The Jericho Deception: A Novel (19 page)

“What if, Father”—he found it strange to address a man two decades his junior as
Father
, but he respected their customs—“we see God not as an all-powerful, Zeus-like figure, but as something greater than
a
being? What if God is the essential source of being itself?”

The priest scrunched up his brow. “I’m not sure I see how that works.”

How did he explain what was impossible to explain? What was beyond words, beyond symbols, beyond understanding? Then he recalled an explanation his physics teacher had used after young Mousa had returned from reading Mulla Sadra filled with questions.

“Take snowflakes.”

“Huh?”

Mousa knew the metaphor was imperfect, as all such talk of Allah must be, but he tried to explain. “Think of each of us as a snowflake. Each snowflake is a unique individual with its own distinct, crystallized structure.”

The young priest thought for a minute and then said, “So you see God as the cloud that produces the snowflakes?”

He shook his head. “What if God is more like the water that makes up the snowflake? The water is not only responsible for the existence of the snowflake, it also links each individual snowflake with every other snowflake—each is unique, yet each shares its essence in an eternal connection with the others.”

The priest was silent as they approached the end of the hallway, where a pair of carved wooden doors with heavy iron hardware was set into the wall.
Mousa had seen these doors numerous times on his way to the dining hall, whose entrance they’d just passed on his left. He knew that the doors led to the chapel, but he had never been inside it before. He turned to the priest, who rested his hand on the large iron ring that acted as a handle. Had he gone too far in explaining his understanding of Allah? The priest seemed to be contemplating his words, his eyes now fixed on the door before them. Then, with a slight shake of his head, the priest turned to him.

“Today is a special day, Brother Mousa.” The priest smiled. “You are about to meet the Bishop.”

He turned the handle, and the heavy door swung open without a creak or groan. The intense light that poured forth from the chapel rocked Mousa backward, blinding him.

E
than and Rachel climbed the stone steps of what appeared to be a tenth-century gothic cathedral. The imposing façade before them was actually the early twentieth-century Sterling Memorial Library, whose fifteen levels of stacks held over four million books.

Ethan pulled the iron ring on the heavy wood door, revealing a second, smaller glass door inside. They were the only ones entering at this late hour; weary students filed out past them. The heels from Rachel’s shiny black boots echoed in the cavernous and quiet hall. Stone buttresses rose from the floor, holding up arches far above their heads. The ceiling was carved from thick wood beams, while the stained glass windows in the side walls added to the cathedral atmosphere. Directly ahead of them, where the altar should be, was the main circulation desk. Ethan’s eyes caught the painting above the desk: a woman holding a book. The flat dimensions and rich gold and red colors reminded him of a pre-Renaissance painting. To his left was the main reading room with its arched windows, barrel vaulted ceiling, and walls lined with shelves of reference books. At almost any other time of day the long tables in the room would have been filled with students clicking away on their laptops, but now they were empty. He pulled the slip of yellow paper with Elijah’s writing on it from his pocket and approached the middle-aged woman with short mousey-brown hair and thick black eyebrows who was stacking books on a trolley behind the desk.

“Excuse me, can you tell me where to find this book?”

The woman peered from behind round wire glasses, looking him up and down. “Faculty?”

“Professor Ethan Lightman, Psychology.” He nodded to Rachel. “Ms. Riley here is one of my graduate students.”

“If you leave this with me”—she took the note from his fingers—“I can pull the book from the stacks in the morning and have it delivered to your department by lunch.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and shifted from one foot to the other. “I hate to ask, but I really need this tonight.”

“Well, the stacks are open. You’re welcome to go up there yourself.” She glanced at the paper again. “HV—that’s political science. Third floor mezzanine.”

“Thank you,” he said, taking back the note.

“You need to hurry. Library closes at eleven forty-five.”

Turning to his right, he removed his wallet from his front pocket and approached another desk, this one smaller and lower. He held his Yale ID out to a man in a blue rent-a-cop shirt with a head of wispy gray hair. His attention on a magazine, the guard barely glanced at either his or Rachel’s IDs before raising a wooden arm that led to a bank of elevators.

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.

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.