Alex knew Tregaron well. Two hundred acres of windswept Welsh valley, rusted gun emplacements and dilapidated bunkers, all of it behind razor wire.
He'd blown up a few old cars there as part of his demolitions training. Bloody miserable place to stay on your own, especially in winter.
"Who did you put in charge of him?" asked Alex.
"An RWW warrant officer, who provided us with progress reports and so on. We started off by getting a couple of the Hereford Training Wing NCOs to put him through their unarmed combat course, and sharpen up his advanced weapons and driving skills.
Apparently he managed to bring the unarmed combat instructor to his knees by the end of the third session.
"Impressive," confirmed Alex.
"I wouldn't fancy trying to deck one of those guys.
Fenwick nodded.
"At the same time we had an instructor from Tregaron taking him through his surveillance and anti-surveillance drills, and generally familia rising him with intelligence procedures drop offs dead-letter boxes and so on. After this we brought in a rapid succession of people to teach him individual skills like covert photography, lock picking bugging and counter-bugging, demolition and so forth. You probably know most of the specialists in question?"
"Stew for locks?" asked Alex.
"Bob the Bomber for dems?"
"Well, it's not exactly how they were introduced to me," said Angela Fenwick with a smile.
"But I think we're probably talking about the same people. We had a couple of our own Service people bring him up to speed on computers, too. The technology was obviously less advanced than it is now but it was clear even then that the intelligence war was going to be fought every bit as keenly in cyberspace as on the ground.
"Meehan learnt very fast indeed, especially the technical stuff. According to his service record he'd always been a natural with electronics and the SAS demolitions people described him as the best pupil they'd ever had. The usual routine was that he'd do the physical stuff in the mornings and the classroom stuff in the afternoon. The Tregaron people updated him on the geography of the province and told him the locations of all the drinking houses, social clubs, players' homes, safe houses et cetera, to the point where he could almost have got work as a minicab driver, and at least once a day they ran him through different aspects of his cover story. Like all the best cover stories, this had the advantage of being ninety five per cent true. Only nine months of it would have to be fictionalised. Nine months and a lifetime's beliefs."
Alex was impressed by Fenwick's grasp of the salient details of the operation. She certainly seemed more on top of things than most of the MI-5 agents he'd met in the field. He was also beginning to feel the beginnings of sympathy for Meehan. If the ex Royal Engineer was twenty-three in 1987, thought Alex, he's just a year older than me. We were probably learning much the same things at much the same time. The difference being that I was learning them in company with a bunch of mates and going out on the town on Friday nights and he was stuck in an isolated bunker in Tregaron with a tapped phone.
Poor bastard.
"Anyway," continued Fenwick, 'the instructors hammered away at him pretty much full-time, seven days a week. We had a couple oftheJSlW people come down and take him through his story until he was practically reciting it in his sleep. And, of course, we played the usual mind games, getting him to memonse complex documents, waking him up in the middle of the night to check minute aspects of his cover, that sort of thing. Every room in the house was plastered with pictures of IRA players, so even in his time off he was taking in information."
She paused. To either side of her George Widdowes and Dawn Harding sat in trance-like silence.
"After three months we moved him down to Stockwell for a couple of days so that the Watchman team could spend some time with him and from there it was on to Croydon for a couple of months of advanced field craft training with our service instructors. By that stage we were very much concentrating on demilitarising him, on knocking the professional soldier out of him. For that reason his time at Croydon was deliberately made as unstructured as possible. We fed him junk food, beer and roll-ups, slowed his metabolism down, sent him on the sort of exercise that involves spending the day in a pub. There's a test we set field agents that involves selecting a total stranger in a public place pub, launderette, that sort of place and seeing what information you can extract. There was a checklist we had name, address, phone number, car registration number, job description, place of birth, spouse's maiden name, credit card number... It's not an easy skill but Meehan got to be very good at it indeed and he always made the other people think that they were the ones doing the questioning. All in all, he was a natural. A fantastic find." She coughed and patted her throat.
"Sorry, as you can see I'm not used to doing so much talking."
Standing, she walked to a small table beside her desk and poured herself a glass of Evian water. George Widdowes half rose, as if about to pat her on the back, but caught Dawn Harding's eye and sat down again.
The room, Alex noticed, was becoming uncomfortably stuffy.
"After Croydon," Widdowes said, 'we put our man through his first real test. We sent him back to the Royal Engineers two weeks before the 14th Int selection course was completed the course, that is, that we'd pulled him out of several months earlier and told him to get himself kicked out of the regiment. Left it up to him how he managed it.
"What he did was to go around telling everyone he'd been kicked off the 14th Int course because he was Catholic and Irish-born. He made it look as if this had really dented him -he started drinking a lot, picking fights, getting his name on charge sheets and so on. He'd already visibly put on weight and was a long way from being the lean, mean fighting machine the Engineers had originally sent up to Tregaron.
There was an insubordination charge, a complaint of insulting behaviour by one of the civilian catering staff and some incident with a pub bouncer in Chatham all slippery-slope stuff. The end came when one of the warrant officers discovered some detonator cord in his locker in the course of a room search. He claimed that it was a mistake, that he'd signed it out for instruction purposes and forgotten to sign it back in again, but the CO wasn't having it and Meehan was out on his arse."
Alex whistled quietly and Widdowes shrugged.
"It was the only way. The whole thing had to be believable we couldn't risk asking the CO to fake up a dishonourable discharge. Enough people were in the know already.
"Immediately after his discharge Meehan moved back to London and got a bed in a working men's hostel in Kilburn. Within a couple of weeks he'd picked up work with an emergency plumbing and electrical repair outfit run by a local tough called Tony Riordan. He stuck with Riordan long enough to figure out all the scams and fiddles, and generally acclimatise himself in the role of jobbing electrician, and in the evenings, like any other twenty-three-year old he'd hit the bars. As we hoped would happen before too long in that area, he ran into a few exiles from Belfast and Derry, and picked their brains about job prospects over there. Wasn't a political guy, he said, just had family over there and wanted a change.
"He ended up being given a few names. Nobody who'd seen the quality of his work thought twice about recommending him. And finally, over the water he went.