The Jericho Deception: A Novel (29 page)

“I was thirteen when the towers came down.” Chris folded his arms across his chest and glanced up at the wood ceiling. “My Uncle Mark, my mom’s older brother, had an office in Two World Trade. Mom got a call from him about ninety seconds before the tower collapsed. We were watching it on TV together. She was too hysterical to speak, so she handed the phone to me. Uncle Mark and I had always been close; he used to take me go-kart racing when I was younger. He’d tell the track that I was twelve so they’d let me on.” His voice broke. “Mark was calm on the other line. He was standing at his office window. I yelled at him to run down the stairs. We’d already seen the first building collapse. ‘It’s too late for that, Chris,’ he said, ‘but I’m not afraid. God will take care of me.’ The phone line went dead. I watched the second tower come down with the receiver in my hand.”

“I’m so sorry. I never knew that.” Ethan cleared his throat and paused for a moment. “But that doesn’t excuse your betrayal of our work. We want to unlock the mystery of religion, not use it as a tool for continued violence.”

“But what Wolfe is trying to do here has the potential to bring peace to this region.”

“Bring peace? By introducing other religious zealots he’s converted into the mix? That’s a recipe for greater conflict, not less.”

“We might not see the effects for decades, but we’ve got to start somewhere. Until now we’ve been unable to penetrate these terrorist networks. The Logos is our best chance to secure our country from future attacks.”

He evaluated Chris for a moment. His assistant had fully bought into Wolfe’s vision, a Machiavellian one in which peace was used as an excuse to justify immoral acts. But something about this place, something about Wolfe, disturbed him even more. He couldn’t put his finger on the exact source of this unease, but he wondered how far Wolfe wanted to take this program.

“Why am I here, Chris? Wolfe opened up the whole facility to me.”

“I told him that only you could fix the Logos. And he respects your work. He’s been following you for years.”

He found it strangely satisfying, yet unnerving, that the CIA was interested in his research. No one at the university respected what he was doing.

“What happens if I fix the Logos? Will Wolfe let me return to Yale to continue my research?”

Chris shifted in his seat. “I don’t think you’re going to be working on the Logos in public any more. The technology is just too incendiary. But I’m sure that Wolfe could make it financially rewarding for you to continue your research with him.”

“He’s never going to let me leave here, is he?”

Chris refused to meet his eyes.

D
eputy Director Casey Richards sat on the corner of his desk and massaged the top of his bald head with his free hand. The other held a file folder marked “Eyes Only: Jericho.”

“How many are ready to go?” he asked into the cordless headset hooked around his ear.

After a brief delay as the signal bounced across the satellite and was processed by the descrambler, Allen Wolfe replied, “Ten, maybe a dozen if we stretch it.”

“And the problems? We can’t afford to have any of these guys flip out on us.”

Richards massaged harder. The hostage exchange he’d authorized had been brokered by friends within the Saudi government. Officially, it wasn’t even happening. The three journalists and two subcontractors, a combination of American and British nationals, had been held for fourteen months since they were kidnapped in Afghanistan the previous year. The intelligence had been embarrassingly sparse. They suspected the hostages were in Pakistan. On more than one occasion they’d scrambled Delta and SEAL teams to attempt a rescue. In each case the teams had arrived to find a couple of low-level Al Qaeda operatives but no hostages.

He flipped through the folder on his lap, scanning the bios of the men Dr. Wolfe planned to release. They’d been caught in various terrorist sweeps over the past few years and then held in secret prisons throughout Egypt, Jordan,
Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, where they’d been intensely interrogated. Each had gone through Project Jericho, and Wolfe assured him that these men were reliable converts. They would lead the CIA back to almost a dozen terrorist cells. Unlike the case with Youssef, drones wouldn’t bomb these cells. The Jericho men would act as agents, feeding intel to their priest handlers, with whom they would meet every few months.

