Descent (34 page)

Baxter listened without comment, beyond the occasional interjection to ask me to clarify something. Now and again his eyebrows twitched, but that was as much of a response as he gave.

The food arrived. Baxter looked at the waiter, waited for a nod from me, and signalled for two more beers.

‘Well, well,’ he said, ripping a chunk of bruschetta and cramming some salami into a fold. The rest of the conversation took place between bites, which at least gave me time to think. ‘I had no idea. No idea at all.’

‘About what?’

‘About any of this. Especially of course the abduction experiences, and the dreams and the strange lines of thought they led to.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry to hear of what you went through.’

‘It wasn’t your fault. And I shouldn’t have—’

‘No, but I can see now … It never crossed my mind,’ Baxter said, ‘that you or any of your friends were revolutionaries. When you came to me with your story, I was suspicious of course, but I suspected some little sting might have been set up by a news outlet or by one of the other parties – you know, I wouldn’t put it past half the people around us at the moment. It was only when you came out with that nonsense yesterday that I suddenly saw it in a more sinister light.’

‘So what were you doing when you were “Reverend Baxter”? I know you won’t admit that, but …’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right. I’ve examined my conscience, I’ve examined the rules, and – I won’t go on the record, or even off the record, but I think I can couch a satisfactory answer in hypothetical terms. You OK with that?’

‘Let’s hear it,’ I said, not willing to concede any advance acceptance.

He sighed. ‘All right. Let’s suppose that, some unspecified time ago, in some unspecified country an unnamed company was carrying out unspecified R and D towards a type of device whose precise nature shall be left to the imagination. Let’s suppose, furthermore, that they’re alert for possibilities that the competition, to put it very generally, might be a little more advanced in that research than them. One fine Monday morning – I think it’s safe to be specific about the day – the said company receives confused, fragmentary reports of an incident that weekend on the other side of the country, reports that suggest the involvement of … a more advanced form of the imagined device. Worse, two young male civilians have had … some physical interaction with it.

‘Now, this company has friends in high places, among them an institution whose name we dare not breathe and whose very initials are classified information. Let us call it the Non Existent Agency. This NEA can sift millions of messages and images in moments, and do far more with their content than users of keyword searches and semantic parsers can dream. It has no difficulty in identifying the two individuals involved. From their web searches and conversations it has no problem at all in recognising that the hapless lads are interpreting their unfortunate experience in the classic template of a close encounter. The company is fully briefed, and left to sort the matter out, resources being limited, as always. So a certain young engineer, whose name we need not mention, and who happens to have the appropriate clearances if not quite all the acting talents one might ideally wish for, is sent to investigate and, not to put too fine a point on it, to sow confusion.

‘You can imagine how he might have gone about it, and what conclusions he might have drawn. He could, you may imagine, have exploited the Man in Black scenario. He could have used his real name – any searches on his name and his face, or even his face alone, would have shown who he really was, but that didn’t matter, because the searcher might conclude that the advanced machine was in fact a product of our unnamed company, which in the circumstances is itself useful disinformation. Some years later, one of the subjects – still under low-level surveillance by the NEA – is heard broaching some interesting topics in conversation. The engineer, now somewhat older and wiser, is hurriedly despatched to have a word, and to see whether or not the subject seems likely to do or say anything embarrassing, or indeed to have something useful to say. As it turns out, he doesn’t.’

‘And why,’ I asked, ‘might this hypothetical engineer urge the subject to study Divinity, of all things?’

Baxter frowned and looked down at his plate. ‘The engineer might have genuinely have had the subject’s interests at heart, perhaps because his own conscience was troubling him. He might have thought that he owed the subject some … reduction of confusion, shall we say? And that same troubled conscience might, just possibly, have later induced the engineer to go into politics in the cause of the small state and open government.’ He looked up, grinned, and spread his hands. ‘And that’s the end of the scenario. I can’t say more about that. I can say this, though: your seeing me outside the Parliament during the Forum was a complete surprise and happened by sheer coincidence, and not too improbable a coincidence at that.’

