The Jericho Deception: A Novel

by Jeffrey Small

  CHAPTER 12

  UNDISCLOSED PRISON FACILITY

  UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

  The screams at night were the worst.

  The previous day the rap music had stopped. Mousa had been thankful at first, thinking he could finally sleep. Lack of sleep was causing him to hallucinate. Then the screams started. Judging from the voices, all in Arabic, begging alternately either to be spared or to be killed, Mousa guessed that five new prisoners had been brought in. He wondered if that was how his own screams had sounded during his torture.

  As he lay in his cell on a thin mattress that reeked of urine, Mousa palpated his hands over his body, checking his injuries. He had no broken bones, yet. Most of his skin, however, was bruised gruesome shades of purple and green. His right shoulder had been dislocated, which he’d fixed himself by leaning over the porcelain sink in his cell and jerking downward while twisting his arm with his left hand. Putting the shoulder back in place had been just as painful as when it had dislocated: he’d been hung from the ceiling in the interrogation room by chains wrapped around his wrists.

  He examined the skin on his wrists: still shredded. Even worse were the burn marks on his nipples from where the electrodes had been attached. The knee with the torn ACL from the mall’s ski slope was still swollen, but he could put weight on it now. He could walk, maybe even run in a straight line if he had to, but any twisting or sideways pressure would cause it to slip out of place.

  But running was the last thing on his mind. He doubted he would ever run again. He was going to die in this cell. During the interrogation sessions with the mustached man, he had prayed to Allah for death more than once. As a doctor, he had treated terrible injuries—a broken leg where the tibia jutted through the skin was one he particularly remembered—but he had never before experienced true physical pain himself. During the beatings that both preceded and followed the daily interrogation sessions, the mustached man never touched him. He let the two guards handle that. But he always watched. He watched as if he enjoyed it, like he was looking at pornography.

  Worse than the physical pain, the hunger, or the lack of sleep was the psychological torture of not knowing what had happened to Amira. When he’d asked the mustached man about his daughter, his interrogator had laughed, telling him that he would never live to see her again. He was going to die in the prison never knowing the fate of his beloved child, never again feeling the embrace of his beautiful wife, never seeing his newborn son grow into a man.

  Despite his repeated denials and his giving the interrogator all of his personal information about his medical practice in Amman, the man refused to believe that he was not connected to the plot to blow up the mall.

  “You Jordanians are jealous of our prosperity, no?” the mustached man had taunted him before his last brutal session, one that involved whipping the bottoms of his feet until they were bloody and then beating him with hoses until he slipped into unconsciousness.

  That session had been a couple days earlier, as best as he could tell. Since then, he’d heard nothing but the disembodied screams of his fellow prisoners. As guilty as the thought made him feel, he was thankful that the guards had turned their attention on others. His tormentors had given him an unexpected rest. Maybe they were afraid they would kill him too soon, or maybe it was because during the last session, he’d finally given in. Weeping, he’d told them that he would admit to anything they wanted. He would sign any piece of paper they put in front of him.

  As he lay on the stained mattress, which had neither sheet nor blanket, his eyes wandered around the tiny cell. The gray concrete walls were cracked and chipped in some places, stained with blood and excrement in others. He looked to the bucket in the far corner that acted as his toilet. The only way he had to empty it out was into the porcelain sink attached to the wall opposite the door, the same sink that also was his only source of drinking water. He imagined that the sink at one time had been white. One advantage of having his nose broken during an interrogation was that he could no longer smell the stench of the prison—it reeked of death.

  He glanced to the wall above his sink. High up was a window. Only six square inches, with rusty iron bars crossing the opening, it was his only connection to the outside world and the only source of fresh air in the fetid cell. From the pale light filtering in, he guessed that it was dawn, time for the salat al-fagr—his morning prayer. He grunted as he rolled off the cot onto the floor and crawled toward the sink. The three-meter-long chain attached to a metal collar around his ankle dragged behind him. Using the sink, he pulled himself to his feet and then washed his hands and face. He ran his wet fingers through his hair and then shuffled to the center of the concrete floor. His injured knee and bruised body made getting into the proper position difficult, but he did the best he could to face the window, kneel, and then touch his forehead to the ground.

  When he finished reciting his prayers, he opened his eyes but remained sitting on the floor, too spent to move. A single word popped into his head: Islam. The name of his faith also carried a crucial meaning: true peace through surrender.

  Haven’t I surrendered, Allah?

  He had given up hope that he would ever see his family again. The only reality left to him in the wretched cell was the Beloved One, the Source of his very existence. Yet where is my peace?

  Then a tiny movement caught his eye. Something on the wall by the bucket. Maybe he was having another hallucination. But then he saw it clearly.

  He crawled to the corner of the room, training his eyes on the insect, a black beetle with a yellow stripe down its back. The bug explored its surroundings, feeling with hair-like antennae along the cracks in the concrete. It seemed content, going about its life, oblivious of the larger meaning of its surroundings. Mousa reached out and placed his palm up on the wall next to the insect. The bug stopped when it reached his thumb, testing the skin with its antennae. The tiny creature crawled onto his hand, tickling him. He brought it close to his face and stared at it. The bug seemed to stare back. All of a sudden, he was transported out of his cell.

