Descent (31 page)

‘Ah, a question for Mr Baxter. Sir, the so-called revolutionaries to which you refer dissolved their organisation many years ago. They admitted defeat. They have not been heard from since. Does it not seem more likely that this spectacular but limited action is designed to discredit the New Improvement and with it the new economic policy as a whole? And which political forces and economic interests do you think would benefit from that?’

Oh, very good, I thought. Can’t beat the professionals in the conspiracy-theory game …

‘Well played, Mr Leung!’ said Baxter. ‘Your expensive cadre schooling wasn’t wasted, I see. For the benefit of anyone who doesn’t get it – Mr Leung is hinting darkly that those who’ve argued against the unsound economic policies foisted on the world by the Chinese communists may benefit from this outrage. To this I say quite frankly that we may very well benefit. So what? We should. I hope we do. Next.’

With this, as so often before, Baxter over-reached. The reaction in the room and in the ever-expanding shockwave of news and comment radiating from it turned hostile or indifferent as the shadow minister saddled his familiar hobby-horse. I could see it happening, in the room and online.

Nardini took back the initiative, and my outstretched arm caught his eye.

‘Mr Sinclair, from, ah … Mr Sinclair, the freelance.’

I tried hard not to let my voice shake.

‘I just want to raise a … an obvious possibility. Maybe someone here already has the answer, but – before we get too worked up shouldn’t we make sure that what we’ve just seen wasn’t exactly what it seemed? The telemetry and radar showed the Rammie coming down over the sea, and the nose camera and the view in glasses showed it coming down over Edinburgh. Isn’t it possible that it’s the radar and telemetry data that were correct, and the camera and glasses views that were false? And therefore falsified, obviously, and a serious situation but not as bad as we—’

I could see heads shaking all around me. Calum was glaring; Karl was looking at me and making ‘cut, cut’ gestures.

Nardini frowned and turned to Walters. ‘Perhaps you could answer that?’

She stayed seated. She fiddled with her glasses for a moment, then took them off and leaned forward. She spoke with a sad smile in her voice.

‘I see that in the past ten minutes there has sprung up a “5/15 Truth” website that has already had thirty thousand views and climbing …’ She shook her head, as if in disbelief, and continued in a sharper tone. ‘No doubt my answer will go down as part of the cover-up. Let me start by saying unreservedly that my initial comment was unduly defensive – though entirely true it missed the point. I’m an engineer, not a politician. OK. First off, the real failure was of the control system – the turn was initiated far too late. If the Rammie had been where the telemetry and radar showed it to be, over the Atlantic, we’d all be terribly disappointed and indeed embarrassed but no one would have seen this as anything but an accident or an operational failure. For any shortcomings that may have led to that failure I as project director take full responsibility.

‘It was of course the descent of the Rammie above Edinburgh and the very real possibility of catastrophic loss of life that has most shocked us all and raised the questions of sabotage and conspiracy. No one would be more happy than I to say that Mr Sinclair’s speculation is correct. Unfortunately it is not. I can now clarify what was for all of us a confusing complex of events. The lifting device, the self-propelled balloon, was well above the cloud layer and beyond visual tracking for much of its ascent. It was however tracked by radar, and its position was confirmed by the telemetry. Even the drop itself showed up on the radar, though the package fell out of view and the balloon rose more slowly out of range. At that point all attention was on the camera images and instrument telemetry from the package, and was further focused on the … the delay of the thrust reversal manoeuvre. It was only when the camera images showed not sea but land below, as breaks in the cloud became visible, that we all realised that something was even more wrong than we’d thought.

‘The telemetry continued to give false readings throughout. Interestingly they were a precise inversion of the true location. They showed a hundred miles or so west and a little south of Machrihanish, rather than the real location the same distances to the east and north. The package fell into Edinburgh airport radar view, and that of airliner onboard radar. The subsequent trajectory was tracked by civilian and military radar to the final detonation, which was visually confirmed almost immediately. Witnesses on the ground in Edinburgh also saw the descent and the turn, and I should add many saw it with the naked eye.’

‘So why wasn’t the off-course balloon picked up on radar?’

