The Jericho Deception: A Novel (40 page)

The phone beeped.
A message!
He scanned Houston’s brief reply. The administrator wanted to talk to him right away. The tone of the message was
ambiguous, however. Did he want him to call because he believed the story and wanted to help, or did he want to admonish him for his far-fetched attempt at redemption?

He didn’t have time to debate the possibilities. He clicked on the number. He’d give himself one minute. He pressed the phone to his ear and turned to face the water so the two men at the stern wouldn’t be able to hear his conversation. They’d given him no indication that they spoke English, but he’d learned not to make assumptions about anything in this country.

As he waited for the call to connect, he studied yet another boat coming toward them. Unlike the feluccas, which were powered by the wind, this one moved through the water under the effort of two men, both pulling long wooden oars as sweat soaked through their blue shirts. The boat sat low in the water, weighed down by vegetables that threatened to spill over the sides at any time. Ethan marveled at the fertility of the Nile. The cauliflowers in the boat were the size of basketballs, the carrots an unusual color of Merlot.

A series of clicking sounds came from the phone as it went through the various relays to connect the call. He imagined the signal bouncing from satellite to satellite and then down to New Haven.

He wasn’t sure when he first noticed the smell.
Burning rubber,
he thought. The tourist ship was still well ahead of them, but the exhaust from its engines must be drifting upriver, he guessed. His eyes caught the surface of the water. The ripples from the hull of the approaching rowboat spread outward in regular waves. They appeared to come toward him in a geometric pattern, as if in sync with the metronome of the oars. Sunlight danced across their crests. He stared without blinking.

A sudden thought popped into his head:
Each ripple is unique yet shares the river’s water as its source and its connection with every other ripple.

Then he noticed that embedded within each ripple were tiny bubbles. As he watched the bubbles surface and then pop, they seemed to form a pattern.
Binary code!
Just as he’d seen on his laptop when he’d been programming the Logos, each bubble appeared to him as a zero while the tiny splash made when they winked out of existence looked like a one. The binary pattern transfixed him:

He felt as if he was reading a hidden language describing the nature of the water. Then the river began to transform again. Like a photograph on a computer screen pixelating on high magnification, his vision telescoped. The ones and zeroes collapsed in on themselves: each bubble, he realized, was both a one and a zero.
There is no duality.
With that thought he no longer saw the bubble code, or even the water. Instead, he watched each water molecule spin and swirl around its neighbors. But like the binary code, even the molecules were not whole. Soon the hydrogen and oxygen atoms began to resolve into focus, but they remained only briefly. Then the subatomic particles that comprised each atom flitted about like sparks jumping off a campfire.

When he felt his own body begin to pixelate as well, he closed his eyes. He became aware that the cloud of particles that defined him was comprised of a single, vibrational energy. The essence of what made him was different in form, but not in kind, from the essence of what made the world. While new, the insight was also familiar. He’d glimpsed it lying on the grass by his trampoline two decades earlier. This Source of Existence—the Energy of Being itself—had always been present. The Source was manifested in the universe, just as it was manifested within him.

A feeling of warmth spread from the core of his body outward to his fingers and toes. The memories of those he’d lost in his life—his father, Natalie, Elijah, Chris—wove through this warmth like threads through a tapestry. Their deaths had brought him pain, but now he saw that these people were each part of a timeless reality, a reality still present. Their lives, while finite, were part of the Source he now saw so clearly. The essence that was each of his friends was still connected with the energy that made him who he was. The ripples in the river would die out, but the river remained.

For the first time in his life, he felt true peace.

“Hello.” The voice seemed to come from inside his head.

“Is anyone there?”

There it is again,
he thought.

He struggled to focus on the words, but his body longed to remain in its state of connectedness with being.

“Ethan, is that you?”

His eyes fluttered open. His vision flickered off, as if the plug had been pulled. The sunlight that replaced it was almost painful. He was still in the boat. His surroundings appeared normal. The river was just a river. He blinked again, feeling like he’d just woken from a long nap: sleepy yet relaxed.

Then he recognized the disembodied voice calling to him. “Professor Houston?”

“Where are you, Son?”

He pulled the phone from his ear and stared at it. The haze in his mind cleared instantly. He’d just had a mystical vision, similar in nature to the one he’d experienced as a teenager, only this time the vision had been deeper, more vivid.

Did I just have a seizure?

Then he noticed that the phone in his hand was vibrating.

Is it possible?

“Ethan?” Houston called.

He stared at the phone a second longer. Then he tossed it into the river.

“We got him!” Dawkins bent closer to his screen.

“Where?” Wolfe put the receiver to the scrambled satellite phone down on his desk. He was starting to dial Langley to report that he had nothing to report.

“On the Nile. Over a hundred clicks north of here.”

“Can you pinpoint him?”

“The protocol worked?” Axe asked. Wolfe’s idea was pure genius, he thought. Who else but Wolfe would have thought of inserting a tiny solenoid into a phone? The magnetic field wasn’t very strong—nothing like the actual
Logos machine—but for someone who had already been conditioned in the cathedra, even a weak field might induce a feeling of being present with God. The Logos-phone was a way of keeping the subjects they sent out into the world in tune. They planned on giving each of the brothers a cell phone so their priests could keep in touch once a week. They would say a quiet prayer together over the phone while the Logos protocol was sent remotely to the handset. They’d already configured a dozen Logos-phones; they’d been planning on testing them that week on a few of the men.

