The Jericho Deception: A Novel (16 page)

Could it be
?

He turned the key. It moved freely. The door was already unlocked. Pushing it open, his eyes widened at the sight in the center of the room.

“Elijah?”

His mentor lay semi-reclined in the green vinyl chair of the Logos. His eyes were closed and the solenoids were placed above his head. The hum he’d heard outside the lab was the machine vibrating as it cycled through its various frequencies of electromagnetic pulses. But the noises coming from the machine were louder than during their usual tests.

“Elijah!” he shouted over the machine as he hurried to the center of the room.

The elder professor was unresponsive. His mind raced.
Did he come in early to test the machine on himself? Did he of all people choose to violate our protocols
? But something struck him as odd. The machine wasn’t acting the way it should have with his programming. He reached out to shake his friend out of his trance. That’s when he noticed Elijah’s pallid complexion.

“Oh my God,” Rachel cried.

He felt his blood jump from his chest to his head, as if his heart had kicked into overdrive. He searched for a pulse in the carotid artery on his neck. Elijah’s skin was cold and firm to the touch. Even as he probed his fingers next to Elijah’s trachea, he knew he wouldn’t find a heartbeat. He pulled back Elijah’s eyelid, exposing a fixed, glassy pupil.

“Call 911!” he shouted.

He grabbed the metal lever on the side of the chair and wrenched it downward. The chair flattened so that Elijah was prone at the level of Ethan’s waist. He knocked the arm of the Logos out of his way. The sound of the metal bouncing on the wood floor hardly registered with him. With the heel of his right hand, he pressed Elijah’s forehead backward while pinching his nose with his thumb and index fingers; with his left hand, he pulled the professor’s gray, stubble-covered chin up and outwards. He delivered two forceful breaths, watching out of the corner of his eye as the professor’s chest expanded with each breath. Then he began chest compressions.

“Come on, Elijah!” he begged.

But he knew his efforts would be in vain. The sharp compressions made Elijah’s body jerk, and the remnants of the breaths he’d given him fluttered out of his lips, but Ethan’s medical training told him that it was an illusion of life. Nothing he could do would bring his mentor back. In spite of this knowledge, he continued the CPR.

“Why, Elijah? Why?” He spoke quietly to his friend as he continued to pump away on his chest, as if his sheer willpower could work magic. The recliner squeaked in time to his compressions.

He heard Rachel frantically explaining their emergency to the operator, yelling over the continued hum of the Logos. He tried to think of the possibilities of what had happened, but his thoughts came in slow motion, like they were trudging through a bog on their way to his consciousness.
Did he have a heart attack or a stroke while testing the machine?
The blue tint to his lips suggested that oxygen deprivation of the brain had been involved in the cause of death. The calm way in which his body was lying in the chair suggested that unconsciousness had come quickly and unexpectedly.
But why
would Elijah test the machine on himself, and why is the Logos acting so strangely?

The doctor within him told him to stop. But he couldn’t force himself to give up on his friend. He had lost his fiancée three years ago and his dad years before that; how could he lose Elijah now? When he paused the compressions to give another two breaths, something caught his attention that he hadn’t noticed earlier.

Tilting the professor’s chin upwards, he saw a thin red welt across his neck. He traced a finger along its path. The possibility of a more disturbing cause of death began to circle his mind.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. “The paramedics will be here in five minutes.”

He nodded, unable to speak the words that went through his head. An ambulance wouldn’t matter now. He stumbled back from the recliner.

“Why are you stopping? You’re a doctor! You can save him, right?”

He shook his head. “He’s been dead for hours.” The words sounded so clinical coming from his mouth, as if another doctor was delivering the news.

“But—”

He swallowed back the burning in his throat and turned to Rachel, but he was unable to prevent the tears that began to stream down his face.

“Oh, God.” She threw her arms around his neck.

He held her tight.
Why, Elijah?
He buried his face in her hair, finding some comfort in the embrace of this woman he’d only just gotten to know. Then her body began to shake as she started to cry.

After several minutes, the vibration from the Logos box and the rattling of the arm against the floor pierced through the fog of confusion and sadness in his mind. He couldn’t think properly. He gently moved her hands from his neck, walked behind the recliner, and jerked the power cord from the wall. A wave of silence washed over the room.

“W
hen will the autopsy take place?” Ethan looked up from his office chair at the New Haven police officer, one of several crowded into the lab.

“Weekend’s coming up.” The officer, a thirty-something African American male with close-cropped hair, tore off a piece of paper from a white spiral pad and handed him a phone number. “Call the coroner’s office Monday.”

The officer flipped back several pages and reviewed the notes he’d taken over the past two hours. The crime scene investigators had arrived an hour earlier. They had photographed the scene and were now zipping Elijah into a black body bag. Rachel stood by his chair and squeezed his arm.

“Now, Doctor,” the officer said, “I want to make sure I have this correct. You noticed this welt on Professor Schiff’s neck some time after you began CPR?”

Ethan dropped his head and ran his fingers through his hair. If he weren’t so drained, he would have yelled at the officer. How many times did he have to answer the same questions? Although the officer spoke in a cooperative tone, Ethan had the feeling that he was trying to twist his account around, as if to insinuate that he had played some role in his friend’s death. He was grateful to feel Rachel’s touch. Her eyes were red and puffy, but they were dry now, and her gaze was strong. He was comforted having her by his side.

“That’s exactly what I said. Will the coroner be examining that as a potential cause of death?”

“We will be looking into all the possibilities. Now, again, just so I’m clear. This machine of yours”—he turned a page in his notebook—“this Logos was running when you entered the office?”

“You could hear it from the hallway it was so loud,” Rachel said.

