TWENTY-EIGHT

‘THE FIRST THING you have to understand,’ said Joseph Meehan, ‘is just how much I’ve always hated the IRA. My father was a good man, religious and patriotic, and they crippled him, humiliated him and expelled him from the country he loved. Drove him to an early grave. And there have been thousands like him – innocent people whose lives have been destroyed by those maniac bastards. Whatever else I tell you I want you to remember that one fact. I hate the IRA, I always have hated them and I will take that hatred to my grave.’

He paused and the lids narrowed over the pale, fathomless eyes. ‘I’m assuming that Fenwick and the rest of them told you the background stuff – the Watchman selection process and the rest of it?’

Alex nodded.

There was a curious blankness to Meehan’s words. They were passionate, but delivered without expression. ‘When I got over there I started off living in a flat in Dunmurry and working at Ed’s – they tell you about that?’

‘The electronic goods place?’

‘That’s right. Ed’s. Ed’s Electronics. And I was dating this girl called Tina. Nice girl. Grandparents came over from Italy after the war. Had a loudmouth brother called Vince who worked in a garage and fancied himself as God’s gift to the Republican movement. Tried the bullshit on me a couple of times but I told him to fuck off – said I didn’t want to know.

‘That pissed him off, and he made sure that the local volunteers found out that I’d served with the Crown forces – thought they might give me a good kicking or something. Course they did no such thing, they’re not that stupid, but a couple of them started watching me and asking the odd question, and they soon found out I knew my way around an electronic circuit.’

Meehan touched his head and regarded his bloody fingertips.

‘I’ll spare you the details but there was the usual eyeing-up process and I started to hang out with these half-dozen fellers who thought of themselves as an ASU. They weren’t, of course – they were just a bunch of saloon bar Republicans. I did a couple of under-the-counter jobs for them – radio repairs – and then a much heavier bunch showed up. Older guys. Heard I was interested in joining the movement. I’d said no such thing, but I said yeah, I was sympathetic – more sympathetic than I’d been in the past, anyway.’

‘And?’ asked Alex.

‘And they didn’t fuck around. Asked straight out if I wanted in. So I said yeah, OK.’

‘Must have been satisfying after all that time.’

‘Yes and no. These guys were pretty hard-core. I knew there’d be no going back.’

‘So what happened next?’

‘There was a whole initiation process. I was driven to a darkened room in north Belfast and interviewed by three men I never saw. What was my military history with the Crown forces, what courses had I done and where had I been posted? Was I known as a Republican sympathiser and had I ever attended a Republican march? Had I ever been arrested? Where in Belfast did I drink … Hours of it. And why the fuck did I want to join the IRA?

‘I told them I was fed up of living as a second-class citizen simply because I was a Catholic. I told them that I’d been in the Brit army and felt the rough edge of discrimination over there. Said since my return to Belfast I’d come to feel that the IRA spoke the only language the Crown understood. Parroted all the stuff I’d learnt from the Five instructors, basically.’

‘And they bought it?’

‘They heard me out and it must have gone down OK, because I was told that from that moment on I was to make no public or private statement of my Republican sympathies, not to associate with known Republicans, had to avoid Republican bars et cetera. I was put forward for what’s called the Green Book lectures – a two-month course of indoctrination which took place every Thursday evening in a flat in Twinbrook. History of the movement, rules of engagement, counter-surveillance, anti-interrogation techniques …’

‘The old spot on the wall trick?’

‘All that bollocks, yeah. And at the end of it I was sworn in.’

‘How did that feel?’

‘Well, there was no going back, that was for certain sure. But I was finally earning the wages I was being paid.’

‘Go on.’

