The Jericho Deception: A Novel (3 page)

Amira’s hands flew to her head. His daughter’s ski tips crossed, and she tumbled forward. Her body appeared to fall in slow motion toward the fire and glass raining on the snow before them. Fear cinched Mousa’s heart.

He shifted his weight to the outside of his right ski, cut across the snow, and focused on pointing his body straight downhill. Bending at the waist, he picked up speed. He was almost parallel to his daughter, whose descent on her stomach was slowing. He thought he could hear her scream, but it was hard to discern anything with his ruptured eardrum and the explosions booming from the mall.

The moment he passed her, he carved his skis to the left. His plan was to arrest her fall by stopping in front of her. Then the ground underneath him buckled upward, as if an earthquake had struck the ski slope. He toppled over.

The manmade snow wasn’t as soft as the powder he’d skied on in the Alps. He hit hard on his side, his left leg twisting underneath him. He felt something pop in his knee and knew instantly it was his ACL—he’d performed many reconstructions of this ligament on Jordan’s top football players. He ignored the searing pain that shot through his leg and forced his body to roll over as his momentum carried him down the slope. He had to reach his daughter.

There!

Amira was beside him, a wide-eyed expression of terror on her face. He shot out a hand, grabbed her fluffy pink jacket, and dug the heel of his ski boot on his good leg into the snow. They stopped about midway down the slope. He pulled his daughter to him. Her head fell into his chest. He felt her press against the small travel version of the Qur’an he kept in his pocket.

Allah, please let my daughter be okay
, he pleaded.

He shouted over the screams of the wounded skiers around them, “Amira, where are you hurt?”

Her lips quivered. “Baba, what happened?”

“Are you injured?” He tried to push himself upright, but his left leg collapsed underneath him. He shifted his weight and rose to his right knee instead. He ran his hands along her body, carefully palpating her limbs, feeling for any sign of injury.

“I’m okay, I think,” she whimpered.

For the first time since the explosion occurred, Mousa allowed himself to take a breath.
What happened?
Surveying the destruction around them, the horror of the tragedy came to him. The mall had been bombed.

As soon as the realization struck him that the explosion was most likely deliberate, another more disturbing thought occurred.
The smell
. Not just fire and smoke, but the sickly sweet aroma of burning plastic. All that remained of the plate glass windows between the slope and the shops of the mall were a few jagged shards thrusting out of the twisted metal frame. He could see none of the shops, nor the food court where they might have been enjoying their cocoa. Gray smoke billowed from the mall into the ski area. The smoke glowed orange where a fire raged somewhere behind it. If they didn’t leave quickly, they would die. As if to accentuate the point, the eerie sound of protesting metal came from above his head.

He knew that an emergency exit to the outside must be located somewhere at the bottom of the slope. He scanned the area around him. The formerly pristine snow was littered with bodies and debris. Some of the skiers, faces contorted in agony, held onto limbs leaking bright red blood onto the white snow. Others lay quiet, dead. A moment of indecision struck him. He was doctor, and these people needed help.

“Baba?”

He gazed into the dark eyes of his daughter, who clung to his side. Then a loud groaning noise pulled his attention upwards. The ski lift was swaying back and forth. The metal poles holding the cables aloft slowly bent over toward them.

He made his decision. He sat back onto the snow and pulled his daughter onto his lap. With the screeching of the metal becoming louder and the stench of the smoke bringing tears to his eyes, he pushed off, watching below to make sure they avoided the glass that had peppered the slope.

As they picked up speed on their controlled slide, a loud pop echoed through the resort. The lights went out, and they were plunged into darkness.

F
ive years’ work. The breakthrough no one thinks is possible
.

Dr. Ethan Lightman gazed at the machine in the center of the room:
the Logos
. It offered so many possibilities, and yet he was balancing on a narrow ledge. He had to produce results—and fast. He swiveled his chair around to his desk, the wheels creaking against the well-worn strips of maple flooring. He’d worked for the past ten hours in the expansive room that doubled as his lab and office in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, known by everyone at Yale as SSS. The gothic cathedral at the intersection of Grove and Prospect Streets housed Yale’s Psychology Department. All of the lights in the lab were off except for his Tiffany desk lamp and the blue glow from his laptop. The hallways were silent.

