TEN

THERE WAS A lengthy pause. Dawn Harding, as if to make a tacit point about self-control, sat motionless and without expression. George Widdowes stretched in his chair and recrossed his legs. Rising and marching briskly to her desk, Angela Fenwick lifted the telephone and ordered sandwiches for four. From a desk drawer she took a clear plastic folder. Inside was a sheaf of photographs, which she handed to Alex.

He examined them one by one. There was an early Meehan family shot taken in a kitchen: the father standing in his shirtsleeves, the blowsy bottle-blonde mother smoking by the stove and the pinched, worried-looking boy – even then the image of his dad – crouched over his homework. In the school photo, scrubbed and hairbrushed, young Joseph didn’t look much happier, but he appeared to have cheered up a bit for the holiday snap in which, aged about eleven, he and his mother were sitting at a folding table by a river with a caravan in the background. Another shot, possibly taken on the same holiday, showed the boy triumphantly holding up a small trout. Almost a smile on his face.

And then there was Meehan aged about fifteen taking part in a cross-country race. The seriousness and the pinched look were back by then, and had been joined by something else – a tenaciousness, a hard intentness of purpose. The same expression was waiting behind the level gaze as the sixteen-year-old apprentice stood with his visibly frail father in front of their van (‘Lawrence Meehan, Electrical and General Repairs’).

And finally as a squaddie. A formal sit-down shot of the battalion in shirtsleeve order. Meehan in civvies posing with two fellow privates in front of an armoured personnel carrier. Meehan in issue overalls doing something complicated at a workbench with a soldering iron. Meehan and a couple of mates brewing up on exercise beneath a rockface.

And that was it. A life in ten photographs. Not conventionally handsome, but intelligent-looking. Not naturally one of the lads, but the sort you could rely on to stand his round. Not a natural tough guy, perhaps, but a fast learner. And without question a bad enemy. A real implacability behind the pale, narrow features and the rain-grey eyes.

‘So this is him,’ said Alex eventually and, catching Dawn Harding’s scornful expression, immediately regretted the statement’s pointlessness.

‘This is him,’ said Angela Fenwick. ‘The Watchman. Our PIRA mole.’

‘I’m assuming the story you’re telling me has an unhappy ending,’ said Alex.

‘I want you to know everything,’ said Fenwick. ‘I want you to know exactly what sort of man we’re dealing with. I want you to know everything we know.’

Alex nodded. He was busting for a piss. He said so and Dawn Harding stood up. En route, she officiously hurried him past several open office doors. For fuck’s sake, he thought.

‘Aren’t you coming in?’ he asked her when they reached a sign marked Male Staff WC. ‘Just in case I catch sight of something I shouldn’t.’

‘There won’t be much to catch sight of,’ she said.

When they got back to the deputy director’s office the sandwiches had arrived. In Alex’s place two files had been placed on top of the Meehan photographs. They contained ten-by-eight-inch colour photographs taken at the scenes of the murders of Barry Fenn and Craig Gidley, and the respective pathologists’ reports.

‘None of these to leave the building, please,’ said Fenwick. ‘Dawn will show you a room where you can go through them when we’ve finished.’

Opposite Alex, Widdowes was galloping through his sandwiches as if fearful that they were going to be taken away from him.

Alex picked up one of his own, and was about to bite into it when a thought struck him. He froze and Dawn Harding raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ve just realised something,’ he said. ‘Yesterday morning I left an RUF sentry who can’t have been more than eleven tied to a tree. I meant to let him go when we pulled out.’

‘Sounds to me he’s pretty lucky to be alive at all,’ said Angela Fenwick.

‘I doubt he is still alive,’ said Alex. ‘The survivors of the raid will be looking for scapegoats.’

‘Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ said Widdowes through a yellow-toothed mouthful of bacon, lettuce and tomato. ‘Africa’s a bloody basket case, anyway. It’s not what the rest of the world does to them, it’s what they do to themselves. God, the stories you hear.’

‘Sally Roberts is apparently telling anyone who’ll listen that she was carried to safety in the strong arms of the SAS,’ said Fenwick.

‘We told her we were Paras,’ said Alex. ‘Where did she get the SAS stuff from?’

‘She told the Telegraph’s stringer that none of the men who rescued her had shaved or washed for several days and that they wouldn’t talk to her in the helicopter. The Paras always chatted her up.’

The ghost of a smile touched Alex’s face but he said nothing.

‘Right,’ said Widdowes, placing his sandwich plate on the carpet and wiping his mouth with a spotted handkerchief. ‘Shall I take over?’

Fenwick nodded and glanced quickly at Dawn. Alex sensed a current of empathy between the two women from which George Widdowes was excluded.