  He was on a hill in Gilead, a couple of hours’ drive north from his home in Amman. The sun warmed his face and a soft wind blew the grass like waves in the ocean. The hills around him undulated out to the mountains on the horizon. White limestone rocks and boulders dotted the grass. He sat on a blanket, eating a handful of green almonds. Laughter filled his ears. Amira rolled on the grass, giggling uncontrollably, as Bashirah tickled her and laughed just as hard. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a bug, a large black ant, crawling across the blanket, heading for the plate of bread and cheese. He flicked it off of the blanket. The memory faded.

  Although he grasped for the images, willing them to reappear, all he saw was the insect crawling across his palm. He rose on shaky legs, careful not to disturb the bug. Bracing his free hand on the sink for support, he rose onto his toes and extended his hand toward the window. He stretched farther, ignoring the aching in his bruised rib cage and the soreness from his shoulder dislocation. He couldn’t quite reach the window, but the bug got the idea. Maybe it smelled the fresh air or saw the light. It scurried off of his hand onto the wall.

  The screeching sound of metal against metal echoed through his cell. He threw himself onto his mattress. Someone was pulling back the heavy bolt locking his cell door. If they caught him reaching for the window, they might think he was testing it for an escape attempt. Who knew what brutality they would inflict upon him then? He didn’t know if he could survive another session.

  As the door rolled back on its track, he waited for the mustached face of his tormentor or the two guards who carried out the torture with enthusiasm. Instead, four new men entered his cell. Dressed in all-black commando gear, they looked similar to the officers who had arrested him at the airport, but with one terrifying difference: these men wore ski masks covering their heads and faces. A deep nausea rolled through his gut. He had to focus so that he wouldn’t lose control of his bowels. He kn
ew what was coming.

  His interrogator had realized that he’d extracted all he would get, and today was the day he’d told him about: his execution. After the torture, death would come as a relief. He almost wished for it, but then the image of the wide, terrified eyes of his daughter at the airport came to him. He thought of his wife’s radiant smile, and the innocent expression of his baby boy, who would grow up without a father. As much pain as he was in, he didn’t want to give up.

  When the man closest to him spoke, shock replaced the fear.

  “Down on the floor!” the man commanded, in English.

  He recognized the accent as American. Since he’d been taken captive, he’d heard nothing but Arabic. He complied with the order. Lying on his stomach, he waited for the inevitable stomp of a boot in his back, but it never came.

  Instead the man said, “Don’t move.”

  He kneeled on Mousa’s back, which was uncomfortable but not painful. The man brought his hands around and handcuffed them with a plastic tie. One of the others bent over and unlocked the shackle around his left ankle. Then they attached leg irons, which meant only one thing: they were taking him somewhere. Were his captors using the Americans to carry out the execution, or did they have a new level of torture designed for him?

  With his left cheek pressed against the cool, hard concrete, he could only make out the movements of the men with his right eye. Their actions were coordinated, more practiced and efficient than the brutal handling he’d received from his fellow Arabs. Their uniforms were devoid of markings, and they communicated with each other using nods and hand gestures rather than speech. After the man finished with the leg irons, he approached Mousa’s head. Mousa saw that he was carrying a black sack in his hand, about the size of an extra-large bag of rice. The man kneeling on his back shifted his weight and then lifted Mousa’s upper torso off the ground.

  Just before they pulled the bag over his head, he noticed a movement high up on the wall. The beetle had reached the edge of the window. He watched as it crested the edge of the sill and disappeared through the iron bars into the light of freedom.

  Then his world went dark.

  CHAPTER 13

  SSS, YALE UNIVERSITY

  “So then, I’m not crazy, am I?”

  A woman in her mid-fifties, wearing simple black cotton pants and a black turtleneck, reclined in the green leather chair underneath the Logos. Her head was shaved, the stubble on top a silver gray. Her robes hung on the brass coat stand by the door.

  “If only we were all as sane as you, Sister Terri,” Elijah said from his stool beside the Logos. He wore a white lab coat over a black T-shirt with red lettering declaring THE SPARK OF GOD LIES WITHIN ALL OF US. THE BESHT.

  Ethan glanced over Elijah’s shoulder at Terri’s file. The elder professor scribbled a note in a script legible only to him. He’d just finished reviewing the results of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory that Terri had taken an hour earlier. Their protocol dictated that their subjects show no signs of a psychological condition that could be adversely affected by the experiment. Also, none could have a history of epilepsy. Although the monkey tests had gone well, they didn’t want to risk setting off an epileptic episode in someone preconditioned to it. His eyes fixed on the one cautionary note, written in red ink under the section titled “Other Medical History.”

  “How are you feeling today, Terri?” Ethan asked.

  Her forest green eyes locked onto his with a directness that, had it come from anyone else, would have made him uncomfortable.

  “What you mean to ask is how is my cancer progressing?”

  He nodded.

  “Finished the final round of chemo five weeks ago. The treatments slowed the cancer but didn’t eradicate it from my lungs or spine.”

