The Jericho Deception: A Novel (27 page)

A
t 3:16 in the morning the Monastery chapel was as quiet inside as it had appeared on the security monitor when James Axelrod had checked it ten minutes earlier. Although he was Jericho’s head of security, Axe—the nickname he’d picked up when he enlisted in the Navy determined to become a SEAL—had volunteered to take the night watch that evening. He’d caught a few hours’ sleep on the trip back from the States, but these days he rarely slept well anyway. The nightmares had been getting worse. He glanced at the shiny skin along his wrist where he’d sealed the gash caused by Rachel Riley’s razor with surgical glue. Wolfe had chuckled when he’d recounted his difficulty with the monkey girl.

He lowered himself into the throne that held the Logos, feeling his glutes settle into the velvet cushion of the seat. His left ass cheek was still sore from the injection he’d given himself before his workout in the Monastery gym that afternoon. Being ambidextrous made shooting up easier—right hand for right cheek, left for left—just as it gave him an advantage in firing his H&K nine-millimeter with equal accuracy in either hand. He relished the power that came with starting a new cycle, stacking testosterone cypionate, deca, and HGH. He’d also popped a Nolvadex, an aromatase inhibitor that prevented the extra testosterone in his body from being converted into estrogen. The last thing he wanted was bitch tits.

Sitting in Wolfe’s throne, he recalled his mother’s voice from a decade ago, admonishing him as an eighteen-year-old, “Jimmy, don’t get too big or you’re
going to look like a freak.” What his mother didn’t understand was that he wanted to be a freak; he wanted to be superhuman. He would never again suffer as he had when he’d spent his entire twelfth year in and out of hospitals. The kid who’d once been a robust Little League player had wasted away month after month while his doctors struggled to fight the infections that ravaged his young body. Between courses of antibiotics, they had performed multiple skin grafts on his severely burnt legs. His mother had prayed by his hospital bed every day. She’d begged God not to punish her foolish child by putting him through such a terrible ordeal.

Jimmy, as only his mother called him, had known why he was suffering.
But it wasn’t my fault,
he’d told himself through tears. Bobby, his best friend since birth, had been the one to suggest spraying the stray cat with gasoline. Jimmy had just carried out the idea. And struck the match.

The doctors eventually rid his body of the infections, and the skin grafts on his legs left them fully functional but horribly scarred. To a child, the new skin the doctors were so proud of appeared to belong to an alien. His legs had also atrophied to sticks. He left the hospital a different boy: frail, but determined to rebuild himself into a new person. The emotional and financial strain of his treatment had worsened his father’s alcoholism, and it wrecked his parents’ marriage. They divorced six months after he healed.

He toyed with the LCD remote he’d swiped from the surveillance room. Wolfe had proudly explained that the protocol was automated. All he had to do was press the power button on the remote, wait for a short warm-up, and then click on the start icon. The machine would cycle through the programming, shutting off when it was finished.

He knew that he’d be disciplined if he got caught, but the temptation was too great. His main concern was whether the machine would work. Two men had gone crazy after using it, but he felt that the problem was most likely in the weak-minded men it had been used on. For the eighteen others, the results had been good.

Flexing his traps and then his delts, he felt blood pour into his shoulders. He liked the feeling of tightness in his muscles; it reminded him of his size. That afternoon he’d trained legs: seven sets each of squats, hack squats, leg
presses, and leg extensions. Most people hated leg days, but he embraced the apprehension of staring down the squat rack, the bar bending from the 550 pounds of plates. It hurt like hell, but he’d attacked the weight. At the end of the first set, he’d run to a trashcan and vomited. Then he’d taken a swig of water and gone back for the next one. He was a legend in the gym for his pain tolerance. What his colleagues didn’t know was that nothing he could do in the gym was worse than what he’d endured when he was twelve. He didn’t mind the burning in his muscles; in fact, he relished it. Through punishment, he would grow stronger.

