'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.

25.

In what he said to me on the stairs Baxter, of course, was right on every point. Maybe not absolutely a my story about the hidden race was entirely sincere and well-evidenced as far as I could see a 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 a these were the names they gave a 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 a or whatever sorry excuse for live entertainment the rulers of the world had to endure that week a 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 a that's why the frequent flashes of bad temper are so authentic a 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 a 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.'

'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 a may already have found, for all I know a 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 a 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? a 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 a what he, anyway a 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 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 cliches 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 cliche, 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 a 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 a 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.

'But I and Calum and Sophie remain persons of interest from then on. Baxter checks me and Calum out, no doubt having a bit of fun with the MiB act. He finds we have no clue. But when Calum, me, and Sophie get together in later years, a flag goes up. Baxter noses around. He duly finds there's still nothing going on, but what does that mean? Like you said, you don't know who's a revolutionary and who isn't. And we all fit the profile. I'm a journalist, Sophie and Calum are doing well and climbing fast in two industries related to the new aviation and old UFO thing.'

'Interesting speculation,' said McCormick. 'You haven't answered the question, though.'