a gang of early eighteenth-century highwaymen and anything else that figured in a multitude of local legends.
  The area behind Farne village was perfect treasure-hunting territory. At least one local inhabitant, however, was well aware of what local history had to say about Farnescombe Bay and he kept hoping to be around when the wind and tidal conditions were right to bring more treasure from the New World to the Old.

Something was happening on the A13 on a wet April afternoon. A mile before South Hornchurch, Eric Maitland could see orange and white traffic cones on the left-hand carriageway, placed to force the traffic into a single lane. Then he spotted the sign. A curse flew naturally to his lips when he read:

CENSUS POINT
SLOW DOWN

He had no choice but to ease his foot on the accelerator and let his speed drift down to about 20 mph. A policeman in a raincoat was standing at a gap in the traffic cones, waving drivers on. As soon as he saw the fluorescent-pink safety jacket, Maitland just knew that he would be picked to answer the pointless questions.
  He was in a bit of a hurry to make a lunch appointment with a promising potential client. His firm manufactured specialized laboratory glassware, and he had been authorized to invest a Class B lunch against a good prospect of regular orders from a new manager at a firm that manufactured fine chemicals and some basic pharmaceutical products.
  As he knew it would, a gloved finger pointed to his car and directed him into the left-hand lane. Beyond a police car and a dark van, he stopped beside a man in a raincoat and a bowler hat. Maitland leaned across the seat to wind down the passenger-side window. The belt of drizzle had blown over ten minutes before. He was denied the pleasure of watching a nuisance of a civil servant suffer in the rain.
  "Good morning, sir." The man had a black, almost-Hitler moustache and a pale face. "Department of the Environment. We're conducting a traffic census to guide our road-building programme. Shouldn't keep you long."
  "Right." Maitland forced himself to be patient. The time was 12:42 by his dashboard clock, which made it afternoon. He had guessed what the man with the clipboard wanted from him. Pointing out the obvious would just waste time.
  "Could you tell me where you've come from and your destination?" continued the bureaucrat, who had some sort of rain-speckled, plastic-shrouded identity card with a colour photograph pinned to the lapel of his raincoat.
  "Er, London." Maitland turned a thumb over his right shoulder. "Stepney. I'm going to Purfleet."
  "On business?"
  "Yes, on business."
  "Is this a regular journey, an occasional journey or a one-off?"
  "Well, I suppose it's a one-off today. I'm hoping it might become a bit more regular."
  "I take it you're a rep, sir." The census-taker glanced pointedly at the tell-tale, crushed wing.
  "That's right," Maitland said reluctantly. He was still embarrassed about an absolutely silly shunt.
  "Thought so. Typical rep's car. Cavalier sixteen hundred estate. Looks nice and new." The bureaucrat made notes on his clipboard.
  "I got it on Monday," Maitland admitted.
  He had taken delivery of a brand new car on Monday morning. It had been damaged the very same afternoon as a result of a stupid misunderstanding, for which Eric Maitland refused to accept responsibility. The car had been booked in for repair on Friday afternoon. Maitland had to show off his damaged wing for another twenty-four hours yet.
  "And do you have your driving licence and certificate of insurance on you, sir?" asked the man with the almost-Hitler moustache.
  "Er, yes." Maitland reached into an inside pocket. Then he realized that they were in another jacket. "Well, no."
  "I should make sure you have them in future, sir. It'll save you a lot of trouble if the police have to stop you, innocent or guilty. One final question: will you be coming back along this road later today? On your return journey?"
  "Yes, I think so."
  "Thank you for your time, sir. That's everything."
  The man with the clipboard straightened up to make a final note. Maitland left the window open and settled himself back in the driving seat. Another car was taking his place as he left the area cordoned off by the traffic cones. He felt glad to be on his way again with so little trouble. He could still make his lunch appointment quite comfortably.
  Later, when he volunteered for a quizzing by the police, he could remember very little of the incident. It had been a nuisance but a very ordinary one. Maitland had been stopped for a traffic census once before. He had answered very similar questions then, as far as he could recall. The almost-Hitler moustache was about all that he could remember about the man with the clipboard.
  He could remember nothing about the policeman, who had been just a shape in a uniform, wearing wet-weather and high-visibility gear. He could not remember the colour of the van parked in front of the bogus police car. In common with other motorists stopped for the 'census', his mind had been focussed on getting on with his journey as quickly as possible; just as the thieves had expected.

A great deal of time, trouble, research and planning had brought four men to the A13 on a damp, spring morning. They were using as their blueprint a robbery that had been committed far enough in the past for the perpetrators to have served long prison sentences and been released. The architect of this robbery was hoping that the police would go sniffing down false trails if they recognized the method.
