John Weisman: Direct Action

“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.

9:56A.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.”