‘Not all.’ Charles showed me the last picture, of the Sicilian genius Giuliano Caldare. ‘One of them made bad. Caldare emigrated to the United States in 1960, is now in the inner circle of the Cosa Nostra, a coming talent from all one hears.’
I sat down at Charles’s desk. ‘Right, but what does this prove? It may look like a conspiracy, but given their talents one would expect them to rise in the world.’
‘That’s putting it mildly. Good God, this bunch only has to take one step forward and they’ll be running the entire show.’
‘A valid point.’ I opened Charles’s note-pad. ‘We’ll revise the programme — agreed? We start off with the Georges Duval conference, follow up with our own discoveries of where the others are, splice in old newsreel material, interviews with the mothers — it’ll make quite a programme.’
Or so we hoped.
Needless to say, the programme was never started. Two days later, when I was still organizing the newsreel material, word came down from the head of features that the project was to be shelved. We tried to argue, but the decision was absolute.
Shortly after, my contract with Horizon was ended, and I was given the job of doing a new children’s series about great inventors. Charles was shunted to ‘International Golf’. Of course, it was obvious to both of us that we had come too close for someone’s comfort, but there was little we could do about it. Three months later, I made a trip to Jodrell Bank radio-observatory with a party of scientific journalists and had a glimpse of Martin Sherrington, a tall, finely featured man watching with his hard gaze as Professor Lovell held his press conference.
During the next months I carefully followed the newspapers and TV newscasts. If there was a conspiracy of some kind, what were they planning? Here they were, sitting behind the world’s great men, hands ready to take the levers of power. But a global dictatorship sounded unlikely. Two of them at least seemed opposed to established authority. Apart from Caldare in the Cosa Nostra, Georges Duval put his musical talents to spectacular use, becoming within less than a year the greatest of the French ‘Ye-Ye’ singers, eclipsing the Beatles as a leader of the psychedelic youth generation. In the forefront of the world protest movement, he was hated by the police of a dozen countries but idolized by teenagers from Bangkok to Mexico City.
Any collaboration between Georges and Band mi at the Vatican seemed improbable. Besides, nothing that happened in the world at large suggested that members of the group were acting in anything but a benign role: the nuclear confrontation averted during the Cuban missile crisis, the fall of Khrushchev and the Russo-American dtente, peace moves in Vietnam, the Vatican’s liberalized policy towards birth-control and divorce. Even the Red Guard movement and the chaos it brought could be seen as a subtle means of deflecting Chinese militancy at a time when she might have intervened in Vietnam.
Then, three months later, Charles Whitehead telephoned me.
‘There’s a report in Der Spiegel,’ he told me with studied casualness. ‘I thought you might be interested. Another young genius has been discovered.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘We’ll do a programme about it. The usual story, I take it?’
‘Absolutely. That same forehead and eyes, the mother who lost her husband years ago, our friend in the villa business. This boy looks really bright, though. An IQ estimated at 300. What a mind.’
‘I read the script. The only trouble is, I never got to see the programme. Where is this, by the way?’
‘Hebron.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Near Jerusalem. In Israel.’
‘Israel?’
I put the phone down. Somewhere in my mind a tumbler had clicked. Israel! Of course, at last everything made sense. The twelve young men, now occupying positions of power, controlling everything from the US, Russian and Chinese governments to satellite policy, international finance, the UN, big science, the youth and protest movement. There was even a Judas, Giuliano Caldare of the Cosa Nostra. It was obvious now. I had always assumed that the twelve were working for some mysterious organization, but in fact they were the organization. They were waiting for the moment of arrival. When the child came, he would be prepared for in the right way, watched over by the Comsat relays, hot lines open, the armies of the world immobilized. This time there would be no mistakes.
After an hour I rang Charles back.
‘Charles,’ I began, ‘I know what’s happening. Israel..
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Israel. Don’t you see, Hebron is near Bethlehem.’
There was an exasperated silence. ‘James, for heaven’s sake… You’re not suggesting that—’
‘Of course. The twelve young men, what else could they be preparing for? And why did the Arab-Israeli war end in only two days? How old is this boy?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘Let’s say another ten years. Good, I had a feeling he would come.’
When Charles protested I handed the receiver to Judy.
