The Jericho Deception: A Novel (25 page)

“Why am I here?”

The CIA had funded his research, and now he was at some facility in the Middle East. With Wolfe’s history of mind-control experiments, he felt sure that they had something in mind that had to do with the Logos.
But what?

“What do you know about commercial tuna fishing?”

“I don’t under—”

“Sometimes, when you cast a wide net, you catch dolphins when what you really want is tuna.”

“What does that have to do with my machine?”

“In the war against Islamic fundamentalism that began after 9/11, our military and intelligence services, as well as those of friendly Arab nations, have rounded up suspected terrorists in an attempt to prevent future catastrophes. Our efforts have been largely effective. But sometimes, in addition to the hardcore terrorist leaders, we pick up lower-level operatives who we ultimately discover are not an immediate threat.”

“We hold innocents in prison?”

“Innocent?” He chuckled. “In this world, I’m not sure if that word has any meaning. Suffice it to say that these prisoners are eventually released, but before they can be sent back to their homes, many need to be rehabilitated from their time in captivity. We are here to integrate the dolphins back into society after the harrowing experience of being caught in the net.”

“You mean they’ve been tortured?”

“The things some of these men have been through.” A shudder passed through his body. “And not by our people,” he added quickly. “Our allies in this part of the world have different rules than we do.”

“What about our use of waterboarding and sensory deprivation?”

“We may interrogate terrorists using various psychological means, but our methods don’t cause real harm—nothing like the electricity to the genitals, the beatings, the pulling of fingernails that they do here. The atrocities these men have suffered are difficult to imagine.” He shook his head. “What these governments don’t understand is that physical torture is too blunt an instrument to use on a committed ideologue. The torture is often carried out by crude people who enjoy the barbarism.”

The isolated location of the warehouse in the middle of the desert, the high security, and the American guards—it all started to make sense to him. “So this place is some kind of covert psychological rehab facility for suspected terrorists?”

“When they come to us they are no longer prisoners. They are on their way home—after we have counseled them and nursed them back to health both physically and mentally.”

“So where are these men?” He guessed that he’d seen about a quarter of the warehouse building, but he had a hard time imagining that the rest would hold enough room for the type of operation Wolfe was describing.

A twinkle appeared in Wolfe’s eyes. “I think you’ll find this interesting.” He stood from his desk. “Follow me.”

Despite his unease, Ethan was curious. How was Wolfe rehabbing these prisoners, and what did the Logos have to do with it?

He followed the doctor out of the office to the elevator he’d passed earlier. Wolfe removed a lanyard from around his neck and swiped the attached card through a reader beside the elevator. The glass pad beside the reader came to life, glowing blue. When Wolfe pressed his palm against it, the light intensified around the edges of his hand, and the elevator door opened. The elevator was hospital spec, long enough to accommodate a stretcher. Inside, Ethan noted the lack of any buttons. They descended a short distance and stopped.

The knowledge that they were now underground increased his tension.

The door opened into a concrete tunnel that was only eight feet in height; he could reach up and almost touch the curved ceiling. He followed Wolfe to the left, ducking his head to avoid bumping into the various metal pipes and plastic conduits that crisscrossed the ceiling. When they turned a corner after walking about thirty feet, Wolfe stopped beside a glass window along the wall. All of the light in the corridor came from the window rather than the fluorescent fixtures suspended from the ceiling, which were powered off. Wolfe waited by the window.

The sight stopped Ethan in his tracks. He could sense the director grinning beside him.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

The scene before him was in stark contrast to everything else he’d seen in the building. The window looked into what appeared to be a replica of one of Yale’s college dining halls. The room on the other side of the glass was rectangular in shape with three long rows of wooden tables with matching benches that could seat over a hundred people. The floor was a dark oak, as were the thick timbers that rose from the walls to support a cathedral ceiling. Even stranger than the dining hall were the groupings of people eating. At least twenty men, all Middle Eastern in appearance, were dressed in the brown cassocks of Franciscan monks, while about ten others, all Americans, were dressed in the flowing black robes and white collars of priests.