Ethan ran his fingers through his hair.
I should leave and come back in the morning
. The last thing he’d eaten was a Snickers bar, and that was five hours ago. But he sensed that he was close. He focused on the lines of code displayed on his monitor.

The data he’d collected from Liz’s EEG during her seizure was rich with potential, particularly when combined with the results from a study he’d worked on as a young medical doctor writing his PhD dissertation in the field of neuropsychiatry. He clicked a window that brought up a color image of the two hemispheres of the brain of one of the subjects from the earlier study. He thought back to the small group of Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns who had been quite willing, even curious, to be injected with radioactive dye so
that he could scan their brains using SPECT and fMRI analysis. Since Liz’s seizure the previous day, he’d studied the spikes and troughs of her EEG until he was dizzy. His dilemma now: how to combine Liz’s data with the earlier brain scans so he could program the machine in the center of the room? He knew he could make it work; he just wasn’t sure yet how he would do it. His colleagues in the psych department delighted in predicting that the Logos would do nothing. He would prove them wrong. He had to: his shot at tenure depended on it.

Massaging his temples, he reclined in the chair whose frayed fabric seat cushion had seen several generations of Yale professors come and go. An untenured assistant professor, Ethan needed to produce results or he’d find himself teaching at some small college in a town he’d never heard of before. But it wasn’t only his career that drove his search for answers; he longed to understand what had happened to him
that day
. He pushed the memory away.
Ancient history
, he thought. He was a research scientist, and right now he needed to focus on the task before him.

He massaged his temples again.
Not now
, he thought. He took a moment to inventory himself.
No tunnel vision, no nausea
. Those were the usual symptoms that indicated a migraine was beginning. If one developed, he wouldn’t be able to work for the next twenty-four hours. He opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a yellow prescription bottle. He popped the Topiramate into his mouth and washed it down with a swig of water from a half-full bottle. He was first prescribed the drug when he was thirteen. He needed it most frequently when he was under stress.

He glanced at the desk to his right. While his workspace was always immaculately organized, Professor Elijah Schiff’s had stacks of psychology journals and notebooks filled with his illegible scrawl strewn about. Five years earlier, when Ethan became his research assistant, he’d tried to organize the senior professor, but the attempts hadn’t lasted long. Elijah had his own system. He also possessed the most brilliant mind Ethan had ever encountered. After his father’s sudden death from pancreatic cancer when he was a junior in high school, Ethan had been without a male mentor until Elijah took him under his wing. The senior professor had also been his main source of comfort
after the horrible accident that had taken Natalie, his fiancée, three years earlier. He shook his head to clear the memory.

Just then his eye caught a Post-it note stuck to the cover of one of the journals. Elijah was fond of leaving bits of wisdom for his students on these notes, and he still considered Ethan one of his students. Ethan peeled the yellow note off of the magazine and stared at the mixture of cursive and print: “Truth cannot be known, only approximated.”

He slapped the note back on the magazine.
If truth can’t be known, then what are we doing here?
He and Elijah shared the same professional interests and goals, but they approached their project from two different perspectives. Maybe that was why they worked well together.

Suddenly, he had a flash of inspiration that caused him to start, as if a glass of cold water had been poured over his head.
The wavelength, not the amplitude, of the EEG is the key
, he realized,
and it has to be applied asynchronously to the left and right temporal lobes
.

The idea was like a spark that had smoldered within him and suddenly ignited with a breath of air. As he returned to his computer, he was grateful the headache was keeping itself at bay. His fingers flew across the keys as he rewrote a portion of the code. Then he reran the simulation analysis. He wiped his palms on his khakis while he stared at the three open windows on his laptop. One contained the script of the code he’d been writing, the second a graph showing the electrical impulses the Logos would create in a subject’s brain, and the third a series of ones and zeroes—binary code—that was the computer’s translation of his programming.

