The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  Lantern Jaw still had his gun and fired wildly, running for his life now. The redhead looked around her, and she didn’t have enough time to escape the newly arrived cops getting out of their car. Panicking, she completely ignored their orders and moved to grab a hostage, one of the bystander women who still trembled and shrieked over the psychic devastation.

  There was another loud crack, and the redhead dropped to the pavement.

  Tim and Crystal ran over, Crystal waving her credentials and trying to explain in breathless French, but it was too late. The redheaded woman was dead. Tim heard the radio chatter of the cops trying to box their other suspect in, but the man had already run right past Les Halles.

  “Damn it!”

  “Who the hell were they?” asked Crystal.

  “And how the hell did they even know Emily Derosier was back?”

  They didn’t talk about what Emily Derosier had just done to them.

  It took forty minutes for the police to take down their statements and ask all their questions. Precious time was lost, but then did it really matter? They had no idea anyway where their mystery woman had escaped to. Tim paced a furious circle in the square as the sun fell behind the shopping centers of the 4th arrondissement, while Crystal tried to reassure him.

  “Patience,” she told him.

  “I’ve never had much.”

  She gave him a mildly scolding look. “Well, this is law enforcement. Tracking people—even if they’re people who aren’t… normal. You’re either patient or you go mad. And hey, we might get another sighting off CCTV footage.”

  “I suppose.”

  She drove her knuckles gently into his shoulder. “Don’t sulk, Mr. Cale. I was just starting to like you.”

  When the cops were done with them, they walked back to the floor of the library where the first confrontation had happened.

  They didn’t talk about what Emily Derosier had done to them. Neither of them wanted to.

  But both knew if they found the woman again, she could unleash that same kind of mental fury.

  What Tim found interesting as he tried to get past his own revulsion over how he was violated was that it didn’t seem to be a decisive blow against her attackers. The psychic blast had been scattershot, and when she had stopped it, Lantern Jaw and the redhead still recovered just as he and Crystal did.

  Or maybe because they were surrounded by innocents, she hadn’t given them full force. Or she couldn’t focus it to a lethal degree.

  “What was she checking on the Internet anyway?” asked Tim.

  Crystal swiveled the computer monitor so that he could see for himself. “You.”

  On the screen, several windows were open with old news links on his diplomatic and his university career.

  Crystal got the police to show them the CCTV footage of the courtyard in front of the Beaubourg, and when it cued up to Emily Derosier fleeing the center, Tim spotted the mysterious couple emerging seconds later. Then came Crystal and himself. Emily Derosier ran—but that wasn’t what was interesting in the video. As he watched himself and Crystal suddenly freeze in place, he recognized these were the moments when their Booth victim seemed to disappear before their eyes.

  But on the footage, she just ran quickly to a different spot. Other pedestrians were reacting as well. They were all shocked, startled by her disappearance and wondering how she seemed to phase out of one spot and reappear in another. But the man and the woman who were chasing her looked more frustrated than surprised—

  As if they knew to expect this, but didn’t have a way of combating it, thought Tim.

  The same thought occurred to Crystal, plus something more. “They don’t know how to deal with her.”

  “No,” whispered Tim.

  Then on the footage, Emily Derosier walked faster. And faster. Until she was a blur to the police surveillance cameras as well.

  “Whatever she did to get away, she did this to us first,” Crystal pointed out. “Some sort of illusion. She screwed with everyone’s head before she actually had to move faster than the cameras’ motion detection.”

  It was still afternoon back in New York, and Tim emailed the footage to Gary Weintraub with a note about what they saw. An hour and a half later, it was Andrew Miller who responded, suggesting he talk to Tim and Crystal live through Skype so he could offer his feedback more quickly.

  Crystal immediately picked up on Tim’s lack of warmth for the young neurologist. Tim told her they’d be lucky if Miller didn’t have his ratty sneakers propped up on the desk in front of the webcam, and as the link came up, the scientist didn’t disappoint. He was leaned back in a chair, burrowing through a bag of Lay’s potato chips, and his eyes widened over Crystal seated next to Tim. Miller tossed his bag quickly aside.

