Nir Hezroni

Agent 10483, a psychopathic former Israeli spy, is busy trying to shut down the spy organization he once worked for and plotting his revenge against the key individuals who he deems responsible for the Organization’s betrayal against him. Now, he's traveling the world in a quest to find a hidden nuclear warhead to use against them. Offering a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into the technology of high-level intelligence operations, Nir Hezroni's dark thriller is a chilling exploration of the mind of a master killer.
The Washington Post review wrote : "Last Instructions contains echoes of Richard Condon's Korean War-era classic The Manchurian Candidate, as well as more contemporarily, the hit movie Get Out.... Agent 10483 is a true evil genius, who keeps readers wondering what's going to pop out of his head next."… (más)

This is the story of how an intelligence operation, based on the prevalent meme in spy circles that the end always justifies the means, goes drastically off the rails. Exploiting a notebook and a first person backstory, Hezroni gives us access to the twisted mind of an Israeli agent who goes rogue plotting revenge against his former colleagues a decade after erroneous reports of his death. Throughout, the question of who was at fault, the Organization that recruited and trained him or his own paranoid mind is never resolved. Is it nature or nurture? Probably a little of both.

To the espionage and international intrigue common in much of the thriller genre, Hezroni adds a unique twist: a supremely competent agent who has obviously lost touch with reality and is now dangerously homicidal. Can the agency that created this monster for its own purposes now bring him under control?

As a trained and highly skilled assassin, Agent 10483 is a little like a predator drone. His main function is to eliminate people that the State deems to be problematic. He has been programmed for that one task and armed with all of the tools necessary to mindlessly accomplish it. As a young boy, he demonstrated a strong paranoid streak and a clever mind. Using a grade school ruler, he routinely measured the level of liquids in his family’s refrigerator to be certain that no poison was added while he slept. As an adult he was trained and exploited by Israeli intelligence to be a consummate killer—remorseless, compulsive, driven, and psychopathic. A decade before the time when the novel takes place, he was given three envelopes with information about scientists who were to be eliminated. Much of the plot follows the details of these hits; one results in a mass murder. Most of it is over the top, but fun to read. 10483 dies in a suicidal bus accident, but we learn that he survives and is now living an isolated existence while plotting revenge on the Organization that manipulated him.

There are only two other significant characters in the book: Avner and Carmit. Avner is the less interesting of the two. He is an intelligence bureaucrat who receives a notebook describing 10483’s missions and slowly begins to realize that the agent is still alive and poses a threat to the Organization. Carmit is in a totally different league. Her job as a bookseller serves to cover her true function: to control behavior by pharmacologically altering psychological makeup. We see how effective her methods are with a chilling experiment on mice programmed to respond differently to variously colored lights. Also, we follow her into 10483’s bedroom as she programs him while he sleeps.

Hezroni maintains a high level of suspense throughout his narrative by switching between timeframes and perspectives. The pieces of the puzzle never seem to fit until they do. The novel’s principal fault is its tendency to leap into unreal situations that strain credulity. 10483’s alterations of his basement designed to capture intruders is a case in point. Despite several impossibly clever forays into this kind of silliness, Hezroni manages to keep the pot boiling by showing us one of the most depraved characters in recent memory.… (más)