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by providing protective details for diplomats as they pursued their jobs, and furnishing visiting VIPs with competent American watchdogs.
4 The 1949 armistice line separating Israel from the occupied territories.
    In fact, things went a lot further than that. Sure, McGee and his people were bodyguards and chauffeurs. But they were also occasional nursemaids, 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