NEUROTHEOLOGY

The tourists saw only the ruins.

Every day, they came by the thousands, by train and by bus and on foot along the Inca Trail, to stand on the terraces of the fifteenth-century citadel and photograph the mists drifting off the peaks. None of them knew what lay beneath their feet.

Deep under the mountain, in a chamber cut into solid granite, a detachment of U.S. Navy SEALs stood guard over a laboratory that did not officially exist. A second platoon patrolled the surface, out of sight of the tourist paths, watching a single unmarked service entrance. Behind it, a military elevator dropped more than a thousand feet into the heart of the mountain.

In 1995, with considerable embarrassment, the CIA had declassified and shut down a program code-named Stargate. For more than twenty years, the American government had paid psychics to spy on its enemies by means of something called remote viewing. The program had been ridiculed in the press, and Washington had declared it a failure.

Some programs end.

Others simply move somewhere no one will think to look.

The laboratory had been built at enormous expense for a single purpose: to locate, understand, and ultimately harness what the scientists who worked there called, only half jokingly, the power of God. If they succeeded, they would change science’s understanding of reality forever. They would also give the American military an advantage so great it would border on the supernatural.

The main research chamber was a monument to insulation. Every wall was lined with thick polymer padding. The chairs were vinyl, the tables molded plastic, and every instrument that did not need metal had been built without it. The technicians wore latex suits and gloves. Nothing in the room could be allowed to interfere with the delicate magnetic fields the experiment required.

Among themselves, the staff called it the Divinity Room.

An elevator door slid open, and Dr. Xu Yun stepped out between two American scientists and a pair of German neurosurgeons.

The Ecuadorian-born neurologist was the most celebrated man in his field. His work on the temporal lobes had won him a Nobel Prize and made him the world’s leading authority on the young science of neurotheology: the study of what happens in the brain when a human being encounters the divine. He had left a monastery in Northern California four days earlier, telling its abbot only that an old obligation required him to travel. Born to a poor mestizo mother in Guayaquil, he had been adopted as an infant by a Chinese couple who ran a small grocery near the waterfront, and they had given him their name, their language, and their stubborn belief that a poor boy could become anything.

He did not look happy to be here.

He was introduced at once to two volunteers. Then he set a metal case on the table, unlocked it, and opened the lid. Inside lay a strange helmet, a lattice of copper coils, microchips, and padded straps.

Dr. Schultz, one of the German neurosurgeons, leaned over it with open fascination.

“A magnetic field generator?”

“Yes,” Yun said. “I call it God’s Helmet.”

The idea was not entirely his. In the 1980s, a Canadian researcher had built a crude device that bathed the temporal lobes in weak, shifting magnetic fields, and some of his subjects had reported sensing an invisible presence in the room with them. Yun’s helmet was something else: precise, programmable, and far more powerful. It produced a rotating magnetic field of between ten nanoteslas and one microtesla, thousands of times weaker than a refrigerator magnet. In the right brain, it was enough to open a door.

Below the observation gallery, in a glass room ringed with scanners, waited two reclining beds and a steel tray of instruments that, Yun noted with distaste, would not have looked out of place in a 1940s lobotomy ward.

The two volunteers looked perfectly ordinary. One was Susan, a twenty-year-old woman. The other was Richard, a man of thirty-two. They had only one thing in common.

Both had temporal lobe epilepsy.

General Archer, the commanding officer, ordered the experiment to begin with Susan.

He was in a hurry. For eight months, American forces in Iraq had been hunting Saddam Hussein, and for eight months he had eluded them. Every week he remained free, more American soldiers came home in flag-draped coffins.

Yun watched an assistant fit the helmet over Susan’s head while he reviewed her medical history. Then he opened a channel to the general’s earpiece.

“General, I don’t believe she is a good candidate. I strongly recommend we start with Richard. His neural architecture appears considerably more stable.”

“Request denied, Doctor. Proceed.”

Yun switched on the helmet.

Within minutes, Susan’s parietal activity had collapsed and her temporal lobes were firing wildly. Then her body arched on the bed, and she went into violent convulsions.

Yun killed the power at once. A medical team rushed into the glass room. Susan was in a full grand mal seizure, and it went on for a long time.

“Bring in Richard,” the general said.

“General, I must protest—”

“This is a matter of life and death, Dr. Yun. This war has to end. The lives of countless soldiers and innocent civilians depend on it.”

Richard was led in, strapped onto the second bed, and blindfolded. An orderly lowered God’s Helmet over his head. Yun switched it on again and slowly raised the rotating fields, pulse by pulse, around Richard’s temporal and parietal lobes.

Ten minutes passed. No dangerous symptoms. But on the monitors, Richard’s parietal lobes had gone almost completely dark, and his left temporal lobe was firing at three times its normal rate.

The door of the control booth opened, and General Archer stepped in.

“What’s happening?”

“It’s working,” Yun said, without taking his eyes from the screens.

