With the soft background music, the Bishop couldn’t hear what passage they were reading, and even if he could, he didn’t speak Arabic. Probably Revelation, he guessed. He’d designed the educational program at the Monastery to have maximal effect on the new monks. Faith was a tricky business. That was why he was so anxious to receive the email he’d been expecting. The new chapel was almost completed. The sacred space would dramatically speed up the journey for his monks, making his job much easier. Youssef would be the first of the monks to experience the chapel.
The rapid fall of leather dress shoes on the limestone floor echoed behind him. He turned his head. Another of his priests, dressed in a flowing black ankle-length cassock, hurried toward him. The Bishop noticed that his white collar was unbuttoned, revealing a thick neck that bulged with veins the size of cords. He infused his low baritone voice with authority when he spoke to the young priest.
“Brother, have you looked in the mirror?”
The priest, newly arrived from the States via Kuwait, fumbled at the unfamiliar collar with hands that seemed more attuned to moving heavy objects than fastening tiny buttons.
“Sorry, Sir, I’ve been looking for you. You had a call from the home office.”
The Bishop felt the heat begin to creep back into his neck. If there was anyone less patient than he, it was his benefactor. He forced an exhale. He couldn’t show concern in front of his fellow priests.
“I will call them back once I have something concrete to say.”
He turned and walked to the cell next to Youssef’s. While he peered into the window, he asked the priest waiting behind him, “What’s the status on the chapel?”
“Final cleanup today, Sir. There’s a fair amount of construction dust. It’ll be ready for the monks as soon as we get the final specs on the cathedra.”
The cathedra, he thought. The monks’ final induction would take place there. They would approach the marble altar, which he’d imported from Italy. He would give the Eucharist while the monks knelt at his feet. Then they would partake in the final ceremony—a ceremony that would certainly meet with the strong disapproval of the Roman Catholic Church if anyone from its ranks were to witness it firsthand. He would rise from the cathedra, the bishop’s throne, and trade places with the monk, who would take a seat in the chair carved from mahogany and gilded in bronze. He would explain that they were all equal in the eyes of God. Next, he would ask the monk if he was ready to receive the Holy Spirit.
Then everything would change.
“We shall be ready soon, my son.” He nodded at the young priest, who had finally managed to put himself together. Then he moved to the next door.
Bending slightly, he gazed through the door’s iron-crossed window at their newest monk, a Jordanian who had arrived four days earlier. Mousa, he remembered from the file: a doctor who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time. Mousa had been unconscious since his arrival, healing from his ordeal. He looked peaceful, lying atop his cot in a simple cotton T-shirt. An IV bag hung from a pole beside the bed. In a few days they would begin to taper off the drugs. When Mousa woke, he would be given his brown monk’s robes. The doctor’s training would begin then.
CHAPTER 15
SSS, YALE UNIVERSITY
Ethan stuffed his hands deep into his pockets to prevent them from shaking. The humming of the machine changed frequency as the electrical pulses alternated in the solenoids. He felt the low vibration of the Logos in his bones.
The overhead fluorescents in the lab dimmed, causing his heart to lurch. He cut his eyes over to Elijah and then Chris. The Logos changed tune again as it cycled to a higher frequency. The lights came back to full power. Strange, he thought. The machine didn’t draw much power.
He studied his subject. Sister Terri’s eyes were closed, her breathing normal. A tightness crept into his chest. She had the same relaxed demeanor she’d displayed during the first test, when nothing had happened. If the Logos refused to produce any results this time, he was at a loss as to what to do. Their detractors in the department would be proved right. Maybe they really were trying to do the impossible.
Then her eyes popped open. He resisted the urge to ask how she was feeling. He didn’t want to influence the test by giving her any stimuli other than what the Logos delivered. He noticed that she wasn’t blinking, nor was there any change to her dilated pupils. She inhaled deeply.
“I smell honey,” she whispered before closing her eyes again.
It’s starting, he thought, his own breath quickening. Pleasant smells and sounds often accompanied hyperreligiosity. As if on cue, the corners of her mouth turned up in a half-smile.
“Church bells!” Her voice was stronger. “So beautiful.”
He wiped his palms on his khakis and then nodded at Chris, who was similarly transfixed by the nun. His student opened a spiral notebook and began scribbling his observations. The Logos changed tones again, cycling through another frequency. This time her breath caught in her lungs halfway through an inhalation. Other than the low hum of the machine, the room was silent. The urge to reach out to her, to ask her to describe her feelings, was overpowering, and he guessed from Elijah’s anxious expression that he felt the same way.
Another ninety seconds passed, and then the vibration from the Logos cut off. He’d set the program for three minutes, more of an arbitrary choice than anything scientific. Religious visions could last from a few seconds to an hour or more. For the first test, he’d wanted to err on the conservative side.
Terri’s eyes blinked open as if she were awakening from a restful sleep. Her face beamed. If Ethan hadn’t known that cancer was close to defeating her, he would have thought she was in the prime of her life.
“Santa Teresa.” She seemed to be talking to someone else, not those around her in the room.