  “Hiya, I’m Andrew,” he said nervously, dusting his hands of crumbs and doing his best to offer a winning smile.

  “Yes, how are you?” said Crystal, ignoring his attempt at charm. “DI Anyanike.”

  Tim allowed himself the faintest smirk, unable to resist. “What do you have for us? Andrew.”

  “Uh, yeah,” said Miller. “Inspector Anyanike is right. You could call it an illusion, I guess. What you guys experienced is known as akinetopsia. The inability to perceive motion. You said you saw comet trails, right? Fuzzy sort of waves from that chick’s limbs? That’s what people with akinetopsia see. You normally get it from a lesion in a spot of the extrastriate cortex or if you’re popping certain antidepressants. But nobody’s ever heard of mass akinetopsia—let alone somebody ‘strobing’ a crowd like that. Jesus.”

  “She did something else, too,” said Tim. “Can Gary give us a clue as to how she just blipped out faster than the cameras?”

  Miller shrugged. “It’s guess work. Gary says the blur looks faintly—and he said to emphasize this, faintly—like part of the light show of the Booth.”

  Tim and Crystal traded a look.

  Crystal leaned forward. “Are you saying this woman has the power of transporting herself the same way people were brought back from the dead?”

  Miller’s face broke into a happy grin. Tim winced, expecting him to make a foolish comment about loving her accent. Fortunately, their science geek restrained himself.

  “Look, it’s purely speculative. We don’t know, and cut us some slack here—we’re working off a digital transfer of a street camera! We’re already using advanced video equipment here in New York to try to catch stills and progression of the light spectra for the next Booth transpositions.”

  “There shouldn’t be any more Booth transpositions!” snapped Tim. “Not until we figure this out.”

  “Not up to us, dude,” replied Miller, bouncing in his chair. “Can’t believe you’re still pushing that, Tim. Look at what you’ve seen so far! You got people coming back with incredible abilities. Mary Ash, Geoff Shackleton, this chick! We’re not just bringing people back—we’re bringing ’em back better.”

  Tired, Tim ran fingers through his comma of blond hair and asked simply, “There’s nothing more you guys can give us to help track her down?”

  “Sorry, man.”

  Miller didn’t look very sorry at all. But then Emily Derosier wasn’t his problem.

  Tim thanked him and clicked off the Skype program.

  “She was looking into your background,” said Crystal. “Maybe it’s a matter of waiting until she comes out and makes an approach.”

  “Assuming she gets to us before that weird guy finds her.”

  “Yes, well, he doesn’t give people akinetopsia,” said Crystal. “He struck me as quite mortal. So I say we add him to our list of people to find. And I say he might prove easier than the others.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Two days later, to their surprise, Miller was getting back to them in the flesh, fidgeting nervously at the front desk of Tim’s hotel. The concierge had phoned up, and Tim came down from his room and naturally asked what the scientist was doing here.

  Miller groaned. “Weint
raub sent me over. He thought we ought to check to see if that redhead the police shot in the street was anything special. You know… If the Derosier woman came out of nowhere, maybe this one’s an arrival we just didn’t know about? Man, I knew you’d be in decent digs, but you get to stay here? Shit, I’m at a two-star dump in this Pigalle district! Over by the Rue de… de…”

  He couldn’t remember the name and dug into his pocket for the hotel’s business card. Tim wasn’t interested. “Andrew, I’ll talk to Gary about getting you better digs. Listen, there’s nothing about this woman to suggest she came out of a Karma Booth, if that’s what you two are thinking. It was Emily Derosier who flitted away and dazzled all of us. Her attacker bled and died like a regular person. And her boyfriend was ordinary enough to use a right-cross. Take my word for it on that one.”

  Miller was still gaping up at the chandeliers and the gilt-framed paintings as he chomped away on his gum. “Hey, I don’t have a friggin’ clue if she’s special, but Gary called over to the Pasteur Institute and got me a place I can work in. This Center National de la Re-church—”

  “Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.”

  “You know it?”

