The Jericho Deception: A Novel

by Jeffrey Small

  “Now I know. My seizure began in the left temporal lobe of my brain, where it fired neurons that sparked my vision, just like the cases of those who experience hyperreligiosity.”

  “Like your patient Liz you told me about? But your vision was so different.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe because my brain was wired for a scientific worldview—beginning at age ten I was addicted to Discover Magazine and science fiction—I saw geometric patterns rather than angels or Jesus.”

  He’d dedicated his career to understanding mystical experiences because, even after the years he’d spent studying, researching, experimenting—even after receiving an MD and a PhD—he still hadn’t explained the singular conviction that had come from his core that day by the trampoline: His vision of a structure underlying all of reality was real. A structure some ancient Greeks and early Christians had called the Logos.

  “Have you had other visions since then?”

  “No, that was the only time.” He examined his hands, turning them over in his lap. He felt his chest tighten.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” Her voice was compassionate yet firm.

  Did he dare? He’d already just shared one of his most intimate secrets. Could he risk another—one more painful? For a reason he couldn’t articulate, he trusted this woman he’d only known a short time. As much as he resisted the attraction, he was drawn to her. As he’d grown to know her better, the innate awkwardness he usually experienced with women had faded. He hadn’t felt connected in that way to someone since . . . Natalie.

  “I had one other epileptic event. It was brief, and I didn’t have any visions.” He swallowed the lump in his throat. “I hadn’t taken my meds in a few weeks. I’d been happy and relaxed and hadn’t had a headache in months. I’d become complacent.”

  She folded her hands in her lap and waited for him to continue.

  “It was the night Natalie died”—he swallowed again—“when I was driving.”

  “A drunk driver hit you, right?” Her voice was soft.

  “We were talking about something—I wish I could remember what—and she was laughing. Then I smelled something burning. We were in her car. I asked if she’d changed her oil recently. Those were the last words I ever said to her.” He twisted his fingers into a knot. “I don’t know whether or not she answered because my attention was drawn to a distant pair of lights that reflected off the raindrops on the windshield in a starburst pattern. As the lights got closer they multiplied, doubling every second until they almost eclipsed my field of vision.” The knot with his fingers cinched tighter. “Natalie’s scream must have shocked me out of the initial stages of the SPS, my simple partial seizure. The drunk’s car was in our lane. I jerked the wheel, but it was too late.”

  Tears flowed from Rachel’s eyes. She uncrossed her legs, scooted to the edge of the bed, and rested her hands on top of his.

  “You hadn’t had a seizure in almost two decades. You had no way of knowing it could happen that night.”

  “I’m a doctor. I knew better than to stop my Topiramate. My arrogance killed her.”

  “Ethan, you didn’t kill Natalie. The drunk driver did.”

  “I wish I could convince myself of that.” He felt his eyes well up. He wiped them on his shoulder. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get all emotional on you. I’ve only told this story once before—to Elijah.”

  “It’s okay to feel the pain.”

  “I know it’s the natural response of my amygdala—”

  “Hey, Professor”—her voice rose—“enough of your biology lessons. You’re using your intellect to deny the real feelings you’ve suppressed. You can lock up these memories in a box in your mind, but they’ll always be there, festering, haunting you. At times when you think all is right, the cry of hurt will remind you that it isn’t.”

  “I don’t know how else to handle it.”

  “Why not allow the pain to be present? Feel it. Your love for Natalie and the tragedy of her death are part of who you are. Pain means that you’re still alive. But pain doesn’t have to define you either.” She uncurled the knot that he’d made with his hands and interlaced her fingers in his. “I think that’s the real purpose of your research. There exists something deeper within each of us, beyond our intellects and past our emotions, a true essence that we can experience as connection, as peace, and as love.”

  Her words resonated within him. He had avoided pain his whole life. He’d used his mind to seal away the hurt by defining his feelings in terms of biology and immersing himself in his work. But he’d never truly escaped his emotions. He looked into her eyes, which were moist with compassion, and he felt the vault around his heart unlock.

  She stood, pulled him to his feet, and hugged him. Her body seemed to radiate an electricity that enlivened his very core. After a minute, she rose on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for sharing that.”

  As she started to lower, his hands seemed to move as if they had their own mind, sliding from her waist to the nape of her neck. This time the cautionary voice in his head was silent. He drew her face to his. Their lips brushed gently at first, but soon grew more urgent. The forcefulness of their kiss bordered between pleasure and pain, as if it might be the last one of their lives. With what he was planning, he thought, it just might be. At that moment, however, he only wanted to lose himself in her, feel her body melding into his, but the sound of the door opening caused both of them to jump backward.

  CHAPTER 47

  THE MONASTERY

  “Hey, you two.” Chris grinned at them as if he were a parent catching teenagers making out in the basement. He closed the door behind him, glanced upward at a smoke detector in the corner of the ceiling, and then positioned his back to it.

  “Video?” Ethan guessed.

  Chris nodded. “But no audio.”

  “What do you want?” Rachel asked.

