The Human Scale

In May 2022, a bomb aboard a United Airlines flight from Jordan to New York is discovered before takeoff, hidden in a suitcase tagged with the name of a notorious deceased bomb maker from Hamas, the Palestinian militant Islamist organization. At a counterterrorism center in Zarqa, Jordan, FBI agent Anthony Malik, thirty-three, urges the bomb be detonated remotely. An explosion kills five people and leaves Malik in a two-week coma. He awakens at a military hospital in Germany missing his left eye, with broken bones and a traumatic brain injury that impairs his memory, speech, and emotional regulation. Intelligence identifies the bomb's creator as Ehsan Zayyat, a Hamas operative and nephew of the bomb maker whose name was on the luggage tag.

After seven months of rehabilitation, Malik returns to Brooklyn. His girlfriend, Lucy Walker, cannot cope with his volatile moods and night terrors and leaves him. Malik channels his energy into physical training and Arabic courses. Exploring his genealogy, he discovers his late father, Tariq, an immigrant from Hebron in the occupied West Bank, had an identical twin brother, Abdullah, still living there. Abdullah's daughter, Dina Abdul Malik, is engaged to be married, and Malik decides to attend the wedding.

At FBI headquarters, Malik's friend Tommy Cantemessa, now chief of counterterrorism, warns that Malik must pass cognitive assessments within a month or lose his position. Tommy also mentions an unofficial favor: a police officer in Hebron has contacted the FBI's legal attaché in Jerusalem, wanting to discuss a sensitive matter. Tommy asks Malik to meet the officer informally.

The novel shifts to Hebron, a city sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, where several hundred Jewish settlers live in fortified compounds amid hundreds of thousands of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation. Chief Jacob Weingarten of the Israeli police is a peace-loving man who rose to his position through the political connections of his wife, Miriam, a fierce nationalist from the family that founded the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba. His experienced deputy, Yossi Ben-Gal, resents him for it.

On September 25, 2023, followers of Rabbi Immanuel Cohen, known as the Rav, a charismatic Kahanist leader who advocates expelling all non-Jews from Israel, destroy an ancient olive grove belonging to Malik's relatives to clear land for a temple. When Palestinians respond with stones, Cohen's eighteen-year-old grandson, Benny Eleazar, charges through the grove shooting deliberately, killing several teenagers. Hours later, a video arrives at the police station showing Weingarten being beheaded by a masked man. His headless body is found in the Old City's Muslim cemetery, rigged with a booby-trap bomb that Yossi detects before it detonates.

Yossi begins investigating, but Shin Bet agent Tamar Levin, representing Israel's domestic intelligence service, seizes control. Surveillance footage reveals Weingarten met an unidentified one-eyed man at the Cave of the Patriarchs, Hebron's shared Jewish-Muslim holy shrine, before his death. When Malik arrives in Hebron and is spotted, officers chase him through downtown, arrest him, and accuse him of the murder. The FBI's legal attaché intervenes, confirming Malik is an agent sent to meet Weingarten, who had reached out to American intelligence about a sensitive case.

Yossi drives Malik to Dina's engagement dinner at Sheikh Abdullah's farm. There Malik meets his uncle, the physical double of his late father, and learns Tariq secretly funded a local school. Dina's fiancé, Jamal Khalil, is a peace activist whose older brother was killed carrying out an attack for Hamas and whose cousin is Ehsan Zayyat.

Yossi discovers a locked cabinet in Weingarten's office containing secret dossiers on every officer and a missing file, number 169, found hidden in the chief's home. It documents a massive drug-trafficking operation converging on the West Bank: heroin from Afghanistan, crystal meth from Mexican cartels, and Captagon from Syria. Weingarten's charts show overdose deaths clustering near Kahanist settlements. The chief believed his own department was compromised.

The wedding is canceled when Weingarten's frozen head turns up in the butcher shop where Jamal works. The butcher accuses Jamal, who flees. Dina reveals she was with Jamal at a hostel at the time of the murder, an alibi that would destroy her reputation. She also confesses she has been Weingarten's informant, trading intelligence about Hamas for medical treatment for her half-brother Omar, a teenager with a leg injury from a gunshot wound. Her information came from Jamal, who unwittingly shared details about his cousin Zayyat.

Malik is abducted by Hamas and brought before Zayyat, who confirms he did not kill Weingarten but would gladly let Jamal take the blame. When Malik refuses to join Hamas, Zayyat releases him. Malik drops a GPS pin on his phone before being blindfolded.

Malik discovers a Signal message from Weingarten sent the day of their meeting. The letter reveals the chief had uncovered a drug ring he believed was protected by people in his own department and possibly the government. Omar, a gifted hacker, traces a photo posted online to smear Dina back to officer Aharon Berger's computer and uncovers that the Rav's temple fund is a shell organization controlled by Benny, a front for money laundering. Yossi and Malik identify Berger and fellow officer Golda Radidowicz, both settlers in Kiryat Arba, as suspects within the department.

Yossi arrests Berger for obstruction of justice and confronts Cohen, who denies involvement. Meanwhile, Yossi's daughter, Sara Ben-Gal, a student at Sciences Po in Paris, visits Israel during a break, torn between love for her country and revulsion at the occupation. Over a Sukkot dinner, a Jewish harvest festival, at Yossi's home, Sara and Malik discover a deep connection.

On October 6, Malik and Yossi raid Zayyat's headquarters. Malik kills Zayyat when the bomb maker reaches for his pistol. They follow the drug trail to the Rav's compound, discovering heroin cached in an ancient catacomb. Benny arrives with armed followers, but Yossi arrests him as Shin Bet vehicles converge.

Sara invites Malik to the Supernova music festival near the Gaza border, and they become lovers. At dawn on October 7, Hamas launches a coordinated assault that Israeli intelligence had dismissed as fantasy. Thousands of fighters breach the border fence while paragliders descend on the festival. Malik, posing as a Hamas supporter by greeting fighters in Arabic, frees a captured Israeli woman, but Sara is found by fighters and killed as she tries to flee. Yossi, racing south, finds Malik in a field holding Sara's body.

In Hebron, Jamal, who survived an Israeli missile strike in Gaza that killed the family sheltering him, has abandoned his commitment to peace. He drives a sewage truck packed with Zayyat's final bomb into the police station. The explosion kills Golda at the front desk and Berger in his cell. Dina, trapped on the second floor, dies as fire engulfs the building.

Malik and Yossi sit shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, at Yossi's home, their grief for Sara binding them. At the Muslim cemetery, Malik scatters his father's ashes near Dina's grave, fulfilling Tariq's wish to return home. With Dina gone, Malik inherits Sheikh Abdullah's land and plans to donate it to a school, extending his father's legacy. Yossi gives Malik an ancient Jewish coin, telling him to remember that Jews have always been in this land. As Malik and Omar, whom Dina asked him to take to America, walk into the terminal at Ben Gurion Airport, Yossi calls out his final words: to pray for them.