  “It’s the largest government research organization in France,” replied Tim. “It’s also one of the biggest science agencies in all of Europe. You don’t have to be a doctor to know it. They should be able to provide you with anything you need.”

  “I need the dead chick’s brain.”

  Tim nodded. “So that’s why you’re here. You want to peek inside her cranium.”

  Miller’s face lit up in a happy grin. “Hey, what if she is unusual? What could her brain tell us? This could be an amazing opportunity! Man, if the scientific community knew, they’d be clamoring for papers!” Catching Tim’s look of disapproval, he added, “But that can wait. Anyway, Gary spoke to Benson, Benson spoke to the Health Secretary, who got on the horn to Paris. I don’t know what the French word is for ‘Sorry, we are going to drag our asses like zo,’ but the consensus is that your babe of a London bobby knows how to sweet-talk the frogs. And I would be hugely indebted to you, Mister Big-shot Freelance Consultant, if you’d let me ask her to ask them.”

  “Be my guest,” said Tim. “But if you’ll take some friendly advice for your approach, a London police officer hasn’t been called a ‘bobby’ in maybe a hundred years, and you guys might save yourselves a lot of diplomatic aggravation if you stop calling French people frogs.”

  “That’s right, you were this big diplomat.”

  “Yeah, call me crazy—I try to be polite to other cultures and meet them on their own terms.”

  Miller was only half paying attention. “Finally!” he cried out, looking over Tim’s shoulder.

  Tim turned. One of the hotel bellhops was pushing a dolly that carried a very large box. He watched as Miller rushed over, telling the bellhop, “Thanks, thanks a lot.” He signed a form in a frantic scribble and rushed to tear the sealing tape off the box and open it up. Tim didn’t understand.

  “You had equipment brought here?” he asked. “Your hotel’s that bad?”“Real shit-hole,” muttered the neurologist, dumping some bubble wrap on the foyer rug. “They lure the tourists in on their website, claiming Toulouse Lautrec or somebody once lived there, and then you show up, and it’s communal bathrooms and a fucking tiny sink in your room. I think that mattress has bugs, too. No way I want to keep anything valuable there! So I had them ship this to your spot. Jesus, I hoped it survived—”

  Out of instinctive manners, Tim took a step forward to help him lift whatever it was out of the box, sheathed in another layer of protective wrapping. He couldn’t imagine what it contained, Miller chanting all the while by his side, “Careful, careful, careful.” He half-expected a portable 3-D printer, but it was the wrong size and shape for that. Then the neurologist triumphantly peeled away some of the clear plastic and gasped in delight.

  “Yes! It’s okay.”

  Tim could hardly believe it.

  Miller needed two arms and one of Tim’s hands to hold up his treasure. It was about five feet long and heavy, and he talked about it as if he were boasting about a favorite son’s Little League championship.

  “You had this shipped over?”

  Miller beamed with pride. “USS Missouri. Laid down in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1941, launched in 1944. Nine sixteen-inch Mark 7 guns firing armor-piercing shells. This baby saw Iwo Jima, a kamikaze attack, the Japanese surrender…”

  “Well, not this particular baby,” drawled Tim.

  Miller tilted his head and smirked. “Cute. My granddad served on the Missouri, and my dad used to work with me on models—not as big as this. Plastic, rickety shit. This one’s got over seven hundred individual wooden pieces, been working on it every day for months, not about to break my streak now.”

  “And you bring something like this over every time you get on a plane overseas?” Tim asked in disbelief.

  “Oh, no,” chirped Miller. “I’ve never been out of the States before. Getting a passport was a real pain in the ass, but Gary helped. Hey, everybody’s got to have a hobby, right? Helps me think.”

  “But you might only be here a few days. Pretty expensive to ship it over.”

  “Government picked up the tab. They’ll pay for it, too, when I go home.”

  “You’re expensing this?”

  Then Miller squared off in front of Tim and adjusted his glasses. “Hey, from what I hear, you like to go for long lunches at pretty chic places and have Uncle Sam pick up the tab. How is this different?”

