The Jericho Deception: A Novel

by Jeffrey Small

  When Ethan bent over to push the elevator button, Rachel whispered in his ear, “I bet if anyone walked up confidently and flashed a credit card, that guy would let them pass.”

  He laughed. “Half the time, my ID is backward.”

  When they stepped onto the terrazzo of the third floor two minutes later, a chill crawled over his skin. In their rush to arrive before the library closed, he’d forgotten to grab his jacket on the way out of his office. The night had been cool, not cold, but now that he was still, he was shivering.

  “Why is Sterling so spooky at night?” Her voice echoed off the brick-lined hallway.

  “I think it was purposely designed to intimidate the students.” He smiled, but he also felt the unease that the deserted gothic library engendered that close to midnight.

  He led her down the hall, turned right, and opened a low wooden door, inviting her to enter the stacks first. Twenty-five rows of metal shelves on either side of a narrow walkway stretched before them. The ceiling above their heads was also metal; it served as the floor of the mezzanine, their destination. The rows of shelves were ensconced in shadow. Switches at the end of each row controlled fluorescent lights, but at this hour they were off. As they continued down the narrow aisle, he breathed in the aroma of old books.

  A squeaking sound pierced the silence in the darkness ahead of them.

  “What was that?” she whispered.

  He froze in place and tilted his head to the side. Not hearing anything further, he shrugged and resumed his quest down the aisle. When he reached the metal staircase leading up to the mezzanine, he paused again and looked back from where they came. The aisle was still empty. His imagination was messing with him. He started up the stairs.

  That’s when the figure appeared before him.

  He jumped backward, causing Rachel to let out a startled gasp. The student descending the steps two at a time in front of him abruptly halted his descent.

  “Hey!” The voice came not from the male who stared at them with the shocked expression of someone who thought he was alone, but from behind him, where a mass of disheveled blond hair appeared over his shoulder.

  Regaining his composure, the male student said, “What’s up, Professor?”

  “Late-night studying?” His pulse recovered from the surprise encounter as he recognized the student from a lecture he’d given the prior year.

  “Yeah, that’s right.” A grin spread across the student’s face. Then he seemed to notice Rachel, and his grin widened.

  The woman behind him glanced away as she passed them, her cheeks and neck glowing red. Her hands were tucking her navy blouse into her long wool skirt. Sex in the stacks was somewhat of an unspoken tradition. Natalie had even convinced him to experiment there on more than one occasion.

  “The library is about to close,” he called after them.

  “We’re just leaving.” The student’s voice held a hint of relief. “Thanks, Prof.”

  “Busted,” Rachel said under her breath after they reached the top of the stairs. He suppressed a laugh.

  Five minutes later, they sat next to each other in a study carrel—a metal desk attached to the wall at the end a row of books. The clanking of radiators echoed around them. The window to their right looked down onto a retail intersection of New Haven streets. Neon lights proclaiming the “Hip Hop, Metal, Dance, Rock, Funk” of Toad’s Place, a popular nightclub, lit up the foggy evening. Just beyond that, he could make out the four spires of the other campus building designed to look like a cathedral, Payne Whitney Gymnasium, where he had been rock climbing earlier.

  “Are you going to open it?” she asked.

  He turned his attention to the leather-bound book he’d just selected from the shelf by the carrel. Its call number matched the number Elijah had left. He sat up straight in the wooden chair while Rachel leaned in close beside him. He enjoyed feeling the warmth from her body. He flipped the book over so that its embossed title stood out.

  “Findings from The Church Senate Subcommittee on Intelligence,” he read aloud. The book’s title only added to the mystery.

  “Wait,” she said. “I studied this a few years ago in a poli-sci class.” She drummed her fingers against her lip for a few seconds and then continued, “In 1973, Congress, led by Senator Church, held hearings on clandestine CIA activities in the 1950s and ’60s.”

  “I think I remember something about that.” Then a disturbing thought occurred to him. “Wasn’t there some controversy caused by the participation of several renowned psychology academics in those operations?”

  She nodded. “The Ivy League served as a top recruiting ground during the early days of the CIA.”

  Flipping the pages together, they skimmed over the details of a Top Secret operation known as MKULTRA. Beginning in 1953, the CIA had experimented with mind control techniques through the use of drugs, primarily LSD. The program examined ways in which Soviet defectors could be plied with psychoactive drugs to uncover what they knew. They also sought to control assassins with hypnosis and brainwashing, and even discussed whether entire populations could be made docile by putting hallucinogens in their water supply. The early experiments utilized willing subjects who ingested drugs or underwent total sensory deprivation to see the effects, but the CIA quickly came to understand that the only effective tests would be ones in which the participants had no idea that they were being drugged. They set up a safe house in San Francisco as a brothel where they administered drugs to the johns and the prostitutes and watched them on hidden cameras to test the effects. In one surreptitious test in Boston, a subject, thinking he was going insane, ran screaming down the hotel hallway and crashed through the glass window at the end, plummeting to his death.

  Ethan shook his head. “I can’t believe the extent of these experiments. How could an academic participate in this stuff?”