Walters stared at me. ‘I see you are accredited as a technology correspondent, Mr Sinclair. You should know that there is no routine ground radar coverage at such altitudes. As it turns out, it was spotted by a passing airliner at one point, and logged as a UFO. In the precise technical sense, I hasten to add! And it may have been spotted by anti-missile radar, but no defence significance was attached to it. Will that be all?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ I said, with as much aplomb as I could muster. I sat down thoroughly shamefaced.

Walters took a few technical questions, and the press conference broke up in some confusion as journalists stampeded outside for vox-pops and hopefully fragments of debris, which were (I saw) already appearing on sale across the Central Belt.

I didn’t join the rush. All I wanted to do was head for a café, rattle out a think-piece spiced with my own on-the-spot (virtually speaking) reportage, and try to figure out how the false telemetry and its radar tracking confirmation had really been done. Calum had made himself scarce, not to my surprise. I walked out, head down, toking on the sly. Baxter caught up with me on a corner of the stairs.

‘You!’ he barked. ‘Sinclair!’

‘Sir?’ I felt for a moment as if I’d been caught vaping behind the bike sheds, as in a manner of speaking I had.

‘Don’t “Sir” me, you insolent tyke!’ Baxter poked a forefinger at my sternum, hard enough to hurt. ‘I
know
what you’re up to! I’m
on
to you!’

‘What?’ I said, drawing myself up to full frontal injured innocence for the benefit of the stairwell, busy as it was with security cameras and curious glances.

‘You know very well what,’ he said. ‘You’re mixed up in this. You came to my office six weeks ago to spin me a cock and bull story about secret races hiding among the Travelling People in the hope I’d swallow it and come out with some racist outburst and discredit myself and my party in advance. And you’ve just fuelled all the stupid conspiracy theories that what we saw was all a clever illusion or augmentation hack or whatever. Nice bit of disinformation, that! I don’t know if you’re a dupe, a pasty, a tool or a player, but I’m going to make it my business to find out. You already know which I am, Sinclair. Let me tell you, you have no idea how deep is the shit you are in.’

He was off down the stairs before I had time to think of a reply.

I thought of several on my way out, but they don’t call that sort of thing
l’esprit d’escalier
for nothing.

In what he said to me on the stairs Baxter, of course, was right on every point. Maybe not absolutely – my story about the hidden race was entirely sincere and well-evidenced as far as I could see – but I had told it to him with ulterior motives, of which one was indeed that he would take it up and discredit himself. He didn’t know what I was up to, he was going to do his best to find out, and I did know he was a player.

And I had no idea how deep was the shit I was in.

At first I thought I was under suspicion of a taste crime. It does happen. Some people affect surprise to learn that the aesthetic offence laws are still on the books. Dating from the early and militantly self-righteous phase of the New Modernity, widely suspected of being the unintended outcome of an undergraduate guerrilla art criticism project that went too far and got taken up by an exceptionally dim-witted and self-righteous Liberal Democrat MSP and passed into law on the ensuing ripple of moral panic, the anti-irony restrictions are seldom enforced, and when they are it’s more in the nature of a shakedown than anything else. You pay the fine, you promise not to do it again, and everyone goes on their way in the full understanding that you will, and that the enforcers won’t be back.

So when two middle-aged guys turned up outside my flat the evening after the Machrihanish incident, wearing clean, sharp-pressed boiler-suits and brandishing council-official ID that my door camera confirmed as genuine right down to the thumbprints and retinal scans, I was annoyed but not unduly concerned. I let them in. People say they won’t, but they always do. What else are you going to do? Call the police?

Willie McCormick and Ron Humphries – these were the names they gave – were solid, dependable-looking men in their mid-fifties. They sidled past me in the hallway with exactly the manner of electricity meter readers, and that air of vague apology for invading your privacy they radiate as they hunker down to read a meter in the back of the ironing cupboard. These two stood in the middle of my living-room floor and waved their scanners about. There was a ping like a microwave timer going off.

‘Ah,’ said McCormick, in a tone of disappointed surprise. ‘Here’s one.’

