Free The Jericho Deception: A Novel by Jeffrey Small Page B

he’dearned a beating from two guards who’d burst into his cell. His jaw still hurt, but he was too tired to care.
    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