The Watchman (15 page)

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 X 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 MI-5 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 jar king 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 hisSA 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. MI-5'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 Mi 6 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 email 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 generali sed. 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 MI-5 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 speciali sed 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."

ELEVEN.

"So give me one good reason why you can't take the whole thing to the police, let them catch the guy and have him stand trial for murder," said Alex.

He and Dawn were sitting in the cafeteria at Thames House. Beyond the armour-plated ground floor window, the river moved brownly and sluggishly seawards. At the end of the counter steam rose from the electric urns as the staff prepared for the four o'clock tea rush. Like everywhere else in the building, the room was stiflingly overheated.

"Too many people would be compromised," answered Dawn, in the tones of one dealing with a child.

"Surely you can see that?"

"I can see that your Service would come out of the whole thing looking bad, yes. The press would crucify them."

"And your Service too," said Dawn patiently.

"We made the Watchman a spy, but your lot made him a killer and it's the killer we're after now. We're in this together, like it or not. If my people go down, your people go down too."

"It'll come out sooner or later. These things always do."

"Not necessarily. No one's seen or heard of this man Meehan for years. We find him, you chop him finito, end of story. He's certainly not going to be missed."

"You think you'll find him?" asked Alex quietly.

The grey eyes hardened a fraction.

"Don't you think we will?"

"If he doesn't want you to find him, he'll go to ground somewhere."

She raised an ironic eyebrow.

"Somewhere that only you Special Forces boys can follow, right?"

Alex shrugged.

"I might be able to help you with the way that he thinks. Give you an idea of the sort of place he'd look for."

She sighed.

"Look, we have the Service's best psych team dealing with the way that this man thinks and our best investigators looking for him. Any suggestions would, I'm sure, be very helpful, but we do, in fact, have the matter well in hand. What we'd really like you to do is wait and, when the moment comes, move in and eliminate him."

"Is that really all you think we're good for?"

"On this occasion, I'm afraid that it's all we need you to do."

They sat in uncomfortable silence. Outside on the river, a succession of interlinked barges moved upstream against the current. She had no real idea, thought Alex, what she was asking him to do. What it was like to look another human being in the eye and then kill him. How, in those moments, a few seconds could stretch into infinity.

It's all we need you to do.

A belated flicker of concern crossed her face. She frowned. She seemed to be aware of the direction his thoughts were taking.

"It's not up to me," she said.

"I'm just here as a go-between."

He nodded. It was as close to an apology as he was ever likely to get.

"So when did you join the Service?"

he asked.

"Six years ago." She forced a smile.

"I answered the same advert as David Shayler, as it happens."

"What did it say?

"Spies wanted"?"

"It said: "Godot Isn't Coming"."

"Who the hell's Godot?"

"A character in a Samuel Beckett play called Waiting for Godot. The other characters wait for him."

"And he doesn't come?"

"No."

"Sounds unmissable. So you knew this was an MI-5 advert?"

"No. But I knew it had been placed by an organisation with a bit of.. . sophistication to it."

"Right," said Alex.

"Because of this Godot stuff' "Exactly."

"We watch a fair amount of Samuel Beckett's stuff up in Hereford. Are you glad you answered that advert?"

"Yes."

"And are you free this afternoon?"

She looked at him suspiciously.

"No. Why?"

"When I've looked through the photographs and the pathology reports, I'd like to go back to Gidley's place. There are a couple of things I need to check."

"I thought we'd established that you were leaving that side of things to us."