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her scientific mind. Her culture and her country were Western and modern and she didn’t like the direction in which the hard-line ultra-religious Jews were dragging Israel. But that was politics, not blood and murder, and she bit her lip and concentrated on saving Bilal’s life.
    Ensuring that he was now prepped for surgery, she readied herself for scrubbing up and entering the theater. But before she left the prep room, she glanced out the window. She saw in the distance the panorama of the Old City, resplendent and eternal within its ancient stone walls. There was the Muslim golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock, built on top of where once stood the Jewish temples of Solomon and of Herod; there the Tower of David and there the gray-blue dome of the Christians’ Church of the Holy Sepulcher, beside the Via Dolorosa, route of the Jewish Christ’s last agony. Three of the holiest sites to the three great monotheistic religions, dedicated to peace and harmony and the love of the Almighty; yet the site of some of the greatest crimes of humanity committed by fervent men in the name of a peace-loving god.
    And she looked at Bilal, the latest fanatic in the army of madmen who believed in their absolute right to kill all those who disagreed with them. It was her job as a secular, nonreligious Jew—a doctor trained to the highest levels of professionalism inone of the world’s greatest hospitals—to ensure that he didn’t die. She felt aware of the strangeness and stupidity of it all as she felt in her pocket for the key to his handcuffs. And as she did, her fingers found the semiprecious stone she’d retrieved from Bilal’s clenched fingers.
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October 17, 2007
    I N ANY OTHER CITY it would have caused people to turn and stare. But in Jerusalem it was part of the tapestry of Israel, a country where Jews of many different sects walked side by side with Christians of all colors and creeds representing a plethora of beliefs, watched by Muslims resolute in the belief that their version of the Prophet’s heritage was the truth. And all of these zealous believers were ignored by thousands of irreligious men and women wearing the latest fashions, speaking on their iPhones, or engaged in heated discussions about politics or current events.
    So when a middle-aged man wearing a business suit and a white shirt open at the neck sat on a park bench with another man dressed like the reincarnation of a seventeenth-century denizen of the backstreets of a Polish village, in the uniform of the ultra-religious Jews known as Haredi, few turned and stared. Those who did were hardly surprised by the elderly rabbi’s clothes or by the other man’s strip of white hair that ran from his crown to the back of his head, surrounded by graying hair on his temple, making him look as though he had a skunk sitting on his head.
    The two men nodded as they spoke, their heads close together to the point of almost touching, and from a distance it looked as though they were whispering in each other’s ears.
    They were seated on a bench in the middle of Sacher Park, one of the most popular green spaces in Jerusalem. The park—a long and thin stretch of verdant sanctuary separating the suburbsof Nachlaot and Rechavia, and close to the center of government power in the Knesset and the Supreme Court—was a magnet for families, lovers, and workers on their lunchtime break.
    But neither Eliahu Spitzer, dressed like a twenty-first-century business executive, nor Reb Shmuel Telushkin, in the black hat and frock coat of the ultra-religious Jew, was there because it was lunchtime, and certainly not because of any notion of passing the time of day. The two men, one in his late fifties and the elderly rabbi in his late seventies, were discussing the recent attempt to destroy the Western Wall, the Kotel of King Herod’s Temple, and Bilal’s failed attempt to kill a dozen Jews in particular.
    â€œAnd?”