Richards planned to return the men the following week, with the simultaneous release of the Western hostages. The hostages would be met with worldwide media attention, and the White House would bask in the accolades. The release of the men from the Monastery, however, would happen below the radar screen of the press.

“Don’t worry,” Wolfe replied. “We’re close to having the problem isolated and corrected. I’ve got the man who developed the Logos working on it now.”

“I can’t stress to you the critical nature of this project’s success.”

“I understand better than anyone.”

He sensed a tone of annoyance in Wolfe’s voice. “As much of an investment as I’ve made in Jericho, I will shut it down in a moment if its existence comes close to leaking out.”

“In more exciting news, next month I’ll be sending you a proposal for Phase II of Jericho. I have an idea that will make our terrorist infiltration plans look infantile.”

He just ignored my threat
, Richards thought. He shook his head.

The problem with many of the academic types he’d worked with over the years was that they lacked the vision of where their work could lead—the impact it could have on the country. That wasn’t the case with Wolfe. He was, to put it mildly, ambitious. Ambition could change the world, but it could also destroy it. Jericho had the potential to do both.

“I need Jericho working flawlessly before we even begin to discuss any kind of Phase II.”

Silence greeted his last instruction. Sometimes he wondered whether Wolfe understood that he was working for him and not the other way around.

E
than sat on the floor, hunched over a laptop, shivering. The twelve-by-fifteen-foot server room on the ground floor was chilled to a meat-locker fifty-five degrees to keep the floor-to-ceiling racks of computer equipment from overheating. He guessed that most of the black boxes were either surveillance, communications, or computer servers. One piece of equipment—front and center on the bottom rack—he knew intimately: the control system for the Logos in the bishop’s cathedra on the monastery level underneath him. A thick gray cable ran from the serial port on the back of the box and down the side of the rack, where it was neatly clipped together with other cables from the components above it. The cables disappeared into a hole in the white tile floor.

Two hours earlier, Chris had given him the laptop and left him in the room. His vision blurred from focusing on the lines of code that scrolled across the screen while a window in the corner displayed the binary code the computer translated the programming language into. He still couldn’t figure out what had driven the two subjects to have psychotic breaks. If only one man had experienced a negative reaction, he might have dismissed it as an anomaly, but two? And why them? He was missing something, something right in front of him.
But what?

Elijah and Rachel were right
, he admitted. His confidence in his own work and zealousness to see it tested on humans had caused him to dismiss the potential problem with Anakin, the monkey who became disturbed
after the test. The mental image of Elijah with his disheveled hair and warm grin brought an emptiness to his chest, but then the thought of Rachel and the spark in her eyes brought a different feeling to his stomach, one he found more difficult to ignore. She was the one person at Yale he’d felt comfortable confiding in when his life fell apart. He closed his eyes for a moment and recalled the touch of her hand, the way she smelled when they were close, the way she seemed to understand his struggles. He wondered if she’d tried to call him. Would she report him as a missing person to the police? No one in New Haven knew where he was. Then a disturbing thought crowded out the memory of the attractive and insightful grad student: she had been speaking to Houston about him behind his back. He shook his head.

As he clicked on the next page of code, another dilemma floated in his mind: what would he do if he discovered the flaw in his programming? If the US government was going to use his technology whether or not he approved, did he have an obligation to make sure they wouldn’t create schizophrenic subjects in ten percent of the cases? Was it his responsibility to police how his invention was used?
That’s exactly your responsibility
, said a voice in the back of his head that sounded a lot like Elijah.

He disconnected the USB cable from the Logos controller, closed the laptop, and stood. He wanted to examine the men again. Maybe he needed to get back to basics. He would start with routine physicals and then draw blood, followed by EEGs. Maybe the two men had a history of mental instability that their files didn’t reveal. But then, all the men had been subjected to psychological extremes. Were any of them mentally stable?

