TWO

THE TWO MERCEDES SPED ALONG A DIRT ROAD, FORDED A shallow stream at a spot marked by two logs driven into the bank and pulled up in an apple orchard. The lights strung along the top of a security fence around a kibbutz flickered in the distance; from the orchard, with a little imagination, it was easy to take the kibbutz for a cruise ship and the sea of impenetrable blackness around it for the Mediterranean. In the back seat of the first Mercedes, the Rabbi and his secretary, their wrists bound in front of them, their heads covered with leather hoods, waited in the darkness. Both men stiffened when they heard footsteps approaching. The heavy-set Arab with short cropped hair came up behind the car and nodded at one of the young men in turtleneck sweaters. “Cut open their sleeves,” he ordered in Arabic.

The young man, whose name was Yussuf Abu Saleh, pulled out his pocket knife for the second time that night and, leaning into the back of the car, slit open the jacket and shirt sleeve on the left arm of each prisoner. The Rabbi’s secretary, Efrayim, gasped. When his turn came, the Rabbi filled his lungs with air but said nothing.

From a small metal container, the Arab with the short-cropped hair, whom the others knew as “the Doctor,” removed the two syringes he had prepared that afternoon. The Rabbi gritted his teeth and breathed heavily through his nostrils when he felt the needle prick his skin. As he slumped against his secretary, Efrayim cried out through his hood, “Oh God, you have executed him.” When he felt the Doctor’s fingers searching for a vein in his forearm, he started to tremble uncontrollably. As the needle pierced his skin he began to intone the Shema from the book of Deuteronomy: “Shema yisra’el, adonai eloheynu … adonai—” Then his head slumped forward onto his chest.

Four members of the raiding party carried the drugged prisoners over to the small delivery van parked next to a beat-up silver Suzuki with Israeli license plates. The van bore the logo “Fine Bedouin Robes and Carpets” printed in English on its sides. Each prisoner was crammed into a large straw hamper and covered with layers of robes and carpets. Then the hampers were loaded into the van and other hampers packed with robes and carpets were piled on top of them. Yussuf locked the back door of the van and handed the keys through the window to the driver, a pock-marked Bedouin smoking a foul-smelling hand-rolled cigarette and listening to a cassette of a popular Egyptian singer on the car’s tape deck. The young woman who had passed for a Haredi when the Rabbi’s car was being flagged down sat next to him. Her name was Khloud but everyone knew her by the nickname Petra, after the ruined Nabataean city in the Moab Mountains where she was born. For the ride back to Jerusalem she had changed into the long dress and the off-white head scarf of a religious Muslim. “Drive slowly,” Yussuf instructed them. “Use the dirt tracks into the West Bank to avoid Israeli checkpoints, come at Jerusalem from the Jericho side, when you arrive in the Old City pull into the alleyway next to your shop and flash your lights twice. Our people will take care of the rest.”

Yussuf grinned at Petra and he and the Bedouin exchanged high-fives through the open window. The motor coughed into life. The van, driving without headlights, edged onto the dirt road that skirted the nearby kibbutz before cutting across the fields in the direction of the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Yussuf joined the Doctor at the second Mercedes. The Palestinian who had been wounded by the Rabbi’s driver firing his Uzi from the asphalt lay slumped across the back seat. An older Arab who had been trying to stem the bleeding climbed out of the car. “He’s spitting up blood,” he announced.

“That means he was shot in the lungs,” the Doctor said.

“He cannot be allowed to fall alive into the hands of the Jews,” Yussuf warned. “He knows too much.”

“We must get the two Mercedes into Ghazeh before dawn,” one of the Palestinians called nervously.

The Doctor could feel the hot breath of the khamsin on his cheek. He said, “Two minutes,” and climbed into the back seat alongside the wounded man. He cradled the boy’s head in his arms. “Anwar,” he whispered. “It is me, the Doctor.”

Anwar, who was in his early twenties, opened his eyes. He coughed up blood, then gasped for air. With infinite gentleness, the Doctor’s fingers worked their way under the boy’s turtleneck and probed his chest until they found the entry wound. It was immediately above the latissimus dorsi and angled up toward the left lung. There was no exit wound, which probably meant the bullet had struck a rib and caused massive trauma inside the body.

An ugly gurgling sound came from the back of the boy’s throat. “I am going to pull out of this, right?” he whispered.

The Doctor leaned over him until his lips were touching the boy’s ear. “Even better. Tonight you will enjoy the company of seventy-two virgin brides; tonight you will talk with the Prophet.” In the darkness he brought a hand up to the boy’s skull, which was damp with perspiration, and began to search with the tips of his fingers for the distinctive knob of bone behind the ear. “‘Whosoever fights in the way of God and is slain,’” he murmured, quoting one of his favorite passages in the Qur’an, “‘we shall bring him a mighty wage.’” He slipped the pearl-handled Beretta from his breast pocket and pulled back the slide on the top of the barrel to chamber the first round, then warmed the tip of the barrel in the palm of his hand before pressing it to the spot immediately under the knob of bone. Holding the boy’s head against the car’s arm rest, he pulled the trigger. There was a hollow report, something like a husky cough, as the pistol sent the bullet drilling into the skull. The boy’s body jerked once before collapsing back into the seat.

Moments later the two Mercedes, with the still warm body of the martyr on the floor in the back of the second car, were speeding west along Bedouin tracks toward the Gaza Strip. The Suzuki with Israeli license plates and its two passengers, both carrying forged papers identifying them as Arabs from Abu Tor, a half Palestinian, half Jewish village outside of Jerusalem, headed north toward the main coastal highway. The Doctor planned to go to ground in Abu Tor. When things quieted down, he would make his way, tapping a long thin bamboo cane on the pavement before him, past the Israeli checkpoints to the safe house perched above the maze of streets in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and, God willing, begin the interrogation of the Rabbi.