Ethan recalled that the name was the one she’d chosen upon taking her vows: it came not from the tireless advocate in Calcutta who dedicated her life to helping the poor, but from Teresa de Ávila, the sixteenth-century Spanish nun renowned for her spiritual visions who was also the subject of one of the slides he’d shown his class. Although Terri had never had such vivid visions as Saint Teresa, she was regarded in the convent for her dedication to her daily prayer and worship practice. Ethan noticed that tears now streamed from her eyes.
“Before, I thought I understood,” she said, “but now I know there is no understanding. Only an experience of His love.”
Ethan debated whether he should ask questions or let the experience play out. He decided on the latter and waited in silence for her to continue. But instead of speaking, she stared at the ceiling. After several minutes passed, he glanced to Elijah with raised eyebrows. His mentor shrugged as if to say he was also unsure how to proceed, but the excitement in the senior professor’s eyes was clear. Elijah reached over Terri and swung the solenoid headset up and away.
As if on cue, Terri blinked several times and sat up. The distant look on her face vanished. She turned her piercing gaze on the two professors and smiled.
Elijah cleared his throat and asked, “Can you describe it?”
“Words are not adequate.” She shook her head. “The Holy Spirit entered me like a breath of pure light and energy—the breath of God.”
She swung her legs over the side of the chair. “I’ve had glimpses of this light in the past, during my deepest prayers, like a candle flame at the end of a deep cave. This spark of reality, this taste of God’s power, hinted to me that His essence runs through us all. But today . . . this was different.” Her smile grew. “That tiny spark was a blinding light!”
Ethan could hardly believe what he was hearing. Elijah wore a grin as large as the one he felt plastered across his own face.
She reached out her hand and took Elijah’s. “Thank you. You have given me a gift. You have opened my eyes to a depth of reality I could only suspect was present before. Today I experienced that reality for myself.”
After all the years of work
, the frustration of failed experiments, the loss of their funding, and the near closing of the project, they had done it. Ethan felt the weight of expectation drop from his body like a heavy coat he’d shrugged off his shoulders. He felt a lightness to his breathing he hadn’t experienced in years. Then a buzzing noise caught his attention.
“Sorry,” Rachel said, lunging for her bag on the floor by the stool where she’d sat transfixed by the scene. She removed her cell phone. He felt a tug of annoyance. He should have made clear to everyone the obvious point that all cell phones should be turned off during the experiment. Then he noticed that just as Rachel was checking her phone, Chris, who was standing behind the Logos, was bent over his as well, typing with both thumbs. He knew that students had active social lives, but they were in the middle of one of the biggest moments in psychological history. Couldn’t their plans wait?
“Oh no,” Rachel said, still scrolling through a message on her phone.
“What is it?” Elijah asked.
“A problem at CapLab. I just got a text from one of the monkey janitors.”
The technicians and students who worked in the capuchin lab referred to the hourly employees who cleaned the cages and fed the monkeys as the monkey janitors. Despite the unglamorous title, Ethan knew how respected they were by the research students and vets alike. These employees spent so much time on a daily basis with the monkeys that they often knew the animals better than anyone else.
“Is it serious?” Elijah asked. The smile had disappeared from his face.
“It’s Anakin, one of the capuchins we tested the Logos on.” She caught Ethan’s eye. The elation he’d experienced moments before drained from his body, replaced with a void of uncertainty.
“And?”
“He’s not right.”
CHAPTER 16
THE MONASTERY
ASWAN, EGYPT
The sounds came to Mousa first.
The world around him was dark, but he heard music. As the volume inside his head increased, he realized that the sound wasn’t exactly music, but voices chanting. He was tempted to drift back into the darkness of unconsciousness, carried by the chant like a raft floating on the sea, but then another voice intruded into his thoughts.
As the new voice became clearer, he realized that it spoke in English; it sounded American, and it was reading to him. He attempted to open his eyes, but his lids were heavy as if they’d been taped shut. The urge to return to sleep was overpowering; he resisted by focusing on the words.
“And . . . no one shall come to the Father except through me.”
He willed his eyes to open. The light hit him like a board across the forehead. He snapped them closed. Inhaling sharply, he tried again, cracking his eyelids into slits so that only a little light came through. As his pupils constricted, he opened them fully. The light came from a wrought-iron chandelier with six candles around a hand-hammered ring suspended from the ceiling by a rusty chain. As his eyes adjusted to his surroundings, the fog in his mind began to clear.
The voice that had been reading to him stopped. Smiling at him from a wooden chair was a blond-haired, blue-eyed priest.
“You’re awake now,” said the man, who appeared young enough to have just graduated from seminary. He wore a black robe that gathered at his ankles; a white-banded collar peeked above the robe’s lapel.
Mousa tried to push himself upright, but he only succeeded in raising his body an inch or two. He grunted and collapsed on his pillow.
The priest placed a hand on his arm. “Give your body some time. You’ve been asleep for a week.”
A week! The words shifted his mind into a higher gear. He tried to remember where he was and how he’d gotten there. He opened his mouth to speak, but his tongue was swollen and tasted of cotton.
