'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 we.
'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 de fences 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 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
