"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 boys out in time.
"They didn't, of course, and Bledsoe and Wheen were brought down to the border that evening. I had drawn a Browning and a couple of clips from the QM, so that I could at least make it fast, but in the event I wasn't even able to do that."
Meehan fell silent. His eyes were as cold and blank as pack ice.
"They had a generator there and one of those heavy-duty compressed-air staple guns .. . Do you have any idea what happens when you fire one of those things into someone s eye?"
Alex opened his mouth to speak, but found that he could say nothing.
"As the eye explodes and it goes fuckin' everywhere the staple blasts its way out through the roof of the mouth. The guy's kicking, meanwhile, and pissing himself, and generally going berserk, but the thing he can't do is make any sound, because his blood and his sinuses are pouring out of his nose and mouth. The pain has to be beyond anything you can imagine..."
"You did that?" whispered Alex disbelievingly.
"No, thank God, some other volunteer did it to Wheen. But the point is not who did it, the point is that Five, knowing what Byrne and his nut ting squads do, allowed it to happen. They had the information and they deliberately failed to act on it.
"So what happened next?"
"Byrne figured that Wheen was the tough guy and Bledsoe -if he scared him enough was going to do the talking. Well, he scared him all right. The guy was out of his head with sheer terror. But just to make sure, Byrne had the volunteer do Wheen's other eye. And then just to make the point that it was Bledsoe who was going to do the talking he cut Wheen 's tongue out. Have you ever heard a man trying to scream when his tongue's been cut out?"
Alex shook his head.
"It sounds like percolating coffee. Anyway, I stood there, my brain fuckin' turning itself inside out at this sight terror, horror, disbelief, whatever the fuck and telling myself one thing: smile, or go the same way yourself And everyone else was smiling, but I tell you they were all pretty quiet at that point."
Alex nodded.
"So then Byrne told me to do Wheen once and for all so I pulled out the Browning ready to give him one. And Byrne says no. Hands me, of all things, a fuckin' lump-hammer and a six-inch nail ..
"And you did him with that?"
"It made this kind of .. . pl inking sound," said Meehan reflectively.
"The guy died immediately."
"And Bledsoe?"
"Bledsoe coughed. Told them everything. Every last thing he knew. It took hours almost light by the time he was finished."
"And?"
Meehan nodded expressionlessly.