Direct Action

by John Weisman

  McGee had gone to the embassy’s regional security officer to make his feelings known. The RSO, both a realist and a professional, agreed with everything McGee said. But the bottom line was that at embassies—especially at this particular embassy—political considerations just about always won out over security realities. It was, the RSO said ruefully, all about appearances.

  Unlike those in Kabul and Baghdad, for example, Tel Aviv’s armored Suburbans were not equipped with the sorts of black-box variable-frequency oscillators that would remotely detonate roadside bombs at distances of 200 meters or more. The ambassador didn’t mind the VFOs masquerading as TV satellite dishes that were mounted on the embassy’s exterior. Approach within 250 meters of AMEMBASSY Tel Aviv with a remote-controlled car bomb in your car or on your body and you’d simply self-destruct long before you’d get anywhere near the building.

  But he’d forbidden the RSO to equip any of the embassy security vehicles with similar devices. Forbade because it was ambassadorial doctrine that outfitting Tel Aviv’s FAVs with such markedly proactive devices might incense the Palestinian Authority. Not equipped, the RSO explained, because the ambassador said VFOs would indicate the United States believed the PA to be thoroughly riddled through with bomb-planting terrorists.

  The fact that the Palestinian Authority was in point of fact thoroughly riddled through with bomb-planting terrorists didn’t seem to make a whit of difference. Frankly, McGee was dismayed at what passed for diplomacy these days.

  But then, McGee didn’t get a vote. Because Sergeant First Class James Edward McGee, United States Army (Retired) was a civilian contractor. A hired gun. A merc. He was one of two shift leaders for a sixteen-man DynCorp detachment that worked out of the Tel Aviv embassy’s Regional Security Office. His formal job description entailed augmenting State’s overextended Diplomatic Security Service agents by providing protective details for diplomats as they pursued their jobs, and furnishing visiting VIPs with competent American watchdogs.

  In fact, things went a lot further than that. Sure, McGee and his people were bodyguards and chauffeurs. But they were also occasional nurse-maids, part-time guardian angels, and sometimes even confidants. In return, DynCorp paid them $375 a day, seven days a week, plus generous per diem and living expenses.

  In McGee’s case, there was also additional income from the Other Job. The job McGee could never talk about. Not to his DynCorp coworkers, not to the ex-wife back in North Carolina who received all of his Army pension and half his DynCorp salary, not even to anyone from the embassy. The spooky job, which was the real reason he’d elbowed his way onto this morning’s trip.

  At eleven last night, he’d received a phone call on the special cell phone. To all appearances, it was a wrong number. Except it wasn’t a wrong number. It was a call-out signal from Shafiq Tubaisi, one of the Palestinian gunsels leaning on the dirty Subarus.

  McGee’d spotted Tubaisi within his first couple of trips to Gaza. The kid wore American clothing—real Levi’s, which were prohibitively expensive in Gaza, and Ralph Lauren–branded shirts. Turned out they’d been sent by distant relatives living in Dearborn, Michigan. Just about the first words out of Shafiq’s mouth were that someday he wanted to visit the United States. It was an opening line McGee could have driven an Abrams tank through.

  He asked about Shafiq’s family—and picked up on the fact that the kid’s father, a pharmacist, was sick and tired of paying kickbacks to the PA and Hamas. He asked his control officer to have the FBI check on Shafiq’s Michigan relatives and was encouraged to find out the Tubaisis were not on any of the homeland security watch lists. McGee began by giving Shafiq little presents. Books of photographs. CDs. DVDs. It took a couple of months, but he finally came over the border solo and pitched the kid.

  Shafiq took the hook. McGee set it. He played the kid like a fish, reeled him in, and dropped him in the creel. One reason it went so smoothly, McGee believed, was that it wasn’t a one-way street. For example, the first thing McGee did after Shafiq proved his bona fides by supplying McGee with a list of all the cell-phone numbers and call signs used by the top leaders of Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, was to pull strings so the kid’s brother got a visa allowing him to visit the relatives in America, and a couple of hundred bucks from the black-ops slush fund to help with expenses.

