“Thank you.”
Chris grabbed his shoulder. “Professor, I’m so sorry for what I’ve done here. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me one day.”
“I already have. Just get the son of a bitch who killed Elijah.”
He turned to the desert. Squatting, he hurried toward the top of the nearest dune. He was careful to keep the SUV between him and the boulders. When he crested the top of the dune, his hopes rose. The distinctive chatter of Axe’s weapon had ceased. Maybe he’s unconscious.
He started down the far side of the dune toward the emptiness of the desert. The moon was not yet up, and the myriad stars provided only faint illumination. He picked out the next series of dunes he would aim for. After he traversed them, he would head toward the lake as Chris suggested. He turned for one last look before his head disappeared behind the sand.
From his elevated angle at the top of the dune, he saw the danger before Chris did. The graduate student was leaning on the rear bumper of the car while he tracked the top of the boulders with his gun. Axe, however, was no longer popping up to shoot from the center of the rocks. He wasn’t unconscious, either.
Ethan watched as the security chief crawled from around the far side of the boulders. The warning came to his lips a second too late. Axe fired a three-shot burst that caught Chris in the neck and head as his attention was focused on the top of the boulders.
“No!” Ethan screamed.
Chris dropped to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut. A surge of rage and sorrow welled up in Ethan. He should have ducked his head behind the sand and run, but the emotions that threatened to explode from his chest kept him anchored in place. Axe lifted his gaze from the fallen student to the dim horizon. He stood rooted in place, looking in Ethan’s direction. Ethan had no idea if Axe could see him or not in the glare of the exterior lights of the warehouse.
As he slid down the opposite side of the dune, his last view of the Monastery was of Axe taking two steps forward and then falling face-down in the dirt.
CHAPTER 52
BETHESDA, MARYLAND
Casey Richards swirled his drink, Grey Goose on the rocks with lime, as he slouched in his leather armchair. The flames from the gas fireplace warmed the study of his townhome on the outskirts of Bethesda. After his divorce fifteen years ago, shortly after his fortieth birthday, the Deputy Director had given up dark alcohol. It no longer agreed with him. He used to be a bourbon man; now he stuck to vodka and gin. He glanced at the clock icon on his laptop. His General Tso’s chicken—steamed, not fried—would arrive soon.
The phone on the side table chirped at him like a robotic bird. He looked up from his email browser and reached for the secure landline the Agency had installed.
“Hello,” he said without identifying himself, a protocol that had been drilled into him from his training days.
The person on the other end asked him a code-worded question designed both to authenticate his identity and ensure he was alone and not under duress. He gave the appropriate answers.
“Sir, we have a priority message for you from Night Watch. An encrypted file has just been sent.”
Richards scanned his email and saw the most recent file from the office. He entered his sixteen-digit password, pressed his finger on the print reader, and waited as the file downloaded. An image appeared on his screen.
“What am I looking at?”
He stared at a satellite picture of a warehouse building. The image was black-and-white, taken by one of their birds with thermal imaging capabilities—not as high-res as the daytime shots, but impressive for its ability to take pictures in pitch-black night.
“Project Jericho, Sir. We’ve lost contact.”
“Lost contact?”
“There’s been an explosion in the center of the building.”
He hit the zoom button and looked closer. The middle of the building glowed white, a burning circle in the darkness.
“What the hell happened?”
“We have assets two hours out in Cairo that we’re mobilizing to find out.”
“Wolfe?”
“In Cairo too. No answer on his cell. We’ve sent someone to his hotel. A Black Hawk is standing by to bring him and our men to Jericho.”
“I want to speak to him the moment you’re in touch.”
“Yes, Sir.”
He glanced at the English antique clock on the mantel of his fireplace. 8:16. It wouldn’t be daylight in Egypt for another three or four hours.
“We need real-time imagery.”
“We’ve already tasked the satellite. You’ll receive the data as soon as we do.”
“Keep me posted.”
“Will do, Sir.”
The line went dead. He stared at the image on his screen again. A gas leak or a problem with a furnace? He zoomed in more, but the image pixelated too much to make out any helpful details. He shook his head. Wishful thinking. He’d been in the business long enough to know that accidents like that didn’t happen on their own.
If the program is exposed . . .
He didn’t want to think of the consequences. He’d trusted Wolfe. The doctor had worked miracles in the past, and the first test—the subject who’d led them to Abadi-Jabbar—had exceeded his expectations.
Now, he wondered whether he’d been too lenient with the doctor. In operations like this he knew better than to micromanage his field guys. Usually he didn’t even want to know the details of what was taking place, as long as he got the results he was after. But Jericho had grown past the scope of a field op. He remembered the Agency’s history: the Bay of Pigs, MKULTRA, Iran-Contra—all well-meaning covert operations that had gone wrong, and worse, become public. He wouldn’t let that happen here.
He hated having to clean up a mess, but he’d done it many times before.
CHAPTER 53
SAHARA DESERT, EGYPT
Where am I? Ethan wondered.
He thought he’d followed Chris’s instructions—travel straight until he was out of view of the Monastery and then turn left—but he’d been walking for almost two hours and the endless desert landscape hadn’t changed. His eyes had adapted to the starlight, but all he could see around him were sand dunes—no sign of Lake Nasser.
