"Tina Milazzo certainly helped with this. Sources on the ground told us that she gave the impression of enjoying the nightlife and the conspiratorial atmosphere, and the company of the other girlfriends.
She probably sensed that the other men were respectful of Joe that they had plans for him and that this reflected well on her. Whatever, she fitted in. She helped the thing along.
"Over the months that followed we heard almost nothing from Meehan. We wanted him to dig in, to live and breathe Republicanism, and we told him that he should only contact Barry if he had anything really vital to report.
"Nothing vital came up. The killings of soldiers and others continued, but we considered it highly unlikely that Meehan was anywhere near the inner circles where such things were discussed and planned. It would be years, probably, before that would be the case. But he was on his way. Shortly before Christmas 1989 a seventeen-year-old named Derek Maughan was picked up by a team of volunteers after stealing a car and joyriding around the outskirts of the city. It was not the first time this had happened, it was decided to make an example of him, and he was driven out to waste ground and a nine-mil round was put through his kneecap. From the front, as he was just a lad, rather than from the back. Now as it happened, one of the volunteers on the snatch team was touting for the FRU and within a couple of days of the shooting we had the names of all those involved.
"The driver was one Joe Meehan. That year this agency was able to give the Cabinet Office a very special Christmas present. The assurance that a sleeper was in place in the Belfast Brigade. That, finally, MI-5 had a man in the IRA."
TEN.
There was a lengthy pause. Dawn Harding, as if to make a tacit point about self-control, sat motionless and without expression. George Widdowes stretched in his chair and recrossed his legs. Rising and marching briskly to her desk, Angela Fenwick lifted the telephone and ordered sandwiches for four. From a desk drawer she took a clear plastic folder. Inside was a sheaf of photographs, which she handed to Alex.
He examined them one by one. There was an early Meehan family shot taken in a kitchen: the father standing in his shirtsleeves, the blowsy bottle-blonde mother smoking by the stove and the pinched, worried-looking boy even then the image of his dad crouched over his homework. In the school photo, scrubbed and hair brushed young Joseph didn't look much happier, but he appeared to have cheered up a bit for the holiday snap in which, aged about eleven, he and his mother were sitting at a folding table by a river with a caravan in the background. Another shot, possibly taken on the same holiday, showed the boy triumphantly holding up a small trout. Almost a smile on his face.
And then there was Meehan aged about fifteen taking part in a cross-country race. The seriousness and the pinched look were back by then, and had been joined by something else a tenacious ness a hard intentness of purpose. The same expression was waiting behind the level gaze as the sixteen-year old apprentice stood with his visibly frail father in front of their van ("Lawrence Meehan, Electrical and General Repairs').
And finally as a squaddie. A formal sit-down shot of the battalion in shirtsleeve order. Meehan in civvies posing with two fellow privates in front of an armoured personnel carrier. Meehan in issue overalls doing something complicated at a workbench with a soldering iron.
Meehan and a couple of mates brewing up on exercise beneath a rock face
And that was it. A life in ten photographs. Not conventionally handsome, but intelligent-looking. Not naturally one of the lads, but the sort you could rely on to stand his round. Not a natural tough guy, perhaps, but a fast learner. And without question a bad enemy.
A real implacability behind the pale, narrow features and the rain-grey eyes.
"So this is him," said Alex eventually and, catching Dawn Harding's scornful expression, immediately regretted the statement's pointlessness.
"This is him," said Angela Fenwick.
"The Watchman. Our PIRA mole."
"I'm assuming the story you're telling me has an unhappy ending," said Alex.
"I want you to know everything," said Fenwick.
"I
want you to know exactly what sort of man we're dealing with. I want you to know everything we know."
Alex nodded. He was busting for a piss. He said so and Dawn Harding stood up. En route, she officiously hurried him past several open office doors. For fuck's sake, he thought.
"Aren't you coming in?" he asked her when they reached a sign marked Male Staff we.
"Just in case I catch sight of something I shouldn't."
"There won't be much to catch sight of," she said.
When they got back to the deputy director's office the sandwiches had arrived. In Alex's place two files had been placed on top of the Meehan photographs.
They contained ten-by-eight-inch colour photographs taken at the scenes of the murders of Barry Fenn and Craig Gidley, and the respective pathologists' reports.
"None of these to leave the building, please," said Fenwick.
"Dawn will show you a room where you can go through them when we've finished."
Opposite Alex, Widdowes was galloping through his sandwiches as if fearful that they were going to be taken away from him.
Alex picked up one of his own, and was about to bite into it when a thought struck him. He froze and Dawn Harding raised an eyebrow.
"I've just realised something," he said.
"Yesterday morning I left an RUF sentry who can't have been more than eleven tied to a tree. I meant to let him go when we pulled out."
"Sounds to me he's pretty lucky to be alive at all," said Angela Fenwick.
"I doubt he is still alive," said Alex.
"The survivors of the raid will be looking for scapegoats."
"Can't make an omelette without breaking eggs," said Widdowes through a yellow-toothed mouthful of bacon, lettuce and tomato.
"Africa's a bloody basket case, anyway. It's not what the rest of the world does to them, it's what they do to themselves. God, the stories you hear."
"Sally Roberts is apparently telling anyone who'll listen that she was carried to safety in the strong arms of the SAS," said Fenwick.
"We told her we were Paras," said Alex.
"Where did she get the SAS stuff from?"
"She told the Telegraph's stringer that none of the men who rescued her had shaved or washed for several days and that they wouldn't talk to her in the helicopter. The Paras always chatted her up."
The ghost of a smile touched Alex's face but he said nothing.
"Right," said Widdowes, placing his sandwich plate on the carpet and wiping his mouth with a spotted handkerchief "Shall I take over?"
Fenwick nodded and glanced quickly at Dawn. Alex sensed a current of empathy between the two women from which George Widdowes was excluded.
To begin with, Widdowes explained, things had looked good. From Meehan's occasional brief reports to Barry, and from information provided by touts and informers, it was clear that he was serving out some kind of initiation period. He was regularly called out for driving jobs, moving other volunteers from area to area, and transporting punishment squads and their victims to locations where beatings and kneecappings were administered. The IRA liked its volunteers to have a clear understanding that severe penalties were handed out to those who disobeyed them.
Meehan was also used as a 'dicker', standing on street corners looking out for manifestations of security forces personnel. Only the more experienced dickers, Alex knew, were used for 'live' operations. If a hit was planned on a border post a series of walk pasts would be organised in the course of which the dickers would look out for any of the tell-tale signs additional sentries, increased patrols and de fences that the operation was known about. A tout might have talked, anything might have happened, but the net result of a security lapse would invariably be the same: an SAS killing team waiting in ambush and a series of funerals attended by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The job of the dickers was a vital one to the PIRA and many operations were cancelled or postponed because of a dicker's instinct, honed to a sensitive edge on a thousand street corners, that 'something wasn't quite right'.