  The scheme was based on the greed and hypocrisy of their intended victim. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the government of the German Democratic Republic had been buying silver on the London bullion market. In theory, the metal was used in the manufacture of silver salts for the photographic industry. In practice, the East Germans were not above re-selling their silver if the market rose temporarily and they saw that a good profit could be made. A Communist state could not advertise its involvement in such a capitalist practice, and so the silver bullion was always transported in secret, using that secrecy as a means of obtaining security.
  The GDR's agents in London had never informed the British police when a shipment of bullion was on the road. They had avoided the use of security vans, preferring to move their silver in an anonymous container painted with just a standard orange anti-corrosion finish. To make deliveries seem even more routine, they had used a British haulage firm and described the container's contents as stable industrial materials, which would cause no hazard of any type in the event of a road accident.
  The haulage firm had dealt with a dummy British company, which the East German government had established as a front for embarrassing transactions of a speculative nature. Michael Fantony, the brains behind the plan to steal a shipment of silver, had learned that the government of the People's Republic of China was up to the same trick while plying a City dealer with drink in search of other commercial information.
  He had tracked down the PRC's dummy company by trawling through public records and drawing conclusions. He had then traced the haulage company used and identified a weak link in that company's transport office. Barry, his brother, had recruited the rest of the team and attended to the task of making the weak link compliant.
  The despatch manager of the haulage firm was in his early forties, married with four children and vulnerable. Barry had stepped out of the shadows of an overcast night in the firm's car park, pointed a sawn-off shotgun at their man and told him that the next person to see the weapon would be one of his children if he failed to obey orders. Barry had stressed that the weak link would be punished if he contacted the police. Then he had tucked the shotgun under his coat and ducked out of sight, leaving the man shaking beside his car.
  In another brief, night-time encounter on the drive of his house, Barry had told the despatch manager that he wanted to know the details of his firm's next job for the Chinese government's company. Barry had received a promise of co-operation at the third meeting.
  Acting on instructions received by telephone, a private inquiry agent had installed an answering machine in a temporarily unoccupied office. He had received his payment in cash by post. The machine was Michael Fantony's cut-out; a break in his trail. He could dial in from any telephone and send a code signal to prompt the answering machine to replay its messages. He never went near the machine and he had no need to speak on the telephone.
  In due course, the machine relayed a message from the haulage firm's despatch manager. Michael sent it an electronic signal to tell it to rewind the tape, then he recorded some loud pop music over that section of the cassette. After another phone call and another payment by post, the inquiry agent removed the answering machine to complete the break in the trail from informant to bullion thieves.
  The police had caught the gang that had carried out the earlier robbery, which Michael was using as a blueprint. Those thieves had been unprepared for the size of their haul - 321 silver ingots worth £3,400,000 at the time - and they had been so worried about informers that they had considered making a deal with the insurance company for 10% of the value and no questions asked.
  Before they had been able to find buyers for the rest of their haul, the thieves had found themselves under arrest with the police announcing that they had recovered all but a dozen ingots of the shipment. Michael Fantony was expecting to steal a load of around 250 silver bars, each weighing sixty pounds. The other three members of the gang had been guaranteed thirty bars apiece, each worth £3,000 at the current market price. Michael and his brother would share the rest.
  Michael Fantony was not the sort of person to leave anything to chance. He was prepared to call off the robbery at any stage if it started to go wrong. Sacrificing the other members of the gang would be no problem if he and his brother escaped a police trap. And the end of that April day, he expected either to be rich or, at the very worst, free to plan another job.

Michael Fantony had made security the watchword of his plan. He had been careful to maintain a discreet distance between the architects of the plan and the hired help. Roy Lembert, Mario Anselmo and Tim Easton, three professional criminals, had met brother Barry the minimum number of times required to convince them that the plan would work and to pass on details of their part in it.
  Barry had worn a wig and a bushy moustache as a disguise at each meeting. The four had always assembled at night in poor lighting conditions. Just in case the others were caught, Barry had told them that his information came from a study of the market price of silver and successful hacking into the computer system in the embassy of the People's Republic of China.
  They had no obligation to protect the despatch manager of the haulage firm, but Michael Fantony believe in sending the police off down a false trail on principle. No one would ever believe the Chinese if they protested that they could guarantee absolute security on their computer system, or that they had never stored the information used by the gang.
  Michael remained very much a man of the shadows. None of the hired help knew of his existence, just as they had no idea of the identity of their nominal leader, Barry Fantony. They knew only that his references were sound. Barry had stressed that the less they knew about each other, the better their chances of getting away with the robbery and the less scope anyone would have for making deals with the police if caught.
