The Human Scale - Hardcover

Wright, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593537831 ISBN 13: 9780593537831

Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Lawrence Wright at the height of his powers. Centering around the newfound—and forced—relationship between an American/Palestinian FBI agent and a hardline Israeli cop, working together uneasily to solve the murder of the Israeli police chief in Gaza. Moving, thrilling, with extraordinary scope, it does for Palestine and Israel what Gorky Park did years ago for Russia. In the vein of LeCarré and Graham Greene, this is the rare novel that manages to entertain, educate, and deeply move the reader.

Tony Malik is a half-Irish, half-Arab New York based FBI agent, specializing in money flowing from drug and arms deals. The novel opens in shocking fashion, with Malik seriously injured by a terrorist-planted bomb. During his lengthy recuperative process, his life changes radically. A long-term relationship ends, and his job is on the verge of being taken away from him. During this period he learns more about his roots and becomes interested in his father's past and family - his father came to America years ago from Palestine. He decides to make a trip to his father's homeland to attend the wedding of his niece, whom he has never met. As a result of his plans, he is given a simple assignment by his boss at the FBI, partly to see how well he can still do his job. That simple assignment becomes extremely complicated.

As soon as he arrives in Gaza, the Israeli police chief overseeing the area is murdered. Malik is at first a suspect. Then, due to his superior investigative skills, he is invited into the Israeli investigation, seeking the murderer. At the center of this novel is Malik's relationship with Yossi, the hardline anti-Arab Israeli police officer leading the investigation. They must learn to trust each other because, as they move closer to solving the case, they realize there is no one else they can trust on either side.

Extraordinary three dimensional characters populate this novel: Yossi's daughter, studying in Paris, trying to escape the violence that surrounds her in Israel; Malik's niece, whose wedding and life are shattered by the murder; her fiancé, a peacenik whose existence is complicated by the fact that his cousin is high up in the Hamas command; religious leaders on both sides; corrupt Israeli cops; Palestinians thirsting for violence against Israel; Israelis determined to crush the Palestinians. Lawrence Wright brings a wide and complicated tapestry to life, one that culminates on October 7 with the deadly Hamas attack on Israel. But he has written more than just a thriller, or even just an examination of all these complicated lives. He has written a novel that manages to explore and explain much of the devastating history that encompasses the relationship between Israel and Palestine—and shows it to us in a way that poignantly reveals the tragic human scale that is involved.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LAWRENCE WRIGHT is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a playwright, a screenwriter, and the author of ten books of nonfiction, including The Looming Tower, Going Clear, and God Save Texas, and one previous novel, God's Favorite. His books have received many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.

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1

Malik

Jordan, May 21, 2022

The bomb that didn’t go off was aboard a United Airlines flight from Jordan’s Queen Alia International Airport bound for JFK. It was another sweltering day in the hottest year on record, and the temperature inside the plane was insufferable. The pilot promised the restive passengers that the air-­conditioning would kick in after takeoff, but a sandstorm suddenly swept out of the desert, pounding the windows like a desiccated hurricane and leaving the aircraft stranded at the end of the runway. The plane heaved. Passengers swooned. Eventually maintenance called the plane back to the gate and United scrambled to ready another aircraft, which would have to come from Cairo when the storm passed. Some of the passengers bailed out but most hung around the terminal, drinking cocktails in the bar, watching the sun surrender to a dust-­choked sky.

It wasn’t until the luggage was transferred to the new aircraft that a detection dog froze in front of a metal suitcase. Instead of barking or nosing the offending article, which would alert his handler to drugs, the dog sat and stared, as he had been trained to do in case of explosives. Any slight movement could set off the bomb. Within minutes, the airport was evacuated—­because of a gas leak, passengers were told—­so they stood in the parking lot shielding their faces against the stinging sand and cursing their luck. Nobody knew that they might all be dead now, their bodies shredded by the blast and scattered across the Mediterranean somewhere near the boot of Italy.

The bomb squad arrived an hour later with a portable X-ray machine, which revealed the commonality of modern improvised explosives: batteries and copper wiring, and what could be an altimeter, designed to trigger the bomb when the plane reached a specified altitude. The device was implanted in what looked, in the ghostly thermal image, like a stuffed animal. It was surrounded by powder-­filled packets and nails tightly crammed in—­a huge bomb, far larger than anything needed to bring down an airplane. The nails were a pointless addition, useful only for killing crowds, not for knocking planes out of the sky.