He paused to catch his breath. The night air was cool, but he was warm from walking in the loose sand, which gave back some of his forward progress with every step up the side of a dune. His lips were chapped, and he was thirsty. The daytime sun would be brutal. With no water, he wasn’t sure how long he would last before dehydration caused him to hallucinate and then collapse.
Surveying the dunes around him, he picked one to his right—the largest around him. He started up it in a jog. He’d learned early in his escape that walking up a dune was almost impossible. It was like trying to run up a down escalator; he had to move quickly or the loose, dry sand caused him to slip backward with each step. The sand was unlike that of any beach he’d experienced. The fine beige and red particles were each separate, with no moisture to clump them together or to provide a stable surface for his weight.
When he reached the top, he bent over, rested his hands on his knees, and breathed deeply. The only sign of life was a single thorny bush poking through the dune. He straightened and surveyed the landscape. He squinted to see if he could make out his path in the sand. His footsteps at the bottom of the dune were faint and he couldn’t follow them far, but what he saw concerned him. Although he’d thought he was walking straight—his strategy had been to pick out a dune in the distance and head for it—his path definitively curved to the right.
How long have I been walking like that?
He sat on the top of the dune. The fear that he’d walked miles deeper into the desert began to settle over him. Indecision over his next move began to play in his mind. He could keep walking, but doing so might take him farther in the wrong direction—or worse, back toward the Monastery. He could wait for daylight on top of the dune. He might be able to mak
e out the lake in the distance then. He sat up straighter. The thought of daylight brought a sudden realization: the rising sun would tell him which direction east was. If he traveled south, he would eventually hit the lake.
He lay back. The sand was soft and still radiated some of the heat absorbed from the previous day’s sun. He was exhausted. He closed his eyes and replayed the escape in his mind.
The thought of Chris’s death filled him with a sickly feeling. A hot, viscous sensation began to pour into his stomach and fill up his body until it reached his throat. Chris had betrayed him, but he’d saved their lives and sacrificed his own. Then his thoughts turned to Rachel and Mousa. Had they been able to escape? He held on to the hope that the guards were still disoriented from the explosion and that Axe was still incapacitated from the sedative. The image of Rachel’s blue eyes and the memory of the touch of her full lips burned in his mind. The taste of their kiss still lingered in his mouth, and he imagined that with each breath he inhaled the floral scent of her hair. Neither Wolfe nor the brutish Axe would let her live if they caught her. His breathing became labored, as if his belt was cinched around his chest rather than his waist.
I can’t lose her.
After Natalie’s death, he hadn’t thought he would ever again feel the intensity of connecting with another woman that way, yet now he knew he was falling for the insightful, feisty, and beautiful grad student.
But love carried with it the risk of loss—a pain so intense that he thought he would never be able to survive it again. With the adrenaline of the escape gone, the fear of that pain crept into his mind. He wished that praying for Rachel’s safety would make it so. He opened his eyes and stared at the ocean of stars. He doubted that a superhuman grandfather figure was up there to intervene based on words he might mutter, a promise he might make, or a belief he might profess. In the dark night in the middle of the Sahara, he felt the loneliness in his bones as if the marrow had evaporated, leaving his skeleton hollow.
A particularly bright star close to the horizon caught his eye. The desert sky was wide open, like nothing he ever saw in New Haven. Staring at the broad brushstroke of stars that was the Milky Way stirred a memory. He remembered a Post-it note Elijah had once stuck to the back of his office chair: Through the wonder and beauty of the natural world we can understand the nature of God.
He’d pulled the note from his chair, crumpled it, and tossed it into the trash basket by his desk. “Two points,” he’d said to Elijah, who watched him from behind reading glasses.
“One day, my friend, you will appreciate my bits of wisdom,” Elijah had chuckled.
“Maybe that same day you’ll reconcile for me your scientific world view with your spiritual one?”
Elijah had put down the journal article he was reading. “Ah, the tyranny of the logical mind.” He’d swiveled his chair toward Ethan. “Reason is not our only way of perceiving the truth. Sometimes we must feel it, intuit it, and experience it.”
“Sounds awfully fuzzy to me. Didn’t we become scientists so that we could measure, test, and experiment in order to come to objective truths?”
“What if God doesn’t operate from outside the universe, in violation of its physical laws, but from inside? What if God is not separate from us but part of us? We wouldn’t be able to prove this kind of God scientifically because there would be no separate action outside of nature that we could point to.”
“But then what’s the point of even talking about, much less believing in and worshipping, such a God? Why not just worship nature or the universe?”
“Maybe we can experience God—not intellectually, but emotionally. We will never understand God, but maybe we can taste the presence of God. A two-dimensional creature can never truly understand what a three-dimensional world looks like. Its perception of reality is physically limited by its existence. Such a creature could only glimpse part of reality. Art, nature, beauty, love, peace, and the mystical states associated with religion may be our glimpses at this divine reality.”
