The Jericho Deception: A Novel (7 page)

The men shoved him forward. His thighs hit metal, sending a jolt of pain from his injured knee through his body. Hands seized him under his shoulders and lifted him. His leg protested when he collapsed onto a ribbed metal surface.

Shock replaced the fear of a moment ago. He felt detached from the events, as if he were in the middle of a surrealistic dream. Just a few minutes earlier, he’d been standing in the airport with his daughter as they waited to leave for home.

The bass thumping of the rotors increased in frequency. His stomach lurched as the floor moved upward and forward at the same time. The helicopter was lifting off, taking him somewhere. Somewhere away from his home. Somewhere away from Amira.

“M
ay I help you?” a female voice crackled over the intercom in the basement hallway.

“Dr. Ethan Lightman. I’m here for CapLab.”

Although he visited Yale-New Haven Hospital weekly, he’d never paid attention to the three-story building down the block whose small windows and ribbed concrete exterior gave away its 1960s heritage.

“Be right there, Professor,” the voice replied.

The only marking on the door before him was the suite number: 108. No signage revealed its true purpose: CapLab, Yale’s capuchin monkey research laboratory. Because of animal rights protests at other primate labs around the country, Yale kept the location of its research facilities secret.

After his lecture that morning, he’d found Christian Sligh in their office. His graduate assistant had given him the tightly guarded directions to CapLab and then left to make sure that the experiment would be ready when Ethan arrived. Chris had taken the Logos with him.

Ethan heard the lock click on the other side of the door. When it opened, a familiar face greeted him.

“Hi, Professor.” The young woman stuck out a petite hand with manicured nails but no polish, just as she wore no makeup. “I’m Rachel Riley.”

The student from the front row of his lecture class stood before him. Her chestnut hair was pulled into a tight ponytail, her wide blue eyes staring at
him with the same intensity as during his lectures. Her handshake was stronger than her delicate fingers would have suggested.

“You’re one of my students.”

He towered over her—
can’t be more than five-two
, he thought—but she carried herself with an energy that seemed befitting someone of much larger stature. She held his gaze.

“Grad student—first year.” She spun around, started down the hallway, and stopped at an unmarked door at the end. “Evolutionary Biology.”

Even though his legs were considerably longer than hers, he had to hurry to catch up. “So what are you doing in my undergrad course?”

“Thought Psych for Psychos might give me some perspective on my research here.” She flashed a smile that lit up her face. “And, I heard you were a decent teacher.”

He felt his neck flush, but before he could look away, she turned to the wall and punched a code on a keypad. When the electronic lock beeped, she opened the door and motioned for him to enter. His first impression upon stepping into the room was that it looked more like a dorm than a lab. Jackets and book bags were piled on top of a couch that looked as if it had been purchased at a thrift store. Starbucks cups crowded the surface of a wood-laminate coffee table.

“What’s up, Prof?” Chris waved to him from his seat at the desk against the wall to the right. Ethan’s laptop was open on the desk.

“We ready?”

“The Logos is programmed and warming up now.” Chris flipped his head, flinging blond hair from his eyes. “Rachel’s been quite helpful in organizing the apes.” His eyes lingered on her.

“All hominids are apes, including you.” She jabbed a finger in Chris’s direction. “Ape is too imprecise a term. These are capuchins, monkeys.” Her tone was firm, but from the crinkles around her eyes, Ethan suspected her displeasure was feigned.

“You work here?” Ethan asked her.

“Since freshman year. I was an undergrad here too. One of the reasons I came to Yale was CapLab. I took a gap year after high school—well, two
actually—working at an animal preserve in Kenya. I’m the head tech now. I help Professor Sanchez with her research.”

“Where is Laura?”

Ethan respected Laura Sanchez, a fellow psychology faculty member who’d just received tenure last year. Her determination and enthusiasm had been the driving force behind establishing CapLab as one of the leading primate research centers in the nation. She’d also been helpful when he and Elijah had approached her about testing the Logos in her lab.