He shifted his weight in the throne and thought about the brilliance of Wolfe’s dream of creating a new type of Christian soldier to battle the Islamic terrorists.
If this machine can create confident Christians from these broken-down Arabs, imagine what it will do to me.
Weeks earlier, he’d mentioned to Wolfe his idea of using the Logos on the Americans in the facility. They would strengthen their faith in doing God’s work here, emboldening themselves further to serve their country and their Lord.

The Bishop had gotten a twinkle in his eye and said, “Patience, my boy.”

But Axe wasn’t patient. He’d built his body to superhuman proportions through his own determination and action, not by waiting around for others to help him. Tonight he would act. He would purge the remnants of the skinny, scared boy that still lurked in his mind. He would rid himself of the nightmares that still plagued his sleep.

The dream was always some variation of hell. His mother had described the horned devil many times in his childhood. After his parents’ divorce, she had become bitter and had turned to the small church down the road for comfort. The stories the minister told and his mother repeated every night before his bedtime had frightened him. He couldn’t remember when the nightmares began, but they woke him in a shivering sweat several nights a week. Beelzebub, whose face morphed between a man’s and a lizard’s, would tie him up and shoot flames at him from long, black fingernails. He would struggle against the ropes that held his ankles and wrists to a wooden cross, but he didn’t have the strength to break the bonds. In the dream, Axe was missing his muscle—the muscle that acted both as a shield and a sword when he was awake.

If the professor’s machine worked—if it really allowed him to speak with God—he would ask Him to banish Satan from his dreams. When he’d described his dreams to his mother, she’d explained that God was punishing him through Satan’s fire because of his wickedness. Tonight he would explain to God how he’d redeemed himself. He’d built himself into a warrior in order to serve Him.

He stretched his head to the left and the right. The tendons in his neck strained with the effort. One drawback to his size was that it did limit his range of motion, but that was a small price to pay for the benefit of the fear that he saw in other men’s eyes when they encountered him. He was powerful. Yet he knew that physical power wasn’t enough. As he’d watched the Arab prisoners transform from broken men who believed in a false religion to committed Christians, he’d finally understood that salvation for him wouldn’t come through his body, but through his soul.

He laid his head into the cushioned headrest and tapped the power button with his left thumb. A slight hum echoed through the cavernous room. He felt a gentle vibration through the seat. After sixty seconds of warm-up, a green light on the remote illuminated. Axe pressed the start icon. In a moment he would come face to face with God.

T
he sound came to Rachel from a distance. She struggled to awaken, but the melodic chant threatened to lull her back to sleep. With effort, she willed her eyes to open. She was in bed. What a strange dream she’d had. She stretched her arms over her head, but her limbs felt heavy. She pushed herself up on her elbows. The realization that she wasn’t in her own bedroom jolted her out of her sluggishness.

The small room was dark and sparsely furnished. The only light came from a flickering candle on the small table by the narrow bed she lay on.

Then the memory flooded back: the attack in the bathroom, the huge man, the injection that paralyzed her. She touched her chest and glanced down. She was wearing a T-shirt and sweats.

Did he
. . .

She ran her hands along her body. She didn’t think she’d been raped, and she seemed to be uninjured. She swung her feet off the bed. Vertigo hit as soon as she tried to stand. She immediately sat back down. While she waited for the room to stop spinning, she closed her eyes.

