"Since we're to be working together, Captain Temple," she told him with a practised smile, "I think we should at least know each other's real names. I'm Angela Fenwick, and my full title is Deputy Director of Operations. Dawn Harding and George Widdowes you know. Welcome to Thames House."
As they arranged themselves in chairs around the table, Angela Fenwick leant forward and pressed down the plunger of the cafetiere.
"Boom!" whispered George Widdowes. No one smiled.
Angela Fenwick turned to Alex.
"I'd like you to know that nothing that is said in this office is recorded, unless you ask for it to be, and nothing you say here is in any way on the record. Basically, you can express yourself freely and I hope you will. The corollary is that you are not to make any mention of what I am about to tell you to anyone, in or outside this agency and that includes your Regimental colleagues, past and present -without my express say so. Do you have any problem with that?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Good. Coffee, everybody? George, will you be mother?"
When Widdowes was done, Angela Fenwick leant back in her chair, cup in hand, and turned to Alex.
"Craig Gidley's murder," she said.
"Did that remind you of anything?"
Alex glanced at the others. They were looking at him expectantly.
"You can speak openly in front of George and Dawn."
Alex nodded.
"PIRA," he said.
"Belfast Brigade took out those two FRU guys by hammering nails into their heads. Early 1996, it must have been, just after the Canary Wharf bomb. Left the bodies at a road junction outside Dungannon."
"That's right," Fenwick agreed.
"Can you remember where you were at the time?"
Alex considered.
"In February 1996 I was in Bosnia," he said.
"I was part of the snatch team that grabbed Maksim Zukic and two of his colonels for the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. But we heard about the Canary Wharf bomb pretty much as it happened, and later about the FRU guys too."
"Ray Bledsoe," added Widdowes.
"And Connor Wheen."
"Yeah, that's it. Bledsoe and Wheen. We didn't see that much of the FRU when we were on tours in the province, but I probably met both of them at various times."
Angela Fenwick frowned.
"Am I right in thinking that you were number two on the sniper team when Neil Slater shot the Delaney boy at Forkhill?"
"Yes, that was a year later."
"The information about the weapons cache at the Delaney farm came from a tout originally cultivated by Ray Bledsoe."
"Is that so?" said Alex.
"We tend not be told stuff like that."
"Why didn't you tell me last night that you thought there was a PIRA connection to the murders?" asked Dawn Harding accusingly.
"You didn't ask me," Alex answered mildly.
"But I was pretty certain of it as soon as Mr. Widdowes here mentioned six-inch nails."
Angela Fenwick nodded.
"I just wanted to establish that you knew about the Bledsoe and Wheen incident.
And you're right, the roots of this thing do indeed lie in Northern Ireland. But they go back a little further than 1996. Back to Remembrance Day in 1987, in fact."
"Enniskillen," said Alex grimly.
"Precisely. Enniskillen. On the eighth of November in 1987 a bomb was detonated near the war memorial in that town, killing eleven people and injuring sixty three. A truly horrendous day's work by the volunteers."
Alex nodded. Widdowes and Dawn, sidelined, were staring patiently into space.
"The day after the explosion there was a crisis meeting attended by six people. Two of those the former director and deputy director of this service are now retired. Of the remainder one was myself, one was George, and the others were Craig Gidley and Barry Fenn. I was thirty-nine, a little younger than the others, and I had just been put in charge of the Northern Ireland desk.
"The purpose of the meeting was to discuss something that we were acutely aware of already: our desperate need to place a British agent inside the IRA executive. As you'll probably be aware, we had a pretty extensive intelligence programme running in the province at the time. We had informers, we had 14th Intelligence Company people, and we had touts.
What we didn't have, however, was anyone close to the decision-making process. We didn't have anyone sufficiently senior to tip us off if another Enniskillen was in the wind and there couldn't be -there absolutely couldn't be another Enniskillen.
"So basically we had two choices. To turn a senior player or to insert our own sleeper and wait for him to work his way up. The former was obviously the preferable choice in terms of time but in the long run it would have been much less reliable, as we could never be sure that we weren't being fed disinformation. We tried it, nevertheless. Got some of the FRU people to approach individual players that 14th Int had targeted and make substantial cash offers for basically harmless information. The hope was that we could hook them through sheer greed and then squeeze them once they were incriminated. Standard entrapment routine.
"But as we half expected, none of them went for it.
Even if they had any ideological doubts and in the wake of the slaughter at Enniskillen one or two of the players certainly did have ideological doubts they knew only too well what happened to touts. Apart from anything else, they knew they'd never be able to spend any money we gave them. So they told our people where to get off and in a couple of cases published their descriptions in the Republican newspaper An Phoblacht. Which, as you can imagine, made us look pretty damn stupid.
"So the decision was made to put in a sleeper. Not someone who, if he was lucky, might be allowed to hang around the fringes of the organisation and report back snippets of bar talk. Not a glorified tout, in other words, but a long-term mole who would rise through the ranks. Someone who had the credentials to rise to the top of this highly sophisticated terrorist organisation, but also the courage, the commitment and the sheer mental strength to remain our man throughout.
We would need someone exceptional, and identifying him would be a major project in itself.
"Operation Watchword, classified top secret, was planned and run by the four of us myself, George, Gidley and Fenn. It had a dedicated budget and a dedicated office, and no one else in the Service was given access of any kind. It was to be divided into three stages: selection, insertion and activation. Our man, once we found him, would be known as Watchman.
"Selection began in October 1987. The first thing we did was to make a computer search through MOD records. We were looking for unmarried Northern Irish-born Catholics aged twenty-eight or less and ideally those who had been the single children of parents who were now both dead. We looked at all the armed services. From the list that we got, including those with living parents and siblings, we eliminated all the officers, all those above the rank of corporal or its equivalent and all those with poor service records for drinking, fighting, in discipline and so on.
"We were left with a list of about twenty men, spread across the various services, and at that point we borrowed a warrant officer named Denzil Connolly from the RWW."
Alex nodded. He had never met Connolly but knew of him by reputation. A right hard bastard by all accounts.
"Connolly dropped in on the various commanding officers and adjutants. He didn't enquire directly about the individuals we were interested in, merely asked if he could make a brief presentation and put up a notice calling for volunteers for Special Duties, which pretty much everyone knew meant intelligence work in Northern Ireland. Afterwards, over a cup of tea or a beer, he'd ask the adjutant if there was anyone he thought might be suitable. Self-sufficiency, technical ability and a cool methodical temperament were what was needed. If the target name failed to crop up he'd bring out a list that included the man in question. He had been given a dozen possibles, he'd say. Could the CO grade them from A to D in terms of the qualities he'd mentioned?