To begin with, Widdowes explained, things had looked good. From Meehan’s occasional brief reports to Barry, and from information provided by touts and informers, it was clear that he was serving out some kind of initiation period. He was regularly called out for driving jobs, moving other volunteers from area to area, and transporting punishment squads and their victims to locations where beatings and kneecappings were administered. The IRA liked its volunteers to have a clear understanding that severe penalties were handed out to those who disobeyed them.

Meehan was also used as a ‘dicker’, standing on street corners looking out for manifestations of security forces personnel. Only the more experienced dickers, Alex knew, were used for ‘live’ operations. If a hit was planned on a border post a series of walk-pasts would be organised in the course of which the dickers would look out for any of the tell-tale signs – additional sentries, increased patrols and defences – that the operation was known about. A tout might have talked, anything might have happened, but the net result of a security lapse would invariably be the same: an SAS killing team waiting in ambush and a series of funerals attended by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The job of the dickers was a vital one to the PIRA and many operations were cancelled or postponed because of a dicker’s instinct, honed to a sensitive edge on a thousand street corners, that ‘something wasn’t quite right’.

The first indication that Joe Meehan was moving up the terrorist ladder came in August 1990 when he reported to his handler that he’d been asked to act as a dicker on a bank robbery in the Cliftonville Road. The Northern Ireland desk made no move to inform the local security forces and the robbery went ahead. A female teller suffered a badly broken nose when she was punched in the face after attempting to press a panic button and a little over £8500 in cash was taken.

After the bank job, things went very quiet. In a twenty-second call on a public phone the following morning Meehan informed Barry that he was now being watched round the clock, although he had given his fellow volunteers no sign that he was aware of this. As far as the serious players were concerned, he said, he was still very much on probation. A lot of the volunteers couldn’t quite get their heads round the idea of trusting an ex-soldier.

Somebody must have trusted him, however, for he finally got his turn. A three-man team was assembled to recover a weapon from a cache in a churchyard near Castleblayney and Meehan was one of them. Again, he was able to inform Barry of the upcoming operation and again MI5 allowed it to take place unhindered. In the normal course of events the weapon would have been dug up by an SAS team, bugged for tracing purposes and rendered harmless – ‘jarked’ in special forces parlance, then reburied and left for recovery by the IRA.

On this occasion, however, it was decided that the risk that PIRA might discover the jarking and suspect a security leak was too great. No suspicion, however slight, must taint the Watchman. Whatever the cost, the weapon had to remain intact.

And the cost was very nearly fatal. Within two days a Royal Welch Fusiliers patrol had come under fire in Andersonstown and their lieutenant had had the stock of his SA 80 rifle shattered by a high-velocity round. The patrol returned fire but the trigger man escaped across the rooftops. The weapon, later identified from the spent rounds as a US Army-issue M16, was never found. M15’s silence ensured that no watch was placed on the cache for the weapon’s return.

‘We were playing a very dangerous game,’ Widdowes admitted. ‘But if the slightest suspicion had attached to Watchman, even long after the event, then we would have lost him. That M16 was our entry ticket, if you like. It’s probably still out there somewhere.’

From his knowledgeable tone Alex surmised that Widdowes had spent some time on the ground in the province. ‘What would you have said if that lieutenant had been killed?’ Alex asked.

‘I would have said the same thing that I said about the piccaninny in Sierra Leone two minutes ago: that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. We had to get a man into PIRA. He had to be above suspicion. At some stage we were probably going to have to weather a loss.’ Widdowes delivered himself of an uneasy smile. ‘I can see that you disapprove, Captain Temple.’

‘No,’ said Alex. ‘It’s just the way you put it.’

‘We’re in the same business, Captain Temple, and fighting the same enemy by all means at our disposal. The language is neither here nor there.’

Alex nodded. He thought of Sierra Leone, of a Puma helicopter swinging low over the jungle canopy beneath a bruise-dark sky. How would Don Hammond’s relatives be weathering their loss, he wondered.

‘Moving on,’ said Widdowes firmly. ‘The recovery of the M16 marked the end of Meehan’s probationary status. He was in. One of the boys. And slowly, surely, the intelligence followed, increasing in quality as he rose through the ranks. For a couple of years between 1993 and 1995 we had really useful stuff coming in. A little of it we were able to act on; most of it we weren’t – not without compromising him – but it was all grade A information.’

‘The Cabinet Office was happy?’ asked Alex drily.

‘The Cabinet Office was very happy,’ said Widdowes. ‘And so were we. He gave us the location of a training camp in County Clare in the Republic, for example, and we were able to establish a covert OP in order to identify everyone who came and went. He gave us details of a PIRA safe house in Kentish Town in London, and we successfully installed a watcher team next door to monitor all arrivals and communications. Both of those represented major intelligence breakthroughs. And he gave us other things: names, vehicle registration numbers, surveillance targets, touts who had been set up to disinform FRU agents … It was a rich seam and while it lasted we mined it.’

‘While it lasted?’ asked Alex.