As he turned to the door, a familiar sight caught his eye. Amid the racks of computer equipment, three boxes tucked away on the far right were instantly familiar. He hurried to the rack and ducked his head around the metal shelves to get a better look.

Three more Logos controllers?

Neither Wolfe nor Chris had mentioned any others. He followed the cables from the back of the machines. Rather than snaking down into the floor, the cables disappeared into the same two-inch plastic conduit. The conduit ran
horizontally into the wall. Somewhere on the other side of that wall were three other Logos machines.

Thirty seconds later he stood in the fluorescent-lit hallway outside a metal door to the right of the server room. His heart thumped in his ears as he tried the handle.

Locked.

He turned and headed down the hall toward the elevator. The clicking of a door opening in the quiet corridor caused him to jump. He spun on his heels in time to see a man emerge from the locked door he’d just tried. He balanced two file boxes stacked in his arms. The boxes wobbled as the man walked in the opposite direction from him.

He didn’t see me
.

Ethan ran toward the door on the toes of his shoes. Even that seemed too loud, but the man didn’t turn. The metal door was closing faster than he’d expected. He thrust his fingers into the narrow crack between the door and the frame. He winced when the door pinched his skin but resisted the urge to jerk out his hand.

With the exception of the breath expanding his chest, he didn’t move. The man carrying the box disappeared around the corner at the end of the corridor without looking back. Ethan pushed open the door with his free hand and shook out the pain from the red crease across his fingers. He stepped into the dark room, closed the door behind him, and felt for the light switch.

The lights illuminated what appeared to be a storage and workroom about twenty by thirty feet in size. Several rows of file boxes were stacked to the right. To the left was a metal worktable where two dozen identical cell phones were plugged into several power strips. He thought back to his arrival and the guard who had taken his phone and wallet. He selected one on the end, where it would be least likely to be missed, and pocketed it. He wondered whether he could get a cell signal in this place. Then another thought occurred:
Who can I call for help?

He walked deeper into the room, where he confronted an unusual sight. An intricately carved church pew faced him from the back wall. The curved back looked as if it was designed to cradle each occupant. Whereas a standard
church pew might hit one in the mid-back, this was taller, with the wood extending to head height. Then he noticed the cables. He leaned over the pew. They entered the base at three locations. He then traced the cables along the floor where they disappeared into the wall. He knew where they led: into the three Logos controllers. He stepped back and studied the pew.

What is Wolfe up to?

Then he noticed the open door to his right. He approached the door and, after allowing a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of the adjacent space, his mouth dropped open. He was staring into a warehouse with a high, unfinished ceiling and bare concrete floors. Stacked on pallets in the space were dozens of Logos machines, shrink-wrapped in plastic. Also stacked on the floor, one on top of the other, were rows of the modified church pews.

“Looking for something, Professor?”

The rough voice caused him to flinch in surprise. He turned to face a huge man. The man was a couple inches shorter than he was but weighed twice as much, and not an ounce was fat. His black T-shirt stretched over hypertrophied muscles. Even his black pants revealed the separation in his quadriceps.

The man’s face told the complete story. From the acne scars, protruding brow, square jaw, and yellowed eyes, Ethan knew immediately that the man had been taking anabolic steroids for years. The acne and eyes were obvious symptoms of excess androgens, variations of the male hormone testosterone, while the overdeveloped brow and jaw could only result from abuse of HGH, human growth hormone. But something else in the jaundiced eyes disturbed him. The man looked nervous, as if he were struggling with a terrible thought that threatened to burst from his head. Then Ethan realized the source of his own unease. He imagined the man wearing reflective orange-lensed sunglasses.

“You must be James Axelrod—Axe, right?” The name of Wolfe’s security goon came to him out of the blue. He struggled to keep his voice even.

“You are in a restricted area.”

“What’s going on here?” He gestured to the stacks of pews in the warehouse behind him. He was nervous, but his anger emboldened him. Maybe, he thought, he could deflect his presence in the locked room by taking the offensive.