  Her matter-of-fact delivery seemed incongruous with the information she revealed. He’d last seen Terri almost a year earlier, when they’d tested an earlier version of the Logos with lackluster results. Reviewing her medical history then, he’d felt a deep fear for the nun with the irreverent sense of humor. The cancer that had begun three years earlier in her breasts had metastasized throughout her body. He and Elijah had discussed whether her medical condition should disqualify her from this stage of the experiment, but she’d lobbied to be included. She’d been one of Elijah’s subjects five years ago in the experiments in which he’d first begun to develop his theory of a God part of the brain. Terri insisted that although her body may be suffering, her mind was clear.

  “Ironic, isn’t it? Over thirty years ago I took a vow of chastity when I entered the order. I never needed my breasts for their original biological function, to nurse a child”—she waved her free hand across her flat chest, where both breasts had been surgically removed—“yet they will be the cause of my death.”

  “I’m so sorry, Terri.”

  What did one say to comfort the dying? He tried to push away the thought that this gentle woman had limited time left. Why does tragedy have to strike the best of us? He thought of Natalie.

  “We all shall die. That is God’s design for us.”

  He forced a smile, and said, “We shall all die, yes, but I’m not sure God has anything to do with that.”

  What he didn’t add was that a God who would allow good people to suffer was either not as omnipotent as was claimed, or was cruel and capricious. Or more likely, he thought, doesn’t exist at all. Nothing more than a created image of the human subconscious, a projected desire for a father figure, as Freud argued. But he wasn’t there to challenge this woman’s deep faith. Instead, he wanted to understand it. He glanced to the metal arm that held the solenoids that would soon be positioned near Terri’s head. A God, he thought, created by electrical impulses firing in the temporal lobes of the brain. Then her warm hand alighted on his arm.

  “What do you believe in, Ethan?”

  He felt his neck redden. He was a medical doctor, a Yale professor, but the question caught him off guard. He was the one who was supposed to be asking the questions, not his patients or his research subjects. But Sister Terri was different. He sensed that Elijah was waiting for his answer as eagerly as she was.

  What do I believe?

  “I believe in the scientific method.”

  “So you place your faith in science?”

  “Faith? I’m not sure that faith has anything to do with science. I believe in what I can measure and verify: in experimentation and objective observation.”

  “Yes, a popular misconception of faith.” She turned her penetrating gaze from Ethan to Elijah. They shared a look he interpreted as meaning they understood something he didn’t.

  She continued, “Faith does not ask us to turn off our minds or our powers of perception. Faith is not the belief in the impossible. God gave us our powers of reason, and so we should use them.”

  He cocked his head. “Then what is faith, if not belief in the absence of proof, or worse, belief in the face of disproof?”

  His mind scrolled through the scientific problems of religious faith: the creation stories, the descriptions of the cosmos as comprised of realms of heaven and hells populated by divine and semi-divine beings, the miracles attributed to divine powers—all things impossible according to the theories and evidence provided by modern science, an understanding absent in the cultures from which these religious myths developed.

  “What if we defined faith as trust rather than as belief?”

  “I trust what I can measure, what I can see.”

  “As do I, which is why we are here today. Isn’t it? You are interested in measuring something special that I can see.”

  “Even scientists like us,” Elijah added, “need faith. We trust those scientists who came before us; we have faith in their theories and the results of their experiments.”

  “But religion is different.” Ethan turned. “If I disagree with a previous theory, then I’m free to perform new experiments and either validate or invalidate those theories. As scientists, we
can break new ground.”

  Sister Terri smiled broadly. “My experience is the same. I don’t read scripture as either a history or a science text. Instead, I trust in the lives of those before me who had revelatory experiences of the divine. But I understand that these people lived two and three millennia ago in a different age with a different understanding of the mechanics of the world. I use their experiences as the starting point for my own spiritual practice. I seek my own revelation of God.”

  “Which brings us to the Logos!” Elijah jumped up from his stool.

  “It does,” Terri said, “but remember that the mind isn’t the only way we perceive. We understand through the heart too.” She touched her chest.

  “The heart?” Ethan asked.

  “Through love.”

  Love? He tried not to grimace. How does one measure love? Love was ephemeral, changing, impermanent. Intellectual truths were lasting. The memory of Natalie’s death arose again. Love could not be relied upon.

  The door to the lab opened, saving him from voicing his thoughts. Christian Sligh, wearing a striped rugby shirt with a blue and white Yale scarf tied around his neck and white knee-length shorts, strode in from the rainy weather looking like an out-of-place J. Crew ad.

  “Chris, where have you—” He stopped mid-question when he saw Rachel Riley standing next to him.

  Rachel shook off a dripping black raincoat that matched her shiny black boots, and gave Ethan a very pleased wink.

  “Sorry, Prof.” Chris flicked his head, moving the damp blond locks out of his eyes. “Didn’t Elijah tell you? He asked me to pick up Rachel from CapLab.”

  Ethan shot at look at Elijah, who had moved to the door and offered to take Rachel’s coat. He’d only wanted the three of them present.

  “Guess I forgot.” The senior professor shrugged. “Since Rachel observed the Logos in the context of the capuchins, I wanted to get her perspective on our first human trial.”