The Jericho Deception: A Novel Read Online Free

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 sothat 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 comfortafter 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