The Jericho Deception: A Novel (2 page)

She smiled at him. “Are you sure you’re old enough to be a doctor?” Her blue eyes dropped down the length of his body. He felt his face and neck flush.

Ethan knew he looked younger than his thirty-two years. Although he was nearly six-four, he was lanky. At times, usually inopportune ones, he tripped over his own size thirteen shoes. He had a runner’s build—though he didn’t run. His high school track coach had begged him to try out for the team, but after a few practices, both knew he wasn’t meant to be an athlete.

“Old enough,” he said, returning her smile. He suspected it looked awkward. He pulled his penlight from the breast pocket of his lab coat to keep himself focused.

“At least you don’t think I’m crazy. I mean, the things I used to see during my spells.”

He didn’t think she was crazy. On the contrary, he was determined to understand the etiology, the causation, of her visions. During her early twenties, Liz had been active in her church. In addition to working as the minister’s administrative assistant, she’d led an adult Sunday school class, a Tuesday morning Bible study, and a prayer group. However, after she’d revealed the details about her special experiences to the minister, he had asked her to leave. The things she saw were not natural, he’d explained, and he feared that the devil might be at work in her mind.

Ethan checked the connections of the nineteen wires attached to her scalp; they joined in a single bundle below the bed and then ran along the floor until they terminated at a computer monitoring station. The computer recorded the electrical signals originating from Liz’s brain—her EEG—and had sent a text message to his cell phone fifteen minutes earlier, as soon as it detected unusual sharp-slow waves.

He hoped this time he would get the data he needed. He felt the tension in his shoulders as he bent to examine the dilation of her pupils with his penlight. He and his mentor, Professor Elijah Schiff, needed a breakthrough. They weren’t there to cure Liz of her epilepsy. Her condition was under control with the medication that he’d stopped when she entered the study.

If I could just capture an EEG of one of her episodes, then maybe
. . . He let the thought trail off.

Ethan and Elijah had hit a dead end, and they were running out of time. They had exhausted their grant several months earlier. While Elijah was out canvassing the nonprofit community for more money, Ethan was working harder than he had in his life, trying to demonstrate progress—trying to prove that their idea wasn’t just a pipe dream. In his gut, he felt they were close to making one of the greatest breakthroughs in modern psychology. But not everyone believed that their theory was plausible. In fact, most of their colleagues ridiculed the idea.

“Dr. Lightman!” an urgent voice from the back of the room interrupted his thoughts.

He’d almost forgotten about Christian Sligh, the second-year grad student sitting at the small wooden desk overflowing with computer equipment. The bundle of electrodes attached to Liz’s scalp terminated into ten differential amplifiers, which boosted the slight electrical signal coming from her brain activity. These signals were picked up and analyzed by the computer workstation, which filtered out extraneous signals, such as any electrodermal response—spontaneous electrical impulses across the skin caused by a fluctuation in emotion—or the EMG signals produced when muscles contract. Ethan only cared about capturing the electrical signals produced by her brain.

Chris stared at three twenty-inch LCD monitors. With his shaggy blond hair, he appeared more like a surfer from Malibu than a psych graduate from Notre Dame. The flip-flops and shorts enhanced the surfer image, but his wool sweater was a concession to the cold New Haven rain they’d experienced that fall. Ethan didn’t know what he would do without his grad student. Chris had a knack for wading through the bureaucracy of the various university approvals their study required. Ethan didn’t have the patience for paperwork; he was too busy spending late nights working on the project itself.

The faint beeping of equipment echoed in the background. “I’m getting some interictal activity in the temporal lobes,” Chris said.

Ethan turned to Liz. She stared at the ceiling without blinking. Judith reached for her arm to place a blood pressure cuff on it. He touched the nurse’s shoulder, shaking his head. He didn’t want any external stimuli to influence the patient’s experience or disrupt the EEG. Judith withdrew the BP cuff with an annoyed look.

Liz gazed at the ceiling with an expression that exuded relaxed concentration. He guessed that the seizure was spreading:
probably evolving from an SPS to a CPS, a complex partial seizure
. He wondered if it was still primarily located in the left temporal lobe. He was torn between observing at her side and joining Chris at the computer screens. But the EEG was being recorded, and he would spend the night studying it.

