The Jericho Deception: A Novel (48 page)

Finally, the man spoke. “Have a seat, Ms. Riley and Dr. Lightman.” The tone of his voice indicated that they weren’t being invited but ordered. Both sat.

“You have us at a disadvantage.” Ethan attempted to keep his voice steady and confident. “You know us, but we’ve never met you.”

“Ethan, Rachel,” Houston said while fumbling with his own chair, “may I introduce you to Casey Richards.” The administrator lowered his voice. “He’s the Deputy Director of the NCS.”

“NCS?” Rachel asked.

“The National Clandestine Services,” Richards replied before taking a long drag.

Answering the confusion on her face, he explained, “The CIA. I’m in charge of the Agency’s covert operations.”

A sigh escaped Ethan’s lips. “He’s the one responsible for the Monastery. Wolfe works for him.”

Wolfe scurried about his office. He hadn’t heard from Nick Dawkins since the previous afternoon, when his operative had called back a few hours after he’d delivered the news from Karnak to tell him that he was going to the authorities to retrieve Axe’s body and to clean up the mess. Dawkins and the others should have returned last night. Now they wouldn’t answer his phone calls.
The skeletal staff that had remained to make repairs and watch over the confused prisoners—
monks
, he corrected himself—had heard nothing either.

He bent over the aluminum briefcase on his desk. It contained a laptop and two identical hard drives, each loaded with the Logos’s programming. Although Professor Lightman hadn’t fixed the flaw, it still worked perfectly in 90 percent of the subjects. That would have to do for now. He opened the left door on his credenza, revealing a safe that had been bolted into the ground and the wall. He spun the combination lock. Opening the door, he fished under the file folders stamped “TOP SECRET EYES ONLY” until he found what he was looking for. He removed the three bundles of cash secured by rubber bands, each valued at ten thousand dollars in denominations of Egyptian pounds, euros, and US dollars. He pulled several bills from each of the bundles and stuffed them into his wallet. Then he tossed the remaining cash into the briefcase.

The cash would get him out of the country and to his small house in the Guanacaste region of northwest Costa Rica. Once there, he would live off of the two million dollars he’d siphoned from the various projects he’d worked on over the years. After being laundering through banks on the Isle of Man, the funds now sat in a Cayman Islands account under the name of a Panamanian trust he controlled. Having access to off-the-books funding for black ops had its perks. In his line of work, you never knew when the political tides would turn against you.

He would just have to wait out this latest turn of events. His biggest fear was whether he would get another chance. He was seventy-one. Then he thought of the temperate weather, the exotic girls, and shrugged his shoulders. Living out his final years in paradise wasn’t the worse thing that could happen. He reached into the rear of the safe and removed two passports: his US one under his real name and a Panamanian one under the identity of an international businessman—an alias he’d created five years earlier.

He would simply disappear.

Rachel leaned across the table like a lioness readying to pounce. “You had me kidnapped! You had Wolfe’s goon shoot Chris, stab Mousa, and try to kill the two of us! You—”

Deputy Director Richards held up a hand, silencing her accusations. “Yes, Allen Wolfe reported to me, but you need to understand that he acted autonomously. The way my business works”—he took another drag from his cigarette and tilted his head upward to blow out the smoke—“sometimes it’s better if we do not know the details of the operations.”

“Bullshit,” Ethan said, the anger rising within him in spite of his attempts to remain calm. “Building the Monastery must have cost millions of dollars, and what Wolfe is trying to do with my Logos machine is potentially destructive to our relations with the Arab world. You must have known what was going on here.”

Richards evaluated him for a moment, stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray, and said, “I’m glad you understand the sensitivity of this project and why it must be kept absolutely secret.”

“Understand!” Ethan’s face grew hot. “What I understand is that an agency of my government has tried to pervert my life’s work, has murdered at least one of its innocent citizens, and is conducting human psychological brainwashing experiments that violate every ethical principal.” He turned his attention to Houston with his final comment.

“The reason we came here—” Houston began, but stopped when Richards rested his free hand on his shoulder.

“Son, I don’t need you to lecture me on ethics and morality from the top of your ivory tower. My job is to protect our country from dangerous men who have no sense of ethics, who are willing to murder innocent women and children indiscriminately to achieve their goals. War is not clean. War is not pretty.”

“But if we want to win this war,” Rachel said, “we can’t stoop to their level. If we lose the moral high ground, then we will never defeat terrorism.”

Richards tapped his fingers on the table. “Now, did Allen Wolfe overstep his authority? Certainly. Did Project Jericho get out of hand? No doubt. Wolfe, on numerous occasions, disobeyed my explicit instructions. He became a zealot for his own vision, and”—he took another drag on his cigarette—“actions may have been taken that were inappropriate. But sometimes, in my business, we have to give the operatives in the field leeway.”

“Leeway?” Ethan said. “With his leeway, Wolfe planned to take Jericho from a program designed to indoctrinate low-level terrorism suspects to widespread population control.” He faced Houston. “He had plans to build churches throughout the Middle East, incorporating the Logos into the pews in an attempt to indoctrinate the local civilian populations.” Houston’s eyes widened.

Richards raised his eyebrows as if he hadn’t known the full extent of what was going on in the Monastery. When he spoke again, his voice grew softer. “Maybe in Wolfe’s case I gave him too much freedom.”

