The Jericho Deception: A Novel (49 page)

Ethan started to rise out of his seat but settled when Houston raised a hand. “Please, let him continue.”

Richards clicked open a silver butane torch lighter and lit the cigarette. “In recognition of the groundbreaking research you and Professor Schiff accomplished, the university has agreed to offer you full tenure. The Agency will provide funding for your next project, whatever you choose to study, no questions asked.”

“You want to buy me off!” He glanced over at Rachel, who looked up from her contract. “You expect us to stay silent about these abuses?”

The deputy director leaned forward on his elbows. “Do you want to be the cause of a religious war? A war that will bring terrorism to our country in a way that makes 9/11 look like a warm-up? A war that will cause tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths?”

“No,” Ethan whispered. He stared at the dishes of food on the table. He hadn’t eaten yet that day, but he wasn’t hungry. As much as it pained him to admit it, Richards was right. Nothing that had happened could become public. “So Wolfe and his men just get away with everything”—he glared at Richards—“with no consequences for their actions?”

“There are always consequences.” Richards blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “First, I’ve lost millions from my budget that I’ll never recover, James Axelrod has died, and Wolfe will be held accountable for his failures. This program has to disappear.”

“So I’m supposed to return to Yale, pick up where I left off, as if none of this ever happened?”

“You’re free to do as you wish.” Richards rubbed his shiny head as if polishing it. “But you must give up on the Logos experiments. The machine in the hands of the police that contains your programming will be destroyed. The
potential for abuse if your technology falls into the wrong hands is too great. Some frontiers are better off not being explored.”

Ethan looked at Houston. The administrator had never respected his research, and that had always grated on him.
But
, he had to admit,
Houston was right
. Not about whether the technology would work. It had, and spectacularly so, but the head of Yale’s Human Research Protection Program had been most concerned with his protocols regarding human experimentation. In his zeal to progress the research, to push the boundaries of psychological knowledge, he’d minimized the risks.
Risks that came to be realities
. Elijah had sensed the potential for abuse, too, since he’d experienced firsthand during his graduate school days how human psychological experimentation could be taken too far in the name of national security. But he’d chosen to blow off his mentor’s concerns.

He looked at the two men waiting for his response. His first instinct had been to tell Richards where he could shove his money, but then a new idea came to him.
What if the suffering Wolfe caused could be turned to something good after all?
As he outlined the idea, the words spilling out of his mouth, he noticed Houston smiling at him.

When he finished, the CIA man nodded in agreement with his plan and then wiped his mouth with his napkin.

Rachel asked, “What will happen to the Arab men who are still in the facility when you close it down?”

“They will be treated on a case-by-case basis.” Richards dropped the napkin on the table. “We’ll move them to another facility, where they will be rehabilitated, and once we feel that they are no longer a threat they will be returned to their countries. Don’t forget that these men belonged to terrorist organizations.”

“Mousa was not a terrorist,” Ethan said. “Axe tried to kill him in Luxor, and we haven’t had any news of him.”

Richards took a drink from his glass of water. “The Jordanian doctor was airlifted to a hospital here in Cairo where he is being treated. His injuries were serious but not life-threatening.”

“He’s here?” Rachel asked. “When can we see him?”

“We’ll have to check with his doctors, but we’ll see what we can arrange. He’s scheduled to return home to his family in Amman in a few days.”

Richards’s mannerisms and vague responses made Ethan uncomfortable, especially since just moments earlier he’d been so confident when detailing his demands.

“I want to be perfectly clear on this.” He leaned forward and pointed at the deputy director. “If anything happens to Mousa, I will go straight to
The New York Times
and CNN with this story. I don’t give a damn what this agreement says or how much money you promise to put into our research. If I hear that Mousa has had a car accident, a mysterious fall while hiking, a drug mishap at the hospital”—he stabbed his finger at Richards to emphasize each point—“
anything at all
, then all of your shenanigans become public, regardless of the diplomatic consequences.”

Richards visibly swallowed, nodded, and then said, “You have my word. Mousa will be safe.”

A
llen Wolfe snapped the locks closed on his briefcase and snatched the keys to one of the SUVs from the top of his desk. He would drive himself to Aswan Airport, where the chartered jet would pick him up in forty-five minutes.

“Hey, Boss.”

He looked up. Nicholas Dawkins stood in his office doorway.

“Where’ve you been? I called you hours ago.”

“Claiming Axe’s body from the Luxor police took longer than expected. Had to call in some favors to get them to look the other way.”

Wolfe tried not to show his surprise or concern. He should have been the one to place the call to the Agency, not his field operative.

“Yeah,” Dawkins continued, “the big man caused quite a scene.”

“He was acting strangely lately. Not himself.” He started toward the door, but Dawkins blocked his exit. “The subjects?”

“Axe got to the Jordanian, but the girl and the professor . . .” Dawkins shrugged. “Once the authorities moved in, we had to back off. They vanished in the crowd.”

Wolfe shook his head.
How did everything fall apart so quickly?
If only he hadn’t been in Cairo during the escape. Without his direct supervision, these muscleheads were incapable of accomplishing anything.

“Where are your men now?” He used his most authoritative tone.

“Came back with me to regroup.” Dawkins demeanor was relaxed, almost nonchalant.

“Well, I’m running late for a meeting with our assets in Cairo. We need to close in on Professor Lightman and Ms. Riley before they can get help. Without passports, they can’t go far.”

Dawkins stepped to the side, giving him room to pass. “We’ll have this place back up and running in no time. Right, Boss?”

