PART II
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire
“Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.”
Richard Dawkins
CHAPTER 21
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VA
Deputy Director Casey Richards cracked his knuckles as he surveyed the room and its three other occupants. The anticipation of the first test of Project Jericho weighed on him heavier than any black op he’d overseen in his career. Jericho was the most ambitious and riskiest covert action the Agency had conducted since the events leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis fifty years earlier.
The windowless operations room on the sixth floor in the center of the CIA’s NHB, New Headquarters Building, was like its bigger brother in the OHB, only smaller. Behind a sentry-guarded, card-accessed metal door, the ops room was soundproofed and isolated from any electronic eavesdropping through its construction as a floating room within a room. Three fifty-inch flat-panel monitors hung on the wall underneath a row of LED clocks displaying the time in various zones across the world. The four desks in the center of the room each contained two workstations. He preferred the use of this smaller ops room to monitor the most sensitive operations. The fewer people who were exposed to these off-the-books actions, the more he could maintain operational security and deniability; plus, the room was just down the hall from his office.
One of the two technicians in the room, a late-thirties woman with black cat-eye glasses and dark hair tied in a neat bun on top of her head, keyed in a command at her workstation. One of the flat panels came to life, switching from the blue CIA logo to a satellite picture of a mountainous region. Alternating patches of evergreen trees weaved between brown patches of dirt and rocks. The technician entered another command and the picture zoomed in to reveal a village of tin and wood shacks dotting the foot of one of the mountains. The resolution from the satellites never ceased to impress him. He could count the sheep and goats grazing in the wood pens behind the huts.
The second technician, a new but thoroughly vetted recruit in his late-twenties, who held a PhD from MIT and spoke fluent Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto—the result of a Pakistani father and Egyptian mother, both doctors and US citizens—held his hands on either side of the Bose headphones on his ears, his eyes focused somewhere beyond the room.
“Shouldn’t they have arrived by now?” asked the silver-haired man standing beside him.
Richards turned to face the doctor. They had become friends fifteen years earlier after his son’s attempted suicide. The doctor had saved his son’s life, though with the various medications his son took he sometimes found it hard to recognize the boy he had raised.
“It’s only been two hours. The road’s pretty rough.”
He suspected that the impatient and imperious tone the doctor had taken masked an apprehension that the mission might fail. Both of their careers were riding on this. The doctor was the mastermind behind Project Jericho. In two years, Richards had already pumped twenty million dollars from one of his discretionary accounts into a program that had no paper trail—a program that had the potential to destroy both of their careers and bring down a popular president who had no idea of its existence. More troubling was the devastation that public knowledge of Jericho would have on US relations with the Arab world. They were risking an all-out religious war in the Middle East, a confrontation in which the US would be isolated from any sympathetic nations.
The potential payoff, however, was just as grand. The arrogant doctor had a concept as brilliant as it was dangerous; a concept that had the potential to bring a lasting and stable peace to a region that had been seized by religious warfare for thousands of years. Richards understood that being the world’s only superpower meant making those types of difficult decisions.
After the closing of Guantanamo several years earlier, the prisoners who had been swept up in the US War on Terror who could be tried in court had been relocated to federal penitentiaries. Suspected terrorists on whom they didn’t have enough evidence to try in a US court were hustled to secret locations across the world, delivered into the hands of cooperative nations who were generously compensated for their trouble. The question remained, however, about what should be the ultimate fate of these men. Richards had anticipated this issue. He’d known that many of these terrorists would eventually be released. They needed a way to reintegrate the men into society. The doctor had crystallized a plan and then implemented the project now known as Jericho.
“Sir, they’re coming into range now,” the female tech said.
“Where’s the drone?”
“Overhead now. I’m bringing it online.” She tapped a button on her console. “Transferring control from the USS Ronald Reagan to my terminal.”
A second monitor flickered on, displaying a beat-up flatbed truck moving down a dirt road and trailing a cloud of dust behind it. Three men sat in the cargo area. Unlike the first stationary satellite picture of the area, this one occasionally blurred or degenerated into digital pixels. The live feed came from a MQ-1 Predator drone that was flying high enough overhead that it could be neither heard nor seen from the ground.
“Any audio yet?”
The tech with the headphones said, “Nothing distinct from the truck. Do you want to hear?”
When Richards nodded, the tech rotated a dial. He and the doctor both jumped as the roar of an engine blared from the B&W studio speakers mounted in the corners of the room.
“Sorry!” The tech twisted the volume knob, reducing the noise to a hum.
No one spoke for the next twenty minutes as they watched the monitors. Then the woman broke the silence. “Here we go!”
His breath quickened. As many of these operations as he’d witnessed, he’d never gotten over the rush, nor the fear, that something could go horribly wrong. In addition to worrying about the loss of the lives of his operatives, he also had to worry about exposure. The image of the truck appeared on the first monitor as it drove into the middle of the small village.