Although the professor hadn’t used his machine on himself—as far as they knew—they’d hoped that the phone would at least disorient him a bit so that they could track him. Earlier that morning the phone had powered on for just a few seconds; this time it stayed on for over a minute.

“Damn! We lost the signal.”

“Was it long enough?” Wolfe asked.

“He’s either on one of the roads bordering the river or on a boat. And he’s heading north.

Luxor
, Axe thought. He stood from the sofa. The drugs were finally out of his system. He would clean up his mess, just as he’d done with Chris Sligh. “Dawkins, inform the team in the Suburbans.” He’d already scrambled the men based on his earlier hunch. “Then join me in the Black Hawk.”

Wolfe turned to him. “We have one chance at this, James.”

Axe met his boss’s stare. The look of reproach fed the darkness within him.

E
than rubbed his neck. He was sore from the night on the boat’s hard wooden bench, his second night in a row of little sleep. He hadn’t been this tired since his residency. The Nubians had given him a mildew-infused blanket to ward off the cold, but he’d popped up his head to survey their surroundings at every unfamiliar noise.

A helicopter had passed overhead three times. He’d been careful to neither look up into the sky nor stare at the banks, where Wolfe’s men might be scanning the river with binoculars. He kept the scarf covering his face while he pretended to work on the fishing nets with the Nubians. The principle thought that ran through his head, however, was not the danger of being caught on the river, but rather,
How did they do it?

Somehow Wolfe had managed to miniaturize the Logos technology and conceal it in the cell phone. That was the only explanation for what had happened. Ethan’s instinct to throw the phone away was probably the right one, but now he wished he’d just powered it off so that he could dismantle it.

He guessed that Wolfe had installed a small solenoid in the top of the phone and then triggered the Logos protocol remotely.
But how much of a magnetic field could be produced by such a small coil?
As impressed as Ethan was with the engineering feat, he was also curious about his response. He’d had a powerful dissociative experience, one even more powerful than his epileptic vision as a child. Had his earlier experience preconditioned him to react to the Logos protocol more readily, even at a weaker level?

Then another realization occurred to him:
I had a mystical vision but not a seizure.
Although he hadn’t thought that his protocol would cause a seizure because of the way he’d targeted the magnetic pulses on the temporal lobes, his past history of epilepsy would have excluded him from his and Elijah’s tests. After his failure to account for left-handed subjects in his programming, he had to admit a certain satisfaction at having gotten part of the protocol right.

What spoke to him most about the experience, however, was the reality of it. He knew that schizophrenics were often unable to distinguish their hallucinations from concrete reality, but something felt different about what he’d just seen. It wasn’t the visual nature of his vision that struck him as real as much as his own intuition of the revelation. He felt in his core that he’d glimpsed an essence of reality that had always been there.
But what do I do with this knowledge?
As profound as the insight seemed, the more time that passed, the more difficult it was to remember the feeling of unity and connectedness the experience had inspired.

“Luxor!” One of the two Nubians pointed ahead and to the right, pulling Ethan out of his head.

He followed the man’s finger. He could ponder the nature of existence at a time when his and Rachel’s lives were not in danger. At the horizon, he saw, the landscape began to transform. The fields of crops transitioned into a city. He could just discern sand-colored concrete buildings and the tall minarets of mosques. As they sailed closer, he marveled at how tropical the famous city was: palm trees lined the streets and flowering plants of magenta grew everywhere.

In contrast to the city of Luxor, which was on the east bank of the Nile, the left bank was verdant cropland that became desert rising to mountains that were as barren as anything Ethan had seen. He imagined that the red, rough terrain was what the surface of Mars must look like. Although the air was dry, a haze hung over the mountains.
Maybe dust?
Then he noticed the traffic jam on the river. At least eight ferry-sized tourist boats were tied up at docks on the Luxor side of the river. Many spewed black exhaust.

As the Nubians readied their lines, he picked up the bag that contained his Western wear. He was grateful for the galabeya the Bedouins had given him—the
disguise had worked. But in a few minutes he would be stepping off into the middle of one of the largest tourist sites in the country. He began to change back into his own clothes. Looking like a tourist would be the best way to blend in.

Ten minutes later, they drifted toward a low dock just behind the tourist ships. Ethan slung his bag over his shoulder and shook hands with the Nubians. When they both continued to stare at him, he reached into his pocket and pulled out another twenty-dollar bill. Grins spread across their faces. They nodded and helped him off the boat. From the dock, he climbed stone stairs set into the concrete retaining wall that led to street level. As soon as he reached the sidewalk along the top of the wall, his heart rate accelerated.

Staring at him from no more than fifteen feet away were three Egyptian military officers. Dressed in black wool pants and button coats with black berets on their heads, each carried a Kalashnikov rifle with a collapsible stock. In addition to the curved ammunition magazine stuck in each rifle, they all had a second magazine taped with duct tape to the first, but upside down. Ethan had seen this in movies before. In the event of a firefight, all one had to do when the first clip ran out was to eject it and flip it around to start shooting again. These men were ready for a serious battle. He looked away, trying to appear casual despite the tightness in his chest.