  Recruit the whole clan, not just one man—that was the couplet McGee’d learned in Afghanistan from his CIA paramilitary colleagues. Obviously, the same poetry worked in Gaza. So, McGee’s operational skills as a spy—albeit limited—were paying off. He was about to recruit his first unilateral agent in Gaza. Three weeks ago McGee had received POA—provisional operational authority—to take Shafiq to the next level. He was ordered to formalize the relationship—give the kid a wad of cash and schedule a polygraph so the agent recruitment process could be completed. And start to apply real pressure. McGee’s bosses wanted him to start developing actionable intelligence.

  A Rome-based polygrapher was dispatched to flutter the kid just after Labor Day. But then things began to unravel. Shafiq missed the appointment for the polygraph—and the box man had scheduled only twenty-four hours on the ground. Christ, it would be a month, maybe more, before the test could be rescheduled. Shafiq blew off the next meeting and it was almost the end of the month before McGee saw him again.

  Only to be disappointed: the kid came up dry on the al-Qa’ida front. There was no evidence of al-Qa’ida, he insisted. No foreigners in Gaza.

  “What about Arabs?” McGee asked.

  “There are always Arabs,” Shafiq answered. “Egyptians. Bedou. But none of the al-Qa’ida—the ones from Yemen or Saudi Arabia. I have not seen them.”

  McGee began to think he was getting the runaround. But he pressed on, tasking Shafiq to track down the rumors about personnel from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—Iran’s Seppah-e Pasdaran.

  The subject was obviously touchy because Shafiq had gotten nervous the moment McGee said the magic words. Shafiq hemmed and hawed as only Palestinians under pressure can hem and haw. Finally, after an excruciating series of serpentine wavering, flip-flops, vacillations, and equivocations, he whispered that he thought yes, maybe, perhaps, it was possibly possible the Seppah might have a man in Gaza.

  McGee’s antenna focused. “What makes you think that?”

  “This one man, he came maybe two weeks ago or so, Mr. Jim.”

  McGee nodded. Inside, he was seething. Why the blankety-blank had Shafiq waited so long to tell him. McGee controlled his emotions and his breathing. He waited for the Palestinian to continue.

  Shafiq took his time. He lit a cigarette. Inhaled deeply. Blew smoke out through both nostrils and his mouth simultaneously. Finally, he took the cigarette out of his mouth. “This one man, he’s different. He moves around constantly. He has his own bodyguards—some are Lebanese from their accents; others speak in a dialect I do not know—and we’re not allowed to bring weapons into his compounds.”

  “Compounds?”

  “He moves every day and every night. Often twice. They say that sometimes he dresses as a woman.”

  “Have you seen him like that with your own eyes?”

  Shafiq’s own eyes focused on the ceiling.

  “Shafiq—”

  The Palestinian dropped his gaze to the floor of the dusty three-room flat just south of the Erez industrial zone McGee used as a safe house and drew a circle with the toe of his shoe. “I saw him only once, Mr. Jim. Only once.”

  “Where?”

  Shafiq flicked the half-smoked cigarette onto the floor, ground it out, pulled a pack of Marlboros and a Bic from his shirt pocket, lighted a new one, and exhaled noisily. “In Gaza City. Coming out of a house on Mustafa Hafez Street behind the Islamic University.” The Palestinian found something else on the floor to focus on. “I was assigned to guard the end of the street for three days,” he mumbled. “That’s why I couldn’t make the last meeting.”

  McGee’s tone hardened. “You didn�
��t tell me.”

  The kid’s eyes finally shifted past McGee’s face. “You didn’t ask.”

  “All right, Shafiq,” McGee nodded. “Go on.”

  “I saw him when he came through the gate and got into the car.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “It was dark. The windows of the car had curtains.”

  “Then how do you know it was him?”

  Shafiq shrugged. McGee edged his chair closer to Shafiq’s and stared coldly at the Palestinian. Quickly, Shafiq looked away. It was a cultural thing with Arabs. They detested being stared at; scrutinized. McGee knew it and was instinctively using body language to keep his agent off balance. It was, he’d discovered, an effective way of asserting control. McGee waited the kid out. Finally, Shafiq said, “I did see him, Mr. Jim.”

  “Feyn—where?”

  “On Mustafa Hafez Street when I was a part of the security detail. I did see him get into the car.”

