Descent (32 page)

‘Aye,’ said Humphries. ‘Postmodern irony. That was the point, all right. That’s why it fell foul of the law.’

‘But,’ said McCormick, ‘the real twist is that it
was
all true.’

‘Oh, come on!’ I said. ‘If it had been true, it would have been exposed years ago.’

‘It was,’ he said, sounding bored with the topic. ‘But of course, that was taken to be another twist of the irony. Or maybe a conspiracy theory.’ He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter, I forget. But I remember the way the prisoners screamed when we threw them out of the chopper. The dust the blades kicked up and the red splashes. That’s not the sort of thing you forget.’

I stared at him, sick with the unwanted, gloating reminder of just how bad things used to be. ‘You’re winding me up. Look, let me just pay the fine and get this over with.’

‘How do you know I’m winding you up?’

He sounded serious, and curious, like he really wanted to know.

‘Well,’ I said, remembering a point Baxter had made to me, ‘if you were involved in something like that you wouldn’t be able to talk about it, because of the Official Secrets Act, and anyway you’d be confessing to a war crime, which seeing as you know I’m a journalist and you don’t know how wirelessed this room is would be a really stupid and careless thing to do.’

‘So it would,’ said McCormick, ‘if I gave a toss about the Official Secrets Act, or about investigative journalists.’ He spun the DVD into a cluttered corner, without looking. I think the cover cracked. ‘Or if we were council officials.’

At this point I realised I was in deep shit all right and made a lurch for the door, but Humphries had anticipated my move and blocked it with two expert blows, one just above the elbow and the other to the hip. I collapsed quite neatly onto the sofa. I tried to get up but my leg and arm let me down, not gently and not painlessly. I fell again in a huddle, clutching, curling up.

I looked up at them.

‘Take what you want,’ I said.

McCormick grabbed my glasses off my face and my phone from my shirt pocket.

‘Not much use to you,’ I pointed out.

‘Oh, we’re not
criminals
,’ said Humphries, in a tone of one trying to set my mind at ease. ‘We’re secret police.’ He glanced at McCormick. ‘Are we allowed to say that?’

‘I think so,’ said McCormick. ‘We just can’t give him the name or initials. Which raises a delicate problem. How to explain?’ He frowned down at me, then brightened. ‘Mr Sinclair, I’m given to understand that you have been under the impression that James Baxter is or was a Man in Black.’ He laughed. ‘Baxter isn’t a Man in Black. We are.’

‘Ah, fuck off,’ I said.

Without a flicker of change to his expression, Humphries kicked the knee of my hitherto undamaged leg. I howled and doubled up, then fell apart again.

‘We can keep this up all night,’ said McCormick. ‘Don’t push your luck. As I said, I was in the helicopters.’

‘What do you want?’ I moaned.

‘Ah, that’s better,’ said McCormick. ‘We just want to talk, really.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Mind if we sit down?’

‘Be my guest,’ I said, with as much dignity as I could muster while blinking back tears and sniffling up snot.

Humphries dragged in a couple of chairs from the kitchen. The two men sat facing me across the coffee table. I wasn’t going anywhere. I tried to convince myself that if they had been criminals I would have fought back. That thought wasn’t going anywhere either.

‘You may well be wondering,’ McCormick said, ‘what you’ve done to bring us down on your head. You may even be feeling rather pleased with yourself that you have at least done something of significance; that you must be on the right track, that you have touched a nerve. I see you’ve spent the afternoon and evening digging into today’s unfortunate incident. You may speculate that after we leave, you will resume your investigations and uncover the truth. I must disabuse you of that notion. If that were the situation, you would already be dead.’

He let that sink in for just long enough, and continued, ‘Luckily for you, that is not the situation at all. There is no possibility of your discovering, or even touching on the truth except by accident, and even if you did, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest. Let me tell you the truth about today’s events. It was obvious straight away that the Rammie flight was deliberately sabotaged. By assiduous investigation, you may find – may already have found, for all I know – that this was done by overriding the controls to send it east instead of west, and to falsify all the downlink telemetry. The radar echoes were spoofed, or a decoy device was used – I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. Logically, something of the sort must have happened, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Yes.’

