The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “But we’re not talking about minutes, we’re talking about months, and he could be different,” said Tim. Again, he appealed to Weintraub. “I went and saw Mary Ash, Gary. She’s not the same person.”

  “Jesus, you know this after meeting her for the first time?” scoffed Miller.

  “Her own mother is afraid of her.”

  Tim broke off, realizing there was no point. The neurologist wasn’t in the mood to listen. Besides, he was learning nothing from this argument and something new had occurred to him—something he had almost forgotten in the light show of the Booth chambers.

  “Hold on. Cody James hadn’t exhausted all his death row appeals.”

  Weintraub and Miller exchanged a look, but both were curiously silent.

  “How did you speed up the legal process?” asked Tim. He realized as he finished the question, he had his answer already. “You didn’t, did you? You didn’t have to. Did they just give you carte blanche to go ahead and use it for convictions?”

  Still, the two scientists said nothing. At last, Weintraub shook his stubby fingers in a gesturing circle, confessing, “They’ve sanctioned the Booth for cases where the murders are beyond any factual mitigation or doubt, and yes, I know, Tim, you’ll ask who decides that, but we get authorization from the Attorney General. Look, given that you remember so much about the Cody James case, you must know that students at the school caught the shooting on their phone cams. He did it. He was clearly guilty. The appeals were nothing but a formality.”

  “Oh God, Gary, is that why you did it?”

  Weintraub sighed. “We needed to know.”

  Tim understood: to know if the Karma Booth worked on its own laws, not on the laws of Man. And now they had their answer.

  The Karma Booth remained a constant source of news, near-news and speculation. You couldn’t turn on the TV anymore without hearing discussion about it. It filled blogs and sold magazines. It inspired sick jokes on late night talk show monologues.

  Two weeks after the lights flashed and dazzled in the test room in White Plains, Tim walked down Sixth Avenue in New York with Michael Benson, the under-secretary of Homeland Security who had got him involved. Benson was five years older than him, with a tuft of lank black hair at the front of his scalp while the rest had long since retreated. The man’s vanity was focused on his body, and he often bragged about four games of racquetball a week and his morning jogs.

  “Little shit from the Congressional page staff beat me,” laughed Benson, rubbing the hair on the back of his head, still wet from his sports club’s shower. “Better play a couple more times a week.”

  “What’s surprising is that you think you can still slaughter seventeen-year-olds on the court,” replied Tim.

  “You go ahead and grow old gracefully, pal. I’m going to fight it every step of the way.”

  Tim had known the exec as an ambitious player who had moved up through the management ranks of the CIA and then saw the potential in Homeland’s growing new department. It didn’t surprise him at all that Benson was taking point over something as controversial and explosive as the Karma Booth. The man had always liked keeping a hand in plots to hurt the credibility of the latest Saddam or Osama, and his ego loved a consult from State over how to flatter the newest French prime minister. The Karma Booth offered power over life and death—impossible for a political addict to resist.

  “Enough chit-chat about your impending mid-life crisis,” said Tim. “Let’s talk about this rush you and your pals in the corridors of power have to set off a bomb.”

  “What can I say, Tim? The Republicans had the Senate seats to pass the bill. It was rushed right through committee.”

  “Then I’m even happier you couldn’t persuade me to move to Washington.”

  It was a regular friendly and not-so friendly duel between them whenever he was summoned to the Beltway. He had no desire whatsoever to live in the capital. Benson always argued it would make life easier… for him. Tim always reminded him that he charged enough that his clients could, and should, damn well come to New York.

  “So they’ve decided to use it, even though they still don’t know how it works.”

  Benson was philosophical. “Nobody is ever sure how the biggest scientific breakthroughs—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.” Tim sighed wearily, knowing Benson was about to drag out the penicillin defense again. He was getting so tired of that one. “So I take it my services are no longer needed. You certainly don’t need an ethics assessment.”