  The three assistants were strangers to each other, who had been brought together on the basis of reputation and special skills. Barry had warned them not to try to become friends, or even drinking companions. They laughed among themselves about his emphasis on security and cut-outs, but they were professional enough to appreciate sound planning. When their payday came around, they were expecting to collect enough to give them three or four months to select their next job.
  Lembert, Anselmo and Easton were all in their middle or late twenties; the same sort age as the Fantony brothers. Royston Lembert was an ex-soldier, who knew how to use firearms both to threaten and intimidate, and to dispose of a threat. His usual line of work was acting as a bodyguard to people with violent enemies.
  Anselmo was twenty-nine, three years older than Lembert, and a complete contrast in looks. He was as Latin as his name suggested. Lembert had played a stereotypical Nordic SS-man on several occasions when roped in as an extra while working for a client in the film industry. He looked hard and he played hard. Anselmo had enjoyed a brief but successful career as a bare-knuckle fighter on the Home Counties circuit, but he still managed to look like a soft, Latin lover.
  Tim Easton was twenty-four with mousey hair and a wiry build. When he worked, it was as an odd-job man. He could turn his hand to vehicle repairs, simple plumbing and electrical jobs, and cowboy building jobs. The problem of giving him a job was that he knew what to do, but he had the bad habit of taking short cuts if not watched carefully by someone who knew what he should be doing.
  Michael Fantony had discovered early in life that he could always find people willing to take a few risks if he provided complete instructions and dangled the prospect of a worth-while reward before greedy eyes. He had learned that life revolves around money and that someone at the dodgy end of the money business is never short of work. This insight had led him into accountancy. His speciality had become tax evasion, the illegal cousin of tax avoidance, and the laundering of dirty money. Constant contact with criminals, some of them very successful, had led him to the active step of planning his own perfect crime by proxy.
  Brother Barry had landed himself in more than enough hot water for the pair of them, but people had recognized that he was wild and impulsive by nature rather than bad. At twenty-six, two years younger than Michael, he had learned some discretion as a way of avoiding unwelcome interference in his life by the police and other busy-bodies.
  He had held a great variety of jobs during his ten years on the labour market. His habit of enjoying himself at the work-place had always been seen as a disruptive influence sooner or later. Eventually, his brother had given him a job to ensure a continuing income for Barry and his wife Jean, an annoyingly slim brunette, who shared her husband's casual approach to life. When he was at work, Barry kept an eye on people from a distance to make sure that they were not double-crossing brother Michael. He also made deliveries of confidential documents to clients on the UK mainland and in Europe.
  Barry fancied himself as a sportsman, unlike his brother, who played the occasional round of golf when he wanted to talk to someone under circumstances that made eavesdropping difficult. Barry was a regular visitor to his local squash club, he enjoyed a game of pool with less athletic partners, and he fell for crazes such as mountain bike-riding and roller-blading.
  A combination of Michael Fantony's organizational skills and Barry's energy had brought four men to a stretch of dual carriageway on a Thursday in April. Barry, dressed as a motorcycle patrolman, was sitting in the back of a white Bedford van with police markings. The doors were open. He was swinging his booted feet and dying for a smoke behind the concealing visor of his crash helmet. The rules for the job demanded no smoking, eating or drinking at the scene of the robbery to avoid leaving unnecessary clues for the forensic scientist.
  Six-footer Roy Lembert was playing the other policeman, taking advantage of his physical presence. Lighter and more average-sized Mario Anselmo had the gift of the gab. He was conducting the brief interviews with drivers, hiding behind his almost-Hitler moustache. Tim Easton was sitting in the back of the van with Barry Fantony. A blue overall on top of jeans and a warm anorak filled out his wiry shape and he was wearing a blond, shoulder-length wig and a gingery beard.
  Easton kept pretending to shoot up the van with a replica of a Colt .45 calibre self-loading pistol. His gun was loaded with 8 mm blanks, and he was wondering if he would have to pull the trigger to further the illusion of being armed and dangerous. A sawn-off shotgun with a cut-down stock, looking very much line an ancient highwayman's horse pistol, lay on the floor of the van, conveniently close to Barry. The weapon was not loaded. Michael had calculated that the threat of the weapon would be enough to ensure co-operation from the victims of the robbery. Michael wanted to be sure that nobody would be killed or injured by a shot fired by accident.
  Beep! Beep! Beep! went the personal radio beside Barry.
  Easton almost dropped his gun, but managed to recover it after some fumbling.
  "Mobile, stand by," said a male voice.
  "Checker, we are standing by," said Barry.
