He’d soon learned that an eidetiker was a person with a photographic memory. A mnemonist. And that a doctor suspected a twelve-year-old male patient had a one-in-a-hundred-billion neurological condition that meant he would never forget a thing. Thankfully, that doctor had known that what he had on his hands was something special, and he’d brought the case to the attention of a professor friend of his. The professor, in turn, had alerted ASIO.

And so the studies had started: scans and X-rays, exams and evaluations, tests and tasks. And the twelve-year-old boy named Riley Jax was revealed not only to be mnemonist, just the fifth confirmed eidetiker in history, but also a genius with an estimated IQ of 222.

There followed a battery of psychological tests. Jax’s scores for the five personality traits used by first the CIA, and subsequently ASIO, to recruit agents – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism – were smack bang on the perfect mean. They further broke down his personality and natural tendencies, and again the boy scored well – for courage, honour, flexibility, confidence, humility, amicability, subjectiveness and objectiveness. He would have achieved a perfect score for a spy, except that he had too much empathy. Still, no one at ASIO had ever seen anything like it. Nor had anyone at the CIA – Clarke had personally placed a call to Langley to check.

A board of independent experts – psychologists, neuroscientists and neurosurgeons – had been called in to review the results and verify them, and to study Jax. They’d all confirmed it: Riley Jax was exactly what ASIO thought he was – a remarkable and rare human being, a cognitive mystery. And, potentially, the perfect spy.

CLARKE had headed up the ‘blank cheque’ project from day one. It had been a huge opportunity for him and accelerated his career significantly. He was relatively junior for such a highly classified and unprecedented experiment – a black op – but he had made Riley Jax his obsession, so, in the end, he was the obvious choice. Project Mnemonist and Riley Jax were going to be the making of Clarke. He knew it back then and he knew it now.

Since ASIO had got involved, every moment of Jax’s life had been scripted.

Jax’s grandmother couldn’t afford to buy him a PC or a smartphone, so ASIO arranged for her to win these items in an RSL raffle. Then they made sure a series of subliminal cues came up on the youngster’s screen, via PC pop-ups, Facebook and Instagram posts and online advertisements, to spark his interest. They also went low-tech with the tried and true: strategically placed billboards, posters and people.

Jax’s high-school maths teacher, who just happened to be the only high-school maths teacher he had ever had and just happened to be an ASIO agent, encouraged him.

Leaving school to join the army was ASIO’s idea. Not his. Becoming a combat engineer was their idea. Not his.