The squad carefully loaded the suitcase into a ball-­shaped containment vessel in an armored Humvee, which slowly made its way on the blocked-­off Highway 45 to Zarqa. There, between the national police academy and the town dump, was a counterterrorism center run by Jordanian authorities in conjunction with the FBI. The Humvee passed through the gates of the dump and slowed to a near stop as it navigated the potholes with fearful caution, then parked in front of a small cement-­block building the color of a tangerine.

Inside the counterterrorism center a team of American and Jordanian intelligence watched on video as the bomb-­disposal technician fitted up. The bomb suit, weighing nearly a hundred pounds, was made of Kevlar and flame-­resistant Nomex with a ceramic plate to cover the torso. The polycarbonate helmet was equipped with amplifiers and a defogger, lit within so that the technician’s face, known to everyone in the center, glowed eerily bright. He was Adnan, who was studying electrical engineering and coached a youth soccer team, but they did not refer to him by name. He was too deep in the death zone for anyone to save him, so they called him “the guy,” as if using his name was bad luck. Not a single person watching in the center had the nerve to do what the guy was doing. It was like watching a man on a tightrope crossing a rocky abyss a thousand meters deep.

He took possession of the suitcase and carefully placed it on a Styrofoam table designed to avoid splintering into shards. He could receive radio transmissions but he did not communicate himself—­ the frequency might set off the bomb—­so he worked alone, silently, with the team in his ear but frustratingly out of reach. They could observe what he was doing through a camera on his helmet with high-­intensity lamps on either side. Despite the body armor everywhere else on his body, his hands were uncovered. Dexterity was essential for sensing any hidden triggers or booby traps. If he missed the slightest trick of the bomb maker’s craft, the suit might save his life but his hands would be sacrificed. An ambulance waited outside.

The technician dusted the suitcase for fingerprints, then pointed at the luggage tag and shook his head. An operator inside the counterterrorism center was able to zoom in on the luggage tag. It bore the name, in English block letters, Yahya Ayyash.

“Ayyash? Is this a joke?” An American FBI agent, Anthony Malik, abruptly stood. Everyone recognized the name of a notorious Hamas bomb maker, known as the Engineer. Back in the nineties, Ayyash killed nearly a hundred Israelis using suicide bombers. There were streets named after him all over Palestine. He was finally assassinated by Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security agency, twenty-­six years ago. Now he was back, at least in tribute. “How did this get through airport security?” Malik demanded. “It might as well have a sign on it saying, ‘I am a bomb.’ ”

No one in the center responded. There was only one answer: someone on the inside had placed the bomb. Malik wasn’t blaming anyone in the room. They all felt the same anger and anxiety; they were a team. But it was a colossal intelligence failure that might have led to hundreds of fatalities. Somebody had beaten the security and they were all more or less responsible. If some genius could slip through Jordanian controls, which were among the tightest in the region, where else might it happen? These things are contagious.

Malik, who was thirty-­three, appeared a decade older with the severe lines that formed in his face, as if he had been mauled by age. His hair was dark and unruly, and his brows were black, but beneath them his eyes were green with flecks of brown—­“hazel” is what it said on his driver’s license. His long, down-­pointing nose and jutting chin awarded him a distinct drama; he could have been a wary nobleman in an El Greco painting, not handsome but striking, impressive, the kind of face that assumed command. When he smiled, the lines in his cheeks widened like a drawn bow, but when he was angry, as he was now, his eyes widened and his brows knitted together in a fearsome scowl.

“It’s got to be TATP,” Malik continued, referring to the unstable, highly explosive formulation that Ayyash used. “It’s way too volatile to be handled. There’s a reason they call it the Mother of Satan. It blows up if you sneeze. We’ve got to get the guy out of there. Detonate it remotely.”

“This guy is a pro,” Husni Obeidat, the officer representing Jordanian intelligence, protested. He and Malik were close, they played tennis together at the American embassy. “There’s valuable information to be gained,” Husni continued. “We don’t place people in danger for no reason—­”

And that’s when Malik’s memories were blown out of his brain.

He had horrible dreams. At times he was aware of people in the room, but they vanished or turned into cartoonish monsters. He tried to flee but he couldn’t move. When he awakened he discovered he was paralyzed. This happened several times. When he woke again to find a nurse at his bedside he didn’t remember waking before. He tried to talk but couldn’t.

He fell back asleep. He had a sense of being lifted out of some dark spot, as if he were deep in the ocean and was slowly floating toward the surface, away from the safety of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593537831
• ISBN 13: 9780593537831
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland