The Jericho Deception: A Novel (50 page)

“In their cells.”

He glanced at the timer counting down on his watch. “Let’s get out of here. The plane is warming up on the tarmac.” They would be airborne in less than fifteen minutes.

The men piled into the two SUVs with more haste than usual. Nick drove the lead car, correcting with a smooth input to the steering wheel as the car fishtailed on the dirt drive. He floored the accelerator as he pulled away from the isolated warehouse in the desert.

They were a half-mile away when the C4 detonated. Although the sun was high in the sky, the light from the explosion seemed to overtake the cars, which shook moments later as the concussion wave followed. He glanced in his rearview mirror. The warehouse—along with all evidence of the Monastery and its contents—existed no more.

T
he wait in the customs line in the Amman airport brought a nervous sweat to Mousa’s forehead. The last time he’d been in this position, his life had been ripped apart. He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of the white shirt that had been provided to him, along with a new pair of black slacks, before he left the hospital. His bloodstained clothes had been discarded after they’d been cut from his body. He passed his passport between his clammy hands.

The desk to the left opened up and the agent waved him over. He handed his passport to the portly man dressed in white, hoping he didn’t appear as nervous as he felt. The man flipped through the passport, turned to his picture, and stared at him with dark, unblinking eyes. He managed a half-smile. The agent swiped it through a barcode reader and stared at his computer monitor for what seemed like too long a time. Just when Mousa began to fear that the agent could hear his heart thumping in his chest, the man flipped to a back page, stamped the passport, and returned it.

The walk through baggage claim was a blur to him. He had nothing to pick up. He passed through an automatic sliding door that opened to the noise of the arrival hall, which was crowded with families and drivers holding signs.

A high-pitched voice called to him from his right. “Baba!”

He turned to see his princess, Amira, waving to him from beside his wife. Bashirah’s long hair flowed down her back underneath a colorful headscarf. She held their infant son in her arms, and tears streamed down her face. She had never looked so beautiful. Before Mousa could make his way through the
crowd, Amira broke loose from her mother’s hand and raced ahead, dodging the other passengers.

He wept as Amira leaped into his arms and threw her petite hands around his neck.

E
than turned the key in the brass lock and pushed open the heavy wood door to his office in SSS. Feeling around the wall, he found the light switch. He blinked along with the flickering fluorescents, his eyes still accustomed to the New Haven night. When the door thudded closed behind him, he stood still for a moment, taking in the space that was his office and lab. The room felt too big without the Logos in the middle of the room. Elijah’s and Chris’s absences made it feel even more cavernous. The last time he’d been in the office, yellow police tape had cut across the door and the furniture had been in disarray. Now everything was clean and in its proper place. He missed his mentor’s clutter.

Then he noticed the stack of mail on his desk. He’d been in New Haven for two days, but his time had been taken up first by sleep and then by meetings with Houston and the university president, who had been apoplectic when Ethan had retold the complete story over dinner while the three of them polished off two bottles of an earthy Bordeaux. Other than Rachel and Mousa, these men were the only ones he would ever be able to talk with about the events in Egypt and the deaths of his friends.

The most surprising change for him, however, was his new relationship with Houston. As different as their personalities were, they had bonded. The senior administrator had intervened with the CIA, saving his life, and now Houston was enthusiastic about both the possibilities of his new research and his relationship with Rachel.

Ethan rolled out the chair from his desk, turned on the Tiffany lamp, and began to shuffle through his mail. On top of the letters, scientific journals, and unpaid bills was a brown package a little smaller than a shoebox. Curious, he reached into his top desk drawer and grabbed his scissors. Then he noticed that although his name and office address were typed clearly on the mailing label, the package had neither postage nor a return label. He looked over his shoulder at the empty office and the closed door. Someone had hand-delivered the package.

Weighing the box in his hand, he poised to cut through the package tape that encircled it when he noticed the letter that had been under the box. This envelope had a return address:
St. Mary’s Convent, Fairhaven, CT
. He set the box down and picked up the letter.
Sister Terri
, he thought. In the events after Elijah’s death and then his journey to Egypt, he hadn’t been able to speak to the kind nun who had been so integral to their research. He would have to visit her soon. He was sure she would have heard about Elijah’s passing; he wished he’d been the one to tell her.

He tore into the envelope. In addition to a folded sheet of stationery, an index card with the convent’s logo fell out. He turned over the card first. As he began to read the neat cursive writing, his throat constricted. Sister Terri had died in her sleep while he was in Egypt. One of the other nuns had found the enclosed letter next to her bed. She’d written it before turning off her light and falling asleep for the final time. He blinked back the tears burning his eyes, unfolded the stationery, and read her final words.

Ethan folded the letter, replaced it in the envelope, and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. As much as he’d needed to read this before he’d left for Egypt, he didn’t think he would have understood it then the way he did now. While Terri had dedicated her life to faith, he’d dedicated his to science. He’d sought to explain experiences like Terri’s—experiences like the ones he had as a teen and on the Nile. But now he understood a complexity he hadn’t before. He and Elijah had
recreated the mechanics behind mystical visions, but his science missed part of the picture. He knew that Elijah had tried to impress on him this limitation, but he hadn’t seen it. Science excelled at explaining
mechanics
, but it struggled with giving
meaning.