When the analysis was complete, he studied the results. Was the answer to the past five years of research really that simple? He swiveled his chair and stared at the machine. Now all they had to do was to test it.

He thought back to Liz’s vision. “What do you mean by infinity?” he’d asked her.

“Words are inadequate, trivial,” she’d said. “It’s something that must be experienced.”

“Can you try?”

She’d put a finger to her lips for a moment, shrugged, and said, “God.”

A
s his daughter played in the white sand on the edge of the blue-green Persian Gulf, Mousa sat on a beach lounge chair by the Royal Mirage Hotel. He rewrapped the Ace bandage around his knee, pulling it tighter and crisscrossing the joint to add stability. He didn’t need an MRI to know that the ligament that normally did that job was ruptured. He tugged his linen pants leg down over the wrap. It fit, barely. He’d picked up an elaborately carved cane in the hotel’s gift shop, much fancier than he needed, but it would allow him to walk well enough until he returned to Amman. He thought about which one of his colleagues would do the surgery to repair his ACL.
Too bad I can’t operate on myself
, he thought.

Their flight left in four hours, and it was time to head back inside the hotel to clean up, but he decided to give Amira a few more minutes to play. She was chatting to herself as she built a sand castle, miraculously uninjured from the bombing that had killed countless others the previous day.

Alhamdulillah
, Mousa mouthed for the hundredth time that day.
Praise Allah
. The emergency lights above the ski slope had kicked on a few seconds after the main power went out. Mousa had somehow navigated down the slope on his back, maneuvering past the dead and dying in the bloody and blackened snow, frantic to get Amira out before the entire building ignited in flames. When they reached the metal fire door at the bottom of the slope, he put a hand on his daughter’s bony shoulder to steady his balance as he stood. He hopped on his good leg to the door as Amira clung to his waist. The cries
of his fellow skiers called to him to do his duty: to help. He was a doctor, after all. But the groaning sound of metal twisting against its will overpowered the voices. And what use would he be if he couldn’t even steady himself?

He and Amira had managed to wobble out onto a side street and into the harsh sunlight. He led her away from the exterior of the mall in case the walls failed. In the time it took to reach the intersection with the main street, police and fire trucks screamed up to the building. He’d paused, breathing deeply and resting his leg. People and smoke poured out the main doors to the mall.

How could this happen?
he’d wondered, paralyzed by the shock of the past few minutes. Then an image popped into his head, one that was almost as disturbing as the injured people he’d passed on the ski slope: the other Jordanian he’d seen in the mall, the one with the backpack.

Mousa surveyed the police cars screeching to a halt in the street around them. He had to get Amira far away. The ambulances were arriving, and he rationalized that they wouldn’t need one more doctor, especially one who was lame and accompanied by a child. If he stayed, the police would ask him questions. A quiet voice in his head told him that he had a duty to tell them about the Jordanian, but he also knew how things worked. A louder voice said that it was better not to get involved. He had a greater duty to the little girl beside him.

Now that he sat on the peaceful beach out of danger, his daughter safe and himself with only a burst right eardrum and a bum knee, he felt guilty. Maybe he should have remained and helped. But he’d been afraid. Terrified, if he was honest with himself. More for Amira’s safety than his own, of course, but he’d also heard rumors of where men were taken after a terrorist attack. He shook off a chill even though the sun warmed his skin. Within a few hours they would be back in Amman with his wife and new son.

As he looked up across the flat waters of the Persian Gulf, he noticed how the city looked manufactured, the same thought he’d had the previous day in the mall. The beach was groomed by a crew with rakes every morning and was off limits to the local population. He and Amira were the only Arab-looking people on the beach; only guests at one of the expensive hotels bordering the Gulf were allowed access. Three German tourists strolled ankle-deep in the water. Bellies, pink from overexposure to the sun, extended over their too-small
bikinis. Just offshore he saw more high-rise buildings than he could count, thousands of condos recently constructed on a manmade island in the shape of a palm tree.