“Atlanta. Conference at Yerkes. I’ve been instructed to assist you guys with anything you need.” She cast her eyes down the length of his body for a moment so brief that he wasn’t sure that it had happened.

Did she just check me out?
As a young faculty member, he’d experienced female students flirting with him before, but he’d never pursued that dangerous path, even though he’d known others—even much older professors—who had done so.
Not my type anyway
, he told himself. The memory of Natalie’s tall body, jet-black hair, and olive complexion popped into his head, bringing with it the familiar pang of regret in the depths of his stomach.

A touch to his arm brought his attention back to the woman standing before him. Her hand rested on his upper arm; it was warm.

“You’ve had your TB tests, right? We can’t risk an infection that would wipe out our whole population.”

“We both have,” Chris rose from the chair.

“Yes, both negative,” Ethan confirmed.

“So, can we go in now?” Chris gestured to the plate glass window that took up most of the wall to their left.

With his attention focused on Rachel, Ethan had failed to notice the giant window when he entered, though it was the focal point of the room. Tree branches swayed on the other side, giving the impression that he was looking outdoors—an impossibility since they were in the basement of the building. Closer inspection revealed a chain-link fence and a concrete floor covered in wood shavings that defined a large room on the other side of the window. The tree branches were bare and several ropes connected them to the ceiling and to each other. A dozen small brown monkeys played in various parts of the
room-sized cage. Some groomed each other; others climbed on the branches or swung from the ropes; a few chewed on chunks of fruit before tossing the rinds to the floor.

“Do you have the paperwork showing the negative results?”

“Here.” Chris picked up a manila folder from the desk and handed it to her. Ethan once again appreciated how well his graduate assistant handled the myriad regulations their research required.

“Not trying to be a pain.” She flipped open the folder. “I don’t want the IACUC coming down on my ass because the protocols weren’t followed. Just last month we were cited because one of the monkeys was underweight. They refused to listen to us. We provide them more than enough food. He was just a lower ranking member of the community.” She tossed the folder on the desk. “Bureaucrats. Last year, they actually changed the locks on the office doors because they said it was too messy in here!”

Ethan chuckled. The IACUC, the Institutional Animal Care Use Committee, was just as difficult as Samuel Houston’s Human Research Protection Program Committee with its IRBs. Each of these committees saw it as their jobs to bust the researchers before the feds did. In addition to the university’s committees, they had to deal with inspections by government agencies like the USDA and AAALAC—the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care. The acronyms drove him crazy.

“Tell me about it. I’m struggling with the HRPP right now.”

“You work with Sam Houston?”

“Not sure I would say ‘work with’—more like try to avoid at all costs.” She laughed at his half-joke. Talking to the attractive yet earnest grad student felt unusually easy to him. “You know Houston?”

She glanced away from him toward her desk. Her voice dropped. “Let’s just say that we’ve had our run-ins too.”

From the change in her tone he guessed that whatever had happened with the administrator wasn’t something she wanted to discuss. He could relate. He followed her gaze to the desk. Two items caught his attention: a dog-eared paperback by Walt Whitman and a chunk of quartz the size of a softball.

“A Whitman fan?”

“
Adore
him.” She enunciated each syllable. “His idea that an ineffable power enlivens nature speaks to me. Like the Native American view that everything has a consciousness—humans, eagles, mountains, rivers—and that consciousness is what links all of us together.”

The emptiness in his gut returned. Natalie had loved Whitman too, but for different reasons. She’d admired his use of language in describing nature. For the second time since he’d entered the office, he forced the memory of his deceased fiancée from his mind.

Chris snorted. “You’re telling me this rock has consciousness.” He picked up the translucent stone and held it up to the light.

“First off, it’s a crystal—quartz. Second, I don’t mean a consciousness like the awareness that we have, but a certain force—an energy of existence. And third, many wise people believe that the unique molecular structure of crystals can hold this energy and that it can even provide healing powers.”

