The Jericho Deception: A Novel (6 page)

“What do you see here?”

Two dozen hands shot up. He pointed to a brunette with glasses and pigtails in the sixth row. “A square.”

He nodded in understanding, but not in agreement. “Let’s take a survey here. How many of you see the white square in the middle as what stands out most in the drawing?” Two thirds of the class raised their hands. “Now look at just the black areas. What do you see?”

This time he called on a woman from the front row. Her chestnut-colored hair was streaked with blond highlights, and it flowed around her face and shoulders in waves of loose curls. Her pale complexion, uncovered by makeup, was accented only by a small diamond stud in her nose. He noted that she wore only black, from her sweater to her shiny boots. With over four hundred students attending his lecture, he rarely got to know anyone’s names, but his visual memory was close to eidetic; he recognized each and every student who showed up for class. She was always one of the first to arrive, and she took notes every day with a pen in a notebook, paying close attention to his words. She also often had her hand in the air, usually to challenge him on some point.

“The drawing is just four partial circles,” she said. “Our brains are only extrapolating the square in the empty space—it’s an illusion. We’re imagining something that doesn’t actually exist.”

She held his gaze confidently, and he found himself smiling at her.

“Illusory contours,” he said. “The lines of the square do not exist.” He broke eye contact and looked across the room at the rest of the class. “An Italian psychologist named Kanizsa developed this optical illusion to show how our brains take input from our five senses and then combine those sensations with our previous knowledge, experiences, and expectations in order to construct the view of reality we expect to find.”

“Are you saying our realities are relative?” the woman in black called out. “That our brains are just making guesses?”

This one is sharp
, he thought. Her round blue eyes held a spark that drew him in as he nodded his head. He stepped from behind the lectern and answered her question with another, one of his favorite Socratic teaching techniques. “How does any individual know that an experience they are having is real or imagined?”

A voice called out from the rear, “Physical evidence.”

He turned his attention to the new voice, a male in jeans and an oversized Yale sweatshirt. “If I were to put you under hypnosis and then prick a finger on each hand with a needle, causing them to bleed, I could make a hypnotic suggestion to you that your left hand was being immersed in cold water. Even though in reality both hands were at room temperature, your left finger would stop bleeding, while the right would continue to flow.”

A murmur went up among the class.

“The complexity of the brain is what makes abnormal psychology, the subject of this class in case anyone wandered into the wrong room”—he elicited a few laughs—“such a fascinating and difficult field. The line between normal and abnormal, between reality and fantasy, is not a bright one. Why are religious leaders’ hearing God’s voice any different from schizophrenics having visions?”

He returned to the lectern and clicked the laptop. The slide changed to an image of Caravaggio’s painting
The Conversion of St. Paul
. The Apostle Paul had been riding his horse along the dusty road to Damascus, Syria on his way to arrest early members of the Christian sect when he was struck by a powerful vision of Jesus. The painting that now riveted the students’ attention depicted
Paul lying on his back after falling from his horse. His hands covered his eyes, his body spotlighted by a light from above.

After three seconds, the slides cycled through other religious images: Bernini’s sculpture
The Ecstasy of Santa Teresa
from the Santa Maria della Vittoria church in Rome; a photograph of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, taken as the sun rose above the church spires; and finally a section of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco containing a red-robed and white-bearded Ezekiel—the Old Testament prophet famous for his graphic visions.

With this generation raised on constant visual stimuli, Ethan knew that the best way to capture their interest was to play to their need for multisensory input. As he scanned the students engrossed by the slides, he noticed an unfamiliar face in the first row of the balcony staring at the front of the room from behind iridescent orange sunglasses. A feeling of unease crept up Ethan’s spine.

At first glance, the man appeared to be a jock—football or hockey—judging by his size, the dark blue sweats on his legs, and the gray sweatshirt embroidered with a giant blue Y in the center. He perched like a statue in his chair with a military-erect posture that leaned forward as if he were waiting with anticipation for the rest of the lecture. Then Ethan noticed that the man wasn’t the typical large athlete. His bulk strained the fabric on his sweatshirt; his trapezius muscles bulged out of the neckline, almost reaching his ears, while his pectorals distorted the shape of the embroidered Y on his chest, threatening to pull it apart like a wishbone.

