by Chris Ryan
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."
"Dawn, I need to see what Meehan's exact movements were the night before last. If I'm going up against him, I have to know how he operates."
"I very much doubt there'll be anything to see.
"That depends on what you're looking for. Trust me, I'm not going to be wasting your time."
She regarded him expressionlessly for a moment and nodded.
"OK, then, but like I said, I'm tied up this afternoon. It'll have to be tomorrow morning."
"I guess that'll have to do. Tell me something off the top of your head."
"What?"
"Why is Joseph Meehan murdering the MI-5 officers who ran him?"
"I heard you ask Angela Fenwick the same question.
She said she didn't know."
"I heard her say it. But what do you think?"
"I think he went native, like George said." She shrugged.
"Why do any terrorists do what they do? It's an armed struggle. We're the enemy.
"But why choose such an extreme method of killing people? And why take out Fenn and Gidley who, let's face it, were pretty much at the fag-end of their careers?"
"He killed the people he knew. To Meehan, Fenn and Gidley represented the heart of the British Establishment. As do George Widdowes and Angela Fenwick, presumably."
Alex shook his head.
"I don't think he killed them for symbolic reasons. As Brit oppressors or whatever. I think he killed them for a specific reason."
She narrowed her eyes.
"What makes you think that you can see inside this man's head?"
Alex shrugged.
"We're both soldiers. Soldiers are methodical. They believe in cause and effect. What's the point of carrying out an elaborate, ritualistic murder that no one will ever know about? That you know will be immediately covered up?"
"Perhaps he's mad."
"Do you know something?" said Alex.
"For a moment there we were almost having a conversation."
Dawn held his gaze for a moment, then reached to the floor for her briefcase. When she straightened she was her usual brisk, businesslike self.
"As well as the photographs and reports on Fenn and Gidley I've got some keys for you. They're for a top-floor flat in St. George's Square in Pimlico. You can stay there if you need to or' she hesitated for a fraction of a second 'you can make your own arrangements."
"Thank you," said Alex neutrally.
Barry Fenn, he saw, had been a weaselly, narrow shouldered man. From the photographs, in which he was wearing bloodstained pyjamas and was sprawled half in and half out of bed, it was clear that he had been woken from sleep. According to the pathologist's report he had struggled briefly and ineffectually before being struck on the back of the head with some sort of cosh. The six-inch nail had been hammered into his temple while he was semiconscious and his tongue, it appeared, had been hacked out as some sort of afterthought. Livid and hideous, it had been placed in the unused glass ashtray beside the bed alongside a book of matches. There was less blood than there might have been.
Looking at the photographs, Alex realised that his earlier identification with Meehan had been dangerous and stupid. Beyond their training and a similarity in age, he had nothing whatever in common with this maniac. Dawn was right: the man was a psychopathic murderer and had to be stopped.
The pathologist's report on Craig Gidley indicated that, like Barry Fenn's tongue, the victim's eyes had been cut out after the fatal hammer blow had driven the nail through his temple. To Alex this confirmed that the mutilations were there for a purpose other than to cause suffering. As a message, perhaps?
But a message for whom? For MI-5 as a
whole? For George Widdowes or Angela Fenwick in particular? Whatever the message, it was clear that either Widdowes or Fenwick was next on the Watchman's list.
Would he get them? Alex wondered dispassionately. Would he catch them and kill them? Forewarned and with all the protective resources of MI-5 at their disposal, they would be much harder targets than Fenn and Gidley had been.
But then the Watchman was clever. He had been taught by the best in many cases the same people who had taught Alex and he had clearly forgotten none of it. The combination of professionalism, sadism and sheer insanity he embodied was terrifying.
What did he want? What was the man trying to achieve?
Alex stared at the photographs of Meehan as if his gaze could somehow penetrate their surface and unlock the man portrayed in them. But the more he shuffled them around, the less they seemed to reveal. Just those pale, skinned whippet features and that watchful, guarded gaze.
He looked tough. Not in the sense of being intimidating, but in the sense of being a hard man to break. He'd duck and he'd dive but one way and another he'd keep on going. There were a thousand looking like him on the streets of Belfast dingy, forgettable figures hunched into donkey jackets. Alex could see why he'd been such a perfect undercover man.
Would MI-5 find him? Meehan would have to make a serious mistake first and there was nothing to indicate that that was going to happen. Mad he might be, but careless he clearly wasn't.
Alex turned to the large map of Britain on the wall. Where would Meehan be hiding out? No, turn the question round. Where would he Alex be hiding out if he were Meehan? In a city, among the crowds? No, he'd be in danger if he revisited his old London stamping grounds. He couldn't risk going anywhere there was an Irish community.
The arm of the IRA, like its memory, was long.
Meehan would know that MI-5 would leave no stone unturned in their search and that unless he had built up a completely watertight new identity they would find him. He'd have to have a new passport, driving licence, social security number everything. Just checking in and out of bed-and-breakfast houses was not going to be enough. He'd have a base somewhere. Somewhere he could hide.
Somewhere he could plan the next killing.