He thought back to the vision he’d had on the Nile, a vision induced mechanically by the cell phone programmed with his Logos protocol. He then recalled the vision he’d had as a teenager, a vision brought on by the neurons in his temporal lobes misfiring—his epilepsy. He understood what had caused these visions, but he still couldn’t shake a deep-seated feeling, a feeling that was more instinctual than logical:
the meaning behind these experiences was real
. Yet how could he reconcile this intuitive understanding with his logical mind? Math, physics, biology, and chemistry ruled supreme in his twenty-first-century universe, but then their elegance was also awe-inspiring in an almost religious way. Could these scientific laws be reflections of the creative power of God?

For so much of his life Ethan had resisted the image of God as a father figure living somewhere in the sky: a king or a judge ruling over his subjects, capriciously deciding who suffers and who doesn’t, who is saved and who is condemned, like a cosmic puppeteer playing with humanity for his amusement. But now he realized that the image of God he had rejected was nothing more than a straw man, a finite and weak idea of God. The God that Terri, a Christian nun, had described in her letter, the God that Elijah, a Jew, had tried to get him to understand, and the God that Mousa, a Muslim, had experienced, was much greater. Theirs was a God that was the fabric of universe itself, the fabric at the core of who we are as living beings. But this was not the common view of God taught in churches and temples; this was not the view of God used by fanatics and fundamentalists to justify their own closed-mindedness.

But if scientific theories evolve over time as we learn more,
he wondered,
why not our views of religion?

The creaking of the door opening snapped him out of his thoughts. He swiveled his chair around.

“Hi, Stranger.” Rachel strode into the room wearing jeans and a thick black sweater that clung to her curves.

Ethan smiled and felt a rush of joy at seeing her. “How are things at CapLab?”

“Crazy.” She pulled the chair from Elijah’s desk over toward his and plopped down in it. She then scooted it closer so that her knees slipped on either side of his. “Professor Sanchez was worried sick about me when I disappeared. Dad spoke to her and conveyed the message that I was involved in an important government project I couldn’t discuss. I could tell it was killing her not to ask me specifics about it.” She pointed to the box sitting in his lap. “Hey, what’s that?”

“Not sure. Must have been hand-delivered this morning.”

“Well, are you gonna open it?”

Using the scissors, he sliced into the cardboard. Styrofoam peanuts spilled out like confetti. Digging around, he pulled out three shiny black cell phones and a flash drive.

“Deputy Director Richards lived up to his agreement,” Rachel said.

Ethan stared at the Logos-programmed phones, identical to the one he’d used on the Nile. Sitting across the table from Houston and Richards in Cairo and faced with the loss of his research, an inspiration had come to him. He’d delved far into understanding the complex electrical misfirings that caused epileptic seizures, and he’d wondered,
What if I could reverse engineer these misfirings and induce an electrical current in the brain that would halt a seizure the moment it began?
What if he could take Wolfe’s modified cell phone and create a portable device that could stop an epileptic attack—a pacemaker for the brain?

Then he’d thought of other neurological conditions that the TMS technology they’d based the Logos on was used to treat: depression, schizophrenia, and chronic pain. He turned the shiny black plastic case around in his hand. Could all of these diseases be treated with electromagnetic devices that a patient could use as easily as their phones? In exchange for his signing the CIA’s non-disclosure agreement, he’d demanded access to Wolfe’s design of the Logos cell phones, as well as the money to support the research that could change the lives of millions of people. He twirled the flash drive through his fingers. He guessed it contained the miniaturization technology schematics he’d requested.

“So they gave you the funding too?” she asked.

“I met with Houston and President Martin last night. They confirmed the government grant for a five-year longitudinal study.”

“Don’t you worry about staying involved with Richards and his people?”

“That’s the great part. The funding is coming through the NSF, the National Science Foundation, not from CIA sources.”

“And they agreed that once you reengineer Wolfe’s phone, you’ll hold the patents? That could be worth millions if it works.”

“Oh, yeah, that too.” He smiled. “Wolfe’s design was based on my protocol, after all.” He replaced two of the phones in the box. “Of course, I’ll have to wipe any of my original Logos programming from these before we start to tinker with them, but first”—he toyed with the third phone—“how’s Anakin doing?”

Rachel cast her eyes to the ground. “Professor Sanchez said that his behavior became even more erratic while I was gone. She thinks we’re going to have to put him down.”

“I have an idea.” He held up the phone. “Let me stop by tomorrow. I’ll reprogram this phone with a Logos protocol to handle left-handed brains. We can try it on Anakin.”

Her face brightened. “Will it help?”

He nodded. “It should reverse the effects of the first test.” He set the phone on his desk. “Then I’ll erase the Logos program completely, just as I promised Richards.” A smile crept across his face.