The Jericho Deception: A Novel (9 page)

The clanging of metal against metal brought clarity to his mind. The door to his cell slid open. He shrank into the corner of his narrow cot. The two guards who had beaten him earlier marched inside. Dressed in black from their boots to the berets on their heads, their complexions were equally dark. One was tall, trim, and clean-shaven, while the other was shorter, solid, with several days’ worth of stubble. Each held a baton.

Without speaking, the short one pulled him off the cot, flipped him around, and snapped handcuffs on his wrists. Then the guard pulled a black hood over his head. The fear of suffocating under the fabric, which smelled of sweat and vomit, was so overpowering that he had to force himself to take shallow breaths through his teeth.

They led him out of his cell to the right; twenty-four paces, he counted. Then they turned right again, at which point he sensed they had entered another room. He had no feel for the prison’s size or layout. The door to his cell was solid steel, with only a sliding opening at the bottom big enough for his captors to shove through a plate with a single boiled potato or some cold rice, which they did once a day. The rap music prevented him from hearing anything outside his cell.

The guards uncuffed him, pushed him into a hard wooden chair, and then reattached the handcuffs behind the back of the chair. His shoulders burned from the strain. When they yanked the hood from his head, he inhaled deeply. After his eyes adjusted to a light that was even brighter than the one in his cell, he saw that the room was several times larger than his own, but it had the same dull gray concrete walls. The guards stationed themselves beside the single door. His chair sat at one end of a metal table in the center of the room; across from him was a second, empty chair.

I’m in an interrogation room
, he thought.

He turned his head to the right. Against the wall was a large wooden trunk with a padlock securing it. He tried not to think what the trunk might contain.

Then he rotated his head further. The chasm in his gut grew deeper when he saw the metal chains hanging from bolts in the ceiling. The concrete floor underneath the chains was stained with dark blotches.

Then a spark of hope flickered through him: maybe this was the opportunity he’d waited for—the chance to explain himself, to clear his name. As the thought occurred, the door opened and a man entered. In contrast to the military black of the guards, he wore a charcoal suit, blue shirt, and striped red tie. His mustache was as groomed as his slicked-back hair.

Mousa felt the tension in his body ease. This man looked like he was here to help: a lawyer, a government official perhaps. He set a laptop and a manila file of papers on the table.

“Mousa bin Ibrahim Al-Mohammad?” The man smiled at him. He spoke in a cultured Arabic.

“Yes, that’s me.” He was surprised how rough his voice sounded.

The man opened the folder on the table and scanned through several pages. Mousa saw his picture in the corner of one of the pages.

“You are a doctor, an orthopedic surgeon at King Hussein Hospital in Amman, Jordan?”

“Yes, yes, I am.” He exhaled deeply as he nodded. The fog in his head began to clear. Finally, someone knew who he was.

The mustached man looked at him with a curious but friendly expression. Then he realized the man had not introduced himself. Before he could ask his name, role, or any of the other questions that began to flood into his mind, the man pulled a large color photograph from the folder and placed it on the table.

“Who is this?” His tone was cordial, but firm.

Mousa squinted at the photo. His glasses had disappeared at some point during his abduction. The man in the photo looked vaguely familiar but was not someone he knew personally. He appeared to be around thirty years old with short hair and the dark stubble of a beard. He wasn’t looking at the camera.

“No idea.” He shrugged.

The mustached man’s unblinking gaze urged him to study the picture again. Mousa bent as close as the handcuffs would allow and studied the blurry features. The man appeared to be Jordanian. A feeling of unease began to spread across his skin like a cold wind, causing the hairs on his body to stand on end. He remembered where he had seen the man before:
the Mall of
the Emirates, before the bombing
. With the upheaval in his own life, he had forgotten about the suspicious man with the backpack with whom he’d spoken before he took Amira on the ski slope.

He looked up at the man in the suit, who was smiling as if he knew that Mousa recognized the person in the photograph. He now had an inkling of why he was there.

