The Jericho Deception: A Novel

by Jeffrey Small

  Ethan clenched his fists. Hearing her recount Axe’s assault caused a surge of anger to flow through his veins. He recalled the locked door to the private jet’s bedroom and realized that she’d been drugged there while he’d enjoyed the luxuries of the main cabin. The guilt of realizing that he’d been worrying about his career while she’d been in terror for her life only deepened the pit in his gut. And to make matters worse, he thought, she’s only here because of my research. The desire to embrace her and hold her was overpowering. He wanted to protect Rachel with every cell in his body, yet he wasn’t even sure how he was going to protect himself. Even if Chris agreed to help them escape, he struggled to think how they would elude the security of the place.

  “We’re in Aswan, Egypt,” he said, trying to connect with her. “I was on the plane too. The pilot told me the bedroom in the back was being renovated. You must have been in there.”

  She turned her head toward him, the fire still in her eyes. “Egypt?”

  Something about her wild-eyed look in that moment made her all the more beautiful. He motioned to the bed. “Maybe if we sit down for a moment, Chris can explain what’s going on here.”

  “I’ll stand.” She whipped her head back to Chris. “Explain.”

  “First of all”—Chris swallowed—“I had no idea that you were here at the Monastery until last night; second, James Axelrod, the man who kidnapped you, went beyond his orders in his methods. Axe has a way about him.” Chris turned the wooden stick he had taken from Rachel over in his hands. Then he went to the small table by the bed and stuck it back where it belonged—it was the rear leg closest to the bed.

  Watching his student, a realization struck Ethan like a bat to the chest. Axe had been Wolfe’s muscle in New Haven. The hulking man had followed them in the library and assaulted Rachel. He recalled Wolfe’s veiled admission of involvement in Elijah’s murder. A nauseous feeling rose from his stomach to his throat. Axe killed Elijah. He wanted to yell, but, seeing Rachel’s expression, he held his breath to suppress the words that wanted to spill out.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Monastery?”

  Chris launched into the same description of the facility hidden under a warehouse in the Egyptian desert that Wolfe had given Ethan earlier. Rachel listened in silence. After Chris spoke about the importance of the project and the potential to bring a long-standing peace to the region through the introduction of a religion based on a mystical experience of the Christian God, Rachel began to fire off many of the same objections Ethan had posed earlier. Chris looked uncomfortable with his canned answers.

  When it was obvious that she wasn’t accepting his rationalizations, Chris whispered, “Look, when I was working with you two in New Haven, I didn’t know the extent of Jericho either. I certainly had no idea Wolfe would bring either of you here.”

  “So why exactly am I here?” She crossed her arms.

  “Wolfe was following all aspects of our research at Yale. When you raised a red flag about an anomaly in one of your monkeys, we ignored it at first. After all, monkeys aren’t human, and it’s not like they had epileptic attacks or anything.”

  Rachel’s expression hardened. Chris continued, “But when we experienced two negative reactions to the Logos here, Wolfe took your claims seriously.”

  “Rachel, I—” Ethan began.

  “Please leave.” She flopped on the bed and put her face in her hands.

  “I know it’s a lot,” Chris said. “Rest and we’ll come back later.”

  As his student led him out of the room, the one nagging question in the back of Ethan’s mind resurfaced. He knew from her reaction that she wasn’t part of Jericho. He wanted to reach out to her, to convince her that he wasn’t part of the conspiracy either, but he had to address his one remaining doubt. He stopped in the doorway.

  “When Samuel Houston called me to his office when you and I were at Koffee together, he mentioned that you two had been speaking.” Before he could articulate his question, Rachel lifted her head. Her expression was no longer steely. She seemed to be questioning him, as if she was trying to look deep inside his soul to uncover the truth of his involvement.

  “Sam is my father.”

  CHAPTER 45

  THE MONASTERY

  Ethan watched Mousa through the one-way window in the doorway. Seeing the Jordanian doctor go through his exercise routine reminded him how much he missed his recent workouts at Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium. A hard workout on the rock-climbing wall would do him good now, especially with the tension he was feeling from his encounter with Rachel an hour ago. Houston is her father? Her admission had caused him to step back into her room, but Chris had pulled him out and closed the door. His student was right; she’d been traumatized. His questions could wait a couple of hours.

  He returned his attention to the doctor, another innocent caught up in Wolfe’s web. Mousa had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d been torn from his family. He’d suffered physical and mental torture that Ethan couldn’t even imagine enduring, and now Wolfe wanted to use his technology to destroy the man’s faith. The doctor had healed physically from his unjust imprisonment; he should be headed home. But Wolfe planned to keep him there, continuing the brainwashing until he broke, just to prove the efficacy of Jericho. Thinking of his work being used on men like Mousa compounded the anger Ethan felt at learning of Elijah’s murder and Rachael’s kidnapping.

  An escape plan began to form in his head, one in which Mousa would play a role. He felt a kindred connection with the orthopedic surgeon. Getting out of the Monastery was only part of the problem. They would have to navigate their way through a foreign country without being caught by Wolfe’s henchmen. He’d seen enough movies to be wary of the technological capabilities of the CIA. Public transportation would be out of the question. Since neither he nor Rachel spoke any Arabic, the Jordanian would be critical once they were on the road. He knocked on the door, swiped his card key in front of the sensor, and entered the room.

