‘So they’re in contact? I’m beginning to realize what the MoscowWashington hot line is really for.’

Charles handed me another still. ‘Here’s an old friend of yours — our own Martin Sherrington. He’s on Professor Lovell’s staff at the Jodrell Bank Radio-Observatory. One of the very few not to go into government or big business.’

‘Big science, though.’ I stared at the quiet, intense face of the elusive Sherrington, aware that someone at Jodrell Bank had deliberately put me off.

‘Like Gunther Bergman — he moved to the United States fifteen years ago from Sweden, is now very high up in the NASA command chain. Yen Hsi Shan is the youngest, barely seventeen, but have a look at this.’

The photograph showed Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai on the reviewing platform in Peking during the cultural revolution, an immense concourse of teenagers passing below, all holding copies of Mao’s Thoughts and chanting out slogans. Standing between Mao and Chou was a boy with a fist in the air who was the chief Red Guard.

‘Yen Hsi Shan. He’s started early,’ Charles said. ‘One or two of the others we haven’t been able to trace as yet, though we hear Herter is with the giant Zurich-Hamburg banking trust. Jaako Litmanen, the Finnish prodigy, is rumoured to be working for the Soviet space programme.’

‘Well, one has to admit it,’ I commented, ‘they’ve certainly all made good.’

‘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.

As a matter of fact, I am quite certain that I am right. I have seen the photographs of Joshua Herzl taken at his press conference, a slightly difficult lad who rubbed quite a few of the reporters the wrong way. He vanished off the scene shortly afterwards, though no doubt his mother now has a pleasant white-walled villa outside Haifa or Tel Aviv.

And Jodrell Bank is building an enormous new radio-telescope. One day soon we shall be seeing signs in the skies.

The Killing Ground

As the last smoke from the burning personnel carrier rose through the wet dawn air, Major Pearson could see the silver back of the river three hundred yards from his command post on the hill. Pulverized by the artillery fire, the banks of the channel had collapsed into a network of craters. Water leaked across the meadow, stained by the diesel oil from the fuel tanks of the carrier. Working the binoculars with his thin hands, Pearson studied the trees along the opposite bank. The river was little wider than a stream, and no more than waist-deep, but the fields on both sides were as open as billiard tables. Already the American helicopters had climbed from their bases around the city, clattering in packs over the valley like mindless birds.

An explosion in the. driving cabin of the personnel carrier kicked out the doors and windshield. The light flared across the water-soaked meadow, for a moment isolating the faded letters on the memorial stone that formed the rear wall of the command post. Pearson watched the nearest flight of helicopters. They were circling the motor-bridge a mile down-river, too far away to notice the wrecked vehicle and its perimeter of corpses. The ambush, though successful, had not been planned. The carrier had blindly driven up the embankment road as Pearson’s unit was preparing to cross the river.