TWENTY-NINE

IN THE EARLY HOURS OF THE MORNING, PETRA SAT UP WITH A start. At first she thought she had been awakened by the sound of Hebrew being spoken on the landing outside the door. Slowly it dawned on her that she had been dreaming; in her dream, Isra’ili soldiers were taping sticks of dynamite to the outside of the armor-plated door. Over her field radio, an occasional voice burst through the background static to report, in Hebrew, that nothing could be seen moving on the roads in the West Bank. Splashing cold water on her face, Petra looked around for Aown, then remembered that he had tucked an ancient but serviceable British Webley into his belt and had taken Sweeney up to the attic crawl space over the safe house for the night. She glanced at her wrist watch, then got up to boil water in the electric kettle. Minutes later she was tiptoeing into the inner sanctum with a cup of steaming tea. Azziz was folded into a fetal position, sound asleep on the cot. The Doctor was deep in whispered conversation with the prisoner; Petra didn’t understand a word they were saying, but she could see that the two men were talking almost as if they were old friends. They sat with their knees touching, their foreheads bent to within centimeters of each other. She tapped the Doctor on the shoulder. When he turned around, he looked annoyed at the interruption. “What is it?” he asked sharply.

Petra said, “I have brought you tea.”

The Doctor gripped the cup with both hands and let the tea warm his fingers for a moment. Then he did something that struck Petra as extremely bizarre—he called the prisoner by his given name.

“Isaac.”

Whispering, the Doctor said something to him in English. The prisoner raised his eyes; the Doctor had said that, without his eyeglasses, the Jew could only make out shapes and shadows. The prisoner shook his head no. The Doctor spoke to him again more firmly and pressed the cup of tea into his manacled hands. The prisoner shrugged and muttered something in English. In the middle of a sentence he pronounced the Doctor’s given name.

“… Ishmael …”

The Rabbi brought the cup to his lips and blew loudly across the surface of the tea, and then began to sip noisily at it. The Doctor stood up and came around behind the Rabbi and started to massage his bony neck with the tips of his fingers. Looking over the head of the Rabbi, he nodded toward the door. As she backed out of the room, Petra could hear the two of them resuming their whispered conversation.

“Ah, Ishmael …”

“… Isaac …”

This must be a new technique of interrogation, she told herself, one designed to gain the trust of the prisoner and lull him into thinking of his interrogator as a friend, someone in whom he could confide. Once the Jew’s guard was down, the Doctor would extract from him the information he wanted. Surely this was the meaning of the strange bond that appeared to be growing between the two men.

How else could a reasonable person explain the Doctor’s permitting the Jew to call him by his given name?