He leaned forward, elbow on knee, didactic finger pointing. ‘Now, whatever the method used, it was far beyond the capacity of one person. Therefore, it was done by more than one person. Therefore a conspiracy, likewise a logical necessity. The only question remaining is: how do we find out who the conspirators were? And once again, the answer drops out with tedious predictability. We apply the time-tested principle of
cui bono?
– who benefits? And there, my friend, is where your troubles begin.’

I shook my head, or tried to. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘Oh, you get it all right,’ said McCormick pleasantly. ‘But allow me to elaborate. At the press conference you heard two distinct suggestions in that respect. One was Baxter’s, that the revolutionaries are coming out of sleeper mode. The other, from the local eyes, ears and mouth of the Red empire, was that what you – what he, anyway – might call
counter
-revolutionaries were behind it. People opposed to the new order, the Big Deal, the New Improvement. People, in short, like Baxter. And, not to beat about the bush, people like me and my colleague here.’ He glanced sidelong at Humphries, and smirked. ‘We, as you’ll have gathered from what we’ve told you, are men of the old order, kept around by the new for our general usefulness in dirty work, but with who knows what real allegiances and values and resentments and what have you. Securocrats. Are you familiar with the term?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

It was first used, if my Modern Studies Higher hasn’t let me down, during the Northern Ireland peace process. Some republicans saw the new settlement as a defeat and a betrayal. Most saw it as a victory, or as a step to victory, for the republican cause. The latter view was shared by many in the security forces who’d spent their lives fighting the very same terrorist bastards who were now posturing as legitimate politicians and in due course posing as elder statesmen. And the bitter old spooks did their best to undermine the peace process, along with, of course, the hard-line dissident republicans and the old-guard Unionists and die-hard Loyalists, all of whom got well and truly played by the securocrats.

McCormick shrugged, almost apologetically. ‘Here we are, having to accept that the revolution we fought against has happened in a different form, one that some of the revolutionaries themselves didn’t accept and still reject. But, you know, that ship has sailed. Now, it doesn’t take a genius to join the dots, seeing as there are only three dots. Baxter and us, obviously – a right-wing politician is easy to link with the likes of us. Less obvious, taking maybe another minute’s thought, is a connection between us and the third dot: the revolutionaries.’

‘What?’ I hadn’t joined these dots at all.

‘Who knew them more intimately, back in the day, than us? Some of us spent the best years of our lives spying on, infiltrating and disrupting the revolutionaries. If we were even minimally good at our job, we’d have had assets in place. Some of the revolutionaries would be spooks. Uh-huh?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

‘Now, we all know who won that round. The revolutionaries admitted defeat, dissolved their organisation, quit their pranks, and dispersed. But, as they used to boast, they didn’t go out of business, they went
into
business. They resumed the middle-class careers that their youthful enthusiasms had so rudely interrupted. Some of them will have changed their ideas to suit their circumstances, exactly as their own theory would predict. Being determines consciousness, except when it doesn’t. Isn’t that how it goes? Great fucking insight, that. It explains those who fall away, as well as those who don’t. The ones who hang onto their ideas become, in effect, sleeper agents within the system they despise. Who knows what they’re waiting for, or what they intend to do? Or indeed what they’re doing now?’ He coughed modestly. ‘
We
do. Not all of it, but some. Because some of these revolutionary sleepers are
our
sleepers. And by a high probability, some of
our
sleepers are
their
sleepers.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Let me get this straight. You’re saying there are outwardly respectable business and professional people who are secretly revolutionaries, that some minority of these are secretly working for the security services, and that you suspect a minority of
that
minority are assets of the revolutionaries, either infiltrated or turned?’

‘Spot on,’ said McCormick. ‘Again, I’m not telling you anything that can’t be figured out. What complicates matters further is that some personnel of the security services, namely old securocrats like us, are of dubious loyalty to the new order and would be quite happy to see it undermined. So if, let’s say, someone wanted to make one of the new order’s prestige projects screw up very publicly and spectacularly, almost literally blow up in the faces of its sponsors, the question of whether it’s the revolutionaries or the counter-revolutionaries, the ultra-left or the ultra-right, behind it becomes indeterminate, irrelevant and moot.’

The didactic finger wagged with emphasis. ‘
Particularly
when we consider that the net of
cui bono?
can be cast far and wide. Competing space business interests, other states, the entire freaking menagerie of non-state actors, and last but not least, the new brooms of the security services, setting up a provocation to lure any disloyal elements out from the woodwork and chop their heads off.’