He took a breath, straightened, and stared the man directly in the eye. “My daughter and I were in the Mall of the Emirates during the explosion. I may have seen him there, but I don’t know him. When we escaped, I wanted to get her out of the area quickly, so we returned to our hotel.”

He told the truth, but he omitted his suspicions about the man’s involvement in the bombing. His guilt at not going to the police after they escaped the mall returned. How could he explain now why he didn’t do so?

The mustached man nodded, but Mousa wasn’t sure if he was nodding in agreement or in understanding of something else.

“What is his name?” He tapped on the picture with his finger.

“His name? I told you, I don’t know him.”

“He is Jordanian, like you.”

“Yes, I’m Jordanian.”

This isn’t going well
, he thought. His questioner’s smile had vanished, along with his friendly demeanor. Then he pulled a second photograph out of the folder: a picture of Mousa and Amira in the mall.

“What was in the red backpack?”

The red backpack?

“My daughter and I went to the mall to ski, and I brought our ski clothes in the backpack.” He was worried that his explanation didn’t sound convincing. He was telling the truth, but his nerves seemed to be controlling his voice. He knew that if he could convince this man of his innocence, of the truth, then surely the man would file his report and release him to return to his family. The thought of his family brought a pang of longing deep in his core again.
Amira. Where is she?
Had they contacted his wife to come and get her, or was she being held by strangers somewhere too?
God willing, they wouldn’t harm a child
, he prayed silently.

“You do not know this man?” His interrogator opened up the laptop as he spoke.

“Correct. I can’t even say if the man in this photograph is who I saw in the mall.”

The interrogator pressed a key on the laptop, and a video began to play on the screen. The streaming numbers in the corner of the video displaying the date and the time indicated that the video was from a security camera. The quality of the recording from the mall was surprisingly crisp. After a few seconds of random shoppers passing by, he and Amira came into the frame. They walked hand in hand as she tugged on his arm. Seeing his daughter was painful yet strengthening. He had to get out of this place,
wherever this is
, to find her. Then he saw the other man, the one in the picture. The other Jordanian carried a backpack identical to his but in blue rather than red.

As the two men passed each other on the video, Mousa clearly saw himself nod to the suspected terrorist. Although there was no sound to the video, he watched both of their lips move as they spoke to each other before heading off in opposite directions.

He felt the back of his neck flush hot as his predicament became clear: the arrest at the airport, the imprisonment, the days without sleep before the interrogation. The UAE government thought he was part of the plot to bomb the mall. The man who he had recognized as a fellow Jordanian, the man he had greeted, was the terrorist.

He looked up from the laptop to the interrogator. He felt as if a heavy weight had settled in his stomach, pressing him down into the hard wood of the chair. The pain had returned to his shoulders and the handcuffs bit into his wrists.
How do I explain the mistake?
His walking past the terrorist was an unfortunate, random occurrence. He had recognized a countryman and said hello. The expression on his interrogator’s face was as businesslike as his dark suit. Mousa knew that the mustached man would never believe the explanation.

He wouldn’t have either.

P
rofessor Elijah Schiff was nervous.

He didn’t say so, but Ethan could tell that his mentor was preoccupied. He scurried about their lab, straightening the piles of journals teetering on the edge of his desk and stuffing overflowing folders into the file cabinet, then muttered to himself as he turned toward the Logos, which Chris had moved back into the lab. The machine sat behind a leather reclining chair they had picked up at Goodwill; the solenoids were positioned over the headrest. Elijah pulled a white handkerchief from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket and began to dust the machine and then the recliner. Ethan watched the nervous energy from his desk chair. He was just as apprehensive, but he pushed it inside and maintained a calm and composed exterior.

He focused his attention outside the leaded glass of the gothic bay window in front of their desks. The lights of the cars backed up on Grove Street two stories below sparkled through the gray mist of the chilly New Haven afternoon. At any minute, the head of the Neurological Advancement Foundation—the group that had thrown them their final financial lifeline, without which their project would be terminated—was due in their office.

