The Jericho Deception: A Novel (5 page)

“Doctor,” Houston sighed, “every time I come here to question you or Elijah about this failing project, you’re on the verge of some major new progress, and yet the only thing you seem to do well”—he made a show of looking around the room again—“is take up valuable real estate in one of our larger labs.”

Ethan felt his face flush as he tried to formulate a response that wouldn’t aggravate his superior, but he wasn’t as smooth as he wished. The perfect comeback always seemed to form in his brain a minute too late to be effective. He had the same problem speaking with women. Feeling his heart rate and breathing increase, he reminded himself that he was experiencing a typical sympathetic nervous system response to stress. He’d discovered during medical school that naming the biological basis for his response to anxiety helped to calm the nervousness he often felt under pressure.

“We got it!” boomed a Brooklyn accent from the lab’s open doorway.

Startled for the second time that night, Ethan turned to see his mentor, Elijah Schiff, bound into the room. His eyes sparked with excitement below his thick, white, unkempt hair. His khaki pants sported a coffee stain on one knee, while a striped tie whose advanced age was betrayed by the frayed strings of silk around its edges hung around the open collar of his blue oxford shirt. He held up several sheets of paper crumpled in his hands.

Ethan wondered what had brought Elijah back to the office at this hour, and he figured he’d be none too pleased to see Houston here. But when Elijah met Houston’s glare, he seemed unfazed, as if he’d expected him to be there.

“What is it you
got
?” Houston asked.

“Funding.” The elder professor’s smile revealed crooked teeth that his working-class family had never had the money to fix.

“You’re serious?” Ethan asked.

When their first grant started to run low, Elijah had tried to get re-funded by the original foundation but had been told that the foundation’s priorities had changed toward projects “with more concrete medical benefits.” Elijah had suspected that the continued failure of the Logos to produce any results in their test subjects had more to do with the rejection than did any changing priorities. The other foundations the senior professor approached had dismissed them out of hand, questioning whether the topic of their study was an appropriate one for psychiatry or, as one foundation director put it, “better off left to the Theology Department.”

“And where did this last-minute funding come from?” Houston stuffed his hands in his pockets.

Although Elijah was close to retirement age, Ethan had noticed how his mentor made Houston uncomfortable. Maybe it was because Elijah refused to participate in the game that was university politics, or maybe it was just because the professor was so much smarter.

Elijah waved a hand. “A new foundation based in Dallas—last-ditch try, really. I met today with an old classmate of mine from Harvard who’s the Executive Director.”

Ethan didn’t remember Elijah mentioning a classmate.

“Which foundation?” Houston asked.

“The NAF: Neurological Advancement Foundation.”

“Never heard of it.”

Elijah shrugged. “Until recently, me neither.”

“How much are we talking about?”

Elijah’s smile widened. “Two hundred fifty thousand for the next eighteen months.”

Houston’s eyebrows shot upward, while Ethan’s jaw dropped. Such an amount was huge for a psychology study.
How does he do it?
Ethan wondered.

“The foundation was set up by a Texas software tycoon whose teenage son committed suicide.” He paced over to his desk and dropped the papers in the midst of his journals. “Schizophrenia. He claimed he heard the voices of saints—they were a strong Catholic family, you see.”

The perfect funding source
, Ethan thought. “So this tycoon is interested in the psychological basis of religious experiences?”

“How convenient,” Houston said.

“Imagine for a moment”—Elijah pulled out his desk chair and sat, reclining so far back that Ethan worried he might tip over—“that certain individuals have the ability to sense that which most of us cannot see.” He picked up a ballpoint pen from his desk and began to twirl it between his fingers. “Life is something more than mere matter made of molecules. What is it that animates life itself? I’m not talking about a God who molds us like a sculptor making figurines from clay or a God who acts on the world like a puppeteer manipulating the strings of a marionette. What if God is more intimate to life itself? If physicists can study the Big Bang by examining the background microwave radiation left in the universe from that event, maybe we can hear the echo of God that is inside of us.”

“Unanswerable questions,” the dean huffed. “We are concerned with scientific inquiry here that can be demonstrated empirically.”

Ethan hated to admit it, but Houston had a point. His own interest in the Logos Project had always been from a different angle than Elijah’s. He cleared his throat. “Religion is one of the most powerful motivators of humankind. Over ninety percent of the world’s population believes in God. If we can
unlock the biological basis—the neurological and biochemical processes—that leads to these beliefs, we will have accomplished a feat no scientist has ever accomplished.”

Houston sighed. “That’s a very big
if
. After five years of university resources, all you have to show for this”—he pointed to the machine in the center of the room—“is, well, nothing.”

Elijah said, “Samuel, I’m not sure it’s productive for us to revisit this discussion. We just need more time to figure out the right programming. Now that we have our funding, you shouldn’t be concerned. Ethan’s work with temporal lobe epileptics who experience hyperreligiosity holds great promise. The Logos will work, and the results will be spectacular.”

The professor’s words reminded Ethan of his earlier breakthrough, but he bit his tongue while Houston turned to leave.

“Don’t screw this up,” Houston said, casting a final wary glance at the machine. “New funding or not, I will shut this program down if I hear so much as a hiccup.”

Once he was out the door and out of earshot, Ethan turned to his mentor. For the first time, he noticed the strain behind the excitement in Elijah’s eyes. “We’re going to need to show results now more than ever, aren’t we?” he asked.

“How did your programming go?”

Now it was Ethan’s turn to smile. “I think I did it.”