‘I started off as a dicker. I was told to hang on to my job so my volunteer activities were all in the evenings and at weekends. And this started to cause problems with Tina. She was a sympathiser, but not to the point where she was prepared to give her life over. She wanted to do what other girls did – go out in the evening, go round the shops on a Saturday … Anyway, I arranged a meet with Geoff, my agent handler – you would have known him as Barry Fenn – and he just said do whatever the fuck makes the bloody girl happy. Buy her a ring, get her up the duff, whatever. He felt it was vital for what he called “my integration into the community” that I stuck with her.

‘So we got engaged, which was fine by me. And almost immediately afterwards I’m told I’m spending my two weeks’ summer holiday in a training camp in County Clare in the Republic. So Tina hits the fucking roof. Me or the movement – choose. So of course I chose as I had to and she walked, and that was the end of it.’

‘Was that … difficult?’

‘I saw it as a sacrifice. A sacrifice for the greater good, which was nailing those PIRA bastards.’ He paused for a moment, then the toneless voice continued: ‘At that time I thought that all the evil was coming from the one direction.’

Alex watched him thoughtfully. Squaddies, by and large, did not express themselves in such abstract terms. Even the average regimental padre tended to steer clear of words like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and ‘sacrifice’. For the first time since they had found themselves face to face, Alex wondered about the other man’s sanity.

‘How was the camp?’

‘Pretty basic. Weapons drills, surveillance, interrogation scenarios. I had to wind down my skills to volunteer level, which is a fuck’s sight harder than it sounds.’

‘I can imagine. Were you upset at the break-up with Tina?’

Meehan looked away. ‘There was something I only found out later. She was pregnant at the time. She had the child – a boy – but never let me see him …’

Alex nodded, letting Meehan take his time.

‘After I came back from Clare I was either working at Ed’s or on call for the movement. I did a year or so’s dicking and then I was seconded as a driver to one of the auxiliary cells, which is what they call their punishment squads.’

Alex grimaced. ‘Shit!’

‘Yeah – shit! – exactly. In theory we were supposed to be keeping the streets safe for Catholics to go about their business, in practice we were kneecapping teenage shoplifters. It was fucking evil – especially since I’d seen the same thing done to my dad. But that was the point. To make it as horrible as possible. To see if I had what it took. A bit of interest was being paid to me by then.’

Alex raised his eyebrows.

‘A man called Byrne. Padraig Byrne. CO of Belfast Brigade at that time and later on the Army Council.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yeah. He’d been told I’d been a Royal Engineer and had bits and pieces sent to me for repair. Computers, mostly. There was one job where some information had to be recovered and it turned out to be details of a bank security system.’

‘Fenwick told me about that.’

‘Yeah, well, it wasn’t too difficult to figure that one out as a plant – if the security was beefed up, they’d know that I was passing the information on.’

‘But you did pass it on.’

‘I passed everything on. But London’s policy was not to move on anything that might compromise my cover. Which at that stage I was bloody grateful for, because my impression was that the Provos still didn’t a hundred per cent trust me. Especially Byrne. It was like … have you ever done any fishing?’

Alex shook his head.

‘It was like when you’ve got a fat old carp nosing at your bait. He wants it, he’s desperate to believe that it’s safe, but his instinct tells him no. And that’s how Byrne was. I could tell that he wanted to believe in me, but …’ Meehan shrugged. ‘I’d been doing a lot of driving. Scouting jobs mostly, with me in the lead car keeping an eye out for trouble and the players or weapons or whatever in a second vehicle following behind. Important, I guess, but still auxiliary stuff. I was never allowed anywhere near any operational planning.

‘And then in late 1990 early 1991 things moved on. I was contacted by Padraig Byrne at Ed’s and told that I was part of a weapon-recovery team. We were to dig up an Armalite from a churchyard in Castleblayney and deliver it to a stiffer back in Belfast – some ex-US marine sniper, I think it was. I reported all this to Fenn via a dead-letter drop and he told me to go ahead and not to worry, they’d jark the weapon and follow it in.