  "Good luck. Over and out," said his brother.
  Michael Fantony had decided to involve himself in the action of the robbery to the extent of shadowing the container lorry, and the escorting car that the Chinese embassy provided without telling the haulage company, so that he could deliver an alert when they approached the ambush.
  "You all set?" said Barry.
  Easton swallowed, cocked the hammer of his pistol and forced a confident grin. "Ready to rock and roll!"
  Barry got out of the van and stretched lazily. Anselmo saw him out of the corner of his eye and nodded as he filled in one of the boxes of his current questionnaire. Barry strolled over to Lembert.
  "Here in two minutes. You ready?"
  "Ready," mumbled Lembert, who was wearing cheek pads to distort the natural shape of his face.
  Barry moved back to the van and picked up the sawn-off shotgun in a gloved hand, holding it concealed behind the door. Lembert pointed another car into the coned reservation, then scanned the road for a container lorry. He knew that the vehicle was mid-blue with the name Ambron Haulage in white on both the front of the cab and the aerodynamic fitting on the roof of the cab.
  The lorry obeyed a wave of a policeman's arm and turned into the left-hand lane. A green Vauxhall Cavalier, the escort vehicle, turned after the lorry, disobeying a signal to keep going with the stream of traffic. Lembert stalked after it, making angry gestures. The car stopped behind the container lorry and the driver rolled down his window, ready to plead an honest mistake. He had been picked for the Western cast of his features and his ability to follow orders. He had been told not to let the container lorry out of his sight.
  "Is there a problem, officer?" he said.
  Lembert shoved another replica pistol into his face. "Both of you, get out at the other side of the car. There's two rifles aimed at you as well as this. Don't be heroes."
  The two men in the escort car crossed meekly to the van and allowed themselves to be gagged, blindfolded, trussed up and then searched for weapons. The thieves secured their prisoners with cable ties as used in the electrical industry for securing bundles of cables. These tough strips of plastic have a gate at one end and a tongue with backward-facing teeth at the other. Once the tongue has been drawn through the gate, they can be released only by cutting them off.
  When the escorts had been neutralized, the lone driver of the container lorry was moved to the van under the threat of an empty shotgun. He had received a routine briefing on what to do if a valuable load was hi-jacked. He could remember co-operation to avoid risking his life and the need to try to remember as much as possible about the thieves. But the quick application of a blindfold and his belief that it was all a mistake because the cargo was of no great value left him in a state of bewildered uselessness as a witness.
  Within minutes, a procession moved out of the coned area. Anselmo, who had an HGV licence, was driving the container lorry with Barry Fantony as his passenger. Easton was driving the van with the prisoners. Lembert brought up the rear in the dummy police car. They left the Chinese embassy's escort car behind in the coned area.
  At the end of the dual carriageway, the leader took the road to Romford. The other vehicles headed toward Basildon on a minor road. Easton and Lembert dumped the stolen Bedford van of prisoners in an area of isolated woodland. They stripped self-adhesive, plastic panels of police insignia from the two vehicles, removed the roof fitting of police flashing lights from the car and turned back to a rendezvous with the rest of the gang.
  By the time they reached the disused factory on the edge of Brentwood, a good part of the unloading operation had been completed. Barry had ripped open the side of the container with a chainsaw, by-passing the locks on the rear doors. He had left a fork-lift truck in the building for moving the pallets of silver bars. When there were just ninety silver bars left in the container, Barry Fantony had moved four tons of silver to his own getaway vehicle. After dividing the rest of the load between the three smaller vans, he drove the fork-lift up the ramp into his vehicle and clamped the wheels.
  "Right, lads, good job," he told the others through a broad grin. "There's lots of time in hand yet, but keep your skates on."
  "Smooth as silk," said Lembert, who had shed his cheek pads. He was enjoying being able to speak comfortably again.
  "Bloody great!" added Anselmo. "A real pleasure working with you."
  "Thanks, mein Führer," laughed Barry. "Right, you know what to do next. You've all got somewhere of your own to stash your share. When you've got it under cover, forget all about it for a month, at least. Then you phone this guy Hobart we told you about in turn, as arranged. He's worked with the insurance company before so there shouldn't be any messing about. Don't let him have more than one per cent of the insurance money as his commission. And don't let the thieving sods at the insurance company give you less than ten per cent of the value of the silver. You can work out what it's worth from the price in the paper, the way I showed you."
  "What about yours?" said Lembert.
  "I'll get rid of mine after yours," said Barry. "The biggest cut takes the biggest risk and the last turn. After they get the first lot back, they'll be expecting to get the rest back thirty bars at a time. So they won't dare try any tricks on you three because they think they'll be out three-quarters of a million quid. When you've got your cash, stash it somewhere safe and don't splash it around too much. But you know that, don't you? Or you can take it abroad where no one knows you. Stay careful, stay lucky and don't get too pissed tonight."