  Benson pursed his lips, surprised. “On the contrary. We need your assessment more than ever now.”

  “What on earth for?” Tim asked gently. And Benson’s face told him it was just as he feared. The final decider was politics. The technology had to be used because they did have it. He struggled for another tack. If they wanted him to do his job, they could at least clear a path for him.

  “Look, if you don’t know how it works then tell me where you got the technology from. And I’m not going to buy that it’s the latest tech toy from the NSA or CIA.”

  “It’s not,” said Benson, looking mildly embarrassed. “I suppose the best way to categorize it is… It was a gift.”

  “A gift? A gift from who?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” replied Tim. “You’re telling me an earth-shattering technology is just given to American authorities? And no one bothers to do the necessary homework or get briefed on what it—”

  “Weintraub was briefed,” Benson said tightly.

  “He knew?” And as Benson nodded, Tim wondered aloud, “I cannot believe the government gave him carte blanche like this. How could they?”

  He ran his hand through the straw-blond comma of hair over his forehead, always a classic sign that he was trying to work something through. It was unbelievable. The technology would be fascinating no matter how the booths had been developed, but to learn of this naïve, irresponsible adoption of them and then blindly putting them to use—

  “Weintraub made his case for human trials,” Benson was saying.

  “How? How could he make a case for human trials with absolutely no empirical evidence of his own to demonstrate what they can do?”

  “The way I hear it, our good doctor told the cabinet secretaries something like this: ‘Put aside all the conspiracy theories, all the bullshit. Just imagine for a moment that there’s incontrovertible evidence that Oswald did shoot JFK in Dallas. And that you have the Karma Booth to fix that.”

  Tim sighed in disbelief. “Aw, come on, that doesn’t fly. That whole hypothetical shows you exactly what problems we’re going to get with this thing. There are still doubts to this very day over Oswald’s involvement. Great! What happens when you do have a case that sparks public outrage but the evidence isn’t clear-cut?”

  Benson offered a lopsided smirk. “Come on, Tim, that’s why they invented appeals. Yes, I know they fast-tracked the Cody James case, but they’ll come up with a new process. What? You think if they fried Oswald, and he didn’t do it—”

  “Go ahead, tell me what happens.”

  “Nothing happens!”

  “Nothing happens? You’re sure? How do you know? How can you possibly know, Benson, until it happens?”

  And as he saw Benson grapple with that one, he nudged the man’s elbow, urging them to keep walking. The walking always helped him to think. He just wished it worked for others. He didn’t want to be distracted into the tired arguments for or against capital punishment. Those in the pro-Booth camp had the ultimate trump card, and yet no one was pausing over the enormity of a far more humbling truth of the machines.

  “Benson, listen to me,” Tim tried again. “I’m not a physicist or a medical doctor, but it baffles me that I should be the only person waving the red flag here. Let’s say these things work properly—they bring back a victim while they execute the murderer. Then we have physical laws of Nature that may actually follow a moral principle. Can you wr
ap your head around that one? Because I can’t!”

  Benson licked his lips, eyes downcast, clearly wanting to speak some truth to the issue. “Tim, listen, the Booth can still be used,” he said slowly. “If it does follow a moral principle then we have scientific means to guide us in—”

  Tim cut through him brutally. “Project past your wishful thinking. The Booth has this enormous power. It was built—by a man or a team—somewhere. That means somebody already has insight into how these mind-boggling principles work. They may even be able to manipulate these principles, whatever they are. You comfortable with that one, too?”

  Benson allowed himself another long pause to consider. “Maybe that’s why the tech is a gift. The responsibility is so huge.”

  “So I’ll ask again: Who gave it to you?”

  “Orlando Braithewaite.” Benson waited for the surprise then nodded as he saw something else on Tim’s face. “That’s right, they say you met him once. Had some kind of enlightening special meeting with him and your dad.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to call it that.”

  Benson shrugged. “Call it whatever you want. Find him, and you’ll get your answers.”