“What . . . where . . . ?” His voice was hoarse. He tried to swallow and start again, but his mouth was too dry to accomplish even that simple task.
The priest lifted a glass from the desk and held it to his lips. “Drink slowly. Just enough to wet your mouth.”
The water tasted like nectar. He gulped down more than he should have, and he started to cough. The priest replaced the glass on the desk by the bed. “When you arrived here, you were very sick. The monastery doctor gave you some medicine to help you rest and sleep it off.”
Sleep it off for a week? That didn’t seem right. Even in his hazy state of mind, he couldn’t recall a single patient he’d ever treated who had slept for a week, unless they’d been in a coma. Why couldn’t he remember what had happened to him? He knew that comas could be induced in a variety of ways: head trauma, extreme fever, powerful drugs.
He evaluated his symptoms. A quick glance at his body, covered by a single sheet, didn’t reveal any bandages or other sign of trauma. His fogginess, the amnesia, and the difficulty moving were not surprising considering how long he’d been unconscious. He wiggled his fingers and was relieved that they moved. He lifted his right arm, which also responded. An IV needle was stuck into the back of his hand and wrapped with tape. He followed the clear hose to the head of his bed, where a half-filled clear bag was suspended on a pole. Saline and sucrose, he guessed.
He glanced about the room. It contained a single twin bed, a small desk, and the chair the priest sat on. The floor was stone and the walls and ceiling were plaster. The young priest continued to grin at him, patiently waiting for him to orient himself. Then another thought struck the doctor. What’s a Christian priest doing by my bedside rather than a nurse or a doctor?
“Where am I?” He’d found his voice.
“St. John of the Cross Monastery.”
“Not a hospital?”
“One of my brothers is a doctor, and he has seen to your care.”
The priest hadn’t answered his question.
“You were brought here for your safety, so that you could recover before you return to your family in Jordan.”
The mention of his family went through his body like an electric shock. Using all of the strength he could muster, he pushed himself into a sitting position. As soon as he was upright, the blood began to drain from his head, and the room began to go dark again. He felt the priest’s hands steadying his body.
“Careful there, Mousa! Don’t get me in trouble by falling out of your bed on my watch.”
The memories flooded into his mind like grains of rice pouring out of an upended sack. The white limestone buildings of his neighborhood in Amman, the rolling green hills of the countryside dotted with pink-flowering almond trees, the laughing faces of his wife, his daughter, and his newborn son. The thought of Amira brought back a new set of memories, but these were not so pleasant. He felt the blood rush back into his head as he recalled the explosion in the Dubai mall, the arrest at the airport as Amira screamed for him, and his imprisonment and torture.
Almost unconsciously, he rotated his right arm, the one that had been dislocated. Only a little tender, he realized. He palpated his sides with his fingertips. The bruising must have healed, because he couldn’t find any damage from the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of the brutal guards. Then he turned his attention to the young man in the robes beside him. His eyes narrowed and his voice came out stronger than he would have expected.
“What has happened to me? Where is my daughter?”
The priest seemed taken aback by the force of his words—his smile vanished. Mousa guessed that people rarely raised their voices in monasteries.
“Well . . . my understanding is that you were a prisoner in Dubai after a bombing in which you were accused of playing a role.”
His final memory came to him. He’d been dragged out of his cell, certain that he was being taken to his execution. The military men who had taken him were Americans, like the priest, but he could remember nothing else.
“You had been treated horrifically. You arrived here unconscious and badly bruised. That is why you were allowed to rest until you healed. And your daughter”—the smile returned to the priest’s
face—“she was returned to your wife in Jordan after your detainment at the airport. She is fine.”
Mousa bowed his head while tears ran down his face. Amira’s fate had been the one hope that kept him going. He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of the white cotton galabeya they must have dressed him in.
“Thank you. But how”—he gestured to the room—“did I end up in a monastery?”
“Two years ago”—the priest rose from his chair—“the Bishop, our abbot, had a dream that the brotherhood should be doing more to reach out to those in our community.” He began to pace the room. “In the three centuries after the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, much of the doctrine of the early Church was formed in monasteries just like this one in the Egyptian desert. We refer to our spiritual ancestors as the Desert Fathers.”
He paused by the desk, fiddling with the wood surface before moving back to Mousa’s side. “We try to live by the edicts of Jesus—caring for our fellow men, our neighbors who are in need, even if, like the Good Samaritan, they are not of the same culture and religion as us. We opened the doors of the monastery to political prisoners so that we could help them recover and reenter society as healthy individuals.”
The thought that his ordeal might be over flooded Mousa like a warm ocean wave. The knowledge that both he and his family were now safe brought an unexpected feeling of being tired again. He lay back on the bed, resisting the weight of his eyelids.
“I’ll be going home now?”
“Soon. Soon, my friend.” The priest patted his shoulder. When he did so, Mousa noticed that the clear tubing of his IV fell from the man’s hand. As he drifted off to sleep again, he thought he noticed something odd, but maybe his mind was just playing tricks on him. He was so sleepy.
He must have imagined the syringe in the priest’s hand.
CHAPTER 17
YALE UNIVERSITY
The Jericho Deception: A Novel Page 10