The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “You wanted this.”

  “Yes, it’s true, I wanted it! I thought the whole world wanted this—that we needed this technology! Every day the network news is an unspeakable recital of carnage.”

  “Gary, it’s always been that,” replied Tim. “History is a steady roll call of plague, butchery, intolerance, war, and yeah, mass murder. So we live in a bloody age—what else is new? Except for this. Can you reach Braithewaite? Can you ask him how we control this goddamn thing?”

  “Don’t you think I’ve tried? It’s impossible. He has a whole corporate army of receptionists to keep you at bay. They take messages, but he never responds.”

  “Okay, but do you think he foresaw this? That he knew the Karma Booth would have these effects with the way it’s being used?”

  Weintraub looked up. His helpless expression told Tim he couldn’t be sure of what Braithewaite had thought.

  “Damn it,” muttered Tim. “Okay, I need to talk to that boy.”

  “He’s not talking to anyone.”

  “I’ve had some luck so far with Mary Ash and Geoff Shackleton.”

  Weintraub nodded. “Fair point. But if I were you, I’d be worried about why you’re the one who connects with these people.”

  “For now, let’s just use it to our advantage.”

  “Very well. But he’s still a child, whether he was reincarnated in Germany or born into some other realm of existence. Assuming he’ll talk to you at all, what do you expect to learn? He’ll probably tell you even less than Mary Ash.”

  “If he really is a child, he won’t lie well,” replied Tim. “Maybe I’ll get something.”

  Tim walked in, offering a friendly smile to the boy, who snapped to attention as the adult closed the door. He looked as anxious as any three-year-old in a strange place without parents or a trusted guardian. His tiny mouth opened in surprise and expectation, and his little feet still dangled over the side of the examination table as if he was sitting on a fishing dock on a summer holiday. He fidgeted and shoved a couple of fingers in his mouth. Whatever else the new arrival was, Tim thought, he was a small child.

  “Hi, buddy,” Tim started, sliding over a chair. “We want to get you home. I know you haven’t talked to anyone here, but maybe your mom and dad told you not to talk to strangers. So okay, we’ll do this properly. My name’s Tim. And you are?”

  He held out his hand to shake. The blond boy smiled shyly and looked away.

  “You know,” Tim tried again, “I’ve lived in all kinds of places all over the world. Maybe you want to start differently. We can bow like they do in Japan—” He bowed. “Or maybe you come from another place where they don’t shake hands. Hey, maybe they start with hand puppets. You come from the land of hand puppets?” He started to pantomime a horse galloping and a goofy bird. “Is that it, you come from the country of Gooney Bird?”

  The little boy began to giggle at his antics. Contact, thought Tim.

  “Come on, buddy, I’m acting my heart out here! If we can’t use gestures, do I have to sing my name and you sing yours? Tiiimmmmmm…” He imitated a long humming chime.

  The boy laughed harder, and then his small hand reached out and touched the side of Tim’s head. Tiny fingers lifted in a fluttery brush of movement, carried out with a three-year-old’s coordination, but there was an intent, a purpose.

  Contact.

  It was not telepathy, not quite.

  “Whoa, wait a minute,” muttered Tim. “I can’t… I don’t know how to… How are you doing this?”

  Music. He tasted music. He wouldn’t have thought such a thing possible. The notes and sounds seemed to have a weight in his mouth and throat, as if the emotions of melody can have a taste. The music itself was disturbing, barely anything familiar to him. He tasted Arabic melodies, Armenian and Turkish woodwinds, but only later, much later, would he be able to identify the cultures behind what was being passed to him. Or pin down what he guessed were the instruments. As if they mattered at all. Arabic duduks, Indian tablas, arghul drones, finger cymbals, Persian kamanches. But he suspected the Middle East flavor of the melody in his throat wasn’t important. It was the feeling, the feeling rushing from the boy. Anxiety, little lost animal fear.