  “It’s not like I have Braithewaite on speed dial and can get an appointment.”

  “That just makes you the same as everyone else who’s tried,” replied Benson. “He gave us the goods, briefed Weintraub about it and then nicely buggered off on his Gulfstream. Anybody else, yeah, of course you ask about a gift horse in the mouth, but…”

  “Yeah, I get it,” said Tim. “Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, Orlando Braithewaite.”

  Yes, he knew about Braithewaite. He had known about him for decades.

  “Look, if you can find him, more power to you,” said Benson. “The cabinet secretaries are expanding the parameters of their—your investigation. We need more than just your input as an ethicist. We need you to figure out how this damn thing works, Tim. What the long-term effects are, what kind of trouble we could get into, what our billionaire’s real agenda may be—everything, everything—”

  “You need a scientist to make those kind of evaluations,” argued Tim. “And you’ve already got one with Weintraub. I’m not an investigator for State anymore, pal—I’m not even a diplomat. I’m busy raising the next crop of Oxfam workers and correspondents for The Economist.”

  Benson stopped at a corner and dropped his voice to a whisper, pointing a finger into Tim’s lapel. “You are exactly the guy we need. You think for one second we’re going to get an objective view from Gary Weintraub? Are you shitting me? Get real! Yeah, sure, he’ll tell us what he knows for equations and physical effects, that’s it. I mean… Jesus, they go on and on about Oppenheimer and those other guys and their conscience over the bomb. Well, they still built the fucking thing, didn’t they?”

  Benson stepped back and looked around them nervously, as if he had just confided a dirty little secret. “You get your retainer plus twenty-five percent above that. We’re giving you unlimited travel—first-class commercial when it’s regular business, private Hawker Horizon when it’s a priority, on loan from Justice.”

  “What do I need a jet for when the Karma Booth’s right in New York?”

  And as soon as he started the question, he heard his own words trail off, as if someone else had spoken them in a distant room. He had his answer. “Jesus Christ…”

  “You got it,” said Benson.

  “There’s more than one out there.”

  “There’s several of them,” said Benson. “We should have known Mr. Braithewaite wouldn’t play Santa Claus only with the United States. The Japanese came to us on their own about their Booth after Weintraub’s news conference. The Israelis won’t admit they have one, and we’re not holding our breath over Saudi Arabia either. I’ve got a list of the others. Intelligence ops confirmed pretty early that Moscow has one. The liberals at State are bitching how Russia signed the European Convention on Human Rights, so capital punishment ought to be outlawed there already.”

  Tim rolled his eyes dismissively. “It’s not like we can claim the moral high ground when we execute people. And these same geniuses should remember that Russia never ratified the protocols. Anyway, there hasn’t been an execution there in years—the last one was in Chechnya.”

  Benson shrugged. “Hardly makes a difference, does it? I’m sure everybody’s rulebook is getting thrown out the window. By the way, we’ve discovered the regime in Iran is a complete bunch of hypocrites—their mullahs denounced it, but Iran’s got one.” He crouched down and snapped open his briefcase, fetching a file and passing Tim a large photo blow-up. “Do you know what this is?”

  Tim pulled out his reading glasses and looked. The color photo took in a large swath of a city skyline, and it took him only an instant to recognize the Montparnasse district of Paris. After all, he used to keep an apartment there. But then he saw in the foreground what the picture was really about.

  “La Santé Prison,” offered Tim. He tapped the grim, brown blockhouses stretching out like spokes on a wheel. “The French have a Booth? It’s one thing for the Russians to have one, but capital punishment is definitely against the French Constitution.”

  “They do,” said Benson. “They’re taking the view that they’ll use it for terrorists—same rationale as the British, who, incidentally, are keeping their Booth in Wapping or some godforsaken place, can’t remember. But we have a new headache in Paris.”

