Free The Amateur Spy by Dan Fesperman

of thirteen—he was now in his fifties—but lately he was resorting more to the old ways of his West Bank hometown of Nablus, where men generally got what they asked as long as they weren’t asking Israelis.
    When Aliyah didn’t want to play along, she countered with holding actions and mute refusals. “Passive-aggressive behavior” was what her office friend Nancy called it. But that was just a new label for a longtime female staple in Arab households. Aliyah had left that world behind at a younger age than her husband had. She was only five when the Six-Day War sent her family fleeing for cover from a small village near Jerusalem in 1967, and in some ways it felt like she had never lived there at all. But if Abbas was going to resort to the old ways, then so would she.
    So Aliyah now tallied her moments of obedience on a mental scoreboard on which she continually ran a deficit, even though she knew Abbas was probably doing the same, with the opposite result. This became apparent whenever their tensions erupted into open combat. Each would argue as the aggrieved party, with both claiming unpaid reparations.
    Take this episode, for example. Aliyah would record it as a moment of submission. Abbas wouldn’t. Not that Aliyah objected to calling 911. Nor did she disagree with her husband’s decision to stop. It was his duty as a doctor.
    On the other hand, considering all that their family had endured during the past few years—the slights, the humiliations, and, worst of all, the horrible tragedy abroad that might so easily have been averted—she wouldn’t have blamed Abbas for driving on. Let the other Americans help their own, because they certainly weren’t rushing to her family’s aid.
    But by stopping, Abbas reassured her that his professional judgment hadn’t yet drowned in a simmering pool of resentment. That meant there was still hope for him and, in turn, for them. With enough diligence, she might yet find the old Abbas, hiding in the shadows of his anger.
    Aliyah had lived with her own shadows in the months following the family’s ordeal, but she chose to return to the light by seeking the solace of worship and prayer, even though she hadn’t been a regular at a mosque since childhood.
    She was still not a “good” Muslim in the strictest sense, and did not intend to become one. No five prayers a day except when it was convenient. No mandatory this or that. She skimped on ablutions, still had a taste for both bacon and gin, and wore what she pleased. She believed such matters were trifling as long as your faith was strong. Hers was a searching brand of devotion that sought comfort in unanswerable questions, or in the contemplation of her own smallness on the vast blurry map of God’s majesty. The ritual of prayer instilled calmness and introspection, and the mosque itself offered the kinship of like-minded women. If diet and head scarves really mattered as much as the hotheads said, well, then, let God sort out the details of her punishment later. Because surely God was wise enough to decide that what really mattered was the thoughts in your heart. Intentions and beliefs. Your eagerness to do good.
    For a while she had tried to coax Abbas to attend the men’s prayer service on Fridays.
    “Please,” he had scoffed. “To do what? Bow my head and raise my voice to some vacant room in the heavens? If there was a God to begin with, he checked out of his hotel room long ago.”
    Maybe his job was partly to blame. As a surgeon, he was far too often powerless to save the righteous, yet many times had easily rescued the obviously unworthy. By clipping and sewing the innards of the nation’s top decision makers, he had sliced away the maladies of dozens of unsavory demagogues and liars, many of whom you have probably heard of. By rescuing them, perhaps he now felt complicit in any number of their actions.
    Yet he had never lost pride in his handiwork. He still displayed a framed White House letter of