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.
'When I got there he told me that Proinsas had got drunk, turned himself over to one of the nut ting squads and confessed he was touting for the FRU. In theory PIRA's always run an amnesty system for touts spill your guts and you're off the hook but in practice it's more likely to be a debriefing followed by two to the head. In this case, untypically, the nut ting squad was bright enough to consult Byrne and he told them to hang on to Deavey he'd debrief the man himself.
Which he did and then set up Proinsas to feed disinformation back to the FRU.
'Now at this stage you have to remember what's going on politically. The Crown forces don't know it yet, but the cease fire is at an end. Southern Command's England Wing is about to detonate the Canary Wharf bomb and Padraig Byrne -a very ambitious man, remember, keen to move from the Army Council to the Executive sees a chance for a spectacular of his own. He's going to take out a pair of FRU agents.
'He tells me this. He tells me something else. I'm a junior member of PIRA GHQ staff by then a sort of assistant to the Quartermaster General. There's been a major technical updating and I've had to play a big part in that training operators and so on.
'Byrne wants me to kill the FRU guys. In person, in public, in front of a big volunteer crowd. The ultimate commitment, the ultimate statement of loyalty. Do that, he says, and you're on the Army Council, guaranteed. You can forget all that paper chasing at GHQ you'll have proved yourself heart and soul. So of course I say yes what the fuck else can I say and ask for details. And he fills me in. Tells me exactly what's going to happen.
'So the next day I work late at Ed's. File an encrypted report to London on a client's machine, wipe the hard disk people are wising up to the insecurity of email by then and hope to God that the FRU people are pulled out in time. I ask to be pulled out too: the finger's going to be pointed straight at me if these guys are miraculously whipped off the streets just days before they're due to be whacked.
Byrne, like I said, is a very sharp, very switched-on operator.
'The next day I got a call from the rep of a company called Intex, saying they'd ceased production of the software I'd enquired about. Intex was Five, of course, and the call meant that my message had been received and I was to sit tight.'
Alex stared at him.
'Let me get this right. Are you saying that Five knew that Ray Bledsoe and Connor Wheen were due to be picked up, tortured and murdered, and did nothing?'
'Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. A bunch of us were driven down to a farmhouse on the border that the nut ting squad often used for interrogations and executions a horrible bloody place, stinking of death. The boyos, needless to say, were pissing themselves with excitement at the chance of seeing a pair of Brit agents chopped at close range. The hours passed and I tell you I have never prayed like I prayed then: that London would pull those