  The music sounded at first like a cacophonous wail to Tim’s ears, so used to his diet of jazz, classical and pop. But these melodies would have sense and precision to those who grew up in Cairo and Tehran. He wants to go home. I know you want to go home, thought Tim, swallowing, trying to say the words. We want to help, we need to know your name, who you belong to, and then the music changed. The taste in his mouth became bitter, with a garlic tang. The notes grew dissonant, harsh. A child’s frustrated banging on a piano keyboard—

  Weintraub and Miller were rushing into the room, their faces showing concern. “Tim, step back,” said Weintraub, an arm already up to gently urge him aside.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Look at the monitor,” said Miller, his hand in a surgical glove lifting a tiny flashlight to check the boy’s pupils.

  Tim looked. There was an earthquake on the small screen, the lines for brain function jumping and stuttering. And he knew what this was. He had actually seen it before—at fourteen years old he had watched, helpless and panicking, as a cousin experienced what doctors called an absence seizure. They used to call it petit mal. A thunderstorm in the brain even as the person’s eyes stare vacantly ahead for seconds, occasionally a limb twitching or the sufferer moving on his own to a different spot for no reason. It was chalked up to a form of epilepsy.

  But this boy was not disconnected as his cousin had been. He was in there, a piece of him communicating with him on a subliminal level.

  “He’s alert,” said Tim.

  “No,” mumbled Weintraub, his reaction automatic.

  “No, he’s right!” piped up Miller. “Look at him, Gary!”

  The boy was moving his head, studying the room, not engaging with any of his visitors. For Tim, the music was gone. He tried to make eye contact once more with the boy, but there was no sign of interest. By the time Miller told a nurse to fetch a sedative for the child, the seizure was over, and the lines on the monitor showed normal brain activity.

  Outside the room, Tim tried to explain what he had just experienced.

  “Sounds like synesthesia,” reasoned Miller.

  “What?” asked Tim.

  “Neurological anomaly,” explained Miller. “It’s really kind of cool. It’s like, two body senses coupled together. Some people with one kind of synesthesia have talked about, like, seeing music on a kind of screen in front of them, in wavy lines. I mean oscillations. People with another kind can associate colors with certain numbers or letters. It’s not like it’s a consistent thing, but many of them, you know, think of ‘A’ as red. So imagine if every time you see nine, you associate nine with blue.”

  “But I don’t have this synesth… this neurological thing,” complained Tim. “The boy made me taste music! He caused it.” He turned to Weintraub. “I think you can forget about the milk cartons, Gary. I can’t believe he’s from this plane of existence. He communicated that way because he expected it would make sense to me.”

  “Well, that’s a huge assumption,” snapped Miller. “You don’t know that for sure, man.”

  “You think a three-year-old boy could do that, and this would be the first we learn of it?” Tim shot back. “Every child wants to communicate. He just did. He didn’t use language—he used what was available to him. And I felt him telling me he wants to go home.”

  “But he couldn’t tell you where.”

  “He’s a child,” said Tim. “Imagine you’re a tourist lost in Athens, and you can’t read or speak Greek. Now imagine you’re a little kid who’s separated from his tourist parents. I couldn’t speak his language.”

  “But he chose to speak with you,” Weintraub pointed out.

  “I know, and I don’t quite understand that either. I don’t know how to read or play music. Yo
u do, Gary—you play jazz piano. You’re a more fitting choice. You’d know the underlying mathematics to possibly communicate with him. I don’t know why he singled me out—maybe because I hummed my name as a joke for him. There is a pattern emerging, though, from the three we’ve seen come back.”

  Weintraub shoved his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “I don’t detect one.”

  “I can’t pretend I have it completely figured out,” admitted Tim, and with a sideways glance at Miller, he added, “and I’m willing to admit this is purely subjective. But Mary Ash could tell me what I was doing on any given day of my life. Geoff Shackleton was able to detect my impatience to get on with things, and he transported me out of a building with a single thought. That boy made me taste an instrumental piece of music in order to understand what he felt. Each of the Booth victims has come back with extraordinary skills informed by heightened empathy.”