Steroids
, Ethan thought. He’d never seen such extreme muscle hypertrophy outside of the movies.
Who is he?
The Yale athletic department didn’t tolerate juicing. Although the sunglasses made it difficult to know for sure, he appeared older than the undergrads in the room, and he was tan, unusual for a New Haven fall.

A realization deepened his sense of unease:
muscleman is not a student
. Before he could ponder what the man was doing in his class, he sensed the anticipatory silence from his audience. He shifted his gaze to the students who were waiting for him to continue.

“During medical school, I learned how an uncommon but not rare form of epilepsy that originates in the temporal lobe of the brain produces intense religious visions in the sufferers.”

An African American man in the middle raised his hand. “So if we see someone thrashing around on the ground from a seizure they could be speaking to God?”

“Probably not. A grand mal seizure such as you described affects the whole brain—it’s like the entire electrical system short circuits, causing neurons to misfire and create the seizure.”

“Like the electricity in my dorm room last weekend when we plugged in the extra amps for the party?”

He laughed along with the students. “Something like that. But a grand mal seizure usually causes unconsciousness and amnesia. With other seizures that are limited to certain areas of the brain, such as the ones that cause hyperreligiosity, the sufferer may have no idea that they’re having a seizure. They may see a strange light, smell something unusual, hear a voice, or have a full-fledged vision while remaining conscious.”

The woman in the front row spoke again. “So, Professor, are you claiming”—she pointed to the image on the screen, which had cycled back to Caravaggio’s painting—“that St. Paul was knocked from his horse by an epileptic event that also caused his vision of Christ, and”—she paused as the slides transitioned—“that the Spanish mystic St. Teresa de Ávila, Joseph Smith—the founder of Mormonism—and the Prophet Ezekiel also each suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy that led to their religious visions?”

She is sharp
, he thought again. “Look at the other symptoms these figures had: flashes of light, strange sounds or smells, their obliviousness to the world around them—all classic symptoms of epilepsy. Is it more likely that an imbalance in the electrical firings of neurons in the brain, which we can record today with modern equipment, caused their visions, or that a supernatural deity spoke to these people from heaven?”

The anticipation of the test of his Logos Project later that afternoon flashed through his mind.

“In the ages during which these figures lived, people had no concept of modern medicine or psychiatry. What we might call an
abnormal
event
today—a vision caused by epilepsy or schizophrenia—might have been interpreted as either a demonic possession or an oracle from God.”

“But if that’s true,” she continued, “then the basis for these religions—Christianity, Mormonism, Judaism—so influenced by these visions would be called into question.”

He let her last comment sink into the other students. As he paused, a memory from his own past intruded on his thoughts, but he pushed it away as he’d done many times before. “A question we can leave to the theologians.”

He glanced at the clock on his monitor: 11:50. He closed his laptop, cutting the video feed to the screen. “Next week’s assignment is posted on the website. Enjoy the discussions in your groups.”

He looked for Chris Sligh as he descended the steps from the stage. They needed to go over a few details before the experiment, but he didn’t see his grad assistant in his usual seat. When he landed on the main floor, students encircled him, peppering him with questions about the lecture. He did his best to answer them while he walked, making his way to the rear of the hall. His mind was already spinning through the possibilities of what might happen that afternoon. When he reached the steps that descended from the balcony, he glanced at the students filing down. The unease he’d felt earlier crawled from his spine to the back of his neck. The muscleman with the orange glasses had disappeared.

A
mira’s screams tore at Mousa’s heart.

“Please, what is going on here?” His voice came out sounding more desperate than he wanted. The three security officers who dragged him along the white hallway said nothing.

“My daughter, you don’t understand what we’ve been through. She needs me.” He knew that he was pleading, but he couldn’t help himself. Questions spun in his head like a desert sandstorm picking up debris: where were these men taking him, and who was the woman who had his daughter?