He reached into a bookshelf, pulled out an old DVD, and turned it over in his hands. Humphries looked on, nodding gravely as he saw the cover.

‘“
Anachron
, Complete Season Two”,’ McCormick read out. ‘On a digital video disc, and all. Takes me back, Mr Sinclair. My own kids used to watch it every Sunday evening. The law’s the law, though.’

‘Yeah, OK,’ I mumbled. ‘It was kind of a cult thing when I was in high school.’

Anachron
, for those of you too young to have enjoyed that guilty pleasure, was a popular if somewhat niche television series whose high concept or inspiration must have flashed into the mind of its maker while he was watching a re-run of the genuinely classic 1976 BBC TV series
I, Claudius
and it struck him that what was missing from the frequent banqueting scenes were cigarettes and smartphones. All those upper-class Romans lolling around pretending to enjoy listening to Horace recite his poetry – or whatever sorry excuse for live entertainment the rulers of the world had to endure that week – and sipping wine, spitting out grape pips and eating dormice on sticks, just obviously needed to have a smoke and to update their relationship statuses to give them something to occupy their hands. Once the thought’s got your head in its grip it won’t let go. You can never see
I, Claudius
on screen again without noticing that everyone in it is just dying for a cigarette. No doubt when the series was made back in the 1970s nearly everybody
did
smoke, and the actors really were aching for their fix – that’s why the frequent flashes of bad temper are so authentic – but that doesn’t account for the equally conspicuous once it’s pointed out lack of smartphones, which hadn’t even been invented in late imperial Britain, let alone early imperial Rome, and for which everyone’s thumbs are itching in vain to twitch.

The genius of
Anachron
was that it was played absolutely straight, with no suggestion of comedy or camp. It was a historical drama set in an ancient Rome where most people smoked, everyone but slaves had smartphones, and everyone including slaves watched scenes from the Colosseum on television. The regular characters even had favourite series of their own, particularly the reality TV series
I’m a Martyr, Get Me Out of Here!
in which terrified Christians and traitors and captives were thrown to the lions or hacked up by gladiators or hurled from hovering helicopters week after week.
Slave Idol
was another big hit, but its sadism was so gratuitous that the game-show was summarily axed by senatorial decree in the third or fourth episode. A particularly clever aspect of
Anachron
was that the imperial wars that appeared on the news channels and involved some of the characters happened in exactly the same places as the real imperialist wars that were going on at the time, and you could watch Romans watching their legions pacifying Persia, Mesopotamia, Cyprus, Libya and Palestine and getting attacked by bearded, robed, turbaned religious fanatics and understand exactly what it was all about.

‘You do know that possessing copies of this filth is illegal, Mr Sinclair?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted.

Humphries chipped in, ‘Do you know
why
this particular series falls foul of the law?’

I nodded. Even in the circumstances, I felt a little smug that I knew.

‘It isn’t the content,’ I said. ‘It was the marketing.’

‘Aye,’ said Humphries. ‘The stealth marketing campaign. Legendary, that was.’

‘Legendary,’ McCormick agreed, still looking down at the plastic square jewellery-box cover, still turning it over and over in his hands. He looked up, as if suddenly snapping into focus. ‘It was all true, you know.’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ I said. ‘That was the point.’

He cocked his head. ‘Explain. Go on, Mr Sinclair. Impress me.’

‘Why should I?’ I shrugged. ‘You know it as well as I do.’

McCormick sighed theatrically. ‘An awful lot of people don’t seem to comprehend the seriousness of the offence. They give me lip about censorship and that – which really ticks me off, to tell you the truth. It gets me in the mood to throw the book at them. And we wouldn’t want that. So tell me.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘The marketing campaign was a rumour that the series inside the series, the
I’m a Martyr, Get Me Out of Here!
thing, was real. Like, it was real jihadists and shaheeds and war on terror prisoners getting torn apart by lions and all that. And the surface point, if you like, was that the British Government and the MoD and MI6 didn’t deny it. The Prime Minister herself even actually winked once when she was challenged about it in an interview. The real point was that everyone went on watching it, even though they thought it might be true. But of course it wasn’t, it was, uh, postmodern irony.’