‘Well, they followed it in all right, but they didn’t jark it and the stiffer used it against a patrol in Andytown a couple of days later. Luckily – for all that he was supposed to be a real deadeye – he missed, but that was more to do with the patrol spotting him than there being anything wrong with the rifle. We returned it to the cache the next day, it was never jarked and as far as I know it’s still in circulation …’

For a moment Alex saw an expression of murderous bitterness flash through Meehan’s eyes, then the blankness was back.

‘Whatever – I must have passed some sort of test in Byrne’s eyes, because immediately afterwards I was sent to join a bomb-making cell who were working out of a basement on the Finaghy Road. The cell had a problem. What they were trying to do was to get bombs into police or army bases, which could then be detonated remotely and the problem was that the Crown forces maintained a twenty-four-hour radio-wave shield around every vehicle, building or installation that could possibly be of interest. They needed someone to work out a signal that could penetrate the shield.

‘Well, I found one. I found a frequency they hadn’t thought of, and as soon as I had, and it had been tested by a feller we had working as a cleaner in one of the police stations, I passed it back to Fenn and told him to factor it into the installation defences. The next thing I knew I was being congratulated by Padraig fucking Byrne. They’d had a success down in Armagh, detonating a remote-controlled bomb inside a base there. Bessbrook. Three soldiers had been seriously injured and a cleaner – a Catholic woman, as it happened – had been killed. And serve the bitch right, according to Byrne, for taking Crown money.

‘I rang Fenn that night from one of the public phones at Musgrave Park Hospital and asked him what the fuck was going down. He told me they’d had to let the bomb go by. There had been several failed detonations in the previous few months and there was suspicion at the top levels of the organisation that a British agent was defusing them. I told him it was more likely that the button men were so fucking solid they couldn’t do the job properly and that was why the bombs hadn’t been going off, but he just changed the subject. I was to carry on as usual. The O’Riordan woman – the cleaner – was an unavoidable loss. The soldiers would be well cared for. Finish.

‘I realised that part of what Fenn said was true. There was no question mark in Byrne’s mind now – I was well and truly in. That’s how it seemed at the time, anyway. Looking back, I can see that I was so preoccupied with the O’Riordan woman’s death that I missed the single vital fact I’d been …’ Meehan doubled up and bared his teeth. For several long moments he was silent, neither breathing nor moving. Finally he seemed to relax and slowly straightened.

‘Are you OK?’ asked Alex, aware of the question’s ludicrous inadequacy.

Meehan managed a smile. There was now a dark, wet stain on his shirt-front. ‘Never better!’ he gasped. ‘Top o’ the world!’

Alex waited while Meehan drew breath.

‘I worked with the cell for about eighteen months. There were five of us. A QM, an intelligence officer, two general operators – one of whom was a woman – and myself. We were a bomber cell, which is why we had Bronagh with us. It was reckoned that a woman was better for planting devices in public places.’

‘And all the time you were reporting to back to your London handler?’

‘I was.’

‘What sort of stuff?’

‘Names and addresses of volunteers, registration numbers of cars, possible assassination targets, anything.’

‘By dead-letter drop? By phone?’

‘By e-mail mostly, from about 1991 onwards, using machines that had been brought into the shop. I’d bash away in my back room and no one took a blind bit of difference: I was just the anoraky bloke that fixed the computers. Dead-letter drops and meets are all very well, but if you’re discovered you’re dead. This was perfect: I’d transmit the information then delete all traces of the operation. And I was usually able to make sure that the owners of the machines I used got a cash deal, so there was no record of their having passed through the shop.’

‘Sounds as if you were earning your Box salary.’

‘Fucking right I was.’

‘Fenwick said you lost your nerve.’

Meehan closed his eyes for a moment. The accusation didn’t merit a reply.

‘Our cell was involved in shooting an RUC officer at the off-licence in Stewartstown Road. I scouted in the stiffers and drove them away from the scene. London knew the hit was going to happen because I’d told them a couple of days earlier what the score was – in fact, I e-mailed them a detailed warning – but the hit went ahead.’

