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