  “I know. They were in violation of the Nuremberg Code.”

  He glanced at the graduate student, impressed with the breadth of her knowledge. After the Second World War, the judges at the Nuremberg trials had exposed the gruesome human experiments conducted by Nazi doctors and proposed ten points of research ethics that became known as the Nuremberg Code. The United States laws governing human experimentation followed these same principles. The most important points were that human subjects give their voluntary consent for any experimentation and that study participants never be in danger of real physical harm. For these reasons, his subjects—like Liz, his epilepsy patient, and Sister Terri—had to be informed and then sign off on all aspects of his studies.

  Reading further, he learned that MKULTRA was disbanded not because of ethical concerns, but because the CIA realized that the drugs they were using were unpredictable at best in controlling behavior. When these experiments and other abuses at the Agency came to light in the 1970s, Congress enacted strict oversight of the CIA. Under President Carter, the covert operations capability of the Agency was essentially disbanded. Although its secret activities were renewed in the 1980s and again following 9/11, questions were raised in both of these cases because of abuses with the Iran-Contra scandal under Reagan and the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo under Bush.

  All very interesting, he thought, but why did Elijah send me to this book? Turning another page, a paragraph jumped out at him that made his eyes widen.

  Because of the covert nature of the experiments, the CIA went to great lengths to hide their involvement, even for the more innocuous research they funded at universities. They used the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research to funnel money to numerous projects whose research was later adapted for CIA purposes.

  He unbuttoned the next button down on his blue oxford shirt. He was sweating now. Is it possible? The memory of how odd Elijah had acted when talking about the Neurological Advancement Foundation that had funded their research blazed through his mind.

  A distant clanging noise of metal caused both of them to look up.

&nbs
p; The noise sounded like a door had just closed. He glanced at his watch: 11:35. “Probably the security guard coming to tell us our time is up.”

  He held his breath for a moment, listening again. Nothing.

  “I’m sure that’s it,” Rachel said, but he heard an edge to her voice that hadn’t been there earlier.

  He turned his attention back to the book and then fished the Post-it note from his pocket. After the call number, he noticed a comma and the number 214. He flipped to page 214.

  Rachel slapped his shoulder. “Good catch. I missed that.”

  A black-and-white picture stared back at them. The photograph showed six solemn figures standing in a lab. The team of Harvard psychologists was testing the effects of a combination of hypnosis, drugs, and sleep deprivation on memory and suggestibility. His breath caught in his chest when he noticed the two young graduate students on the far right side of the photo.

  “Is that—” Rachel began.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  But what scared him was that he did believe it. The puzzle pieces were starting to fall into place. The first graduate student in the picture, tall with neat hair, was identified as Allen Wolfe. Next to Wolfe was his classmate, Elijah Schiff.

  The squeaking of sneakers echoed through the stacks below them. “That doesn’t sound like how that ancient guard would walk,” she whispered.

  She’s right, he thought; the steps were quick and deliberate. “Maybe another student. I’ll check.” The image of his mentor and Wolfe working for the CIA burned in his mind. Careful not to scrape his chair against the floor, he stood and made his way to the staircase.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE MONASTERY

  Mousa blinked rapidly. His eyes had been accustomed to the cloister’s flickering candelabras when the intense light from the chapel hit him. As his pupils constricted, he realized that the light shone from a monumental stained glass window at the far end of the chapel opposite the doorway in which he stood. He felt the young priest’s hand on his lower back, urging him into the room. He cast his eyes to the floor, whose polished white marble contrasted the textured, sand-colored stone of the rest of the monastery. His sandals slid across the smooth finish as he shuffled toward the light.

  The stained glass was in the form of a cross over five meters in height. The glass was divided into various triangles of brilliant color, except for the center, which held no color and radiated a brilliant white light that seemed to pierce through to the innermost core of his brain.

  “Welcome, Brother Mousa,” a baritone voice called from the light.

  Mousa shielded his eyes and walked the twenty paces to the far end of the chapel. The voice, he discovered, did not come from the light but from a regally appointed man sitting on an elevated golden throne underneath the stained glass.

  The Bishop.

  He had heard rumors of the Bishop. The priests spoke about him in reverent tones. He had the power of God within him, they said with a note of awe.

  The Bishop beckoned to him. Mousa approached the throne, stepping onto a lush burgundy carpet that stretched out from the platform upon which the throne sat, raised above the marble floor. When they reached the base of the platform, the priest kneeled, bowing his head. Mousa followed his lead, kneeling also but looking up at the man on the throne. Embroidered silver silk robes hung from his shoulders to his feet, which were dressed in polished Italian wingtips. Adorning the man’s head like a crown was a tall pointed hat made from the same silk as the robes.

  The Bishop smiled in a fatherly way. “We are so happy to have you here with us, Mousa. Seeing you recover from such a great injustice brings joy to my heart.”

  “And I appreciate your hospitality”—he stood while the young priest remained kneeling—“but now that I am better, I’m ready to return to my family.”

  “That day is coming soon. We are working out the details with the local government. Because of the way you were treated, these things can take some time.”