“The Monastery, or as we refer to it, Project Jericho,” Wolfe said, as if that explained everything.

“I
don’t understand,” Ethan said for what felt like the tenth time. “These former prisoners”—he motioned through the window—“are Muslims, but they’re dressed as Christian monks.”

“Precisely.” Wolfe beamed.

“And the American priests?”

“Do you know why our intelligence services have failed so miserably in predicting, much less stopping, fundamentalist Islamic terrorist attacks?”

Ethan recalled the post-9/11 criticism of the American intelligence services missing the obvious signs of the impending attack. “Because we didn’t put enough resources behind the task after the Cold War ended?”

Wolfe shook his head. “A popular but mistaken view.” He paced in front of what Ethan assumed was a one-way window as the monks and priests dined on the other side. “During the Cold War we faced an enemy who ruled its population through coercion based on an economic ideology—communism—that ultimately proved unsustainable. In a country where you had to wait in line for toilet paper, bribing a government official to pass us secrets was easy. Our enemy today, however, is motivated by a drive stronger than money, sex, or even political power.”

“Religion?”

“Exactly. Look at the populations of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran: you have a handful of elites in power and then masses of uneducated people with little hope for advancement or prosperity. The men in these societies are often at
dead ends, barely scraping by. Multiple wives are permitted, but only the wealthy can afford a single one, much less more. This leaves little hope for these young men to earn more than a menial living, not enough to support a family. Then they go to a mosque and they hear the promise of the paradise that Allah will deliver to them. In these barren landscapes, paradise is depicted not only as overflowing with abundance, like an oasis in the desert, but as offering the promise of young virgins. How does one enter this paradise, the mullahs preach?”

“Through martyrdom.”

Wolfe nodded. “These men are indoctrinated from a young age, when their futures look hopeless. They are brainwashed by a form of Islamic fundamentalism that we’ve found almost impossible to penetrate. When dying for your cause is believed to be the ultimate reward, there’s little earthly persuasion we can use to change their minds.”

Ethan looked through the window at the men dressed as Christian monks. “So you’re trying to convert them?”

“What if we could take a religiously polluted mind and clean it as one might clean the bacteria from a kitchen counter after a piece of raw meat sat there?”

He saw where this was heading. An unease passed through his gut as the image of Sister Terri reclining in the Logos flashed through his head. “But Islam isn’t the problem. It’s illiteracy, poverty, dictatorships, and ego-driven mullahs who distort its teachings.”

“We can never eliminate the inequality and poverty in these countries. But what if we can eliminate the religious reaction to it? What if we have a way to wipe the infected counter down and then serve healthy food there?”

The unease grew in his stomach like a widening gulf, but at the same time the scientific side of his mind was curious. He knew that deprogramming someone who had been brainwashed was a time-consuming and inexact process. He recalled the case studies he’d read in medical school of people who had been kidnapped and kept prisoner for extended periods of time. The victims often began to identify and even grow to love their captors, a condition known as Stockholm syndrome. Undoing the psychological damage could take years.

“How?”

Wolfe turned from the window and continued down the corridor. He stopped beside a row of metal lockers. He opened the first one and withdrew a long silken robe of silver and gold that he pulled over his head. Next he attached a white-banded collar around his neck. The rosaries that went last completed the picture.

“You look just like—”

“Inside they call me ‘The Bishop.’” He winked.

Then he opened another locker door and removed a simple black cassock. “Put this over your head. The arms go here and here. And then tie the belt around your waist.” After some fumbling with the material, Ethan did as instructed. Wolfe then retrieved a white collar from the locker. “Let me do this. These can be tricky.”