“Youssef was one of our very first subjects,” the doctor said. “We’ve been working with him for eighteen months, and we just tested the new protocol on him before he left our care.” The doctor beamed. “Spectacular, really!”
Richards recalled the file on the twenty-four-year-old Pakistani they had picked up two years earlier in an Afghan border village controlled by the Taliban. After a thorough bombing, a SEAL team went in to pick up the pieces. They found him battered and dirty but alive. What Richards remembered the most about his photograph were the eyes. The hatred in the dark eyes behind the mass of straggly black hair seemed to jump out of the picture as if it were in 3D.
With his patchy beard, Youssef was no more than a boy. He’d grown up in the slums of Islamabad, illiterate, with no hope of finding anything other than menial labor. His prospects of finding a bride were near impossible. With the radical group hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, he’d found a brotherhood and meaning to his life he’d never known before. In their leader, he’d found the father figure missing from his own life. The terrorist leader had unfortunately been away from the camp during the bombing. Combating the fanaticism born of such life experiences had confounded the US for years. Until Jericho.
“How did you get him back into Pakistan?” the doctor asked. “Will his former comrades suspect anything?”
“He was released with a larger group of non-violent prisoners. We issued a press release stating that we’d concluded that these men were not threats, and that we didn’t have cause to hold them. As to whether his former associates believe it, we shall see in a minute.”
“He’ll be convincing. He’s a different man now.”
“He won’t forget the code?”
“His conditioning was complete. If he finds the leader of his old terrorist cell in this village, he’ll let us know.”
“He
has no suspicion of what awaits him then?”
The doctor shook his head. “During an induced sleep, we drilled a hole in one of his molars. After a week of complaining about the pain, we took him to our dentist, who replaced the molar with the tooth you provided us. He has no idea we’re listening or that he’s working for us. He’s doing what he is doing because he believes it.”
The rumble from the engine ceased. Both monitors now depicted the same image: the truck stopping in front of a hut in the village. A man emerged from the hut wearing a fur hat and a bulky coat. When the three men jumped off the bed of the truck, the new man embraced Youssef. Voices speaking Pashto came over the speakers.
The tech with the headphones closed his eyes and translated: “God willing, you have been returned to us, Brother!”
Brother? Richards glanced at the doctor. Had Youssef just returned to his family? If so, they’d wasted over a hundred thousand dollars on this operation.
The doctor pointed to the screen. The new man began to frisk Youssef. He relaxed. Family members didn’t frisk each other. He was thankful that he hadn’t gone with the original concept of the mission: strapping a bomb onto Youssef before sending him back into his terrorist cell. He never would have made it to the cell’s leader. Plus, as confident in Jericho as the doctor was, Richards wasn’t sure the protocol would work as well as he claimed.
“How I dreamed of this day!” the tech translated Youssef as saying. “Abadi?”
“He’s waiting for you now. He has many questions about what the Americans know.”
Richards straightened in his chair. The jackpot he’d been waiting for! Under intense interrogation, Youssef had revealed that he was the personal assistant to Abadi-Jabbar Mohammad, one of the leading Al Qaeda operatives hiding in the mountains on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. Unfortunately, Abadi-Jabbar constantly moved around. Nothing that Youssef had supplied them had led them to the terrorist leader—until now.
He watched the two men enter the small wood building whose tin roof reflected the bright sun. He realized he was holding his breath, but he knew that telling himself to relax would be useless.
A new voice came through the speakers—scratchy and weather-beaten. Richards wished that they had a voiceprint to match Abadi-Jabbar, but he was smart enough to avoid using cell phones. They were reliant on Youssef’s identification.
“Ah, Youssef! Come here,” the tech translated. “How have you been?”
Youssef’s reply seemed out of context, both in its ebullient tone and the final two words in clear English.
“Abadi-Jabbar, I must tell you how my life has been saved by Jesus Christ.”
Both techs and the doctor turned to Richards. That was it. The code they had been waiting for. He could hardly believe what he’d heard. The doctor had done it. To Youssef, this was not a code, but a sincere belief.
“Execute,” he said to the female tech.
She nodded and turned back to her console. Seconds later a bright light flashed on the screen. Richards watched as a thin trail of smoke traced like a pencil line across the image. The Predator carried two AGM-114 Hellfire Missiles. Now, he thought, it has only one.
The terrorist leader’s voice sounded confused even before the translator said, “What are you saying to—”
A loud static pop echoed from the speakers and then the audio cut off. The shack containing Youssef and Abadi-Jabbar disappeared in a cloud of splinters, smoke, and fire. The three men waiting outside were incinerated as well.
For a full minute, the operations room remained silent as they watched the ball of dust expand outward from the shack. As the smoke settled, Richards saw that the two closest huts were also consumed by fire. Villagers raced from the surrounding structures, some holding children in their arms, others half-dressed, looking over their shoulders in bewilderment at the destruction that had unexpectedly occurred on a calm, sunny day. He wondered who had been in the other two houses. Then he heard the sound of slow clapping from beside him.
