"The first thing he did over there was to visit his relatives. There was his mother, of course, still living over the pool hall in Bogside, and there were the usual uncles and aunts and cousins scattered around the place. He looked them all up, said his hellos, paid his respects. He didn't advertise the fact that he'd been in the army, but he didn't try to hide it either. Just told anyone who asked that he'd got fed up and left.
"He saw his mother for the first time in more than ten years, but made no secret of how he felt about her walking out on the family. The boyfriend, by now a pissed old fart approaching sixty bit like me tried on a bit of Republican stuff, told him there were people he should meet and so on, but Meehan wasn't buying.
Didn't want to know, he said. Wasn't interested.
"By the autumn he was living in Belfast. A cousin who was a chartered surveyor highly respectable guy, married, kids, house in Dunmurry offered to take Meehan in until he'd found his feet. Meehan stayed there for eight weeks or so, sorted himself out a job with the service department of a store in the city centre, a sort of Tandy-type place called Ed's Electronics, and moved into a rented place a few streets away from his cousin. He also started seeing a girl, a hairdresser called Tina Milazzo. She was a careful choice Catholic, clearly, but not part of any obvious player set-up. Her family were immigrants and her parents ran a cafe in the Andersonstown Road. The Milazzo family were known to us because of Tina' sbrother Vince, who fancied himself as a hot-shot driver and all round dangerous dude, and liked to hang out where the players hung out. He would never have been allowed within a mile of any real action because he was a loudmouth, but he was tolerated.
"After that, it was basically a question of waiting.
We sent Barry Fenn out as his agent handler and Barry used that waiting period to run through the various communications procedures something we always try to do if we can, because it reassures the agent in the field that the systems work.
So we were pretty well informed about the assimilation process.
"Did Fenn handle anyone else?" Alex asked.
"No. He was Meehan's dedicated handler. We didn't tell Meehan that, though."
"Why not?"
"Well, I suppose because we didn't want to worry him by suggesting that PIRA might have sussed out the others. They hadn't, of course, but we didn't want him concerning himself for one moment with those kinds of issues. Anyway, once Meehan was in place we told him that henceforth the drops and meets would be initiated by him rather than by us, and that we'd be pulling Barry back or "Geoff' as Meehan knew him until he reported that a definite approach had been made. We knew this was likely to be months rather than weeks, because we'd agreed from the start that Meehan would adopt a strictly "not-interested" posture vis-~-vis any Republican stuff' "Wasn't there a danger that PIRA would take him at his word and leave him alone?"
"I think we pretty much made him irresistible. As well as working at the shop he let it be known that outside work hours he was happy to do repairs at home. Transmitter-receivers and computers that no one else could fix, that sort of thing. The more complex the problem, the better he liked it. It was only going to be a matter of time before the word got around that one of the guys at Ed's was a circuitry wizard and a few quiet checks started to be made. And of course we also had Vince Milazzo shooting his mouth off about his sister's new bloke who'd been in the army but had got pissed off and walked out."
"And they bit?"
"Eventually they bit. To our relief, as you can imagine. It had been more than eighteen months since Enniskillen by then, and in that eighteen months we'd had eight soldiers killed in Ballygawley, six at Lisburn and two in the Buncrana Road. More than thirty-five men had been seriously injured and that's just the army statistics. I can't honestly remember how many civilians and UDR members had been murdered in the period, but the pressure on this Service to get a man in place was unbelievable.
"The way it happened was that one evening in June 1989 a couple of fellows were waiting for Meehan when he finished work. Suggested he came for a quiet drink and drove him to MacNamara's, which is very much a volunteer hang-out. Asked him if he took on private work. He said he did, but nothing political, which they seemed to accept. One of them then took him out to the car park and showed him an army Clansman radio. Asked if he could fix it.
"Well, obviously he could have fixed it in his sleep, but he refused, said he wasn't touching it. When they asked him why, he told them that he recognised the radio as army issue and wanted no involvement with that sort of business. Then he thanked them politely for the drink and walked off. They didn't try to stop him.
"But of course they were back a few days later, and this time it was six of them and they didn't take him to a bar, but to the first floor of a house in the Ballymurphy area. They'd done some checking, they told him, and they had some questions that needed answering. They were still polite, but it was clear that if the answers weren't good enough he was in serious trouble.
"It was the moment he'd rehearsed a thousand times. Sure, he'd been in the British army, he told them, and he'd never tried to hide the fact. His family knew it, his girlfriend knew it and his employer knew it. He also told them what had happened to his father and how he had been chased from the country a decade earlier. With his father dead, he explained, he no longer had any family on the mainland, so he'd come home.
All he wanted now, to be honest, was to carry on with the work he was doing, bank a decent salary and be left alone to get on with his life.
"They heard him out. As a Royal Engineer, they said, he must have been involved in demolitions.
"Sure, he told them, and for the first time allowed a note of bitterness to creep in. He'd been a qualified demolitions instructor and at one time had considered a career in the quarrying industry after leaving the army. With his dishonourable discharge, however, all that had gone up in smoke.
"Tell us about the discharge, they said, so he did.
He'd been stitched up, he explained, and all for a couple of lengths of det cord. All the instructors kept bits and pieces in their lockers -signing the stuff in and out every day took bloody hours. It wasn't as if it had been drugs or live ammunition, they'd just had it in for him for being a Mick. But then that was the Brit Establishment for you heads they win, tails you lose.
But what the fuck, he still had the skills. No one could take the skills away.
"They listened and then drove him back to his flat.
Nothing much was said, but this time when they handed him the Clansman he took it. They gave him a number to ring when it was ready.
"After this encounter, which he described to Barry in detail from a public phone near his home, the communications from Meehan via Barry Fenn almost dried up. It became clear to him that he was being watched almost full-time. He was certainly being tested; a few days after mending and returning the Clansman a woman called round at his flat at seven in the morning with an Amstrad computer in a plastic bag. It had crashed, she told him, and she needed a data-recovery expert.
"He unpicked the mess, downloaded the data and discovered that it contained details of the security system of one of the city-centre banks. It was obviously a set-up: if the security was beefed up in any way they'd know he was a player for the other side. So we did nothing about it at all didn't even bother to tell the bank. And of course there was no raid.
"A couple of weeks later the first two men turned up at his flat on a Saturday morning. As far as we can work out he was taken on some kind of tour of the city. Various introductions were made and the day ended at a drinking club.
"Over the next few months a gradual process of indoctrination took place. The people that he met were low-level players for the most part, and I guess they flattered Meehan and showed him a pretty good time. A charm offensive, if you can imagine that. Our instructions to him, relayed via Barry, were to allow himself to be drawn out. We wanted him to give the impression of "coming to life", both socially and politically.