The Jericho Deception: A Novel (36 page)

“You don’t have time. You have to go.”

Another round of bullets rocked the SUV. “I’ll drive us into Aswan while you hold the compresses. I’ll drop you at a hospital and then disappear.”

With his robe off, Chris reached into his pants pocket and produced a slender magazine. His right thumb depressed a lever on the side of the handgun that caused the spent magazine to drop to the ground. He slammed the fresh one in and chambered the first round.

“You shouldn’t have done this.”

Chris maneuvered himself so that he could see around the bumper of the car. Axe unleashed another volley of bullets.

Ethan reached up and opened the door. “Hand me the keys. I’ll start the engine while you keep his head down.”

They both noticed the hissing sound at the same time. Ethan felt his heart sink as he realized where the noise came from. The SUV listed to the side away from them. He felt the pressure of panic rise in his chest.

“He’s shot the tires,” Chris said without any emotion.

“We can still drive on the rims. Town’s not that far away.”

Chris stuck his gun around the car and fired off two rounds. Then he turned toward Ethan. His face had grown even more pallid, his breathing more labored. He stuck his hand into his pocket, but instead of pulling out the keys, he retrieved his wallet. Thrusting it into Ethan’s chest, he said, “Use the cash, but be careful with the credit cards unless you absolutely need to use them. They can track you that way.”

“But—”

“The car will never make it. They’ll gun you down.” He leaned into his professor. “Axe thinks you’re in the car with the others.” He pointed into the desert, where dunes rose and fell like waves on a dark ocean. “Run straight. The SUV will block you from view. When you’ve crested the dunes and are sure you can’t be seen, turn southwest—that’ll be to your left. We’re two or three miles from Lake Nasser. These warehouses were built in the ’60s to store supplies for the construction of the lake. Follow the shoreline west—away from Aswan. Eventually you’ll come across some small fishing villages. You can pay someone there to drive you to Luxor.”

“What about you?”

“If I can kill Axe before the others come outside, I’ll tell them you guys shot both of us in your escape attempt.”

He looked at his student. He knew the odds weren’t good. But they were out of options, and the frequency of gunshots coming from Axe had decreased. The Ativan was winning the battle for his consciousness. He would pass out soon. Maybe Chris could finish him off. He took the wallet.

“Thank you.”

Chris grabbed his shoulder. “Professor, I’m so sorry for what I’ve done here. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me one day.”

“I already have. Just get the son of a bitch who killed Elijah.”

He turned to the desert. Squatting, he hurried toward the top of the nearest dune. He was careful to keep the SUV between him and the boulders. When he crested the top of the dune, his hopes rose. The distinctive chatter of Axe’s weapon had ceased.
Maybe he’s unconscious.

He started down the far side of the dune toward the emptiness of the desert. The moon was not yet up, and the myriad stars provided only faint illumination. He picked out the next series of dunes he would aim for. After he traversed them, he would head toward the lake as Chris suggested. He turned for one last look before his head disappeared behind the sand.

From his elevated angle at the top of the dune, he saw the danger before Chris did. The graduate student was leaning on the rear bumper of the car while he tracked the top of the boulders with his gun. Axe, however, was no longer popping up to shoot from the center of the rocks. He wasn’t unconscious, either.

Ethan watched as the security chief crawled from around the far side of the boulders. The warning came to his lips a second too late. Axe fired a three-shot burst that caught Chris in the neck and head as his attention was focused on the top of the boulders.

“No!” Ethan screamed.

Chris dropped to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut. A surge of rage and sorrow welled up in Ethan. He should have ducked his head behind the sand and run, but the emotions that threatened to explode from his chest kept him anchored in place. Axe lifted his gaze from the fallen student to the dim horizon. He stood rooted in place, looking in Ethan’s direction. Ethan had no idea if Axe could see him or not in the glare of the exterior lights of the warehouse.

As he slid down the opposite side of the dune, his last view of the Monastery was of Axe taking two steps forward and then falling face-down in the dirt.