“Was it normal for you to run experiments on yourselves, with no one else present?” The officer peered over his notebook at him.

“I’ve already answered that.” He started to rise. He didn’t like either the officer’s tone or the direction in which the questioning was heading. Rachel’s hand on his arm tightened. He sat back in the chair and released the breath he’d been holding. “Elijah never would have done that.”

Then a thought occurred to him. “Wait a minute!”

He jumped from his chair, causing both the officer and Rachel to flinch. He hurried to the Logos. Everything about Elijah’s death was wrong: his presence alone in the chair, the red welts on his neck,
the way the machine had been running
.

Ethan knew one thing with certainty: Elijah had been murdered.

“Over here,” he called.

The officer approached the Logos as if the peripherals on his belt weighed him down. Ethan pointed to the controls on the back of the metal box. A faint layer of powder covered the box where a technician had just finished dusting for fingerprints. Ethan and Rachel had given prints to the technician so that theirs would be distinguished from any unknown persons.

“The Logos isn’t set up properly.” He tapped on the empty Ethernet jack. “It’s just a reconditioned TMS machine.” Noting the blank look on the officer’s face, he elaborated, “A medical device used to treat depression by sending magnetic impulses to the brain. We developed a proprietary programming for our experiments that is delivered from my laptop into this jack here. These dials”—he gestured to the dials on the machine underneath the square LED display—“also control the machine. They are all turned up to the maximum level. None of these settings are consistent with our work.”

“Is it possible—”

Ethan shook his head, anticipating the question. “The machine in its original configuration is FDA-approved. Even at these high settings, it could never
be fatal. The electromagnetic fields it generates are much too small for that.”

“You’re saying the machine couldn’t have killed him, in your medical opinion?”

The last phrase rubbed him the wrong way.
It isn’t opinion
, he thought. “What I’m saying is that Elijah was murdered.”

“Who would want to kill the professor?

“No one.” He cast his eyes to the floor. The words came out softly. “Elijah was the gentlest man I’ve ever known.”

The officer closed his notebook and nodded to two of his colleagues, who stood by the door.

“We’ll be in touch, Dr. Lightman.” He handed him a business card. “In the meantime, please call if you think of anything else, no matter how insignificant.”

“Certainly, I . . . Wait! What are they doing?” The two other officers had coiled the power cord on top of the Logos and were lifting it off of the cart.

“Your machine is evidence in our investigation. We’ll need to take it with us.”

“But it’s one of a kind! I already told you it couldn’t have caused his death.”

“It will be returned, eventually.”

“You don’t understand. This project was the culmination of Elijah’s lifetime of research.”

“Well, it’s not going to continue until after this investigation.”

As the officers carried both Elijah’s body and his most important work out the door of the lab, Ethan felt as if they were taking his life with them too.

D
eputy Director Casey Richards cracked his knuckles as he surveyed the room and its three other occupants. The anticipation of the first test of Project Jericho weighed on him heavier than any black op he’d overseen in his career. Jericho was the most ambitious and riskiest covert action the Agency had conducted since the events leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis fifty years earlier.

The windowless operations room on the sixth floor in the center of the CIA’s NHB, New Headquarters Building, was like its bigger brother in the OHB, only smaller. Behind a sentry-guarded, card-accessed metal door, the ops room was soundproofed and isolated from any electronic eavesdropping through its construction as a floating room within a room. Three fifty-inch flat-panel monitors hung on the wall underneath a row of LED clocks displaying the time in various zones across the world. The four desks in the center of the room each contained two workstations. He preferred the use of this smaller ops room to monitor the most sensitive operations. The fewer people who were exposed to these off-the-books actions, the more he could maintain operational security and deniability; plus, the room was just down the hall from his office.

One of the two technicians in the room, a late-thirties woman with black cat-eye glasses and dark hair tied in a neat bun on top of her head, keyed in a command at her workstation. One of the flat panels came to life, switching from the blue CIA logo to a satellite picture of a mountainous region.
Alternating patches of evergreen trees weaved between brown patches of dirt and rocks. The technician entered another command and the picture zoomed in to reveal a village of tin and wood shacks dotting the foot of one of the mountains. The resolution from the satellites never ceased to impress him. He could count the sheep and goats grazing in the wood pens behind the huts.

The second technician, a new but thoroughly vetted recruit in his late-twenties, who held a PhD from MIT and spoke fluent Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto—the result of a Pakistani father and Egyptian mother, both doctors and US citizens—held his hands on either side of the Bose headphones on his ears, his eyes focused somewhere beyond the room.

“Shouldn’t they have arrived by now?” asked the silver-haired man standing beside him.

Richards turned to face the doctor. They had become friends fifteen years earlier after his son’s attempted suicide. The doctor had saved his son’s life, though with the various medications his son took he sometimes found it hard to recognize the boy he had raised.

“It’s only been two hours. The road’s pretty rough.”

He suspected that the impatient and imperious tone the doctor had taken masked an apprehension that the mission might fail. Both of their careers were riding on this. The doctor was the mastermind behind Project Jericho. In two years, Richards had already pumped twenty million dollars from one of his discretionary accounts into a program that had no paper trail—a program that had the potential to destroy both of their careers and bring down a popular president who had no idea of its existence. More troubling was the devastation that public knowledge of Jericho would have on US relations with the Arab world. They were risking an all-out religious war in the Middle East, a confrontation in which the US would be isolated from any sympathetic nations.

The potential payoff, however, was just as grand. The arrogant doctor had a concept as brilliant as it was dangerous; a concept that had the potential to bring a lasting and stable peace to a region that had been seized by religious warfare for thousands of years. Richards understood that being the world’s only superpower meant making those types of difficult decisions.