Although Elijah had described the funding to Samuel Houston as a done deal, the reality was less clear. Elijah had signed the paperwork that Chris had helped prepare, but the foundation hadn’t returned their signed copy of the contract. The NAF wanted to inspect the lab first. Ethan wiped his palms on the thighs of his khakis and then straightened his striped blue tie.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have faith in your ability to close the deal.” His words were more to comfort himself than Elijah.

“Ah, my friend, faith is a state of mind, not a belief.”

Ethan smiled at the Zen-like response he was accustomed to hearing from the elder professor.

“Is Chris joining us?” Elijah asked.

“He’s over at CapLab, picking up the final report from the tech who helped us observe the capuchins’ behavior.”

The image of Rachel’s smile flashed through his mind.

“Before we move to human testing,” Elijah said, “I’d like to study that report in detail.”

Ethan suppressed a sigh. His mentor was brilliant, but he was overly cautious. The monkey tests two days earlier had gone well. Only one, Anakin, had even been agitated by the strange contraption humming near his head. Ethan was anxious now to test his programming on a person. Then they might have something more impressive to show the NAF than a quiet machine hovering over an empty chair in the center of the room.

The door to the lab opened. A distinguished man in a navy pinstriped three-piece suit, with a yellow tie and matching pocket square, strode into the room. Ethan stood.

“Elijah!” the man boomed in a baritone voice with a hint of a New England boarding school accent.

The man gripped Elijah’s hand in both of his and pumped it up and down. “So good to be working together again. It’s been how long?”

“Over four decades.” Elijah returned the man’s smile, but to Ethan it looked forced. He’d never seen Elijah under this kind of stress before. He knew the two men had been in graduate school together in the sixties, but it was a time Elijah never discussed. He wondered what history these men shared.

“And you must be Professor Lightman.” He gripped Ethan’s hand. “Dr. Allen Wolfe, but please call me Allen.” From the inside pocket of his jacket he produced a business card which identified him as the Executive Director of the Neurological Advancement Foundation.

“Likewise. Ethan.”

The foundation director had a full head of silver hair swept back in a wave across his head. Wolfe was tall—not quite up to Ethan’s six-four, but close. He glanced at the Dallas address on the business card before putting it in his pocket.

“You flew in from Texas?”

Wolfe shook his head. “Been in DC the past two days. Working with our Congressional lobbying firm. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that funding for mental illness research sorely lags behind that of physical ailments.” He looked each of them in the eye as he spoke, confident but relaxed at the same time.

“That very issue has threatened to shut down our study.”

He felt Elijah shoot him a glance as soon as the words came from his mouth. The senior professor was the one who handled the grant proposals, and for good reason. Sometimes he spoke too directly, as if the inner censor between his thoughts and his mouth was a step behind his tongue. He knew better than to reveal the desperate nature of their financial condition, but something in the way Wolfe nodded his head in agreement gave him comfort that this man understood their plight and genuinely wanted to help.

“Well, I hope”—Wolfe paced over to the Logos as he spoke—“we can do our small part to fill in the research gaps that others have overlooked.” His erect but fluid posture communicated the same refined ease as his speech.

When Wolfe reached the machine, he bent over and touched the solenoid headset. He was delicate yet curious at the same time, as if he were examining an antique automobile at a car show.

“So this is it. Have you finished the primate safety tests?”

“We get the final report back this afternoon.” Ethan was surprised that the head of the foundation was conversant in the protocols of the experiment. “But the tests appeared to be successful. I watched all of them.”

Elijah cleared his throat. “Yes, Allen, we didn’t expect to have any problems, but we might want to run a few more rounds with the primates just to be sure.”

Wolfe turned to face the two professors. The grin on his face, golden from the Texas sun, revealed straight, white teeth. He reminded Ethan of a classic Hollywood star from the movies his father used to watch.