  "Don't forget this." Easton surrendered his replica pistol reluctantly. It was the sort of toy that a grown-up can own.
  "Here's mine, too." Lembert took his pistol from the side pocket of a sports jacket, which he was wearing with his police trousers.
  "Right," said Barry, "I'll be getting off. Last man out, don't forget to put the padlock on the door here. And the other one on the gate of the yard. Stay lucky."
  Leaving the others waiting to follow him at irregular intervals, Barry Fantony let himself through a high gate and onto an overgrown road. He passed through the town centre of Brentwood and took the road to the south-west, telling himself to remain more or less within the speed limit. He crossed the Thames and arrived at the outskirts of Catford forty minutes later. His brother was waiting with outward patience at a run-down building just off the main road.
  Michael had bought an off-the-shelf company and he had been renting the craft workshop for two months. The previous tenants had been potters, who had failed to capture the imagination of cash customers. When the robbery had been pushed into the background by other current events, Michael was planning to install a skilled and thoroughly dishonest silversmith in the workshop.
  After going through a stable period, the price of silver had made one of its periodic drifts downward and the Chinese government had chosen to stock up with the metal either for use or to sell if the price went up sufficiently. The Fantony brothers' share was worth a nominal £450,000 on the day of the robbery. Michael was planning to settle neither for the insurance company's ten per cent nor for the full market price. He planned to convert the bullion into articles that would have an apparent intrinsic value that was much more than the cost of their precious metal content.
  There is a thriving market in the United States for British antiques. Creating new pieces of 'antique' silver, Michael had learned, is a relatively simple business for an expert craftsman. According to a London dealer of his acquaintance, the craftsman just takes a small silver item with a genuine hallmark and incorporates it by the standard methods of the craft into a larger, and therefore more expensive, piece.
  Anyone attempting such a scheme with silver bought legitimately from a bullion dealer must take steps to break his trail to the antiques. Michael knew that the Chinese government would not admit to the police that they had lost silver bullion, and so the load did not exist officially; which meant that it could appear mysteriously as part of extended antiques. He had not made any exact calculations, but he expected to increase the value of his haul five- or ten-fold at least as long as he planned carefully and he was patient.
  There was a large, double door at the back of the craft workshop. It was just tall enough to admit the van. Headroom was even less of a problem with 158 silver bars weighing four and a quarter tons aboard. The wooden floor creaked ominously, but the brothers had taken the precaution of adding strengthening props between the joists and load-spreading boards on the bare ground below.
   On Michael's instructions, Barry had dug a pit two feet deep and two feet square. He had piled the earth on polythene dustbin liners, which he had also used to line the hole. For once, Michael had to exert some muscle power. Moving twenty of the sixty-pound silver bars from the back of the van, through a trap in the floor and into the storage pit was a two-man job.
  The headroom under the floor was just three feet and they both had to work in a crouch wearing a crash helmet for protection against unyielding wood overhead. The bars were about three inches square and a foot and a half long. They looked quite easily manageable until somebody tried to pick one up. Then the concentration of wealth became apparent.
  Michael had bought a supply of tough, plastic bags to provide the silver bars with a further layer of protection against a damp, corrosive environment. When the brothers had covered the cache with earth and removed the surplus, part of the loot had disappeared satisfactorily. While Barry loaded muddy wellingtons and overalls into more bin-liners, Michael sprayed the workshop liberally with an aerosol air-freshener. Barry had dug the pit ten days before and a smell of open graves had lingered in the workshop ever since.
  "Bloody hell!" sighed Barry as he worked up a lather on muddy hands at the workroom's sink. "I thought I'd never get straight again after lurking about down there."
  "All in a good cause," said his elder brother. "And good training for the rest of the job."
  "Hard work, this crime lark," Barry remarked with a grin. "And we've still got to get all that bloody shoring out."
  When they had locked two silver bars in the workshop's safe, the Fantony brothers drove to the site of the next cache. Michael was a great believer in dispersing his assets. If they lost one cache through betrayal or bad luck, or they had to abandon it on safety grounds, there would be over half a million pounds worth of silver in the others.
  In the extremely unlikely event of their capture by the police, they would be able to bargain some of the haul against shorter sentences and hope to retain at least one cache each to provide for their families and themselves after their release. Michael Fantony did not believe for a moment that his plans could go wrong, but he saw no harm in preparing for every eventuality. Knowing what the worst case scenario was helped him to avoid it.