  “Look, I can’t explain how horrible I feel about your harrowing experience, and”—he looked Ethan in the eyes—“how I betrayed your confidence. When I joined the Agency, I did it to protect Americans. My uncle didn’t die in 9/11 so that I could bring harm to the people I care about, to those who’ve mentored me and taught me. I had no idea when I got sucked into this that Wolfe would go as far as he has.”

  “In Wolfe’s mind, the future of Jericho is more important than the lives of a couple of scientists,” Ethan said. “He’ll justify disposing of us as sacrificing a few to save the many, just as he did with Elijah.”

  Chris cast his eyes to the floor. “I see that clearly now—which is why I’m going to get you guys out of here.”

  “How?” Rachel asked.

  “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  Ethan heard the sincerity in his voice. “I’ve had a good look at the backbone of the electronics that run this place. I have an idea that will disable the monitoring systems while providing enough of a distraction to allow us to escape in the confusion.” He pointed to the cardkey in Chris’s hand. “We’ll need help getting out of the building, as well as taking one of the cars.”

  “When?” Chris asked.

  “We go tonight, before Wolfe returns.” He outlined his plan in detail.

  Chris shook his head. “It’s crazy enough that it just might work.”

  Ethan turned to Rachel. “But we need an excuse to get you out of this room and into the chapel.”

  “That’s easy,” Chris said. “Wolfe thought her knowledge about the monkeys might help you fix the problem with the Logos—that’s why she’s here. All we have to do is pretend we need her assistance.”

  “You don’t need to pretend,” she said. The lines of worry that had been etched in her brow disappeared, and the spark Ethan was used to seeing radiated again from her eyes. “I know what’s different about Anakin.”

  “You do?” He felt his heart rate accelerate. As dire as their situation was, the flaw in the Logos still ate at him.

  She shuddered. “It came to me when I tried
to escape that Axe guy who attacked me.” She turned to Chris. “When you stopped by earlier, you said that two men out of twenty had negative reactions?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can we see them?”

  Chris removed a set of black robes from a hook on the door. “It’s not exactly your tie-dye scrubs.” A sly grin crept across his face. “You’ll be Sister Rachel.”

  “Never imagined I’d hear those words,” she said as she shrugged on the robes and covered her head with the habit. Then she walked over to the table by her bed and selected a red apple from a plate that also held grapes and figs. “Let’s do it.”

  Ethan restrained himself from blurting out the questions that flew through his head. His detailed examinations of the men had revealed nothing that would explain why the Logos would affect them negatively. He recalled Elijah predicting that people would experience “the ultimate,” as he called it, in different ways. Maybe the minds of the two men simply couldn’t handle being exposed to something greater than their own limited realities. Maybe they interpreted the resulting ego dissolution that mystics found unifying and blissful as a terrifying loss of existence. But had Rachel discovered an anomaly that he’d missed? His curiosity ached to know.

  When Chris led them down the cloistered hallway in silence, Ethan glanced at the faux-stained glass windows along the left wall opposite the doors to the monks’ rooms. He immediately recognized the scene of a man lying on the desert sand beside his horse while the translucent figure of Jesus spoke to him from the sky. Less than two weeks previously, but half a world away, he’d shown Caravaggio’s painting of this scene of the conversion of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus to his class—a class that included Rachel. Paul wrote cryptically about a physical ailment that plagued him, “a thorn of the flesh,” as he referred to it. Could this ailment have been temporal lobe epilepsy, as some suggested—a neurological condition that led to his hyperreligiosity? Paul’s vision altered his life and ultimately changed the religious landscape of the world. Seeing the stained glass, Ethan couldn’t shake the realization that his own vision, though he knew the biological source of it, had done the same to him.

  Chris stopped by the door of the monk who had been ranting about seeing the devil. “He’s been sedated heavily, but he’s awake.”

  When they gathered at the foot of his bed, the Arab’s eyes fluttered open and wandered between them with a blurry expression. His fingers tapped lightly on the bed cover, but he was calm and silent. Ethan noted that his restraints had been removed. Rachel held the apple up in the air. The man’s eyes followed the only color in the drab room. She tossed it to him.

  The Arab caught the apple in his left hand.

  Ethan looked from the man to Rachel. What am I missing?

  “Anakin,” she said, “is left-handed.”

  “Huh?”

  “Like humans, capuchins and other primates show characteristics of handedness.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The way they dangle from a branch or feed themselves—they’ll do it with their dominant hands. Of all of my capuchins, Anakin is the only one who is left-handed. He was also the only one to react negatively to having his temporal lobes stimulated by your machine.”

  Ethan’s mind spun through the implications. “I can’t believe I missed this.”

  “So being left-handed could make a difference with the way the Logos works?”

  “Professor,” Chris asked, “could it have something to do with the way the two brain hemispheres interact?”

  He stared at his student. He still thinks of me as his professor.

