The Jericho Deception: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

up and strode around the desks. Then they converged on Mousa and Amira. The other travelers waiting in line stepped back. Thetightness he’d felt in his chest cinched in like a python trying to squeeze the air from his lungs.
    “May I help you?” He tried to keep his voice relaxed.
    The lead officer rested a hand on the butt of his pistol and asked, “You are Mousa bin Ibrahim Al-Mohammad?”
    “I am Doctor Al-Mohammad.” His voice came out weaker than he wanted, even with the emphasis on Doctor . He had done nothing wrong, but the determined look in the officer’s eyes concerned him. Before Mousa could process what happened next, the officer standing to his left grabbed his arms, jerked them behind his back, and tightened a plastic handcuff tie around his wrists until it dug into his skin. His cane rattled to the ground.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Come with us, please,” the lead officer said.
    “Baba! Don’t leave!”
    His heart lurched. He turned his head to see Amira staring at him with terror on her face for the second day in a row.
    “My daughter—” He struggled against the men who pushed him forward. “Please, let her come with me.”
    “She will be taken care of.” The officer nodded to the woman in the burqa who bent to Amira’s level and put a hand on her shoulder.
    “It’s okay, Princess,” Mousa tried to sound comforting in spite of the surging fear in his gut. “Just a misunderstanding. This will only take a minute, I’m sure.”
    “No!” she pleaded. “Let my Baba go!” The tears streaming down her face tore at him.
    He hesitated again but was shoved from behind. His weight fell on his injured knee and he stumbled, but the men on either side of him grabbed his arms and dragged him toward the white door. The first officer opened the door, which led into a narrow hallway. The last sounds he heard before the metal door slammed behind him were his daughter’s screams.

CHAPTER 5
SSS , YALE UNIVERSITY
     
    ----
    A s the memory of Liz’s mystical vision echoed through his mind, Ethan packed his laptop into his satchel. He was tired, and the dark silence of the building reminded him that once again he’d worked too late.
    “Dr. Lightman, explain yourself.”
    Ethan jumped in his chair. He swiveled to see Samuel Houston, Chair of Yale’s Human Research Protection Program—the HRPP—standing in the doorway. Houston was in his late fifties, a few years younger than Elijah, wiry thin, and mostly bald with a ring of salt and pepper hair around the crown of his head.
    “Explain what?” He tried to keep the tension out of his voice. He didn’t have much contact with Houston, and that was by design. He let Elijah handle the temperamental chair. A former researcher and psych professor himself, Houston was now a full-time administrator whose job was to oversee human experimentation at Yale. When he took his position four years earlier, he had moved from being a peer to being a thorn in the side of his former colleagues.
    Houston removed the wire glasses that teetered on the tip of his nose and stabbed them in Ethan’s direction. “I should have terminated your research when your funding dried up a few months ago, but Elijah persuaded me to give you two more time. After what happened yesterday, I’m making an executive decision: your time is up.”
    “But the data we collected . . . I just—”
    “Your treatment of your patient, Doctor , was out of line.”
    My treatment of Liz?
    “You’ve let your ambitions for this project cloud your professional judgment.” His voice was larger than his slight frame seemed capable of.
    “How dare you question—” Ethan took a breath and fought the urge to lash out at the administrator. In his role as Chair of the HRPP, Houston had the power to close down a lab, to prevent a researcher from receiving funding, and to keep a professor from achieving tenure.
    He tried again in a calmer tone. “All of the protocols were followed to the letter. My