The Watchman (38 page)

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-thecounterjobs 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 Fern 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."

"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 de fences. 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'lliordan 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'lliordan 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.