He’d always been respectfully dismissive of Elijah’s views. His mentor, for all the brilliance of his research, had held on to quaint views from his upbringing. Now, for the first time, Ethan began to feel that his intellectual arrogance had been misplaced. His world had fallen apart around him—Elijah’s murder, Rachel’s kidnapping, his suspension from Yale, the perversion of his research, Chris’s death. He was no longer sure of anything. Then he thought of the vision from his youth and the time he’d spent with Rachel.
He pushed himself up to a seated position. All this introspection isn’t going to get me out of the desert, nor will it help Rachel and Mousa. He scanned the horizon, searching for any sign of dawn.
Then he saw it.
At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. The light in the distance was closer than the horizon—it couldn’t be the rising sun.
A CIA search party? The hairs on his arms stood on end.
He squinted, focusing on the light. It wasn’t moving, nor was it the steady light of a car headlight or flashlight. This light was flickering.
A fire.
He was probably seeing the edge of one of the villages. He figured he must be close to the lake and freedom from the desert. He stood, noted the exact location of the fire in relation to the dunes around it, and took off running.
CHAPTER 54
SAHARA DESERT
Ethan approached a campsite of three tents. His initial hope that the camp marked the edge of a village was dispelled when he got closer. The fire that had led him there blazed in the middle of the same endless desert he’d been lost in for hours. But at least he’d found people. As he moved closer, he noticed that the long tents were hand-sewn from a quilt of various fabrics: hairy animal skins, colorful cloths, and recycled clothes.
A snorting sound to his right caused him to jump. He turned toward the noise and could just discern the outline of camels bedded down in the sand. He rounded the corner of a tent, wondering exactly what he was going to say to the people camped here.
A tented camp in the desert, he thought. Must be Bedouins. Nomadic tribes who wandered the desert, Bedouins lived by trading camels and goats the men raised and rugs the women wove in exchange for the supplies they needed. He remembered learning from a Discovery Channel documentary that they were known for showing hospitality to strangers. He hoped that to be true.
When he stepped into the clearing in front of the fire, he saw two men dressed in loose white robes with red scarves wrapped around their heads seated in plastic folding chairs. After a brief delay in which they stared at him as if trying to understand how a man could just appear out of the desert in the middle of the night, they jumped to their feet. His stomach lurched when each grabbed an antique rifle from beside their chair and pointed it at his chest. They yelled at him in Arabic.
“Help.” He raised his hands in the air. “I need help. Do you speak English?”
The men waved their guns at him. He felt a trickle of sweat form on his brow in the cool air. His main concern was not further exciting the men with their fingers on the triggers of the guns pointed at him. Thoughts of how he might communicate his harmlessness to them raced through his head. Then he had an idea.
With his hands still up in the air, he pointed to himself and said, “Doctor. I’m a doctor.”
The word had an immediate effect. They stopped yelling and began to speak between themselves. Ethan forced himself to release the breath he was holding. The more relaxed he was, the less tension the men with the guns would feel. At least he hoped that was the case.
One of the men said something in Arabic and then disappeared into the nearest tent. The other kept his gun trained on Ethan. After what felt like ten minutes, but was probably more like two, the man emerged from the tent. A third Bedouin followed him. Taller than the other two, he matched Ethan’s height. Wisps of gray mixed with the long black hair that fell over his shoulders. Unlike the other two, who wore white robes, this man wore
red; instead of the turbans the others covered their heads with, he had a blue scarf wrapped around his neck. The elder man rubbed his eyes as if he’d just been awoken.
He spoke in a gravelly voice. “Doctor?”
“You speak English?”
“I’m my tribe’s sheikh.” He raised his eyebrows, no doubt questioning why an American doctor had appeared in their camp in the middle of the night with no supplies.
“I’m lost.” Ethan shrugged. “I have to get to Luxor quickly.” Evaluating the skeptical expression on the tribal elder’s face, he added, “And I can pay you for your troubles.”
He hoped the last fact would motivate the Bedouin leader to help him without requesting details. As the elder continued to stare at him, he stuck out a hand. He didn’t know the proper protocols for introduction here. “Dr. Ethan Lightman.” He emphasized the word doctor again.
A smile spread across the sheikh’s face. He grasped Ethan’s hand in both of his. “You may call me Josef. Your money is not needed here. If a traveler in the desert is in need of a place to rest, he may always rely on our diyafa—our hospitality. You may stay with us for three days.” His smile grew wider. “And we could use a doctor.”
He turned and spoke in Arabic to the men behind him. They lowered their rifles. One went to the fire and placed a tarnished silver pot that had been sitting on a nearby blanket in the coals. The other disappeared into the far tent.
“Follow me to our beit al-sha’ar.” The sheikh started toward the far tent.
Ethan wiped his palms on his pants and followed after him. “To your what?”
Josef parted what appeared to be goat hide, revealing the opening into the tent. “Our house of hair.” He chuckled.
The tent was roomier and cozier than Ethan would have imagined. Lanterns on posts in three corners illuminated the interior with a soft, flickering glow. The floor was covered in colorful, hand-woven rugs, and groups of large red pillows defined seating areas. To his right a low table contained a hookah whose tentacle-like hoses snaked around a glass vase. Curtains at the rear separated the tent into other areas he couldn’t see.
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