  “And?”

  “He is shorter than you with dark hair.”

  That wasn’t much help. “His face—round? Long? Square?”

  Shafiq thought about it. “Round. But angular. A prominent nose, but not too big. Heavy eyebrows—like one big eyebrow.”

  “Beard?” Most of the Seppah had facial hair.

  “No.” Shafiq rubbed his index finger back and forth under his nose as if stifling a sneeze. “But a mustache like Saddam Hussein.”

  “How did he dress?”

  “Dark trousers, white shirt with no collar, I think. Dark leather jacket.”

  The guy dressed more like a Hezbollah car bomber from Beirut’s southern suburbs than a Seppah operator. McGee mentally tagged him Mr. ML, for Mustached Lebanese.

  “Was he armed?”

  Shafiq shook his head. “I saw nothing.”

  McGee scratched his chin. “And why do you think he is Seppah?”

  “Because they treat him like a god, Mr. Jim.”

  “They?”

  “Everybody.”

  McGee struggled for the correct Arabic words. They came out of his mouth distorted. “How does said treatment manifest itself?”

  The Palestinian looked at McGee, confused.

  McGee tried again. “How do you know they treat him like a god?”

  Shafiq blew more smoke through his nostrils. “Because I heard when they took him to see the Sheikh Yassin, Yassin kissed both his hands and asked for his blessing.”

  The self-proclaimed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was the wheelchair-bound godfather of Hamas. In the past year, the sixtysomething quadriplegic son of a bitch had sent dozens of homicide bombers out to kill hundreds of Israeli women and children.

  The guy with the big mustache had to be important. Very important. McGee had read the security files on Yassin and knew the bastard was no hand-kisser.

  McGee said nothing, but his mind was working overtime. Immediately he sent a Steg-encrypted message to his boss in Paris about the hand-kissing incident and got a terse message back: Have your agent get us a picture.

  McGee set up a clandestine meeting with Shafiq. Obviously, this was potentially a huge development. It was now just before the Jewish New Year—a little over two weeks to Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar and the thirtieth anniversary of the 1973 October War—exactly to the day, October 6.

  If the Seppah was about to make a move in Gaza, that was significant. It confirmed McGee’s own suspicions that the reconciliation being backchanneled from Tehran was a diversion. It told him Iran was still attempting to destabilize the region by using terrorist surrogates like this Mr. Mustached Lebanese—and that they conceivably might act on October 6. The Iranians were already involved in Iraq: hundreds of Seppah had crossed the border to take charge of Iraq’s Shia majority. If McGee could confirm that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was simultaneously planning something in Gaza—supporting Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades’ operations during the Jews’ High Holidays—the consequences could be cosmic.

  McGee pulled at his right ear. He wished he had the polygraph results so he’d have some indication of whether Shafiq was fabricating or not. But he didn’t. He was flying seat-of-the-pants now—hurtling blind through opaque clouds with no sense of up or down because the fucking artificial horizon wasn’t functioning. Damnit—he didn’t want to pull a John-John. He shot a quick glance at Shafiq, who was talking earnestly with one of the other gunsels. On the one hand, maybe he was being played. But on the other hand, maybe he wasn’t. Either way, the clock was ticking.

  And Shafiq was coming up with good stuff again. Maybe they were over the hump, whatever the hump might have been.

  McGee had war-gamed the session. He’d decided on a direct approach. So he didn’t mince words. “You must get me a photograph of this man, Shafiq.”

  The Palestinian’s eyes went wide. “Mr. Jim, Mr. Jim, I cannot,” he stammered.

  McGee understood the young man’s fear. But it didn’t matter. McGee needed hard evidence. Paris wanted paper. It was time for Shafiq to deliver.

  Shafiq was balky, but McGee insisted. Wore the Palestinian down. He put it to the kid in no-shit Arabic. “I did favors for you—and you keep telling me how much your family owes me. But I ask for nothing. I do more. I pay you—I have your thumbprint on the receipts. And what do I get in return? I get bullshit stories from you about a man in a black leather jacket and a white shirt with no collar who has Lebanese bodyguards and moves around a lot. That’s not enough, Shafiq. It’s time for you to earn your keep. I don’t need rumors about a man from Seppah. I need a photograph. You will get it for me or there will be consequences. You have relatives in the United States. I have friends in high places.”