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“The parietal lobes are how the brain locates the self in space and time. They draw the line between me and everything else. His have shut down. As far as his brain is concerned, he is no longer bound to one place or one moment.” Yun hesitated. “He is no longer only an individual. He has begun to dissolve the boundaries.”

The general smiled. “Can we start the questioning?”

“Not yet. I need at least another fifty percent from the temporal lobe before remote viewing is possible.”

A few minutes later, Yun nodded. The general keyed a microphone that fed directly into the glass room.

“Richard. Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been focusing on the target?”

“Yes. I have.”

On Yun’s monitors, Richard’s alpha waves held steady, but the activity in his temporal lobe had become erratic.

“Tell me what you see.”

Richard spoke slowly, as though describing something glimpsed through fog.

“An open area. A farm. There’s a farmhouse. It’s dusty. There are chickens nearby.”

“What else?” The general was recording every word.

“A rug. Yes. A rug, and bricks. They’re covering something. A hidden space. Underground. He’s hiding. He’s afraid. And he’s sick. He’s in a small room. No. Not a room. It’s more like a hole in the ground.”

“His neural pathways are firing erratically,” Yun said sharply. “At this level of stimulation, he could slip into a coma.”

The general ignored him.

“Richard. Can you see anything that tells you where this is?”

Richard was silent. On the screens, his temporal activity spiked far past anything Yun considered safe.

Then he spoke one last sentence.

“A few miles south of Tikrit.”

His head fell forward. He was unconscious.

General Archer was already reaching for a secure phone.

“We’ve got him,” he told the field commander. “A few miles south of Tikrit, near his hometown. Search every farm. He’s hiding in a hole or a cellar, probably covered with a rug and bricks. Don’t stop until you find him. Offer money if you have to. And move whatever you need out of Baghdad. He’s not there.”

He hung up and clapped Yun on the shoulder.

“Thank you, Doctor. You’ve done your country a great service. I suspect we’ll be needing your talents again.”

“With respect, General, I am a scientist. My purposes are nobler than warfare. I would like to leave now.”

Archer’s face hardened. “There’s no nobler cause than defending your country and preserving our way of life, Dr. Yun.”

“General,” Yun said quietly, “have you ever stopped to ask whether our way of life is worth preserving?” He closed his case. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

An hour later, a military helicopter carried him over the Andes toward Lima, where a plane was waiting.

Two days later, on a farm outside the town of ad-Dawr, fifteen kilometers south of Tikrit, American soldiers lifted a rug, cleared away a layer of dirt and bricks, and pried open a lid hidden beneath it. At the bottom of a narrow hole, they found a frightened, bearded old man.

Yun heard the news on a car radio somewhere in Northern California. He did not feel triumphant. He felt only tired, and he wanted very much to be home.

As he drove north toward the mountain, he thought, as he so often did, about the helmet. It had never been more than a catalyst. It could open a door in a gifted brain, but it could not create the gift. Something far more complex was at work in the minds of the spiritually gifted, something he had spent his whole life trying to understand.

In all those years, he had found only one person who did not need a helmet at all.

He thought of the general’s hand on his shoulder. I suspect we’ll be needing your talents again. For eight years, he had kept that one person’s name out of every paper he published, every lecture, every grant application. He had told himself it was to protect a patient’s privacy. Now, driving north in the dark, he understood the real reason. It was to keep him safe from men like Archer.

And he remembered the night he had found him.

Baltimore, Maryland. July 1995.

It was after midnight, and Dr. Xu Yun was still at his desk at Johns Hopkins.

A stack of case files sat in front of him: patients referred from across the country, all with temporal lobe epilepsy, all reporting experiences their doctors could not explain. Most were minor. Simple partial seizures. Strange smells, sudden waves of déjà vu, flickers of light at the edge of vision. No loss of awareness.

His helmet had shown that such experiences could be amplified, that in a brain already prone to them, a carefully tuned magnetic field could open the door wider. But the helmet was only a key. It was not the room behind the door.

To Yun, spirituality was a gift, perhaps written into human genes. Perhaps it was even the next step in evolution, already present in a few and waiting for the rest of the species to catch up. He thought of the temporal lobe as an antenna: a receiver tuned to a frequency most human beings could not hear. Mozart had been born with a gift for music. Einstein had been born with a gift for physics. And a rare few, Yun believed, had been born with a gift for God. They were not merely capable of experiencing the divine. They were capable of carrying it.

But for all his years of research, he had never found a single subject who could prove it. Not without the helmet. Not without some device to coax the gift into the open.

The telephone rang.

He looked at his watch. No one called at this hour.

“Dr. Xu Yun?” The voice on the line was urgent.

“Yes. Speaking.”

“I’m sorry to call so late, Doctor. My name is Dr. Carl Banks. I’ve followed your work on neurotheology for years.” The man drew a breath. “I need you to come to Redding, California. As soon as you possibly can. There’s something here you have to see.”