The Watchman (12 page)

"We're wearing Italian today, are we?"

she said, noting his Gucci loafers and running an appraising glance up and down his grey Cerrutti suit.

"I thought you Hereford boys were more comfortable in Mr. Byrite."

"I know the importance you civil service types attach to appearances," Alex said equably, fixing his visitor's badge to his lapel.

"You wouldn't want me to let the side down, now would you?"

He followed her into the lift, where she pressed the button for the fourth floor.

"And you found somewhere to stay all right?"

"I managed to get my head down."

"I'm sure you did." She stared without expression at the brushed-aluminium wall of the lift. As previously, she was dressed entirely in black and wearing no make-up, perfume or jewellery. Her only accessories were the briefcase large, black and plain and a military issue pilot's chronograph watch. This spareness did not, however, disguise her femininity. In some cuno us way, Alex mused, allowing his gaze to linger around the nape of her neck, it highlighted it.

Or at least it made you wonder.

The lift shuddered to a halt.

"A word of advice," she said flatly, checking her watch as she marched out into a grey-carpeted corridor flanked by offices.

"The correct form of address for the , ,

deputy director is ma am.

Alex smiled.

"So who are you, then? Matron?"

She gave him a withering glance.

"Dawn will be just fine."

The deputy director's office was at the far end of the corridor. Dawn left Alex in an ante-room containing a leather-covered sofa and a portrait of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, and disappeared through an unmarked door.

She reappeared five minutes later. Alex was still standing the leather sofa was so slippery he could hardly sit on it and she led him into an office which would have been sunlit had not the blinds been partially lowered. This, Alex guessed, was to prevent glare rendering the computer monitors illegible. There were three of these on a broad, purpose-built desk, along with a telefax console and a tray piled high with what looked like newspaper cuttings. Maps, books and a large flat-screen monitor covered most of the walls, but a painted portrait of Florence Nightingale and a signed photograph of Peter Mandelson romping with a dog went some way towards softening the room's essentially utilitarian lines. At the near end half a dozen leather-and-steel chairs surrounded a low table bearing a tray with a steaming cafeti~re and four civil service-issue cups and saucers.

Behind the desk, silhouetted against the half-closed blinds, sat the deputy director and once again Alex was struck by her handsome, clear-cut features and elegant appearance. Today she was wearing a charcoal suit, which perfectly complemented her shrewd blue eyes and the expensively coiffed gunmetal of her hair.

To one side of her, both hands thrust deep into the pockets of a suit which had probably once fitted him better, stood George Widdowes. To Alex, the studied informality of the posture looked like an attempt to play down his subordinate status.

The deputy director rounded the desk and held out her hand.

"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?

"By Christmas we had the numbers down to ten, all of whom answered the selection criteria and had either been directly recommended or assessed as As or Bs.

The ten were then sent to Tregaron to join the current selection cadre for 14th Intelligence, bumping the course numbers for the year up to about seventy. You probably know more about the 14th mt course than I do, Captain Temple, but I believe it's fairly demanding."

"It's a tough course," said Alex.

"I think it prepares people pretty well for what they're going to encounter as undercover operators."

Angela Fenwick nodded.

"Well, of the ten we sent on the course, four were among those returned to their units as unsuitable by the staff instructors at the end of the first fortnight. The other six were pulled out of Tregaron by us at the same time, although they assumed that what followed was part of the normal selection course. They were housed in separate locations in the area where our Service's psychiatric people interviewed them over several days to assess their suitability."

"Why not let them just go through the normal 14th Int selection course?" asked Alex.

"Because there was a big difference in what we wanted out of them. Working undercover is lonely and solitary work but ultimately you're still part of a team. You're still a soldier on a tour of duty, and there are plenty of times in an undercover soldier's life when he can let his guard down, put aside his cover, socialise with his colleagues and be himself The man we were looking for, on the other hand, would have no such opportunity. Once inserted he would probably never speak to another soldier again. He'd be giving up everything and everyone he'd ever known. We needed to know that he was capable of that."

"And there were other factors," added George Widdowes.

"We didn't want our man known as one of those who successfully completed the course. As part of his cover story he needed to have failed. And to have failed early enough for it to be believable that he couldn't remember much about the other sixty-odd blokes on the course. We didn't want our operation to compromise the security of the ones who passed."

Alex nodded.

"Yes, I see what you mean.

"The other thing at that stage was that we had to separate our six men from each other in case they figured out what they had in common and put two and two together. It wasn't a huge risk,

but even at that stage we had to be one hundred per cent security conscious.

"Right."

"We interviewed the six," continued Angela Fenwick, 'and, as George explained, they assumed the process was part of the normal 14th Int selection.

Four of them we were happy with, the other two we sent back to Tregaron. The four we liked the look of were bussed one at a time to different points in an MOD training area in the North-West Highlands near Cape Wrath, given rudimentary survival and communications kit, and ordered to dig in. It was January by then and conditions were atrocious, with blizzards and deep snow.