  Shafiq hadn’t been able to look McGee in the face for the rest of the meeting. And then the kid just plain dropped out of sight. There’d been no contact for more than two weeks. The high holy days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur had come and gone without incident. There had been a few ripples—some overly ambitious amateur bomb makers had set their explosives off by accident down in southern Gaza. But no Israelis had been killed, there were no suicide attacks inside the Green Line, and—more to the point—the probes of American diplomatic targets seemed to have subsided.

  Then the call last night. Today, McGee would get the photograph. Shafiq said so during that brief phone call. Spat out the three-word confirmation sequence twice before he’d hung up. That was why McGee’d pulled rank and assigned himself to the morning milk run.

  4

  9:56 A.M. The butt of the damn 229 dug into McGee’s kidneys. McGee compensated by adjusting his own butt in the seat. Today he’d earn his salary—the contract that paid him six thousand dollars a month. The money was direct-deposited by a small engineering firm in Enid, Oklahoma, into an account in the Northwestern Federal Credit Union of Herndon, Virginia. The credit union in turn sent the funds directly into a bank account in the Cayman Islands.

  Six grand a month wasn’t a lot of money for putting his life on the line. But then McGee’d never worked for money. The recruiters knew that about him when they’d pitched him to go undercover because they’d already done a psychological profile and they knew just which buttons to push.

  Once he’d signed the papers, McGee referred to himself as an IC, or independent contractor. His status was known formally as an A-contract with a GS-12 pay grade. Although he didn’t know it, 4627 was charging CIA fifteen hundred a day for McGee’s services.

  The recruiters showed up about ten days after he’d extracted from Baghdad. DO spooks. He knew they were for real because they’d been allowed inside the Delta compound, and because they were accompanied by a tall, thin, bearded guy Jim McGee knew as the Kraut.

  The Kraut, whose real name was Bernie Kirchner, was one of the CIA paramilitaries with whom McGee had served in Afghanistan. The two of them had been through some tough times. “We shared a shitload of roasted horse in our three months together,” was the way the Kraut put it as
they shook hands. Bernie was visual confirmation of the spooks’ bona fides.

  Except they weren’t exactly from Langley. They said they were retired CIA and they worked for something called the 4627 Company, which was handling an Agency outsource contract. That’s when McGee understood this was all about wink-and-nod stuff. Hell, W&N was okay with him. He’d worked with a few CIA wink-and-nods in Afghanistan. Not a month ago, some big Washington risk-assessment firm had just sheep-dipped three of Delta’s most senior people to work on a cross-border program in Iran. Then there was the financial end. Wink-and-nod paid a lot better money than CIA, where you’d hire on as some GS-9 contractor. Besides, no one got into the Delta compound unless they were active. Ever since the Ed Wilson fiasco, there had been safeguards. So these guys could call themselves whatever they wanted to. McGee would play along.

  The lead spook was a tough old bird who called himself Rudy. He was seventy if he was a day. Rudy told McGee he’d spent his entire career at CIA doing counterinsurgency. Said he’d started with the Cubans and finished with the Kurds. They played a short round of who-do-you-know, and Rudy knew them all.

  Rudy was missing part of his left index finger. When McGee asked how it happened, Rudy’d deadpanned, “Moray eel had it for breakfast.” He paused. “I had him for lunch.”

  McGee knew the real thing when he saw it, and Rudy was it.

  The second spook was a thirtysomething youngster dressed in Eurochic and Levi’s who said his name was Tom. Tom had an engaging smile and a laid-back, surfer-dude attitude. But from the way he moved, the way he held himself, the way his eyes took everything in without appearing to even move, McGee understood Tom was a case officer—maybe even one of the few good ones.

  Tom unzipped a black canvas briefcase, brought out a sealed brown envelope, and laid it on the table. Then he spoke to McGee in rapid, flawless Arabic. “Inside this envelope is a nondisclosure form. If you understand what I’m telling you, slide the envelope across the desk—don’t lift, just slide—open it, read the form, then sign. After you do, we can tell you why we’ve come to see you.”