‘Oh, I can believe that,’ I said. ‘And your scenario sounds plausible enough.’

‘Do you believe it, though?’

I hesitated. Baxter looked, at that moment, so open and honest that I had to remind myself not just that he was a politician, but of what the spooks had told me. He knows, they’d told me. He knows. That’s why he might accept our story. And that’s why you have to confess and apologise first, to set him up for that.

‘I can accept it,’ I said. ‘It more or less fits what I thought was going on at first, before I made all these other connections.’

Baxter smiled. ‘Good. Well, I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up. No hard feelings on either side, I hope. Now – you have something more urgent to tell me?’

He knows. He knows. I had to keep reminding myself of that. Just as I’d been confident in telling him what had happened and what I’d thought had happened, because I
knew
Calum and I hadn’t had any sinister purpose in walking up to that microwave mast, so how Baxter responded to what I had to tell him now hinged on what he knew. What he knew and hadn’t said – hadn’t so much as hinted at – and that I couldn’t hint at either.

‘Yes indeed,’ I said. ‘It’s probably best if …’ I took my phone out, thumbed up the document folder, and looked at Baxter. He nodded, took out his phone and laid it on the table. I picked up the folder from my phone and placed it on his.

‘Have a read,’ I said. Our plates were clear and waiters were nowhere in sight. ‘I’ll get coffees.’

‘Cappuccino,’ he said, not looking up. ‘Chocolate on top, no sugar.’

We touched phones to split the bill, and waited for our coffees to cool. With a stirrer stick Baxter doodled patterns in the chocolate powder on top of the foam.

‘Ah, well,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘So this is how it’s going to be. I should have known.’ He looked up. ‘You’re going to publish this?’

‘Yes. I can’t not.’

‘And if you don’t, somebody else will.’

‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘I mean, I have no idea who sent it.’

‘Some public-spirited whistle-blower, of course,’ Baxter said, with heavy sarcasm. ‘No, I reckon you know as well as I do who’s behind this.’

‘If I did,’ I said, ‘and I’m not saying I do – do you think I could tell you?’

His cheek twitched. ‘Same problem as I have, eh?’

‘Maybe.’

‘So … this certainly clears up why the Rammie ended up in the wrong place.’ He pointed overhead, with a dark chuckle. ‘It doesn’t explain why the radar showed it in the place where it was expected to be.’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘It doesn’t. But …’ I found my hand was rubbing the back of my neck. ‘There are other cases on record of that sort of thing. False echoes caused by temperature inversions, instrument unreliability, all that …’

‘Indeed there are,’ said Baxter. ‘Hell of a coincidence that it should happen just then and there. Or maybe not. Peculiar weather conditions that day. Unusual reflective properties of the metafabric, which in any case was being used at altitudes it was never designed for. I’ve seen that sort of thing before, of course.’

He gave me such a quizzical look that I felt sure he knew I knew he knew.

‘Maybe you could mention that,’ I said, ‘if you want to make a statement.’

He wiped foam from his upper lip and stood up. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

Not sure what he meant, I walked along with him as he headed back to the Parliament.

‘Funny thing,’ he said, as we turned into the High Street. ‘Funny thing. I checked you out last night, trawled up everything I could find. I admit I was looking for something to use against you if I had to. I was a bit surprised to find you have a long-standing interest in UFOs – even spoken on the subject. As a sceptic, naturally. Now I see why.’ He laughed self-consciously, and lowered his voice. ‘You know, I understand the fascination myself. Even if there’s nothing there, there’s so much there, so to speak. Psychology, perception, meteorology, astronomy – ufology can be quite educational if you approach it in the right way.’

‘Like an atheist might study Divinity, you mean?’

He shot me a glance. ‘Aha! You don’t catch me out like that. But what I meant to say was – don’t worry about the dreams. They’re real all right, but they’re not
about
anything real, if you see what I mean.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘They’re a manifestation of something that has been with us since before the ice. Since Africa, perhaps. They’ll always be with us. We’ll take them with us to the stars.’

