'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 a 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 a 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 a 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 a 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 a 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 a while the error in the control system was an inexcusable screw-up for which he took full responsibility, it having happened on his watch a 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.

PART SEVEN.

27.

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.

I stood at the foot of the familiar short flight of worn stone steps, took a deep breath, bounded up, and rang the doorbell of Calum's flat. The power light of the camera in the top right corner of the doorway winked on, a red bead like the gaze of a lab-rat's eye. The speaker grille crackled.

'Hello?' I said. 'It's me a Ryan.'

'Oh, right, Sinky.' The voice was Calum's. 'Just a minute.'

More than a minute passed. The grille crackled again.

'OK, Ryan,' said Gabrielle. 'You can come up.'

She didn't sound welcoming. I pushed the door as the lock buzzer sounded and went up three flights of stairs within, past the usual parked bikes and scattering of car rental and fast-food flyers. Calum opened the flat door halfway and looked at me round the side.

'Morning, Sinky.'

'Hi, Duke.'

'What are you here for?'

'I just wanted to see you and Gabrielle and, uh, explain and apologise for a few things.'

'"A few things"?' He snorted. 'We havnae got aw day, you know.'

'I didn't say everything.'

He cracked a smile, and opened the door wider.

'Ah, come on in then.'

He looked not long up, barefoot and in jeans and an old T-shirt. Gabrielle, similarly dressed, sat curled up in an armchair in the small front room. She smiled but didn't get up, and motioned me to the couch.

'Coffee?' Calum offered, from the doorway.

'Yes please. Black, no sugar.'

'I remember whit yi take.'

The room looked like it was still very much Calum's, apart from the pictures on the walls, which as I'd noticed months ago showed Gabrielle's taste. The carpets were as worn as I expected and the bookcase in a niche in the corner had only half its shelves occupied by books: casual collectors' items by the look of them, more for decoration than for practical use. The other shelves suggested Gabrielle's hand at work: shells, feathers, odds and ends of old crockery, some with small cut flowers in them; glass paperweights with fossils inside, instead of the random dusty clutter the shelves would no doubt have accumulated when the place was Calum's alone.

Gabrielle watched me with a wary eye.

'How are you?' I asked.

'I'm fine,' she said.

'Everything going, uh ...'

She sat up a bit. 'How did you know?'

Her pregnancy wasn't showing under what she was wearing at the moment: one of Calum's old T-shirts.

'Someone told me,' I said. 'I'm happy for you.'

A flicker of a smile. 'Fingers crossed.'

Calum returned bearing a mug of coffee. He handed it to me and sat on the arm of Gabrielle's chair, fingers lightly playing with her hair in what struck me as an unduly possessive manner. She didn't seem to mind.

'OK, Sinky,' said Calum. 'Shoot.'

'Well, there's two things I want to apologise about,' I said. 'First of all I want to apologise to the two of you for being such a dickhead about your being together. I mean, I knew it was all over with me and you, Gabrielle, and I know it was my fault or anyway not your fault, and, well, fuck, I'm sorry.'

'Oh, I'd have been miffed if you'd not been jealous,' Gabrielle said.

Still wounding, still teasing, still winding me up. I tried to rise above it.

'Yeah, I understand that, but still I should have been a bit more mature about it. I shouldn't have called Calum ... all the things I called him.'

'You called me things?' Calum shook his head. 'Cannae remember. Forget about it yirsel, OK?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Thanks. Well. The other thing is ... a bit more awkward.'

Gabrielle laughed. 'More awkward than harassing me and slandering Calum?'

'Well yes, actually. And, uh, sorry about all that, too.'

At that moment I was thinking about what I hadn't confessed and had no intention of confessing. I must have looked impressively guilty and ashamed of myself because Gabrielle shrugged one shoulder and said, 'All right, apology accepted. A note to my parents wouldn't be out of place either, by the way.'

'I'll do that,' I said.

'Grovel a bit,' she advised.

'Uh, that won't be hard,' I said, 'because the other thing kind of concerns them, as well.'

'It does?' Gabrielle looked less lazily sensual, less accepting of an apology that was nothing but her due, wary again and more alert. 'What's it about?'

I took a fortifying puff of Zip and sip of coffee. 'Do you have your glasses handy?'

With a faint snort of irritation, Calum heaved himself up, padded out, and returned with two sets of glasses. I took out my phone and thumbed up the genealogy file, and flicked it across. They examined it.