‘Sadly, yes. For about two years Watchman gave us 24-carat weapons grade intelligence. And then, over the months that followed we began to notice a decline. At first it was barely noticeable. The information kept coming in – initially via Barry and later via a secure e-mail line to this office – and it all continued to look good. Names, possible assassination targets, projected dates for mainland campaigns – it was all there. But it had become subtly generalised. There was a lot of stuff about “policy”. It had stopped being the sort of information it was possible to act on.

‘Eventually there came a point where Angela, Craig Gidley and myself sat down and went through the message files, did some hard talking and came to the regretful conclusion that, for want of a better expression, we were having our pissers pulled. The general consensus at first was that Meehan had lost his nerve. On the rare occasions where he provided raw intelligence it came in too late for us to do anything about it. For example, there was an RUC officer who died because we only heard about the plan to murder him forty minutes before it took place. We put an emergency call out to his CO but the guy was in his car, driving home, and one of Billy McMahon’s boys shot him outside an off-licence. You probably remember the incident.’

Alex nodded. The RUC man had been named Storey and it had been his habit of stopping off for a packet of Benson and Hedges every evening that had sealed his fate.

‘The intelligence was either too late or it was second-source,’ continued Widdowes, ‘by which I mean that it was information that we were going to get from someone else anyway – touts or whoever. It looked OK on paper, but on the ground it was never quite good enough and we were forced to admit that we’d probably lost him. He’d gone native, lost his bottle – whatever.’

‘Couldn’t you pull him out?’ asked Alex.

‘We tried to but he went silent on us. Wouldn’t respond to any request for contact. In late 1995, when it became clear that he’d moved out of his flat, sold his car and gone to ground, we started to close things down. We pulled Barry Fenn out for a start, in case he was compromised, and didn’t replace him.’

‘You turned Meehan loose, effectively?’

‘We left the e-mail link open. He could have contacted us any time. But he didn’t. By mid-1996 we were sure that he had turned – that he was now one hundred per cent PIRA’s man. There were two bombs, one in a Loyalist pub in the Shankill Road, one in a supermarket in Ballysillan, and the word coming in from the FRU’s touts was that they’d been set by Joe Meehan. A total of seven dead. Lives might or might not have been saved in the Watchman’s early days but now they were most definitely being lost. And the joke of it in the bars in Ballymurphy and on the Falls Road – the real hilarious fall-down-laughing joke of it – was that we’d trained him. That the PIRA’s top electronics and explosives man was British army-trained.’ He shook his head. ‘What happened in February 1996 to the FRU people, Bledsoe and Wheen, you know. They were killed on the orders of Padraig Byrne – that was pretty much common knowledge. What you won’t have heard is that the man who actually whacked those nails through their heads was – to our certain knowledge – Joseph Meehan.’

Alex winced. ‘You had proof of that?’

‘Everyone knew. Apparently there were at least a dozen people there when it happened. Word is they were blooding all the young guys.’

‘And Meehan was completely beyond your reach by this time?’

‘Yes, completely beyond our reach. There was only one thing we could do and we did it. We fed him into the jaws of PIRA’s paranoia. We sent a story to the Sunday Times purporting to have been written by a former undercover soldier from 14th Intelligence’s Belfast Detachment. In the article, among a lot of other stuff, the supposed soldier mentioned that for several years MI5 had been running a senior IRA mole and went on to describe three or four intelligence breakthroughs that the mole had made possible. The stories were true and in each case the information in question was known to Meehan.

‘We then immediately went through the motions of attempting to place an injunction on the Sunday Times, but at the same time made sure that the attempt wasn’t successful. A few days later we dropped the word in the Falls that Joe Meehan was playing both sides and one of his mainland bank statements arrived at the Sinn Fein office. We pay our people pretty decently and the best part of three and a half K was going into his account every month.

‘After that we never heard another word – either from him or about him. He just vanished. We had a tout chat to Tina Milazzo but she hadn’t seen him for months. Not since he “got weird”, as she put it. Our assumption until a couple of weeks ago was that he’d been executed some time in the spring of 1996. Interrogated, probably, and then shot.’

‘Until Barry Fenn’s murder,’ said Alex quietly.

‘Exactly. At which point we realised that he was alive.’

‘You were – are – certain that it’s Meehan, then?’

‘It has to be him,’ said Widdowes. ‘He knew Fenn and Gidley, he used a hammer and nail, he used entry and exit methods that only a man with highly specialised training would use.’

‘So what exactly do you want me to do?’ asked Alex, although he was already certain of the answer.

Widdowes looked at Angela Fenwick and after a brief pause it was Fenwick who spoke. ‘There were four of us on the Watchman team,’ she said tautly. ‘And Fenn and Gidley are already dead.’

Alex nodded. Despite her professional control he could hear the fear in her voice.

‘Basically,’ she said, ‘we need you to kill Joseph Meehan before he kills us.’