Read Online The Jericho Deception: A Novel by Jeffrey Small - Free Book Online

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