C
asey Richards swirled his drink, Grey Goose on the rocks with lime, as he slouched in his leather armchair. The flames from the gas fireplace warmed the study of his townhome on the outskirts of Bethesda. After his divorce fifteen years ago, shortly after his fortieth birthday, the Deputy Director had given up dark alcohol. It no longer agreed with him. He used to be a bourbon man; now he stuck to vodka and gin. He glanced at the clock icon on his laptop. His General Tso’s chicken—steamed, not fried—would arrive soon.

The phone on the side table chirped at him like a robotic bird. He looked up from his email browser and reached for the secure landline the Agency had installed.

“Hello,” he said without identifying himself, a protocol that had been drilled into him from his training days.

The person on the other end asked him a code-worded question designed both to authenticate his identity and ensure he was alone and not under duress. He gave the appropriate answers.

“Sir, we have a priority message for you from Night Watch. An encrypted file has just been sent.”

Richards scanned his email and saw the most recent file from the office. He entered his sixteen-digit password, pressed his finger on the print reader, and waited as the file downloaded. An image appeared on his screen.

“What am I looking at?”

He stared at a satellite picture of a warehouse building. The image was black-and-white, taken by one of their birds with thermal imaging capabilities—not as high-res as the daytime shots, but impressive for its ability to take pictures in pitch-black night.

“Project Jericho, Sir. We’ve lost contact.”

“Lost contact?”

“There’s been an explosion in the center of the building.”

He hit the zoom button and looked closer. The middle of the building glowed white, a burning circle in the darkness.

“What the hell happened?”

“We have assets two hours out in Cairo that we’re mobilizing to find out.”

“Wolfe?”

“In Cairo too. No answer on his cell. We’ve sent someone to his hotel. A Black Hawk is standing by to bring him and our men to Jericho.”

“I want to speak to him the moment you’re in touch.”

“Yes, Sir.”

He glanced at the English antique clock on the mantel of his fireplace. 8:16. It wouldn’t be daylight in Egypt for another three or four hours.

“We need real-time imagery.”

“We’ve already tasked the satellite. You’ll receive the data as soon as we do.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Will do, Sir.”

The line went dead. He stared at the image on his screen again.
A gas leak or a problem with a furnace?
He zoomed in more, but the image pixelated too much to make out any helpful details. He shook his head.
Wishful thinking.
He’d been in the business long enough to know that accidents like that didn’t happen on their own.

If the program is exposed
. . .

He didn’t want to think of the consequences. He’d trusted Wolfe. The doctor had worked miracles in the past, and the first test—the subject who’d led them to Abadi-Jabbar—had exceeded his expectations.

Now, he wondered whether he’d been too lenient with the doctor. In operations like this he knew better than to micromanage his field guys. Usually
he didn’t even want to know the details of what was taking place, as long as he got the results he was after. But Jericho had grown past the scope of a field op. He remembered the Agency’s history: the Bay of Pigs, MKULTRA, Iran-Contra—all well-meaning covert operations that had gone wrong, and worse, become public. He wouldn’t let that happen here.

He hated having to clean up a mess, but he’d done it many times before.

W
here am I?
Ethan wondered.

He thought he’d followed Chris’s instructions—travel straight until he was out of view of the Monastery and then turn left—but he’d been walking for almost two hours and the endless desert landscape hadn’t changed. His eyes had adapted to the starlight, but all he could see around him were sand dunes—no sign of Lake Nasser.

He paused to catch his breath. The night air was cool, but he was warm from walking in the loose sand, which gave back some of his forward progress with every step up the side of a dune. His lips were chapped, and he was thirsty. The daytime sun would be brutal. With no water, he wasn’t sure how long he would last before dehydration caused him to hallucinate and then collapse.