‘I heard you gave less than an hour’s warning.’

‘Bollocks. They had forty-eight. And an hour would have been enough anyway. No – they let it happen and that was when I understood that something strange – no, let me rephrase that, something fucking evil – was going down. That the reason I thought I was there – to get intelligence out to where it could save lives and do some good – wasn’t the reason at all.’

‘So what was the reason?’

‘I’m getting there. Does the name Proinsas Deavey mean anything to you?’

‘No.’

‘Proinsas Deavey was a low-level volunteer who occasionally did some dicking and errand-running. A nobody, basically. I saw him about the Falls from time to time and the word was that he was involved in low-level drug-dealing. Anyway, apparently he tried flogging the stuff to the wrong people and he was picked up by the auxiliaries, who gave him a good kicking. Bad idea, because by that stage Proinsas has a habit himself. He’s desperate for money. So when he gets a call from the FRU he’s a pushover.’

Alex nodded.

‘Now I don’t know about any of this until I get a call at work from Padraig Byrne. Some time around Christmas 1995, it must have been. Padraig was what they call a Red Light by then, meaning he was known to the Crown forces as a player, so he had to keep a very low profile. I was told to go round to his place after closing time, making sure I wasn’t followed.

‘When I got there he told me that Proinsas had got drunk, turned himself over to one of the nutting squads and confessed he was touting for the FRU. In theory PIRA’s always run an amnesty system for touts – spill your guts and you’re off the hook – but in practice it’s more likely to be a debriefing followed by two to the head. In this case, untypically, the nutting squad was bright enough to consult Byrne and he told them to hang on to Deavey – he’d debrief the man himself. Which he did and then set up Proinsas to feed disinformation back to the FRU.

‘Now at this stage you have to remember what’s going on politically. The Crown forces don’t know it yet, but the ceasefire is at an end. Southern Command’s England Wing is about to detonate the Canary Wharf bomb and Padraig Byrne – a very ambitious man, remember, keen to move from the Army Council to the Executive – sees a chance for a spectacular of his own. He’s going to take out a pair of FRU agents.

‘He tells me this. He tells me something else. I’m a junior member of PIRA GHQ staff by then – a sort of assistant to the Quartermaster General. There’s been a major technical updating and I’ve had to play a big part in that – training operators and so on.

‘Byrne wants me to kill the FRU guys. In person, in public, in front of a big volunteer crowd. The ultimate commitment, the ultimate statement of loyalty. Do that, he says, and you’re on the Army Council, guaranteed. You can forget all that paperchasing at GHQ – you’ll have proved yourself heart and soul. So of course I say yes – what the fuck else can I say – and ask for details. And he fills me in. Tells me exactly what’s going to happen.

‘So the next day I work late at Ed’s. File an encrypted report to London on a client’s machine, wipe the hard disk – people are wising up to the insecurity of e-mail by then – and hope to God that the FRU people are pulled out in time. I ask to be pulled out too: the finger’s going to be pointed straight at me if these guys are miraculously whipped off the streets just days before they’re due to be whacked. Byrne, like I said, is a very sharp, very switched-on operator.

‘The next day I got a call from the rep of a company called Intex, saying they’d ceased production of the software I’d enquired about. Intex was Five, of course, and the call meant that my message had been received and I was to sit tight.’

Alex stared at him. ‘Let me get this right. Are you saying that Five knew that Ray Bledsoe and Connor Wheen were due to be picked up, tortured and murdered, and did nothing?’

‘Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. A bunch of us were driven down to a farmhouse on the border that the nutting squad often used for interrogations and executions – a horrible bloody place, stinking of death. The boyos, needless to say, were pissing themselves with excitement at the chance of seeing a pair of Brit agents chopped at close range. The hours passed and I tell you I have never prayed like I prayed then: that London would pull those boys out in time.

