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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 totremble 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