When Wolfe snapped the collar into place, Ethan had to resist the instinct to tug on it. He felt the stiff material when he swallowed. When Wolfe stepped aside, he stared at the three-quarter-length mirror hanging on the inside of the locker door. The image reflected back at him was as foreign as this strange place. He’d never been comfortable in churches, and yet here he was, the image of a pious Catholic priest.

“Around the brothers—that’s how we refer to our guests here—please do not ask questions. We must carefully control their experiences.”

Wolfe moved to a door on the far side of the lockers. Rather than the electronic locks of the elevator, this had a simple numeric keypad. He pressed the numbers quickly, his body shielding the pad from Ethan’s view.

Behind the door, the utilitarian concrete tunnel transformed in a way that rivaled what Disney Imagineers might have designed. They stepped into what appeared to be a centuries-old European monastery with stone floors, a plastered groin vaulted ceiling, and sconces of candles along the long wall. The soothing sound of chanting echoed through the hall. When Ethan inhaled incense, his body seemed to relax of its own accord. He couldn’t guess what it had cost to construct such a space underneath the Egyptian desert. Then he thought about how quickly Wolfe had handed the check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Elijah.

Wolfe’s hand on his elbow guided him down the corridor. “When I first imagined the Monastery, I borrowed from some of the more effective techniques we experimented with forty-five years ago.”

He paused by a heavy mahogany door and motioned for him to peer inside a square window with decorative iron bars crisscrossed over the opening. The small room contained a desk with a chair and a single twin bed. A man with a dark complexion lay sleeping. An IV bag hung next to the bed, the line snaking under the covers.

“We begin with two to four weeks of sleep and drug therapy, which allows the brothers to heal physically from their ordeals while also softening them up for the immersion stage.”

Ethan knew that prolonged sleep could have profound psychological effects on a subject—they woke up disoriented and more pliable to suggestion. He glanced again at the IV bag and speculated at the drug cocktails given to the men: Thorazine, Ambien, Nembutal, Propofol, Seconal, Veronal, Phenergan.

“I thought MKULTRA failed because these techniques were too imprecise.”

“That’s why I created this.” He gestured to the surroundings. “One of the lessons we learned from the use of psychoactive drugs was that the setting in which the subjects took them had almost as large an effect on the experience as the drugs themselves. Here in the Monastery, we immerse these men for months in an environment where we control everything they’re exposed to.”

Wolfe stopped in front of a second door, identical to the first, looked inside, and then gestured for Ethan to do the same. As he bent over, he thought he detected a smile on the director’s face. This room was identical to the first, but the Arab man on the bed was awake, sitting up, and talking to another man. The other man had his back to the door, but Ethan noted his slicked-back blond hair, white collar, and black cassock.

“After we bring them out of sleep therapy, each is assigned one of my priests. Instruction consists of hours of Bible readings along with discussions of the benefits of Christianity.”

“I take it they are no more priests than I am.”

Wolfe’s smile grew. He walked toward a set of double doors carved out of thick wood at the dead end of the corridor. “They’re trained in psychology, all
have a minimum of a master’s degree, and some have their PhDs. Many are fluent in Arabic and Farsi. But each is also a committed Christian, well versed in scripture.”

“But how is what you’re doing any different than the indoctrination they received to Islam?” His voice came out louder than he intended.

“Isn’t that obvious?” Wolfe scrunched up his brow as if mystified why Ethan would have asked the question. “They will now belong to us.”

Ethan bit his tongue. Religious intolerance had been the cause of so many wars and so much suffering throughout history that he had a hard time imagining the Monastery would do anything other than perpetuate the misery. The audacity of what this man was attempting to do—in a Muslim country, no less—astounded him.
If this ever becomes public
, he thought.

Then a more disturbing question passed through his mind:
Why is he telling me this?
For what had to be a top secret project of the highest sensitivity, Wolfe was being loose with the details. The distinguished doctor seemed to relish in his creation, appeared almost eager to show it off.
What does he want from me?

“These men have spent a lifetime being indoctrinated into their Islamic beliefs; how can you undo that in just a few months?”