He lay awake in his hotel that night thinking carefully, re-examining and developing the seed of an idea which had been with him for the past two or three weeks. Next morning he started back to Banwell – by way of Savernake Forest. In the end he reached the Unit a day later than he had originally intended, tingling with well-concealed excitement. He was too senior for anyone to ask him why he was late.
Ben Stoddart was, yet again, a guest on BBC's 'Paul Grant Hour'. The producer, high in his gallery, flicked his eye morosely back and forth across the bank of monitor-screens which faced him, remembering the morning's conference where he had suggested that Stoddart was being overexposed. His chief had answered smoothly: "We all know you have the interests of your programme at heart but don't rock the boat, there's a good chap,' – and the matter had been closed.
The producer disliked everything Stoddart stood for, and hated the man himself even more because he could not deny he made for very gripping television.
'Jack – a bit tighter on that profile,' he ordered into his microphone and saw Stoddart's head grow larger in No 2 camera's monitor. Fascinated, he watched the handsome lips moving.
When the unthinkable happened it took the producer no more than a couple of seconds to realize that although Stoddart was still speaking, the sound had gone silent. He.turned his head quickly to the soundproof window on his right beyond which the sound booth lay and saw that Bernie had already reacted, so he issued no order, knowing that Bemie would trace and correct the fault all the quicker without interruption. Then, suddenly, over the visual of Stoddart still mouthing unaware,' a strange voice broke out: 'The Angels of Lucifer have condemned Ben Stoddart to death! The Angels of Lucifer…'
The producer and Bcrnie had pounced on their buttons in the same instant and that was as far as the voice got, but it Was done, it was said, the pirate voice had already given its message to God knew how many millions from Land's End to John o'Groats. On the floor, of course, Ben Stoddart and Paul Grant still talked and smiled, having heard nothing; and the cameramen, though they must have picked it up on their gallery-fed earphones, did not waver. The producer handed over to his assistant, phoned the security men, and ran through to Bernie's booth.
They soon found the loop of tape, still running on a machine in an empty sound-editing cubicle, and the ingenious re-wiring which had made the interruption possible. They also found the time-switch which had triggered the device and which could have been set minutes or hours earlier. None of this highly professional sabotage bore any fingerprints, and although everybody who could possibly have committed it was grilled for hours, the culprit was never identified.
Although the pirate broadcast was made in the middle of a BBC programme – at 9.43 pm, to be exact – ITN had a beat on its news coverage, to the BBC's chagrin. Seventeen minutes were quite enough for ITN to be able to lead 'News at Ten' with the story, whereas BBC I'S main news had already gone out at 9.00, and BBC 2's was not due till 10.40. BBC, of course, was able to hold on to Ben Stoddart for interview, but ITN smartly grabbed Quentin White and had him in their House of Commons interviewing studio by 10.03.
'How seriously do you think this threat should be taken, Mr White?' the ITN man asked.
'Very seriously indeed. The so-called Angels of Lucifer…'
Had you ever heard of them before?'
'Nobody has, to my knowledge. But the very name proclaims their allegiance – and who else but witches would threaten the life of Ben Stoddart, their staunchest opponent?
The rats are at bay and they are showing their true colours. Rats always do when they are cornered. They have been cornered by the vigilance and courage of the Anti-Pagan Crusade, by the aroused conscience of the British public and by the prompt measures of the Government.'
'If they are, as you say,' cornered – may they not be bluffing?'
'It would be most dangerous to assume that. These people are ruthless, and they have secret supporters in key positions. The very way they issued their threat proves that. You're a television man; am I not right in saying the interruption must have been an inside job – and a technically difficult one at that?'
'Yes to both questions,' the ITN man said, resisting the temptation to rub salt in the BBC's wounds, and went on: 'If the threat is serious, what is its nature? A physical one or a black magic one?' He felt a little foolish asking it, but White had asked him to during their brief preparation and he had to admit it was attention-grabbing.
White, who had had no television experience before his election campaign but had quickly absorbed Stoddart's coaching, turned from facing the interviewer to gaze dramatically into the camera lens which had the red light over it.
'Let no one be in any doubt about the nature of the threat,' he declared, separating the syllables as though he were handing out gold coin by coin. 'No physical assassin can reach Ben Stoddart – he is too well protected by his friends who know that since Midsummer he has incurred the vicious enmity of evil men and women. But these men and women have their own chosen weapons. For two or three centuries now, it has been fashionable to dismiss as a fairy-tale the old belief that one could sell one's soul to the devil in exchange for power in this world. I am not so sure that it can any longer be so dismissed. In the last decades, science itself has come to realize that the human mind has unsuspected latent abilities, to which it has attached modern-sounding labels such as telekinesis, ESP, the psi-factor and so on. I believe that the witches have been laughing behind the scientists' backs – for these new labels merely hide timeless facts, which the witches have known about, and used, since before written history. They have trained and developed these abilities in themselves as an athlete trains his muscles – and just like the athlete, because of that deliberate training they can, in their chosen field, achieve results which ordinary people cannot. And as for selling their souls to the devil – the phrase may be outdated, but the thing which it expresses is not. By deliberately abandoning all restraints of morality, humanity and compassion, these men and women avail themselves of the incalculable powers of darkness – the evil powers which those God-given restraints, in all decent humans, keep in check. And if that is not selling your soul to the devil in exchange for power – what is? I ask you, my friends – what is?… The Angels of Lucifer – and what a revealing name they have chosen 1 – the Angels of Lucifer are not threatening Ben Stoddart with the bullet or the knife. They are threatening him with those very powers for which they have sold their souls to Satan… Whether each of you, listening to me in the security of your own homes, can believe they are capable of carrying out that threat, is up to you to decide. But I believe that Ben Stoddart is in grave danger because here on earth he stands in the front rank of the hosts of God, and he is the declared target of God's enemies. So I ask you – all of you, whatever your beliefs – to fortify this great and saintly man with your prayers.'
The Angels of Lucifer were the splash in every single morning paper (and a few hours later were big news in America, too, for Gene Macallister and Tonia Lynd had been busy all night). The pirate broadcast was news that could not be censored, because millions had heard it, so almost in relief the media went to town on the story. Quentin White's statement was quoted in full and set up the tone of editorial debate; he had shifted the emphasis, within minutes of the pirate broadcast, away from the threat of physical assassination to that of 'the powers of darkness' and there it stayed. It made much more dramatic reading and listening anyway, and the big question – 'Can they do it?' – could be expanded to fill as many column inches, or minutes of air time, as any editor or producer could wish. Everybody from the Archbishops of Canterbury ('yes'), Westminster ('yes' qualified) and York ('no') to the Professor of Parapsychological Studies at King's College, London ('five decades of clinical experiment have established beyond reasonable doubt…') and the Astronomer Royal ('telekinesis does not exist') was willing and eager to be quoted at length. Jungian psychologists clashed with Freudian, vicars with their own curates, and Mods with Rockers (the 1960s idiom was enjoying a mushroom revival among the trendier young this summer; it had begun to peter out, but Mods' 'no' and Rockers' 'yes’ gave it a new lease of life). Fleet Street astrologers contradicted each other as usual.