He sat back and sighed at the unfairness of it all. ‘Fucking wilderness of mirrors, man.’

‘I can see that,’ I said. The pain was beginning to ease if I didn’t move too much. By way of perverse compensation, my head was beginning to hurt.

‘There will of course be an investigation,’ McCormick said. ‘Fingers will be pointed. Heads will roll. Hidden enemies will be dragged into the light of day. Small unpleasant creatures will be found under upturned stones, scuttling for the dark. The journalistic clichés just roll off the tongue. Don’t they, Mr Sinclair?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted. Some of them had rattled off my keyboard already that day.

‘And there, as I said, is where your troubles begin. Because you’ve been pointing some fingers of your own, haven’t you, Mr Sinclair? And, if you’ll forgive another cliché, you should always remember that when you point a finger, three fingers point back.’ He demonstrated.

‘I haven’t pointed a finger at anyone,’ I said.

‘Or maybe it was like this.’ He raised a hand, extended two fingers and crooked a thumb, and brought them down: the pistol gesture. ‘You took a shot at Mr Baxter. Why?’

‘I was trying to divert his attention.’

McCormick shot a pleased glance at Humphries. ‘Aha!’

‘I know why I’m in trouble,’ I said.

‘You do?’ Despite having earlier implied as much himself, McCormick sounded sarcastic. ‘In your own words, then, please.’

‘But not in your own time,’ added Humphries, in a menacing tone.

‘Oh, we have all night,’ said McCormick, in an emollient manner that seemed to be directed, scarily for me, at Humphries. To me, ‘Please go on.’

‘You know about my, uh, UFO encounter years ago?’

McCormick snorted. ‘Yes!’

‘And Baxter’s, uh, pastoral visits?’

McCormick looked amused; Humphries sniggered. ‘Yes.’

‘Oh, right, fine,’ I said. ‘Well, when I was researching for an article about the Rammie, I had an idea about what might have been really going on. It came up because I saw the new flying globes, and Baxter’s name, and a company called Fabrications, all on the same screen as it were. An old school friend works for that company. Her name’s Sophie. You can check her out, she has nothing to do with all this, but she does in a way, that’s the point.’

‘You’ve lost me there,’ said McCormick.

‘Sorry. OK. Look, the thing is, we weren’t supposed to be on the hill.’

‘For fuck’s sake!’ snapped Humphries, half rising. McCormick laid a hand on his forearm. He sat back, glowering.

‘Go on,’ said McCormick. ‘Pull yourself together, man.’

‘All right,’ I said, trying again. ‘What I noticed when I started thinking back was that every time I saw Baxter, it was
after
I’d seen Sophie or been in touch with her. Right at the start, me and my friend Calum set out from Sophie’s house for a walk on a hill above Greenock. We left our phones behind so our parents would think we were still at Sophie’s. We walked up to a microwave mast at the top of the hill, and on the way we saw a police drone and a civilian drone from some strikers who were blockading the main road. Then a mist came down, and after it lifted we saw this light in the sky that came down more or less on our heads and knocked us out. A few days later I was chatting by phone with Sophie and Calum; I was on my own and shortly afterwards Baxter came to the door. A few years later when I was at university I was talking to Sophie, who I hadn’t seen since we were at school, and Baxter turned up again and we had a long conversation. And finally, at the big Forum, Calum and I met Sophie and an hour or two later bumped into Baxter, who by now was an MSP and claimed never to have seen me before. So when I thought back, there it was, staring me in the face all along.’

‘What?’

‘What this was all about. What this has
always
been about. It had nothing to do with the UFO in itself, even if it was some secret early version of the things we see flying around now. The real question was what it was being used
for
, and
why
it came down on us in the first place. I think it was being used as a drone, and it came down on us because – well, there were all these troubles going on, remember, the police at full stretch, and two lads who’ve left their phones behind so they can’t be tracked are spotted walking up to a microwave mast overlooking the Firth of Clyde. Maybe they’re there to plant a bomb and bring down the mast. Communications disrupted over a strategic area, God knows what else could be in the works. The mist covers up everything, makes normal drone work impossible. It’s an emergency, this secret drone gets scrambled or is maybe on station anyway, and it’s called down or called in. It arrives within minutes – not in time to prevent us but in time to catch us, scan us for explosive traces or whatever, and nothing’s found. We’re left with ash stains and bad dreams.