  Mousa looked up and smiled as he closed the door behind him. “Hello, Doctor.”

  “Doctor.” He returned the smile.

  Mousa’s smile then vanished. “Why are you still keeping me here?”

  Right to the point, he thought.

  Before he could reply, Mousa continued, “These priests are determined in their efforts to convert me.”

  Ethan pulled the wooden chair to the side of the bed and sat. “Why haven’t you just gone along with them? Humored them?”

  Mousa’s voice grew stronger. “That would be the easy thing to do, yes? I’m happy to read their scripture and even speak their prayers. The Prophet himself had deep respect for the Christian and Jewish writings—but I cannot betray my faith, just as they cannot betray theirs.”

  “But if it would get you out of here sooner?”

  “Do you know the origins of the mistrust of the Arab world for the West?”

  “Our support for Israel over the Palestinians.”

  Mousa shook his head. “A modern example of a much older trend. You’re familiar with the Crusades, I assume?”

  “Around the twelfth century, weren’t they? I know a lot of atrocities were committed in an attempt to take the Holy Land from Muslim control.”

  “For over two hundred years, Christian crusaders came from Western Europe and slaughtered Islamic civilians, including women and children, for their faith. In the West today, your press writes about the Jihads, or Holy Wars, that a small minority of our fundamentalist sects declare, but during the Crusades, your various popes called it ‘just war,’ and they promised the forgiveness of sins to any Christians who traveled East as part of the campaigns. They were free from guilt or blame for any murder, torture, rape, or pillaging. For those who died in the battles for Jerusalem, the popes promised that they would be taken up immediately to Heaven, with no stopover in Purgatory.”

  “The fundamentalists in your tradition today use the same techniques to motivate martyrs into their terroris
t acts.”

  “Religion is about love, peace, compassion, and meaning, but humans use religion as a tool to justify intolerance, violence, and war.”

  “We kill each other over whose God is the more loving.”

  Mousa chuckled at this. “But is religion the problem, or is it that fallible human beings are interpreting the infinite divine through a limited lens of finite perception?”

  Ethan glanced at his hands. “You remind me of my mentor.”

  “Just look at our own profession. Doctors work to cure illness and save lives. But doctors have also been the ones who’ve created biological weapons. Physicists strive to understand the meaning behind the universe, yet they created nuclear weapons. Science has given us the tools both to understand the universe and to destroy the world in a way that religion never could.”

  Ethan studied Mousa’s dark eyes, which were alive with energy. Then he removed the stethoscope from around his neck. He leaned in toward the Jordanian and feigned listening to his heart. He suspected from the time he’d spent in the server room that all of the cells were under surveillance. He wasn’t sure if it was just video or whether it included audio as well, so he dropped his voice to a whisper.

  “Are you ready to return to your family?”

  “Now?” The surgeon’s voice broke and his eyes welled up.

  “Tell me what you know about the Egyptian city of Aswan,” Ethan whispered.

  One of the many problems in the nascent plan he was working out was that he knew little about this country.

  A confused expression passed over Mousa’s face. Then he seemed to catch on and spoke in similar hushed tones. “A tourist destination for people who want to cruise the Nile. I’ve done it twice. Boats travel between Aswan and Luxor, which, aside from the pyramids of Giza, contain the most visited of Egypt’s ancient sites. It’s a few days’ trip, depending on the number of stops you make.”

  A major tourist destination means lots of people, especially Westerners, Ethan thought. They would be able to blend in, maybe even find someone willing to help them. He moved the stethoscope from Mousa’s chest to his back. “Breathe deeply,” he said loudly. Then he lowered his voice again and began to explain everything he knew to Mousa.

  CHAPTER 46

  THE MONASTERY

  Ethan swiped his key card and turned the knob to Rachel’s door. His heart beat out a loud rhythm in his chest. When he entered and closed the door behind him, she lifted her head of disheveled hair from where she sat on the edge of her bed and looked at him with red, puffy eyes.

  “Rachel”—he shuffled from foot to foot—“I swear I had no idea that—”

  “I know,” she said softly. “Chris came back a few minutes ago and explained everything again. I just can’t believe I’m here. I mean, I’m just a grad student studying monkeys.”

  He took a step closer to the bed and hesitated. “I’m so sorry. I can’t help but think that this is my fault. If it weren’t for my research—”

  She stood, rushed to him, and threw her arms around his neck. Her body pressed into his while she buried her face into his chest. When he wrapped his arms around her, she squeezed him tight. “Stop it,” she said. “That Allen Wolfe guy who runs this place had his ideas long before you and Elijah made the Logos work.”

  He knew that she was right, but he felt an urge that seemed to originate in the deepest level of his cellular structure to protect her. If he hadn’t gotten close to her, she wouldn’t be here now. But he also knew that his desire to escape with her went deeper than a mere sense of responsibility.