“Now that was something.” The doctor grinned broadly.
CHAPTER 22
SSS, YALE UNIVERSITY
Ethan peeled back the yellow police tape that crisscrossed the entrance to his darkened office and let himself in for the first time since Elijah’s death five days ago. He walked across the empty floor, not bothering to turn on the overhead lights. He couldn’t deal with the harshness of the fluorescent bulbs highlighting the empty space in the center of the room where the Logos had been.
The thought that he would never again see his mentor made the office feel even emptier. The autopsy had revealed that his friend had been killed by strangulation. The police had concluded that Elijah’s death was a robbery turned violent. They’d found his wallet down the street in a trash bin, minus the cash and credit cards, and his laptop was missing. Other details of that night, however, unnerved Ethan. Why would a robber have gone to the trouble of putting him in the machine? Also, Elijah had been acting strangely the past few days about their research. Certainly these events could be related.
He dropped into his chair and flicked on the desk lamp. The soft yellow light, which he usually found comforting on quiet nights alone in the gothic building, cast sharp, black shadows from the neat stack of textbooks and journals on his desk.
Without his research to work on, he wasn’t sure of the purpose of being there. Samuel Houston had revoked the committee’s approval for the Logos project. The thought that Elijah’s culminating work would never be finished, that his own questions from years ago would never be answered, opened up a gulf of despair within him. He wasn’t even lecturing. Houston had suggested he take a couple of weeks off from his teaching duties to “allow himself time to heal.” One of the grad students was filling in for him. He hadn’t argued; he knew that the time off was not a request. With nothing to focus on, his mind occupied itself by replaying the scene of discovering Elijah’s body in the recliner over and over. Each time, he relived the shock and the fear as if it were happening again.
He reached out and adjusted the Tiffany lampshade so that the shadows falling across the desk would appear less dagger-like. He removed his laptop from his satchel, along with a stack of unpaid bills. He was meticulous about paying everything the day it arrived, but with his life upside down he’d fallen behind.
After logging in to his bank account, he began keying in the amounts for the e-checks. As much as he relished the details with his academic work, money matters were a hassle to him. He could make three times his salary in the private sector, but wealth had never been a motivating factor for him.
How’s that possible?
He stared at the box in the bottom right corner of the page: his account balance. His balance usually hovered around three thousand dollars. Now it read over twenty-four thousand. Another bank screw-up? They’d done strange things with his account in the past, usually to his detriment—like double mailing online payments. He knew what he’d spend his day tomorrow doing: wasting hours on the phone sorting through their mistake. As he scrolled back through his list of transactions, searching for the source of the excess funds, he saw something out of the corner of his eye.
A yellow Post-it note had been stuck on top of a nearby stack of journal articles. He hadn’t noticed it the previous week in the aftermath of discovering Elijah’s body.
He peeled the note from the journal and tilted it toward the desk lamp. His breath caught in his throat when he recognized the scribbled handwriting. Elijah. But this note didn’t contain one of his mentor’s reflections. He scrunched up his brow. The series of letters and numbers appeared to be some sort of code. He flipped the square paper over, but the other side was blank. He stared again at the writing.
HV5822 L91 L44 1985, 214.
What is this?
He racked his brain for what Elijah might have meant. Not a phone number or address; maybe an account? He thought about the excess money he’d just discovered, and an uneasy feeling began to spread
through his gut. But bank accounts don’t have letters in them, he told himself. Something about the code looked familiar, but he couldn’t place it. His mind had been operating in slow motion since the murder. He’d been finding it hard to concentrate, and not having his work to think about had only made his thoughts foggier.
He’d spent his newly found spare time working out at Payne Whitney Gym, especially on the indoor rock climbing wall, which had proved to be a great all-over body exercise. As a teenager he’d gone to a summer camp in the mountains of Virginia, where he’d learned to climb. Although his long, skinny limbs had seemed to get in his way during school sports, he’d found that his lanky body and high strength-to-weight ratio made him a natural climber. Finally, he’d discovered a sport he could do better than the bulky jocks who taunted him at school. He’d climbed a few times with friends in college, but as his workload increased in graduate school he’d given up the sport. His discovery three days earlier of the indoor climbing wall in the gym had seemed fortuitous. The burning sensation in his forearms and legs after an hour’s climb had helped to clear his mind.
He stared at the code again. The familiarity of the letters and numbers nagged at him. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. The screen showed two missed calls from Samuel Houston, which he’d ignored. He needed a break from dealing with the Yale bureaucracy. He scrolled to the speed dial menu. He’d left a message for Chris to call him but hadn’t heard back yet. His graduate student had left town right after the test with Terri to return to his family in Ohio, where he was dealing with his father’s cancer. Having experienced the same challenge himself, Ethan hadn’t wanted to burden his student with the news of Elijah’s death, but then he’d relented and called. Now he selected the number after Elijah’s, which he hadn’t had the nerve to delete yet.
The Jericho Deception: A Novel Page 13