‘I’ll not ask how you know that.’

He laughed. ‘A wise decision. Oh, and by the way …’

‘Yes?’

‘If you should ever feel the temptation to go over to the dark side …’

‘Which dark side would that be?’

‘Making the news rather than reporting it. I have a research assistant vacancy coming up.’

‘You’re offering me a job?’

‘Yes, if you want it.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind, thanks,’ I said, less than graciously.

‘Do,’ he said. ‘Seriously.’

We walked to the steps of the Parliament, and then to the far corner with the hill behind it. Baxter turned and faced me.

‘Good location?’ he asked.

‘For what?’

‘A recording.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Get your phone out. You want a scoop? I’ll give you a scoop.’

When we had finished, he shrugged and said, ‘Do what you want with it. Bung it to the Beeb, I’d say. They’re near enough. Meanwhile, I’ve got work to do. See you around – or see you again soon, perhaps?’

He shook hands, then walked briskly off into the building. As I watched him disappear behind the doors I felt elated at having such a story in the cam, and at the same time heard a small voice in my head reminding me: he knows.

I took my interview with Baxter to Josie Thompson in the BBC office in the Media Tower. She edited it so as to put herself in the reaction shots asking the questions, with my full permission, because it increased the credibility and didn’t diminish my credit, Baxter having mentioned me by name several times as having dug out the documents. I gave Josie a copy of the folder, so she could check the details herself.

The folder contained documentation of a tiny error in the instrumentation system manufacturing area of BAS. The component in question was one that the Rammie project had bought off-the-shelf. Its normal use was in the control systems of drone copters. Its function was feeding navigational readings from the GPS into the control system, from whence they were passed to the telemetry. Its tiny flaw was an internal counter connected to the altimeter that returned to zero when its value in metres passed 9999. As drone copters can’t fly at anything near ten thousand metres, this wasn’t a problem. Nor was it a problem that if the altitude read by that counter incremented to zero, a cascade of unpredictable but inevitable consequences ensued, one of which was that the system inverted its other positional co-ordinates: north became south and east became west. It only became a problem when the system was used in, say, a self-powering balloon ascending to thirty thousand metres.

The documents were, of course, virtual: they existed only in the company’s computers. The copy of the folder that I gave to Josie held copies of all the documents except one dated seven years earlier: an inspection docket confirming that the design passed quality control, and screen-signed by James Baxter. I hadn’t told Baxter I was going to do this, but I felt I owed him that, especially as I knew that the document, like all the others in the folder, had been forged the previous night.

I wasn’t entirely sure if he knew that, too, but I did know why he was so emphatic that – while the error in the control system was an inexcusable screw-up for which he took full responsibility, it having happened on his watch – the false radar location could be dismissed as one of those things that happen from time to time.

That night I had a new dream. It was as vivid as my first abduction experience. I was in a spaceplane that was some future fulfilment of the Rammie project: a sleek arrowhead that was lifted high by a silver sphere and dropped, to swoop around and up and away to orbit.

That first time, I woke in the initial terrifying drop. In later recurrences of the recurring dream, I wake from further stages of the journey.

I still wake falling.

Saturday, mid-morning. I emerged from Kelvinbridge underground station into bright sunlight, ran up the steps to street level and walked across the green iron bridge over the Kelvin and on up Great Western Road, then turned left into one of the side streets. I knew exactly which door to go to, though it was odd seeing everything from ground level; odd, too, to wonder what lenses, if any, were this time watching me.

In the past couple of days the Rammie near-disaster (as it was now being called, symptomatically) had slipped from global sensation to local topic. Baxter’s retraction of his conspiracy accusation, and his revelation of the instrumentation flaw, had been accepted by everyone except the inevitable conspiracy theorists. As McCormick had predicted, the puzzle of the radar anomaly had been brushed to one side in the general relief that Scotland, Britain, Europe, capitalism, socialism, civilisation, or whatever the putative target had been, wasn’t in fact under attack.