“Doctor,” Judith said in a voice just above a whisper, “hasn’t it been long enough?” She held a syringe in her hand. Her brow was furrowed.

He shook his head. He’d explained the protocol to her several times before, but she’d grown close to the patient over the past weeks. Next time, he would rotate the caregivers.

Liz’s voice caused both of them to break their stare-off and look down at her. “It’s beautiful.”

He was uncertain what to do. Did he engage her in conversation or let the experience play itself out? Sensing Judith’s restlessness, he asked, “What do you see?”

“Beautiful.” Her voice had a distance to it.

“Uh, Doctor,” Chris called from behind him, “the seizures are originating in the left temporal lobe.”

I was right
, Ethan thought.

“But they’re spreading quickly!”

At that moment, Liz’s body went rigid. Her legs and arms stiffened as if she was being hit by a sudden jolt of electricity. Her hands arched upward on the quilt, each of her finger joints locked out.

“It’s time, Doctor,” Judith said. She moved the syringe toward the IV.

“A minute more.” The most important data would be from the early stage of the seizure, when it was isolated to the temporal lobe, but he needed a complete picture. Too much was at stake.

Then Liz’s eyes rolled back in her head, and her body began to convulse. Her chest heaved while her arms and legs shook as if being shocked by a rhythmic electrical pulse.

“She’s going myoclonic!” He lunged for her shoulders.

“Doctor!” Judith screamed.

Ethan knew he was losing control of the situation. Judith jammed a roll of gauze into her mouth—
quick thinking
, he realized, but he should have asked for it earlier.

“Now!” he instructed the nurse while he struggled to control Liz’s shaking arms. “One gram of Phenytoin, two of Ativan.” Normally he would have doubled the Ativan dose on a seizure this strong, but he wanted to control it without sending her into unconsciousness. He needed her clear memory of the experience.

Within ninety seconds of Judith administering the antiepileptic and anticonvulsant meds, the myoclonic jerking ceased. Ethan released the patient’s arms. Judith wiped Liz’s forehead with a cloth while gently removing the gauze from her mouth. The nurse didn’t look at him.

He realized that his own hairline was also damp with perspiration. Taking a step back from the bed, he wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his white lab coat. His heart was pounding, and he was breathing deeply. He recognized the signs: his own sympathetic nervous system was engaged in a fight-or-flight response.

Liz’s eyes opened as if she was awakening from a nap. “Try not to move,” Ethan said. “The seizure is over now. We’ve given you some medication that might make you feel a little groggy.”

He stepped to the bed, bent over her, and placed two fingers on her neck. Her pulse was coming down. He wished his would do the same. He focused on her expression, curious as to what she’d remember in the post-ictal state. Many patients had complete amnesia, but the rare ones with her condition recalled every detail. Those details often changed their lives forever.

While he waited for Judith to give her a few ice chips, he grabbed his black notebook from the leather satchel he’d left near the room’s entrance, pulled a chair over to the bed, and opened the notebook.

“Liz, if you’re feeling up it,” he asked, “can you describe what happened?”

She turned to him, locking her eyes onto his.

“Infinity.”

She smiled a dreamlike smile, as if to say anything else would be inexact.

M
ousa bin Ibrahim Al-Mohammad shifted the backpack from his left shoulder to his right. He was sweating underneath his heavy coat. At least the air conditioning in the mall provided some relief from the October heat wave Dubai was experiencing. He walked across the polished marble floor, passed the gleaming brass columns of the Middle East’s second largest mall, and paused at the window of the Harvey Nichols store. Amira, his eight-year-old daughter, pressed her nose against the glass. The mannequins were dressed in crisp linen pants and bright polo shirts, as if they were enjoying at day at the yacht club. He wished he was dressed similarly, rather than in the jeans, pullover, and heavy coat he was wearing. He shifted the backpack again.

Turning back in the direction he was heading, Mousa almost ran into another man hurrying by who was dressed as inappropriately as he was, and similarly sweating. “Pardon me,” he said to the man.