  Miller folded his arms and tapped out a nervous, distracted rhythm with his sneaker. “Hey, that’s great, but I don’t see what that observation gets us. I mean so what? So like, they understand us better because they’ve been to the Great Beyond? We got to understand them. I’m happy for you that you’re making connections, man, but I’ll feel so much more satisfied when I got raw data in my hands.”

  As he walked away, Tim turned to Weintraub. “What was that supposed to mean? What’s he talking about?”

  Weintraub watched Miller go and said, “Oh, since we can’t figure out yet how Mary Ash and Shackleton can do what they do—and now we have to include the boy as well—Miller wants to do full workups on every returned victim from the Booth, as well as their murderers. Perhaps when a victim returns, he’ll find something in their brain scans, something that can give us insight into these extra… functions.”

  “That’s actually very clever,” said Tim, impressed.

  “Only if it gets results,” Weintraub reminded him. “If our young genius wants to insist on miracle productivity for everybody else, we should hold him to the same standard.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “I have to say, Tim, your pattern theory puts a nice, positive spin on what they do. But these people are returning with enormous power. I can’t say I’m comfortable with anyone being able to rattle off my daily biography or move me across distances, especially if they turn out to be a child who wants to move me around like a Tonka Truck.”

  “They don’t belong here,” said Tim, staring at the little boy through the window. “Even if they are benign, they’re not supposed to be back with us.”

  “Will you tell that to Mary Ash?” asked Weintraub.

  “I think she’s suspected it herself for a while now.”

  “Then what are our conclusions? You’re making it sound like there’s a plan behind it all, and I’m telling you there isn’t one. There never is. It’s the kind of chaotic fallout you always see with a new technology.”

  Tim moved to go. “I happen to think someone planned for chaos.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Tim checked his BlackBerry, which assured him there were no more sightings of Emily Derosier, the murder victim of 1928 who had stepped out of a Karma Booth and onto the streets of modern-day Paris. He didn’t give a damn. He was still convinced, as he had told Benson, that there was purpose behind her return without any execution. The investigation had to move there. He rang Benson’s cell to explain it to him, and to his surprise, the White House official agreed. Best to pile on the favors while the man was in an accommodating mood, thought Tim. He needed something else.

  There was a pause on the line, and then Benson asked: “Seriously?”

  Yes, seriously. Tim wanted him to ask the authorities in India to find the boy and the old woman—the ones who had been “returned” after the mysterious robed strangers had massacred the village residents. The boy wouldn’t be a boy any longer; he would be a young man. The old woman, he expected, would probably not even be around anymore, given her hard living conditions and the life expectancy of her caste. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to look. There was always a chance.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Tim,” said Benson, “do you have any logical reason to think these two people on the other side of the world are connected to this shit?”

  “None at all—except for the fact that this is all about those who come back, the ‘arrivals,’ the returned, whatever the hell we’re calling them. And these two were returned years before the Booth was ever used. I don’t have logic, I just want to play a hunch.”

  “Sounds like a grasp for vindication.”

  Ugh, thought Tim. He should have expected that one. “It’s a lead. It’s one lead. I’m having you chase that lead so I can do my job for you.”

  Christ. A grasp for vindication. Hardly. If he hadn’t been trapped in the firefights over his career after the episode, doing his best to salvage his credibility, he would have gone back to the border region himself to interview the two survivors. In the years since that rainy night, he had castigated himself plenty of times for not returning. Over time, he recognized that a part of him was on the side of the strange monks. Part of him appreciated their swift if brutal justice.

  Because they had returned the boy and the woman.

  On the line, Benson clucked his tongue but at last relented. “Aw, what the hell. I’ll have the embassy in New Delhi make inquiries.”

  “Good. I’ll call you from Paris. And I think it’s time to put that Hawker jet to some use.”