“Certainly.” He grinned at his man. “We’ll have to implement a stricter security protocol this time.” He turned to walk down the hallway.

I’m free
, he thought.

The stinging sensation in his neck caught him by surprise. He swatted at what he thought might be a mosquito biting him. Immediately, a rush of warmth spread like hot water from the veins in his neck down his torso. His limbs grew heavy and he slumped to the ground, his legs no longer able to support his weight.

“Dawkins, help me up.” His speech was slurred. He tried to push to sitting, but even that required a strength he no longer had. “What’s happening to—” Before he completed the question, he noticed the expression of curiosity on his deputy’s face—an expression that should have been one of alarm.

Dawkins stood over him, silhouetted by the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. A syringe dangled in his hand. The lack of returned calls, the sketchy details he’d received about the operation to find Riley and Lightman, Dawkins’s cavalier attitude: everything made sense now. He recalled Richards’s warning about terminating Jericho with prejudice. Strangely, though, the reality of his impending demise didn’t concern him. The fire in his blood had removed his desire to fight.

Allen Wolfe’s breathing became labored. Fifteen seconds later, he slipped into a sleep from which he would never wake.

“M
ousa!” Rachel ran to the hospital bed and threw her arms around the Jordanian doctor’s neck.

Ethan approached the bed with a grin plastered on his face. Seeing his friend safe released the tension that had been constricting his chest since they’d left the café an hour earlier. Despite Richards’s assurances, he didn’t trust the CIA, not after everything that had happened.

“You’re okay?” Tears welled in Rachel’s eyes.

“The knife just missed my kidney. I lost some blood, but I’ll be fine.” Mousa chuckled. “The food here—now that may kill me.”

Ethan leaned over and embraced his new friend. “Everyone says we make the worst patients.”

“Ah yes, I much prefer to be on the other side of the bed.”

Ethan dragged two aqua blue plastic chairs from the corner of the room to the bed. “At least they gave you a private room. From what we saw, that’s unusual in this facility.”

“I imagine,” Mousa lowered his voice, “they don’t want me talking about my injuries to the other patients.”

“Look—” Ethan fidgeted. “I can’t begin to say how sorry I am for what happened to you. When I began my research, I never imagined that—”

Mousa held up a hand.

“I’ll have none of your apologies.”

“But if I had never developed the Logos—”

Mousa waved the hand he still held aloft.

“It was my own people, my Muslim brothers, who kidnapped and tortured me. Your CIA actually nursed me back to health.”

“But what they were attempting to do . . .”

“Ah, but they didn’t, did they?
Ma sa Allah
—God has willed it otherwise. You saved my life, Ethan. And that Logos machine of yours gave me an experience I’d only heard stories about—I experienced
fana
.”

“
Fana
?” Rachel asked.

“Sufis, the mystical branch of Islam, practice various forms of meditation to become one with Allah.”

“So
fana
is some sort of mystical state Sufis aspire to?” Ethan asked.

“The word translates literally as ‘extinction,’ a state in which the self disintegrates into the infinite being of Allah. Our earthly worries, the pain and suffering that is part of our human lives, all vanish in the glory of absorption into the reality of God.”

“And you experienced this?” Ethan’s vision on the Nile flashed through his mind. He’d been absorbed into the binary language that seemed to describe the fabric of the universe around him. For that brief time his personal identity had seemed both insignificant and also part of something eternal and infinite.

“Because of your Logos, I see now more than I ever did before that Allah truly is the center of all existence.” Mousa smiled. “Allah is not only the source of my being, but Allah is also the source of yours, of the guards who tortured me in prison, and of the CIA priests who wanted to convert me. I am as intricately linked to my enemies as I am to my own children.”

“And that is why you’re not angry about what has happened to you?” Rachel asked.

“How could I not forgive these men? They live their lives in pain and suffering because they haven’t looked deeply enough into existence. They haven’t experienced true peace—
salaam
—a peace that comes from surrendering to Allah. That is the true nature of Islam, which I better understand now.”

“I’m going to miss you, Doctor.” Ethan squeezed his shoulder.

“I’ll visit you in America.” Mousa placed a warm hand on top of his. “Early next year I have a medical conference in Boston at Mass General.”

“That’s just a short train ride from New Haven!” Rachel said.

“Yes, I’ve always wanted to see the great university that is Yale, and now I have two tour guides to show me around.”

“You are scheduled to travel back to Amman tomorrow?” Ethan wanted to confirm what Richards had told them.

The smile on Mousa’s face became even wider. “A man from your government visited me earlier this morning. He gave me my passport and a ticket.” He lowered his voice for the second time. “But you know we must never speak to anyone about what has happened here.”

Nick Dawkins placed the briefcase into the rear of the black SUV. He’d checked the contents after Wolfe died. His boss had been planning on running.

“Hey, where do you want this stuff to go?”

Two of his men approached. One held a black rectangular box—one of the Logos machines. In Wolfe’s briefcase were two of the hard drives that ran the machine, but Deputy Director Richards had wanted a full, working machine returned to Langley as well. The second man carried a cardboard box in one arm and a set of rolled-up blueprints in the other.

“Are those the modified cell phones?” Nick asked.

“Yes, sir. The design plans, too.”

“Stick them in the truck.” Richards had called an hour earlier to ask him to bring these items as well. The Deputy Director had reached him just in time. Their work was almost done. “Where are the others?”

“Coming now.”

He saw four other men hustle from the front door of the building. They didn’t bother to lock the doors. “And the prisoners?” He’d dispensed with the fiction of calling them monks or brothers since he’d returned to clean up Wolfe’s mess.