‘They didn’t, of course, and Bledsoe and Wheen were brought down to the border that evening. I had drawn a Browning and a couple of clips from the QM, so that I could at least make it fast, but in the event I wasn’t even able to do that.’

Meehan fell silent. His eyes were as cold and blank as pack ice.

‘They had a generator there and one of those heavy-duty compressed-air staple guns … Do you have any idea what happens when you fire one of those things into someone’s eye?’

Alex opened his mouth to speak, but found that he could say nothing.

‘As the eye explodes – and it goes fuckin’ everywhere – the staple blasts its way out through the roof of the mouth. The guy’s kicking, meanwhile, and pissing himself, and generally going berserk, but the thing he can’t do is make any sound, because his blood and his sinuses are pouring out of his nose and mouth. The pain has to be beyond anything you can imagine …’

‘You did that?’ whispered Alex disbelievingly.

‘No, thank God, some other volunteer did it – to Wheen. But the point is not who did it, the point is that Five, knowing what Byrne and his nutting squads do, allowed it to happen. They had the information and they deliberately failed to act on it.’

‘So what happened next?’

‘Byrne figured that Wheen was the tough guy and Bledsoe – if he scared him enough – was going to do the talking. Well, he scared him all right. The guy was out of his head with sheer terror. But just to make sure, Byrne had the volunteer do Wheen’s other eye. And then – just to make the point that it was Bledsoe who was going to do the talking – he cut Wheen’s tongue out. Have you ever heard a man trying to scream when his tongue’s been cut out?’

Alex shook his head.

‘It sounds like percolating coffee. Anyway, I stood there, my brain fuckin’ turning itself inside out at this sight – terror, horror, disbelief, whatever the fuck – and telling myself one thing: smile, or go the same way yourself. And everyone else was smiling, but I tell you they were all pretty quiet at that point.’

Alex nodded.

‘So then Byrne told me to do Wheen once and for all so I pulled out the Browning ready to give him one. And Byrne says no. Hands me, of all things, a fuckin’ lump-hammer and a six-inch nail …’

‘And you did him with that?’

‘It made this kind of … plinking sound,’ said Meehan reflectively. ‘The guy died immediately.’

‘And Bledsoe?’

‘Bledsoe coughed. Told them everything. Every last thing he knew. It took hours – almost light by the time he was finished.’

‘And?’

Meehan nodded expressionlessly. ‘Yeah, I did him too. Same way. And as I did so I promised myself that the people responsible would know the pain and the terror that these brave men had known. Whatever it took – whatever it fucking took – I would make them understand.’

‘Surely the people responsible were Padraig Byrne and his Provos,’ suggested Alex quietly.

‘Those people were evil,’ said Meehan, ‘but they knew they were evil. They looked evil in the eye, they embraced evil and they knew themselves for what they were. Fenwick and her people, though, were evil at a distance. They never saw the floor of that PIRA abattoir running with blood and shit, never had to look at brave men like Wheen and Bledsoe dying in indescribable terror and agony and tell themselves: yeah, I did that …’

‘Wise monkeys,’ murmured Alex.

‘For every action, there’s a reaction,’ said Meehan. ‘My father taught me that. The universe demands balance. For as long as the lives that I had taken were unavenged, there would be no balance.’

Alex stared at Meehan. Was this insanity? he wondered. Or was it logic? Or both?

‘Within the week I had been promoted to the IRA’s Army Council and Padraig Byrne to the Executive. I continued to file reports to London, but I no longer had the slightest confidence they would be acted upon. I warned them of two bombs: one in a Shankhill pub, one in a Ballysillan supermarket. Both were made by men I had trained, both were set by Bronagh Quinn. Five dead, in total, and over twenty injured. Women and children mostly, in the supermarket. One little girl was blinded when the lenses of her glasses were blown backwards into her eyes.

