I asked one or two questions.
Wolfgang’s father? Frau Herter had arrived with the child just after the war; the husband had probably perished in one of the nameless prison-camps or battlegrounds of World War II.
The balding man in the light grey suit? Yes, he had definitely come to the village, helping Frau Herter arrange her departure.
‘Back to London,’ I said to Judy. ‘This needs bigger resources than you and I have.’
As we flew back Judy said: ‘One thing I don’t understand. Why have the fathers always disappeared?’
‘A good question. Putting it crudely, love, a unique genetic coupling produced these twelve boys. It almost looks as if someone has torn the treasure map in two and kept one half. Think of the stock bank they’re building up, enough sperm on ice in a eugenic cocktail to repopulate the entire planet.’
This nightmare prospect was on my mind when I walked into Charles Whitehead’s office the next morning. It was the first time I had seen Charles in his shirtsleeves. To my surprise, he brushed aside my apologies, then beckoned me to the huge spread of photographs pinned to the plaster wall behind his desk. The office was a clutter of newspaper cuttings and blown-up newsreel stills. Charles was holding a magnifying glass over a photograph of President Johnson and McNamara at a White House reception.
‘While you were gone we’ve been carrying out our own search,’ he said. ‘If it’s any consolation, we couldn’t trace any of them at first.’
‘Then you have found them? Where?’
‘Here.’ He gestured at the dozens of photographs. ‘Right in front of our noses. We’re looking at them every day.’
He pointed to a news agency photograph of a Kremlin reception for Premier Ulbricht of East Germany. Kosygin and Brezhnev were there, Soviet President Podgorny talking to the Finnish Ambassador, and a crowd of twenty party functionaries.
‘Recognize anyone? Apart from Kosygin and company?’
‘The usual bunch of hatchet-faced waiters these people like to surround themselves with. Wait a minute, though.’
Charles’s finger had paused over a quiet-faced young man with a high dolichocephalic head, standing at Kosygin’s elbow. Curiously, the Soviet Premier’s face was turned towards him rather than to Brezhnev.
‘Oblensky — the Russian prodigy. What’s he doing with Kosygin? He looks like an interpreter.’
‘Between Kosygin and Brezhnev? Hardly. I’ve checked with the BBC and Reuters correspondents in Moscow. They’ve seen him around quite a bit. He never says anything in public, but the important men always talk to him.’
I put down the photograph. ‘Charles, get on to the Foreign Office and the US Embassy. It makes sense — all eleven of them are probably there, in the Soviet Union.’
‘Relax. That’s what we thought. But have a look at these.’
The next picture had been taken at a White House meeting between Johnson, McNamara and General Westmoreland discussing US policy in Vietnam. There were the usual aides, secretaries and Secret Service men out on the lawn. One face had been ringed, that of a man in his early thirties standing unobtrusively behind Johnson and Westmoreland.
‘Warrender — the 1952 genius! He’s working for the US Government.’
‘More surprises.’ Charles guided me around the rest of the photographs. ‘You might be interested in these.’
The next showed Pope Paul on the balcony of St Peter’s, making his annual ‘Urbis et Orbis’ — the city and the world benediction to the huge crowd in the square. Standing beside him were Cardinal Mancini, chief of the Papal Secretariat, and members of his household staff. Obliquely behind the Pope was a man of about thirty wearing what I guessed to be a Jesuit’s soutane, large eyes watching Paul with a steady gaze.
‘Bandini, Arturo Bandini,’ I commented, recognizing the face. ‘Oggi did a series of features on him. He’s moved high in the papal hierarchy.’
‘There are few closer to Ii Papa, or better loved.’
After that came a photograph of U Thant, taken at a UN Security Council meeting during the Cuban missile crisis. Sitting behind the Secretary General was a pale-skinned young Brahmin with a fine mouth and eyes — Gesai Ray, the high-caste Indian who was the only well-born prodigy I had come across.
‘Ray is now even higher up on U Thant’s staff,’ Charles added. ‘There’s one interesting photograph of him and Warrender together during the Cuban crisis. Warrender was then on JFK’s staff.’ He went on casually: ‘The year after Oblensky reached the Kremlin, Khrushchev was sacked.’
‘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