  Tim, feeling a bit more respect for the young neurologist, let him tag along to his dinner with Crystal Anyanike that evening at one of his old haunts on the Île de la Cité. Miller wore an ear-to-ear grin through the wine serving and was still singing Tim’s praises for including him after dessert. Two hours later when Tim had returned to his hotel, Benson called him on his cell.

  “Our embassy in Delhi found out what happened to the boy—well, the young guy—and the old woman from that village.”

  The ones returned by the robed strangers.

  “You’re not going to like it,” Benson went on. “There’s no chance of follow-up.”

  “Why not?” asked Tim. “Don’t tell me the Indians have them in protective custody to keep the lid on—”

  “They’re both dead.”

  Tim shut up, mildly stunned. The return of the boy and the woman had been a constant for him, as if their lives must be strangely blessed and would vaguely go on. They were two innocents to whom nothing else bad could happen.

  Wrong.

  “Animal attack,” explained Benson.

  “Both?”

  “Given the weird shit you’ve been telling us about them, this is in the ballpark. And it’s been confirmed. Just a second—”

  Tim heard the blip of a text file sent along. Benson had just given him a translation of a local police report. According to the Indian authorities, two snow leopards had come down from their habitat above the tree line of a nearby mountainous meadow on the Nepal side. The new settlers—the ones that moved into the shacks of the village since that nightmare with the robed strangers—insisted the beasts had deliberately gone after the woman and the young man.

  They came down in great loping strides, and then the big speckled cats singled them out, ignoring completely the easy prey of a toddler child and of a goat in their paths.

  My God, thought Tim. They targeted them.

  The woman was the first to die, her throat torn out by one of the animals. But the cat didn’t stay to feed. It caught up to its companion as the other animal ran down the young man. People screamed and sobbed as the two cats mauled him to shreds, and they later reported the pair was strangely oblivious as a farmer raced out with a rifle. The cats didn’t even stir from their feast as he let out his first shot. He killed both of the animals quickly.

  The attacks didn’t make sense, thought Tim. The Indians were equally baffled. Snow
leopards don’t hunt in pairs or packs, and while they can take down animals three times their size, it was out of character for a pair of them—let alone one—to approach a busy human settlement. More often, they hunted domestic livestock when humans encroached on their domains.

  It couldn’t be coincidence that the old woman and young man were chosen.

  Tim felt frustrated for much of the next day. The others had their own set tasks, leaving him to think he was stuck with unnecessary downtime. Crystal was busy with the police, sifting through CCTV footage to look for Emily Derosier and “Lantern Jaw” as they now called the surviving assassin. Meanwhile, Andrew Miller had finally managed to navigate the French bureaucracy to do tests on the dead redheaded woman.

  There was one bright spot for Tim. Before Miller left to fiddle in a borrowed lab in the 16th arrondissement, he mentioned how the French police had managed to identify the redhead.

  “Her name was Ana Tvardovsky. Whoever the hell she was. Don’t know if that gives you anything.”

  “It gives me enough, thanks.”

  The name wasn’t familiar at all, but the fact that the woman had been Russian stirred a distant memory.

  Thanks to his consultant status and his old diplomacy contacts, he had access to the right databases. Nothing… nothing… nothing. And then he got a hit. Punching in the name ‘Tvardovsky’ prompted a nice page of links to research papers and analysis files, a spot where academia met espionage and tweedy professors did the grunt work for MI6 and Europol. Tim clicked on one, and up came a photo of the dead woman with her washed-out, sallow complexion and tangled curls. In the photo, she was a brunette; the red hair had been a dye job.

  Once upon a time, Ana Tvardovsky had been that rare creature, a female enforcer for the Russian mob. She had started out on her back as a high-price call girl. Then she showed talent for putting others face down dead in the Volga. It figured, thought Tim. He recalled how the woman had turned vicious, raking her nails across the face of the cop back in the Beaubourg.

  What had Emily Derosier been to her? Tim didn’t know yet. But a clue was perhaps in how Ana Tvardovsky had made a career change five years ago.