  “I’m going to get you out of here,” he whispered in her ear.

  “How?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  They held each for several minutes before she stepped back and looked up into his face. “I bet your mind has been spinning from my revelation too.” She managed a smile.

  “Samuel Houston is your dad?”

  She ran her fingers through her hair, combing the wide strands from her face. “I should have told you sooner, but I was afraid it might change the way you saw me.”

  “But you have different last names.”

  “After my parents’ divorce, Mom changed back to her maiden name, Riley. When I started at Yale, I registered under that instead of Houston. I wanted to succeed on my own merits, not because I was a senior faculty member’s daughter.”

  He felt a twinge of discomfort at her keeping this information from him, but then he understood it too. He reported to Houston, and he probably would have distanced himself from her had he known about their relationship.

  “But you followed in his footsteps?”

  “Crazy, isn’t it? If it weren’t for CapLab, I would have gone somewhere else. But the strange thing is that we’ve gotten closer the last few years. I began to understand that behind his walled-off, controlling exterior lies the heart of a moral, good man dedicated to educating young people.”

  When Ethan thought back to his conversation with Houston, he recalled the rare warm tone the administrator had used when he’d mentioned her. “I think in his own way, he loves you deeply.”

  “He, like some other people I know”—she took his hand—“struggles to show how he truly feels. I tried to talk you up around him, though.”

  She spun around, dragged the chair from the table over to the bed, and plopped down on top of the covers, crossing her legs underneath her. When he sat in the chair, he noticed a small tattoo just above her delicate ankle. He was used to seeing her in boots, but now her feet were bare, and with her sweatpants pulled over her toned calves he could see what looked like the number three written in calligraphy.

  “It’s Om,” she said. He felt his face redden at being caught checking out her legs, and he cut his eyes back to her face. She was smiling. “The Sanskrit symbol for the universal divine that is the ultimate reality beyond all existence.”

  Ultimate reality, he thought. His mind flickered to his core motivation for his research—a longing to understand. He pushed the thought away.

  “I can barely touch my toes,” he joked. “Not sure I could make it through a yoga class chanting an ancient Indian syllable.”

  She leaned toward him, placed her hands on his knees, and peered into his eyes. “I’m not buying the whole Mister Science act. You dedicated your career to studying and reproducing mystical experiences. I can’t believe that you chose this path only because your mom dragged you to her fundamentalist church after your father died.”

  Her directness unsettled him. He considered deflecting the question, as he’d done many times in the past, but the expression on her face told him that she would know if he was holding back the truth. Why did I join Elijah? Why did I become a doctor and a neurologist? The memory from his youth that he’d never discussed with anyone but Natalie flashed into his consciousness: an experience that he could explain scientifically but had never understood in his heart. He gazed into Rachel’s eyes and realized that for the first time in years, in spite of the frightening conditions they were under at Wolfe’s secret facility, he felt safe.

  “I was thirteen, and it was the day after my birthday,” he began. “My doctor thought that my frequent headaches were just migraines. Later I learned that epilepsy is often misdiagnosed as migraines.”

  “You have epilepsy? Like your patients?”

  “My best friend, Charlie, and I were jumping on the trampoline I’d gotten for my birthday. We took turns shooting each other with water guns as we bounced and then pretended to die dramatically. But one time I tried to shoot Charlie my hand froze. I couldn’t pull the trigger. The next thing I knew I was lying on the damp grass. I don’t remember falling, and I didn’t feel any pain. Charlie was saying something, but I couldn’t make out the words, like he was calling to me from a distance.” He fidgeted with his hands. “Did you ever play the cloud game?”

  “Yeah, my friends and I would try to spot bunnies, cats, and dogs in the sky.”

  “Charlie and I did t
oo, but we searched for characters from Lord of the Rings: elves, hobbits, dwarves, and especially Gollum. But that day the clouds transfixed me in a weird way. I saw geometrical shapes. It was as if the clouds were revealing a secret substructure that wasn’t normally visible to the naked eye. The longer I stared, the deeper the substructure seemed to go.”

  “You experienced a hidden vision of reality?”

  He nodded. “Suddenly, Charlie’s head came into view, blocking the clouds. He looked concerned, but I was focused only on the lines that connected his pupils to each other. Then another axis appeared to run from his forehead to his chin. I squinted, and his face disappeared into a superstructure of intersecting and connected vectors. Just as I’d seen a veiled structure behind the clouds moments before, I now saw the structure behind Charlie.”

  “So this geometry that made up your friend was part of the same geometry that made up the clouds?”

  “But there was more. I couldn’t help but wonder: was I part of the same structure? As I had that thought, my body began to tremble, and I fell unconscious.”

  “Your seizure became a grand mal?”

  “I woke up in the ambulance with my parents cramped into the space beside my stretcher. Dad was really worried, and Mom cried as she held my hand. I remember trying to sit, but the straps across my chest held me down. After several days of tests, my doctors prescribed me Topiramate to prevent future seizures and to alleviate my headaches. I’ve taken it for the past twenty years.”

  She peered even deeper into his eyes. “Your education has been driven by a desire to understand neurologically what happened that day.”