Without breaking his stride, the man turned his head and nodded. “As-salaam alaykum.”

The man was about Mousa’s height, just under two meters, and had a similar olive complexion and short dark hair. He was younger than Mousa by a few years—late twenties or early thirties—but unlike Mousa, who was clean-shaven, this man had a week’s growth of beard.
Jordanian like me
, Mousa thought.

“Wa alaykum as-salaam,” Mousa replied.

A grin crept across the other man’s face as he continued his journey in the direction of the food court. Mousa noticed that they carried the same backpack in a different color. The man’s was blue and his was red.

“Baba, may I have a cocoa, please?”

Mousa smiled at his daughter. “Don’t you want to get on the slopes before they get too crowded?”

He pointed to the giant glass windows to their right. Beyond the windows lay a sight that still astounded him, even though this was the third time he had seen it. In the middle of this shopping mecca in the center of a desert country on the edge of the Persian Gulf was an indoor ski slope over eighty meters high. The chairlift wound up to the left past where he could see. A wooden play structure with several tubing runs, one of his daughter’s favorite activities, occupied the lower section of the slope closest to the windows. The main ski slope lay just beyond, complete with real snow and fake evergreen trees. Nothing like this existed in Amman, their home. He made it a point to stop here whenever he had a conference in Dubai. He looked forward to the cold air inside; then he would appreciate his extra layers of clothes.

Traveling to Dubai was like exploring another world. Whereas Amman blended aspects of a modern city with its ancient heritage, Dubai looked as if it had sprung out of the desert overnight. Even New York, where he had been two years earlier, paled in comparison to the hundreds of skyscrapers rising from the red sand and piercing the cloudless blue sky. While he was proud to see a fellow Arab country achieve this level of success, something about the conspicuous display of wealth disturbed him. He thought of the Egyptian laborers, also fellow Arabs, who were bused into the city’s construction sites each day from communal living quarters he didn’t even want to imagine.

He also thought of his own country and the burden of the thousands of Palestinian refugees his government struggled to accommodate. At King Hussein Hospital, where he was an orthopedic surgeon, he often saw Palestinian patients whose limbs had been blown off by land mines. These people had been displaced from their rightful land by the Israelis, certainly, but what had his Arab brothers done to help besides complain about Israel in the media?
Taking in the opulence of the mall—Dolce & Gabbana, Escada, Tiffany, Versace, not to mention the ski resort he was going to—he knew that much more could be done among his own people.

Amira, his princess, tugged on his sleeve. “Baba!”

He gazed down at her. With her sharp nose, angular jaw and cheekbones, and wide eyes, she looked noble.
Like the queen
, he thought, and like his wife, Bashirah, who had stayed behind in Amman with their newborn son.

“What if we ski first, and then I’ll get you an extra large cocoa?”

She put a little finger to her lips, thought for a minute, and then asked, “With cream?”

“Extra cream.” He grinned.

“Good. We ski first then.” She took his hand and skipped beside him as they headed toward the entrance.

Fifteen minutes later, they sat together on the chairlift as it approached the top of the slope. He placed a hand on his daughter’s head. She was bouncing in the seat. “Do you remember from last year?”

“I liked France,” she nodded. “But indoors, Baba! This is really neat.”

Mousa clicked his skis together, shaking off the bit of snow that had stuck when he boarded the lift. He wished he had more opportunities to ski. He tried to schedule at least one medical conference a year somewhere cold. Last year, he’d taken his wife and daughter to the Alps.

As they began to descend the slope, he stayed a couple of meters behind Amira. He cut slow arcs in the grainy snow as his daughter headed straight down, her ski tips pointed toward each other in a snowplow position.

The explosion hit without warning.

Just below and to the right, the glass windows separating the ski slope from the interior of the mall, the same windows where he and his daughter had been standing minutes earlier, imploded in an orange ball of fire. He watched the shards of glass shred the clothes and skin of a Saudi family of four skiing just fifteen meters below them. Before his brain had a chance to register the horror of the sight, the pressure of the blast’s concussion hit him like a solid wall of heat. He felt his right eardrum rupture. He rocked backward but somehow managed to stay on his skis.