  “All I want is to go home. I’m not looking to hold anyone responsible for my imprisonment.”

  “We know that, Son. Soon, very soon.” The Bishop beamed a white smile at him. “But today we have something wonderful for you.”

  He raised his eyebrows but waited to hear what this “something” was.

  “Have you ever truly experienced God?”

  He glanced at the priest beside him, thinking of the conversation they’d just had. His understanding of Allah had deepened over the years, and he performed the Salat, praying five times a day while facing Mecca, but he was neither a Sufi nor a mullah.

  “In what way?”

  “When you accept that Jesus Christ is the one and only Son of God, you can experience through Him the power of the Holy Spirit.” The Bishop’s smile vanished, and his eyes narrowed. “Brother Mousa, I’m offering you the opportunity to accept Jesus into your life. Are you ready to confess your sins and give yourself to Christ in exchange for eternal life?”

  The first thought that came to Mousa was to ask why it was necessary to accept Jesus as the only Son of God. Contrary to what the more radical members of his religion claimed, the Prophet Mohammad taught that Allah sent different prophets to speak to different peoples. Allah sent Moses to the Hebrews, Jesus to the Christians, and Mohammad to the Arabs. Mousa already understood that Jesus was the Son of God, but then again all of humanity were children of God. Since there was no truth but Allah, the spark of Allah was in everyone. Certain figures in history, however—Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, even the Buddha—lived a life more centered on this divine spark, lighting the way for others to follow their paths. The mistake Christians made, he thought, was in their deification of Jesus from a child of Allah and a great prophet into an idol rivaling Allah himself.

  While these thoughts raced through his mind, he bowed his head and said in as heartfelt a tone as he could muster, “I accept Jesus as my Christ and Savior.”

  He had said these words many times before to the various priests who sat by his bed. They were just words, and they made his caring hosts happy. He figured that anything that made the priests happy brought him closer to his family.

  The beaming smile returned to the Bishop’s tanned face.

  “Brother Mousa, our order here is unique. While we do have a simple hierarchy—Bishop, Fathers, Brothers—we recognize that in God’s eyes we are all the same.”

  Mousa nodded. As different as their religions were, their teachings shared many similarities.

  The Bishop rose from his throne. “In the Church, the cathedra, the bishop’s chair, is a symbol of my authority and power, a power that comes from God through Jesus, passing to his apostles and then through a line of succession over history to me today.”

  The Bishop stepped aside and motioned to the chair. “Please, take a seat.”

  He glanced to the priest now standing beside him. The priest shared the same smile as the Bishop. Mousa stepped onto the platform and placed a hand on the smooth curved wood of the armrest. It felt luxurious. He turned and lowered himself onto the purple cushioned seat. Although the seatback was wood, it was contoured to his back and felt as comfortable as any recliner. The sides of the back were covered in gold leaf and swept up into a spiral decoration that swirled by his head.

  “Close your eyes and relax,” the Bishop said. “We will pray together for the Holy Spirit to come to you.”

  The baritone voice had a soothing effect. He’d enjoyed praying with the priests, and he admired their piety and their respect for Allah. He relaxed into the throne, resting his head on a cushion embedded in the wood. He closed his eyes. His lids felt heavy.

  “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .” The baritone voice was joined by the blond-haired priest.

  Mousa took up the prayer as well, his lips repeating the words he’d been taught during his stay in the monastery. His mind, however, began a different prayer: “In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful, all appreciation, gratefulness
, and thankfulness are to Allah alone, Lord of the World . . . ” He didn’t have anything against the Christian prayer, but the Sura Al-Fatiha felt more comfortable to him.

  He didn’t know how long he sat in the chair before he noticed the change. The rhythmic voices of the priests, along with the repetition of his prayer, obscured the passage of time. The change started as a subtle awareness. He felt or heard—he wasn’t sure which—a slight hum. When he turned his attention to the sensation, he thought he detected a slight vibration. Maybe it was the powerful air conditioners that kept the monastery cool. Before he explored the sensation further, a new feeling arose. This feeling, however, didn’t seem to come from outside of him but from a distant corner of his mind.

  There is no god but Allah, and Mohammad is his messenger. The words rolled across the back of his eyelids. Then he felt as if a door opened in the dark recesses of his mind. The door didn’t lead to any particular place, but rather it seemed to lead to space itself, as if the physical boundaries of his skull began to open. This space called to him like the distant light of an entrance to a cave beckoned to one lost inside. His prayer trailed off while the voices of the Bishop and priest faded into the darkness. He drifted toward the light. His body warmed as the cool air of the cave gave way to the heat of the sun. The desire to reach the light became irresistible, as if his very existence depended on it. The warmth spread from his skin inward, embracing his heart and eclipsing his fears and doubts about his future—even those about his family.

  Suddenly the darkness vanished.

  The feeling was overwhelming and indescribable. He surrendered to the warmth and the light that now bathed his body from the outside, and yet at the same time radiated outward from his very core. All words but one faded from his mind: Islam. For the first time in his life, he truly understood the teachings of his faith. The meaning of Allah went beyond doctrine, beyond history, beyond mythology, even beyond the prophets.