The horror of the encounter in her bathroom replayed itself in slow motion. After she’d been paralyzed, she’d heard her attacker leave the bathroom. Her mind had screamed for help, but nothing had come from her mouth. The fear of being utterly helpless and at this man’s mercy had threatened to overwhelm her. When he’d returned with her clothes, his rough hands had pawed at her naked body, grasping her breasts as he dressed her. She had never
experienced pure terror like that before. She’d hoped that someone walking along the street might witness the spectacle of him carrying her out into the cold night, but her hope was dashed as soon as she felt herself shoved into the backseat of a car. Then he’d tied one of her scarves around her head, plunging her world into darkness. She wasn’t sure how long she was in the car. It had felt like hours as her mind raced through the possibilities this man might have in store for her. She’d seen enough horror movies to know that she could end up shackled in some dungeon. When the car stopped, her attacker had carried her up a short flight of stairs and then lowered her onto what felt like a bed. Her last memory was of a sharp stinging on the inside of her elbow, followed by a warm feeling spreading up her arm. As she’d slipped into unconsciousness, she’d dreamed that the bed she lay on had levitated as if it were a magic carpet flying through the air.

She opened her eyes and shook her head. The man had brought her somewhere, but where? The room didn’t have the appearance of a serial killer’s dungeon. She stepped onto the cool tile floor and shuffled toward the heavy wood door, which looked like it had been carved by hand. She wasn’t surprised that it was locked. That was when she became aware of the music again. The soft sound of monks chanting filled the air around her.

Axe didn’t notice anything at first. He tried to relax into the throne with his eyes closed. The vibration from the Logos was almost pleasant. At some point he lost track of time. Even the hum faded into the distance. He wasn’t sure when the sensation of falling began. It started slowly but soon began to pick up speed. Darkness engulfed him and then deepened as if he were plummeting down a mineshaft. An unease began to creep into the recesses of his thoughts. Where was the bright light he was supposed to see? He waited to hear from God. He desperately wanted the comfort of a voice that would call to him from the darkness, a voice that would reassure him that he had paid for his sins. But only silence pounded in his ears.

The unease in his gut grew into a feeling he’d despised in himself as a child, a feeling he saw in others as the ultimate weakness. He began to feel fear. The
darkness surrounding him suddenly became part of him. He was no longer suspended in the chasm; the chasm seemed to originate within him. Each molecule that made up his body began to dissolve into the darkness. His breathing quickened as if he were in the middle of a set of squats. But rather than empowering him, each breath seemed to expel the essence of who he was out of his body and into the chasm. The fear gripped his heart, squeezing blood through the cord-like veins that fed his arms and legs. He knew that in seconds he would no longer exist. His entire essence would disappear into nothingness.

The scream came from deep in his belly as he launched himself out of the cathedra. He hit the cool stone floor, gasping for air.

He opened his eyes. Would he still have a body? What would it look like? As the room came into focus, he was surprised to see that nothing looked different. He rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling above his head. The candle flames from the altar cast sinister shadows along the wood beams. The throne beside him was empty. He could detect the slight vibration of the Logos, this time through the floor. He cast his eyes down his torso. His physique was intact, but he was trembling. The room wasn’t cold, yet he couldn’t stop shaking. He pushed himself to his knees. Bowing his head, he closed his eyes again. He inhaled deeply, expanding his ribcage to the point that he felt his lats stretch out the back of his shirt. He exhaled forcefully and rose to his feet.

He finally knew the truth. This new truth frightened him even more than the dream of being tortured by the devil. This truth spoke to him from his core.

God had abandoned him. He was alone.

“W
e can accomplish great things together.” Wolfe’s final words to Ethan the previous day echoed in his mind as he walked alone down one of the candelabra-lit corridors.

What have I gotten myself into?

Two days earlier he’d been in New Haven mourning the death of his friend and worrying about the future of his research. Now he was half a world away with the promise of unlimited resources for his work. But such freedom came at a price. He’d told Wolfe he would fix the Logos, but he struggled with the question,
What will I really do?
If he refused, he might just disappear. No one knew where he was. The uncertainties of how Wolfe was able to build the Logos and who killed Elijah swirled in his head like a tsunami, growing in power every second. Researching why two of the monks had experienced psychotic breaks would buy him time to figure out his next move. In truth, his curiosity about the flaw in the Logos was eating at him, but he was also more nervous than he’d ever been in his life. He was in over his head.