“W
hen do I see something for my $20 million?” demanded Casey Richards, Deputy Director of SAD, the Special Activities Division of the CIA’s National Clandestine Services. He spoke into the phone on his desk on the sixth floor of the New Headquarters Building at the CIA’s 258-acre campus in Langley, Virginia. While he waited for the delay as his words bounced off the satellite and then rerouted through the scrambler, he massaged the top of his scalp with his free hand. He’d started to lose his hair in his early thirties when he was still a field spook. When he became a desk jockey ten years ago at the age of forty-five, he’d finally shaved it.

He eyed the bulge created by the pack of Marlboros in the pocket of his suit jacket, which hung on the back of his door. He longed for the old days when he could smoke in the office. Since joining the Company in the eighties after serving a stint in Army intelligence, technological advances had fundamentally changed the business.
Not all changes were good
, he thought.

“I’m just as anxious as you, but Project Jericho has only been online for eight months,” the refined baritone voice replied. “PSYOPS aren’t an exact science.”

Richards propped his feet on the unopened packing box next to his large oak desk. He’d moved into the office four months ago from the OHB, the Original Headquarters Building. He preferred the larger windows and contemporary steel and glass structure of the NHB, but he found it ironic that they referred to a twenty-year-old building as “new.”

He’d been promoted from being the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center to the position that oversaw all of the Agency’s clandestine activities when his predecessor left for a quadruple bypass. He’d only had time to unpack the essentials—his files. The walls and his desk were still bare of any personal mementos. He was always struck by how modest in size and plain in design most government offices were compared to the Hollywood portrayal. But that was fine by Richards. He didn’t care about the perks that the political appointees he reported to valued so much. His job was to ensure his country’s security, not his own.

“Right now”—he raised his voice—“I’ve got the White House, the DNI, and that bozo in Homeland Security riding my ass.”

“Dubai?”

“That bombing could change the dynamics of the region.”

“How were we to know about a target that doesn’t even pertain to us?”

“The NSA claims they’ve been warning the Intelligence Directorate for months about increased chatter. But there’s always chatter. Damn it, I need to show that we’re doing something now.”

Over the previous few years, the various Islamic terrorist groups had been relatively quiet as they nursed their wounds from a decade of pressure from the US military. That had changed two days ago with the bombing in Dubai. Now that the UAE, one of the most stable, and certainly most capitalistic, of the Arab countries had been hit, the Agency was picking up rumblings in Turkey. None of the secular Muslim states were considered safe from attack anymore.

Since the end of the Cold War, the CIA had struggled with its mission and its methods. He knew firsthand that combating Islamic extremism was not as easy as the talking heads on TV thought it was. Failures had occurred on many levels prior to 9/11: lack of focus, too high a reliance on technology rather than HUMINT, marginalizing the few analysts who warned of the dangers. The US had become complacent with being the sole surviving superpower for having won the Cold War. Human intelligence was more difficult when one’s adversary was driven not by politics but by religion. As a motivating force, religion was more powerful than lust, greed, or ego. Men were not just willing to die for their religion, they were enthusiastic about becoming martyrs.

“I told you in the beginning I needed more leeway with Jericho,” the man on the phone said.

Richards usually wouldn’t have tolerated such insubordination, but the man was an off-the-books subcontractor, not an official employee. He had also devised the most creative plan to combat the difficulties they faced that Richards had ever heard.

“This isn’t the 1960s anymore.”

“Unfortunate indeed.”

“Look, I spoke with the director this morning. You have the go-ahead to ramp up Jericho. Just bring me some results.”

Richards’s oversight of Project Jericho, one of the boldest and potentially most explosive—if, God forbid, it was ever made public—covert operations undertaken in the post-Cold War era, was the key reason he’d been tapped for the role of Deputy Director. His career, not to mention the potential for peace in the Middle East, hinged on the success of the project this man had first pitched to him several years ago. Prior to 9/11, the man never would have gotten a meeting with Richards. The sort of operation he was proposing hadn’t been attempted in almost four decades, which was exactly why Richards thought it just might work.

“I may have a surprise for you too.”

Richards cringed. Surprises were rarely a good thing in intelligence.

“We may have a new technique that will revolutionize our work.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s better if you don’t know all of the details now.”

Knowing the man’s checkered reputation and questionable ethics, he could only imagine what he had planned. Richards had reviewed the file of the experiments the man had overseen early in his career. Even as a CIA covert-ops veteran, he’d been shocked by some of what he’d seen. But if anything, the man was a patriot.

Anyways, all aspects of Jericho took place far away from American soil, with no discoverable links to the American government or the CIA.

Richards didn’t ask for elaboration.

“H
ow do we know what is reality?”

Ethan gazed at his students from behind the podium on the stage of Lecture Hall 114, two floors below his lab. The auditorium reminded Ethan of a medieval castle: twenty-foot-long burgundy curtains hung over leaded glass windows; the wood ceiling was decorated with a faded blue and gold coat of arms; Art Deco steel pendant lights were suspended over the theater-style seats. Most of the blue cushions were filled with undergraduates.

Several students looked at him expectantly, as if the question he’d posed was meant to be rhetorical. The others, dressed in sweats and jeans, were taking notes on their laptops—at least that’s what he liked to believe. He suspected they were checking their Facebook pages, messaging each other, or playing a game. Although his class, Abnormal Psychology, or Psych for Psychos as the students referred to it, was one of the more popular lectures on campus, students today had shorter attention spans than when he was in school. His class was required for all psych majors, but many others took it as well, based on his reputation as an engaging teacher. As uncomfortable as he was in one-on-one conversations with people he didn’t know well, especially women, he enjoyed lecturing, even excelled at it. When he stood in front of his students, he felt as if a veil dropped from him and released his tongue.

He clicked the laptop on the lectern and a slide was projected onto the twenty-five-foot by fifteen-foot screen behind him. The class sat up straighter. The simple black-and-white drawing had their attention.