Surveying the dunes around him, he picked one to his right—the largest around him. He started up it in a jog. He’d learned early in his escape that walking up a dune was almost impossible. It was like trying to run up a down escalator; he had to move quickly or the loose, dry sand caused him to slip backward with each step. The sand was unlike that of any beach he’d experienced. The fine beige and red particles were each separate, with no moisture to clump them together or to provide a stable surface for his weight.

When he reached the top, he bent over, rested his hands on his knees, and breathed deeply. The only sign of life was a single thorny bush poking through the dune. He straightened and surveyed the landscape. He squinted to see if
he could make out his path in the sand. His footsteps at the bottom of the dune were faint and he couldn’t follow them far, but what he saw concerned him. Although he’d thought he was walking straight—his strategy had been to pick out a dune in the distance and head for it—his path definitively curved to the right.

How long have I been walking like that?

He sat on the top of the dune. The fear that he’d walked miles deeper into the desert began to settle over him. Indecision over his next move began to play in his mind. He could keep walking, but doing so might take him farther in the wrong direction—or worse, back toward the Monastery. He could wait for daylight on top of the dune. He might be able to make out the lake in the distance then. He sat up straighter. The thought of daylight brought a sudden realization: the rising sun would tell him which direction east was. If he traveled south, he would eventually hit the lake.

He lay back. The sand was soft and still radiated some of the heat absorbed from the previous day’s sun. He was exhausted. He closed his eyes and replayed the escape in his mind.

The thought of Chris’s death filled him with a sickly feeling. A hot, viscous sensation began to pour into his stomach and fill up his body until it reached his throat. Chris had betrayed him, but he’d saved their lives and sacrificed his own. Then his thoughts turned to Rachel and Mousa. Had they been able to escape? He held on to the hope that the guards were still disoriented from the explosion and that Axe was still incapacitated from the sedative. The image of Rachel’s blue eyes and the memory of the touch of her full lips burned in his mind. The taste of their kiss still lingered in his mouth, and he imagined that with each breath he inhaled the floral scent of her hair. Neither Wolfe nor the brutish Axe would let her live if they caught her. His breathing became labored, as if his belt was cinched around his chest rather than his waist.

I can’t lose her.

After Natalie’s death, he hadn’t thought he would ever again feel the intensity of connecting with another woman that way, yet now he knew he was falling for the insightful, feisty, and beautiful grad student.

But love carried with it the risk of loss—a pain so intense that he thought he would never be able to survive it again. With the adrenaline of the escape gone, the fear of that pain crept into his mind. He wished that praying for Rachel’s safety would make it so. He opened his eyes and stared at the ocean of stars. He doubted that a superhuman grandfather figure was up there to intervene based on words he might mutter, a promise he might make, or a belief he might profess. In the dark night in the middle of the Sahara, he felt the loneliness in his bones as if the marrow had evaporated, leaving his skeleton hollow.

A particularly bright star close to the horizon caught his eye. The desert sky was wide open, like nothing he ever saw in New Haven. Staring at the broad brushstroke of stars that was the Milky Way stirred a memory. He remembered a Post-it note Elijah had once stuck to the back of his office chair:
Through the wonder and beauty of the natural world we can understand the nature of God.

He’d pulled the note from his chair, crumpled it, and tossed it into the trash basket by his desk. “Two points,” he’d said to Elijah, who watched him from behind reading glasses.

“One day, my friend, you will appreciate my bits of wisdom,” Elijah had chuckled.

“Maybe that same day you’ll reconcile for me your scientific world view with your spiritual one?”

Elijah had put down the journal article he was reading. “Ah, the tyranny of the logical mind.” He’d swiveled his chair toward Ethan. “Reason is not our only way of perceiving the truth. Sometimes we must feel it, intuit it, and experience it.”

“Sounds awfully fuzzy to me. Didn’t we become scientists so that we could measure, test, and experiment in order to come to objective truths?”

“What if God doesn’t operate from outside the universe, in violation of its physical laws, but from inside? What if God is not separate from us but part of us? We wouldn’t be able to prove this kind of God scientifically because there would be no separate action outside of nature that we could point to.”