  He handed Tim another couple of photos. They were surveillance shots from CCTV cameras, ones looking down on a young woman who couldn’t be more than thirty years old. She had an ethereal beauty, with long black hair and pale skin, her lips full and her blue eyes inquisitive. And there was something else about her.

  “How did she come back?” he asked. But he sensed he already knew the answer. It was about to be confirmed.

  Her clothes. That was the first tip-off. The woman was wearing a green cotton dress and a broad-brimmed straw hat with a bow, almost as if the legendary Madeleine had grown up and left the old house in Paris covered with vines…

  “The French claim there’s only been limited use of the Booth, and no executions of prisoners are held at night,” said Benson. “We have to take that on faith, but they seem genuinely stunned. After seven o’clock, there are no researchers in the facility wing containing the machine, so there’s no need for any guards to be in the actual room. But closed circuit cameras stay on in there just like everywhere else—”

  New photos. Tim flipped through them and stared at the flare of white light in the grainy shot, the Karma Booth impossibly turned on, functioning with no scientists in attendance—and no condemned inmate to be executed. In the next shot, the woman appeared. She was nude, stunningly beautiful, but clearly disoriented as she staggered out of the second chamber. More photo stills of the surveillance. Snap…snap… snap, and she walked out of camera view. Tim looked up at Benson, who saw his new question forming.

  “They haven’t determined how she got out.”

  “It’s a prison,” said Tim. “She shouldn’t be able to get out at all.”

  “We know. So do they. There’s no footage of her in the entire complex beyond that room. Then the street cameras pick her up from the Rue de Sèvres—how and where she got the clothes is also a mystery. She went into a Métro station and disappeared—no footage of her inside. Anywhere. But the Police Nationale had the presence of mind to lift fingerprints from where she touched that bench.”

  “She doesn’t have a criminal record,” said Tim flatly. “She was a victim.”

  “Okay, you’re so clever,” replied Benson. “If you’ve guessed that then maybe you’ve guessed the rest.”

  Tim skipped back to the first shots of the woman walking along the street. Wearing the green cotton dress that was simple, stylish. No, this woman wouldn’t be in the regular database of unsolved murders. He could see it now, a subtle difference in the line of her jaw and in the oval of her face. Pe
ople really did once look different thanks to diet and environment. Benson handed him a photocopy of a newspaper clipping, and he looked at the same beautiful woman in a posed photo and saw that the story had been printed in 1928.

  The dress wasn’t signature flapper apparel, but similar enough to be from that era.

  “Her name was—is—Emily Derosier,” explained Benson. “The last name is French, but she had a British father. She was a socialite and painter—or so the article says. I’ve never heard of her. She hung out with the celebs. Got stabbed to death in her Paris apartment, and the killer was never found.”

  Tim scanned through the article. It was mostly a bio that recapped the highlights of the victim’s life. He would have to read it more thoroughly later.

  “Great. So I’ve got to find Orlando Braithewaite, and it looks like I got to locate her as well. And I better find her fast.”

  “Maybe ‘fast’ is overstating it,” said Benson. “Hell, she may rattle off the same gibberish as Mary Ash.”

  Tim shook his head. “I don’t think so. Weintraub’s crew pulled Mary Ash from the other side. This woman is different. She walked back into our world of her own accord, after more than eighty years. She must have come back for a reason.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tim had Matilda book a transatlantic flight for him in three days. Before that, he wanted to go and visit Geoff Shackleton, curious to see if the schoolteacher was “different,” as he had warned Weintraub and Miller.

  It was raining as he drove back out to the White Plains facility, the sky a strange twilight blue behind the dark charcoal clouds. On his car stereo, he played Kind of Blue, the signature Miles Davis album. Tim’s father had heavily influenced his jazz tastes. Piano, bass, drums—that’s all you need, Dad said. Tim had found him to be right, and small 1960s combos were always the best musical sedative for him. Lee Morgan, Davis, Bird—yes, he had been right about music even though his father had never learned to play a note. But he had been wrong about so many other things.