  “Our arrangement was for business class if it’s lower priority of—”

  “Get real. If I fly out somewhere on commercial, and then the shit hits the fan, not much good having the jet back in Washington and not with me, is it?”

  Benson groaned and said, “Fine, I’ll fix it. But you should stop over in London first.”

  “Why?”

  “I promised I’d get you some help. Your help is in London, and you’ll have to pick her up.”

  At the Borg El Arab airport in Egypt, the guards who handled the night shift belonged to the Special Forces Regiment attached to the army’s field headquarters in Alexandria. And they were bored. They were doomed to another stretch of hours guarding the peculiar equipment in the aircraft hangar at the newly expanded runway. Being soldiers, of course, they would do as they were ordered. They were well trained to anticipate and deal with almost any attack from terrorists in the region or a civilian uprising. But discipline relaxed a little during a lull.

  In the cafeteria and social area, a couple of men played backgammon, while in the corner an earnest young corporal argued with a sergeant over which channel to keep on the portable television. The debate was over Al Jazeera versus Eal Beit Beitak, the popular game show with a title that translated as “Feel at home.” The game show won.

  When the Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter thundered in on its unscheduled approach, the two curious soldiers who stepped out to greet it recognized their own air force’s markings and colors. It wasn’t a case of the bird not being allowed here, but why was it here in the middle of the night? The soldiers assumed there must be a malfunction. That would be enough to prompt an emergency landing, and one of them jogged inside the hangar to fetch a technician on call.

  The soldier who walked under the blades towards the cab of the aircraft didn’t suspect anything wrong until the door opened. The occupants of the copter were next to invisible behind the tinted glass, but now a white man of about fifty with curly brown hair and weathered features smiled at him affably and jumped out. The man kept right on smiling until his commando knife sliced across the soldier’s brachial plexus and then across his throat. The soldier died within seconds, and the man eased his body gently down in the shadow of the copter’s landing struts.

  “Typical,” sneered the man in his Ulster accent.

  Having read about Israel’s pre-emptive strike that devastated the Egyptian Air Force in the Six-Day War, he felt completely justified in his contempt towards any Arab soldier.

  “Right the
n, let’s move!”

  His handpicked team jumped out of the copter, machine guns ready, and raced towards the hangar. Desmond Leary stayed by the aircraft because he wasn’t bloody stupid, thank you very much (first perk of management: less risk). Plus, he fancied having a smoke. The boys would do fine and could handle a minimal guard detail, and while he’d prefer to have no casualties, his men would open fire if one of the bastards felt like he needed his seventy-two virgins early.

  Unbelievable, letting this country have one of these things. Christ in His Heaven, he’d be tempted to take the fucking thing away from them even if there wasn’t a higher purpose in mind for it. His client was plugged in enough to have politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, all feeding information to him, and the intel—which he promptly passed on to Leary—had been bang on. These buggers had a Booth. Well, they wouldn’t have it for long.

  He checked his watch. Five minutes. Mere seconds to cut the phone lines and cables for Internet, ninety more seconds to scout the location while the Egyptians were herded into their barrack rooms and locked in, with their cell phones and sat phones confiscated and dumped in a bag. Leary had actually padded his estimates when planning the operation, expecting trouble of some sort, and he heard distant shouts of anger and shock from the Egyptians. But his team leader sent him a brief text for the first check in, and it looked like there were no heroes today. Good.

  The men he had hired were experienced; some had stayed with the IRA as it shifted from holy cause to holy shit, let’s get rich off of organized crime. Others were veteran contractors from the conflict in Somalia, the Fiji uprising, Libya’s upheaval and, naturally, Iraq. They wouldn’t hesitate to fire.

  Neither would he if he were in there.

  Leary couldn’t suppress a tingle of nervousness, checking his watch again. He dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out, grateful for the chime of a second text. It meant the boys were on their way out, their target acquired. Wonderful. Now all they had to do was escape an entire bloody air force screaming for blood and on their arses probably ten minutes after they were airborne.