Ethan resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He put the whole New Age crystal theory, as well as Whitman’s pantheistic musings, on the same plane as Wiccan magic, ESP, and angels causing miracles. The human mind’s ability to imagine a pattern or an unseen force behind a series of unrelated but coincidental events was well documented. In his class, he demonstrated this principle by projecting a photograph of clouds in the sky. He would then ask the students to play the childhood game of
what do you see
? After they shouted out their divergent, and often hilarious, answers, he pointed out that each of their own proclivities influenced their interpretations of this random display of nature. The human brain doesn’t like ambiguity, he explained. Our minds have evolved to make assumptions about our surroundings and to draw conclusions from incomplete information. The same neural processes that allowed a hunter in the savannah to make a quick decision about which animal to pursue or to avoid also cause some people to see the Virgin Mary in a cloud or a corn field.

“Shall we get started?” he asked. He glanced at the evolutionary biologist in front of him and wondered how she reconciled her spiritual views with her studies. But he had more important work to attend to than engaging in a philosophical discussion with two grad students.

“Sure. Once your assistant stops touching my stuff.” Rachel took the quartz from Chris’s hand and replaced it in the desk.

She shot a sideways glance at both men before leading them through a metal door next to the large window. They entered another fluorescent-lit hallway whose vinyl tile floor and bare white walls were similar to the one that led to the office. At the end of the hall, they entered through another metal door into an anteroom with a bench along one side and hooks above it. The opposite wall held a row of lockers, and across from where they entered was yet another door. Rachel turned a lock on the door they had just entered.

Ethan glanced between the two doors. “You have an air-lock system here?”

She laughed. “It’s not quite a spaceship.” She nodded to the second door. “But that leads to the monkey room. We need the multiple layers of security because they’re smart. We’ve had some close calls with escape attempts.”

She opened a locker and from it pulled out two sets of blue surgical scrubs, shoe covers, masks, and eye shields, which she handed to the men. For herself, she pulled out a set of scrubs in tie-dye.

“Why the scrubs?” Chris asked. “The experiment is noninvasive.”

Ethan wondered the same thing. It was one of the conditions for conducting the tests at CapLab; this was a psychological research lab, not a medical one. When he first approached Dr. Sanchez about testing the Logos on the monkeys, he had to assure her that no surgical techniques or drugs would be used. The Logos would only send weak magnetic pulses aimed at the capuchins’ skulls.

“It’s to protect the monkeys from human diseases,” she said as she slipped her scrubs over her clothes, “but sometimes they bite and throw feces.”

Ethan pulled the strap of his surgical mask over his head. The last thing he wanted was a mouthful of monkey poop.

“They bite?” Chris asked.

“In the nineties”—she bent over to slip on her shoe covers—“a researcher at Yerkes was bitten by a macaque and died from encephalitis.”

She opened the last door into the monkey room. They were greeted by loud vocalizations from the capuchins and the distinctive smell of a zoo. The room was approximately thirty feet square. Two-thirds of it was enclosed by the
chain-link fence. At the far end was the large window that opened onto the office, but from this side he could only see a reflection of the room they were in; the window was a one-way mirror. Sitting on a metal cart with wheels just outside the cage was the Logos.

The brains and the mechanics of the Logos were contained in a black metal box the size of a large stereo receiver. The box had several dials to adjust the power and frequency of the electromagnetic pulses it generated, but it also had a serial port into which Chris had loaded Ethan’s proprietary algorithm from his laptop that morning. His programming, rather than the dials, would determine the exact protocol by which the machine would generate its outputs. Extending off of the box was a metal articulated arm that telescoped out three feet. On the end of the arm were what appeared to be headphones—the kind that covered one’s ears—although these were wider and ended in three-inch plastic disks rather than plush cushions.

The Logos was designed to be placed on either side of a subject’s head without touching it. Instead of speakers, the disks contained solenoids, tightly wound loops of wire that would produce variable magnetic pulses when an electrical current was passed through them. Today, the solenoids were suspended above a rectangular wire tunnel that branched off of the main cage by a few feet. The tunnel was large enough for a single monkey to crawl through. At the end of the tunnel was a wire box with a small hole and a U-shaped foam attachment on top.