  “You’re absolutely right. I just can’t believe I overlooked it.” He shook his head. He’d made the classic research mistake of seeing the world through a specific limited view—his own. He was right-handed, as were his initial subjects, and he’d neglected to account for the brain differences that occurred in the 8 to 10 percent of the population who were left-handed or ambidextrous.

  He glanced at the Arab taking slow bites from the apple as if he were alone in the room. Ethan knew he spoke no English. “I programmed the Logos to stimulate the left temporal lobe, the dominant side of the brain in right-handed individuals, at more intense frequencies. I theorized, based on Liz’s EEG and on the brain scans Elijah and I did on the monks and nuns, that the difference in the signals between the two temporal lobes of the brain created the feelings of spaciousness and the sense of otherworldliness that mystics describe. One half of the brain sensed something different than the other half.” He grimaced. “I made the assumption that the relationships between the left and right temporal lobes would be similar for our future test subjects.”

  “But,” Chris said, “in left-handed people, the left and right brain hemispheres often have reversed subspecialties.”

  “The overstimulation of the non-dominant hemisphere in these other subjects must have caused their feelings of panic, claustrophobia, and loss of control. In a religious setting, especially with someone preconditioned to see evil in a personalized form, they interpreted these feelings as being influenced by devils rather than God.”

  He turned to Rachel. “I should have taken your and Elijah’s concerns more seriously. If only—”

  She put her hand on his arm. “There will always be ifs. All that’s important is what we do now. Anyway, I don’t think anything you could have done would have changed Wolfe’s actions here.”

  “She’s right,” Chris said.

  The sight of the two students looking up at him opened a void of sadness in Ethan’s heart. He missed Elijah. Not just for his brilliant mind, but for his counsel and his friendship. But now he was the one in charge. He wasn’t at all sure about his plan. Too many contingencies could go wrong. But he knew two things with certainty: he had to stop the madness that was Project Jericho, and he refused to let anything happen to Rachel.

  PART III

  “Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks . . .

  but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake,

  but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire,

  but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

  When Elijah heard the whisper, he pulled his cloak over his face.”

  1 Kings 19:11-13

  CHAPTER 48

  THE MONASTERY

  Ethan wiped the sweat from his eyes. Unlike the computer server room directly over his head, the utility room on the monastery level where he knelt had no air-conditioning. He’d discovered this room yesterday when inspecting the cable connections from the Logos server in the computer room that led to the machine in the chapel. He looked up. A gray conduit disappeared into the ceiling and the server room above it. He traced the conduit across the ceiling, down the far wall, and into the floor—where it ran into the chapel and then into the cathedra. Other than the conduit, the room contained two humming HVAC units that served the chapel and the dining hall. His attention, however, was focused on another piece of equipment.

  He opened the tool bag he’d borrowed from one of Wolfe’s goons. The tools were necessary, he’d explained, for the repairs to the Logos. Fortunately the guards had no idea whether the problems with the machine were mechanical or software-related. The one positive of his role here in the Monastery, he thought, was his access to off-limits areas.

  The water heater was much larger than what he had in his New Haven apartment. This commercial model held one hundred and twenty gallons. It had been over a decade since he’d spent two of his undergraduate summers working for a local remodeling contractor to help pay his tuition. On one job where he’d helped to replace an old water heater, the foreman had regaled him with a tale of incredible destruction he’d seen years earlier when a heater had failed catastrophically. Ethan didn’t buy the story until years later, when one of his favorite Discovery Channel shows confirmed the possibility of truth behind
the foreman’s urban myth. He hoped he remembered how the heater worked.

  He selected wire cutters, pliers, and a Phillips-head screwdriver from the tool bag. His two concerns fell on opposite ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, what he was attempting might not work, and then they’d be stuck in the Monastery. On the other, it might work too well and kill him and the others he was trying to save.

  He glanced at his watch and pushed both concerns from his mind. Nine thirty. The modifications should take no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Chris would bring Rachel and Mousa to the chapel at ten. The other problem with his plan, though, was that its timing was unpredictable.

  Ethan unscrewed the metal plate from the side of the water heater. Inside was the electronic thermostat that controlled the temperature in the heater, which was set for one hundred and ten degrees. He unscrewed the thermostat and followed the path of the wires leading from it. He stood and hit the electrical breaker on the wall that supplied power to the heater.

  Checking that the LED light on the thermostat was no longer lit, he used the wire cutters to clip the black and red wires that led from the thermostat to the heating element of the tank. Once he’d disconnected the thermostat, he stripped the plastic coating from around the copper on the wires. He then twisted the wires together with the pliers. Now power would be fed to the tank’s heating element continuously, regardless of the temperature of the water. He put the defunct thermostat into the cavity of the water heater and replaced the metal plate. On the off chance that one of the guards inspected the utility room in the next half an hour, he would find everything in place.

  The thought of a guard doing an inspection sent a shiver down Ethan’s spine that overrode the heat of the room. He glanced at the closed door. While he could explain his presence in the room—the wiring from the Logos ran through there—he couldn’t explain why he was working on the heater. He had to move faster.