‘There are seven people on the Provisional IRA’s Army Council. At the first meeting I attended I looked round the other six faces and I realised that I had done at least as much for the movement as any of them. I had dicked, trailed, scouted, bugged, planned, organised, designed, strategised and taught. I had brought the movement’s bomb-making skills into line with the best in the world. And finally, with my bare hands, I had killed. By ignoring every warning I ever sent, Fenwick and her people had made me part of the thing I had dedicated my life to destroying. Can you imagine – can you imagine – what that feels like?’

Alex said nothing. Didn’t move. Carried on the buffeting wind – distant at first and then louder – was the pulse of an approaching helicopter. If Meehan heard it he ignored it.

‘At that first meeting a former OC of the Armagh and Fermanagh Brigade got up. Nasty bastard, name of Halloran.’

‘Dermot Halloran,’ said Alex.

‘The same,’ confirmed Meehan. ‘And he didn’t fuck about. He told us, “Boys … We have a problem. We have a mole.” There had been indications for some time, he said, that information concerning upcoming operations was reaching the Crown. Top-level information, not foot-soldier stuff. In recent days, he said, these suspicions had become cast-iron. MI5 had an agent in place – an agent whose minimum possible level of seniority was membership of the GHQ staff. That put every man in the room squarely in the frame. The Executive had men on the case, he went on. It was a process of elimination, and until that process had run its course it had been decided that all operations and meetings should be suspended.’

The rhythmic beat of the helicopter’s engine and the slash of its rotors was very close now, filling their ears. The sound seemed to hold its volume for a moment, then died away. Again, Meehan showed no sign of having heard it.

‘Presumably,’ said Alex, ‘they wanted to see who cut and ran.’

‘That was my calculation. If they’d been sure they were going to identify the mole they would have just let the wheels turn. Said nothing.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I drove back to the city and went home. There was a nutting squad waiting for me and I knew then that Five had sold me out. Well, I’ll spare you the details but there was a fuck of a battle. I dropped a couple of them, dived through a window and drove like fuck for Aldersgrove.’

‘The airport?’

‘Yeah. I was on a flight to the mainland within the hour. From that point I was totally on my own. The next morning I cleared the account MI5 had been paying money into all those years and set about establishing a new identity.’

‘Did you contact MI5?’

‘Are you joking … If I’d contacted them they’d have dropped my co-ordinates to PIRA. Within the week of my leaving Belfast every Provy stiffer in the Command was on my tail as it was. No, Five didn’t want me alive and compromised – my story would bury them.’

‘But why do you think they ignored all those warnings and let Wheen and Bledsoe and the rest of them die?’

‘I thought for a long time that they simply couldn’t risk me. That if they’d started acting on my warnings they’d have had to pull me out, whereas as things stood I was their man inside the IRA, the justification for their budget, their meal ticket from the Treasury. That was what I thought at first.’

‘Go on.’

‘And then – finally – I figured it out. There had to be another British mole. An agent who had been in place not for years but for decades. A man I’d been set up to take the fall for.’

He fell silent for a moment.

‘It was something Barry Fenn had said years earlier about there being suspicion in the senior ranks of PIRA that a British agent was defusing the bombs the organisation was making. At the time, all that I heard were the words that applied to me – i.e. “suspicion”, “PIRA” and “British agent”. I didn’t stop to ask myself the vital question: how the fuck did Barry Fenn know what the senior ranks of PIRA were thinking? I didn’t know, so how did he?

‘They had someone all along. One of the very top men, is my guess. And in case such a man ever came under the faintest suspicion of providing information to the Crown forces, it would be necessary to have a decoy set up. Another agent who could be exposed, proved to be the real source and fed to the wolves.’

Alex shook his head and sank back against the granite. ‘Enter the Watchman,’ he murmured.

‘Congratulations!’ said Dawn Harding. ‘I do believe you’ve got there at last.’

She was standing above and to one side of them, and her Walther PPK was levelled straight between Alex’s eyes.