When they reached the end of the hallway, the men stopped at a door marked “Secure Area” in both Arabic and English. The lead officer, the one who had spoken to him at the customs desk, produced an ID card with a magnetic stripe. Mousa took a breath, rested his weight on his good right leg, and evaluated the situation. The two other officers glanced at him warily. Each grasped one of his arms just above the elbow. In their other hands, they held submachine guns.

He turned his attention to the officer working the electronic lock.
The door must lead into the airport security room
, he thought.
I’m going to be interrogated
. He had only a moment to gather his wits and calm himself. The officers had made a mistake. Maybe his name was similar to someone on their watch list. Or could something have been wrong with his visa? If he calmly explained who he was—a respected Jordanian surgeon—they would have to listen. He might have to wait while they checked out his story, but many people at the
King Hussein Hospital in Amman could confirm his identity and legitimacy. With his hands bound behind his back, he couldn’t see his watch, but he estimated that his flight wouldn’t depart for another two hours. If he remained calm and professional, maybe the security men would clear everything up in time for them to return home that afternoon.

As the lead officer opened the door, Mousa reminded himself not to antagonize the men during the questioning. Regardless of his innocence, he surmised that the security forces in the UAE were like those in Jordan—not to be trifled with.

A wall of hot, dry air rushed into the air-conditioned hallway and dismantled his resolve to stay calm. The door didn’t lead to an interrogation room. It led outside.

“Where are you taking me?” he demanded.

The black-clad men shoved him into the naked sun.

“I haven’t done anything!” he screamed. “You’ve made a mistake.”

Then he noticed the vehicle. Parked on the tarmac just in front of the sidewalk sat a gray, late-model van. It had no markings, and he noted with a growing sense of dread that its windows were blacked out. The lead officer hurried to the van and slid open the side door, revealing a stripped out interior with a metal floor. The only seats were the driver’s and the front passenger’s. Mousa stopped, forcing his feet in front of him. He leaned backward against the pressure on his arms.

“I am a respected doctor in Amman.” He attempted to use his most authoritative, professional voice, the one he used to navigate cumbersome hospital bureaucracy. “I demand to speak to your superiors! You have made a career-threatening mistake here.”

He couldn’t allow these men to remove him from the airport grounds. If they did, he knew that the odds of seeing his family again were slim.

As the words left his mouth, the man to his left swung his submachine gun. Mousa caught only a blur of its movement before the blow struck him in the solar plexus, sucking out his breath. His legs buckled. He would have doubled over in pain, but the men held him aloft. The desert sun became blurry as his diaphragm spasmed in a failed attempt to draw a breath.

The men shoved him into the van. When he landed on the scuffed aluminum floor, a screw in the floorboard cut a gash along his cheek. The men jumped in around him and slammed the door. One jerked his head up by his hair, bringing tears to his eyes. The officer then pulled a black sleep mask, the type the airlines gave out in first class on overseas flights, over his eyes.

In short gasps, Mousa’s breath returned. The air tasted of oil and sweat. Once he recovered his faculties, he opened his mouth to yell again. This time he resisted. The officers had a plan, and telling him anything was not part of that plan. As the adrenaline coursing through his body dissipated, the indignation over his arrest and the frantic urge to be released was replaced by a new emotion: fear. The sudden realization that something more serious than a faulty visa was behind his arrest opened a pit of darkness in his gut.

Before his mind could race through the possible permutations of his predicament, the van stopped. They’d traveled less than five minutes. He heard the door slide open, letting in a deafening noise along with the hot desert wind. This time he didn’t resist as the men lifted him outside. Although he could only see darkness behind the mask, he felt the sun beat down on his blazer. The moment he realized the source of the rhythmic thumping, he instinctively ducked his head to avoid the rotors of the helicopter. He’d been on call at the hospital when the Life Flight chopper brought critically injured patients to the landing pad on the roof. He tried to swallow but found that his mouth had gone dry.