Houston straightened, took his daughter’s hand, and cleared his throat. “What has happened here goes much further than an overstepping of authority.” The commanding tone that came from the administrator was one Ethan had heard many times before, but this time he was thankful he’d found his voice.

“The entire design of Project Jericho,” Houston continued, “and the significance of the name is not lost on me, is fundamentally anti-American. One of the founding premises of our nation is freedom of religion. The First Amendment protects us from the imposition of religious beliefs.”

When Richards opened his mouth to interrupt him, Houston slapped the table with his free hand, silencing the CIA man for once. “Don’t you dare tell me that the Constitution is only meant to protect Americans in our country. Forceful conversion of other populations runs contrary to the essence of the freedom we want to export to the rest of the world. The ends cannot justify the means in this case because the means and the ends are indistinguishable”—he locked eyes with Rachel and his voice turned icy—“especially when the means involves endangering innocent people.”

Ethan sat back in his seat, moved by the words of the man who had caused him so many problems over the years. For the first time, he better understood Houston. Then Ethan added, “Plus, it never would have worked.”

Richards raised an eyebrow. “I thought the anomalies in your programming that resulted in negative reactions in 10 percent of the subjects was something that could be solved.”

Ethan resisted the urge to point out the obvious fact that the deputy director knew more about the details than he had first claimed, but Richards’s
comment also revealed another important piece of information: Axe must have taken his knowledge of the left-handed anomaly in the programming to his grave.

“I never figured out what was wrong with my programming. I think the problem is inherent in the nature of the whole project.” Lying about his success with the Logos, especially in front of Houston, was painful, but he wanted to ensure that the CIA man didn’t restart the project.

“Even if it
could
be perfected,” he continued, “Wolfe never understood the Logos. In fact, until recently I didn’t fully grasp Elijah’s vision for the machine either. The Logos doesn’t cause one to believe in a Christian God—or even any god, as we traditionally think of that word. It does the opposite: the Logos opens up the mind to the possibilities of the infinite, to seeing beyond our everyday reality to an ultimate reality that isn’t exclusively Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist.” A pang of sadness passed over him as he remembered his mentor. “Elijah Schiff, who dreamed up the Logos, explained to me once that these religions may point to this ultimate reality in ways that can be understood by their adherents, but that the reality itself is much greater, and it isn’t something that can be put into words.”

He sensed Rachel and Houston both staring at him. “The success Wolfe achieved with the Logos was only in a limited number of cases with uneducated terrorists who had already been subjected to brainwashing by the Islamic fundamentalists in their countries. As we learned in the case of a Jordanian doctor in the Monastery, the Logos could not convert an enlightened Muslim to Christianity; it instead made him a more devout, while also opening his mind to the truths and the limitations of all religions.”

“All of this is moot now anyway,” Richards grunted. “I’m shutting down Project Jericho.”

“What exactly do you mean by shutting down?” Rachel asked.

“Professor Houston, the Yale President, your congresswoman from Connecticut who chairs the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, the CIA Director, and I spoke before I came here.” He shifted in his seat. For the first time, he appeared uncomfortable. “We decided the risks of exposure are too great relative to the potential payoff. The Logos machines will be destroyed, the
Monastery dismantled. No one will ever know what happened in the desert of Egypt.”

“I can’t imagine Wolfe just giving up on his vision,” Ethan said.

“We are used to cleaning up after ourselves. Allen Wolfe will not be a problem.”

The ominous tone of the CIA’s deputy director sent a shiver through him.

Richards slid two single sheets of paper across the table, one in front of each of them. Ethan glanced at the legal document. “Confidentiality agreements?”

“These contracts cover anything you two may have seen or learned while you were here. Project Jericho is classified as top secret, and this contract binds you to silence in the name of national security. You may not even mention the existence of the Monastery.”

“Why would we even consider signing that?” Rachel asked, pushing her bangs out of her eyes. She glared at Richards and then her father.

“In exchange for your agreeing to stay quiet on these matters, Ms. Riley, you will be safely returned to the US, where you can continue your studies. And you’ll be compensated for your traumatic experience.”

“Compensated?”

“For the trauma you experienced from your detainment. By the time you arrive in New Haven, we will have deposited three hundred thousand dollars into your bank account, tax free, no questions asked.” Richards cut his eyes to Houston. “And should you decide that you would like to stay at Yale next year and pursue your PhD, we have worked out an arrangement with the university that your tuition will be gratis.”

Rachel picked up the paper, sat back in her chair, and studied the text.

Richards turned to Ethan. “Professor Lightman, we have cleared up the accounting irregularities from the NAF grant that funded the Logos project. I explained to Professor Houston and the university president that you’re innocent of any wrongdoing.”

“You mean how Wolfe made it seem like I was embezzling money from the project so I would have no choice but to work for him.” Anger flushed Ethan’s face at the memory of how his life had been turned upside down. “And how
Wolfe’s man, your employee, James Axelrod, murdered Elijah Schiff, a tenured university professor, the most gentle and kind man I’ve ever known!”

Richards reached for another cigarette from the red-and-white pack in his shirt pocket and tapped it on the table. “Any suspicions the New Haven police had about your involvement in Professor Schiff’s tragic death will also be resolved.”