The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “You can’t do that.”

  The Director knew about Tim’s less than heroic departure from the State Department, and his hackles rose over a liberal in his midst.

  “Can’t? You just asked for a strike force, Cale. But you don’t want to throw a net over the guy who started this mess? Why? Because ‘he’s an American citizen with rights?’ Gimme a break! Word is that Braithewaite plans to rescind his US citizenship and throw in with one of the African regimes!”

  “Interesting distinction you’re drawing there,” replied Tim, tilting his head slightly toward Crystal, “especially when we have an international guest in the room. So according to you, the only people we can go ahead and kidnap are those who don’t have an American passport. Nice!”“Let’s just cool the tempers,” put in the President, raising a hand again.

  “My objection was a practical one, not moral,” added Tim. “You’re talking about a covert operation on foreign soil to extract the man who developed this thing. A man who may have access to other technology that can tamper with what we understand about reality. I want to go ask him questions. You want to go fuck with him. Sure, let’s try that and see what happens!”

  “What does happen when someone goes through a Booth without a formal execution order?” asked the President.

  Everyone was suddenly stone quiet.

  The President of the United States looked from face to face, her voice still reasonable. “Does anyone know? What happens if someone goes through the Booth who hasn’t murdered anyone?”

  The Health Secretary spoke up. “No country’s reported ever having tried it. I mean… Why take the risk? What would be the rationale?”

  “But we know someone can travel back through a Booth,” said Crystal. “Emily Derosier. She’s used it as a means of transport. That suggests we could be right: Braithewaite may have the means to use a Booth for escape.”

  All eyes were back on Miranda Grant. She seemed to be staring at a patch of carpet, but Tim suspected her eyes were on a detail of the presidential seal. This is yours, it must have reminded her, it’s all up to you. As much as Tim chased the effects of the Karma Booth, her decisions over it would be written up in history books.

  At last, she looked up, coming to a decision. “Storming in to capture Braithewaite could be disastrous. We need him to tell us what he knows willingly… As for Dr. Wildman and the stolen equipment, you’ll get your strike force, Tim. It’s officially a rescue mission. Wildman could end up being the first non-murderer to go through a Karma Booth.”

  “Well, not convicted,” muttered the CIA Director.

  The President shot him a look. “We’re not having that discussion, thank you! However you personally stand on the abortion debate, Mr. Capanelli, you’ll pardon me, but I am not interested. It doesn’t matter what any of us think, Roe v. Wade is still the law of this land, and if I remember correctly, what you’re talking about isn’t against the law in Wildman’s adopted country either. This administration categorically does not condone tactics of intimidation like bombing of health clinics, assassination of doctors or kidnappings! We’ll keep on labeling this a terrorist attack in all communications to the media.”

  She stood up, a signal that the briefing was over. As the other officials filed out, the President gestured to Tim and Crystal to hang back.

  “Tim, I have no idea what kind of dangers all of this presents to you and Miss Anyanike. If you want, I can order a Secret Service detail to accompany you.”

  Tim turned to Crystal. Was it bravado if he turned it down? The strange couple hunting Emily Derosier made him think he ought to consider accepting the help.

  On the other hand, no one could have anticipated what he and Crystal faced outside the Beaubourg. And Crystal, standing just out of the President’s line of sight, was giving him the slightest shake of the head: no.

  She had developed a working relationship with him one-on-one. The last thing she would want, he recognized, would be to have to negotiate with more Americans over this crisis.

  “We’ll be all right, thank you, Ma’am. But I do think we should keep Weintraub’s fellow, Miller, on in Europe with us. He’s head of the neuroscience group and has been involved with several of the resurrections. We’ll need him.”

  The President nodded. “I’ll get Weintraub to understand.”

  Benson started to usher Crystal out of the Oval Office, but Tim hung back, lowering his voice. “If I may…”

  “What’s on your mind, Tim?” asked the President.

  “If the teams do get lucky and track this group down—say they confiscate the stolen Booth, what then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Tim frowned. He wasn’t comfortable with his own position on this, but it had to be said. “Is it wise to let the Egyptians have the Booth back? Nothing against the Egyptians per se—maybe it’s an opportunity to rid the world of one less device.”

  The President smiled. Tim had once played poker with her years ago after a UN conference, and she’d gone home with more in her wallet than he had.

  She paused and said carefully, “We’ll cross that bridge when, God willing, we get our hands on the thing.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The briefing with the President of the United States was sobering enough that Tim and Crystal hardly spoke as the limo whisked them to a hotel. Then Tim remembered his manners. “Thanks for your help in there. I didn’t realize I’d been set up for a call on the carpet.”

  She smiled faintly and muttered, “No worries.”

  It was understood that they could have two days’ rest, enough time that hopefully fresh intel could be gained on the terrorists, and then the jet would return them to Paris. As their new hotel’s façade loomed in the tinted window, they said nothing more to each other, both seemingly drained. Then Crystal leaned on her armrest and finally sounded him out.

  “I got the impression you weren’t too keen on our young Dr. Miller.”

  “I’m not,” replied Tim. “In terms of social skills, he’s an ass. In terms of his field, he’s allegedly brilliant. I want to learn what Emily Derosier is once we catch up with her.”

  “You don’t think she’s human?”

  “Well… ‘human plus’ maybe.”

  Crystal didn’t say anything for a moment, and there was the steady, lulling noise of the limo engine, the sunlight crisscrossing over the car’s sunroof. She pulled out her laptop, switched it on and showed him a downloaded file she said had just come in while they were busy in the Oval Office.

  “Nine weeks ago, Somali pirates captured a merchant marine vessel in the Gulf of Aden, but they didn’t demand any ransom, not right away. That’s unusual—obviously. Her Majesty’s Government, like everyone else, has had it up to here with these thugs, and though the ship doesn’t belong to a British concern, it’s been put under our surveillance. And it rendezvoused, interestingly enough, with a Greek yacht.”

  “They used it to transfer the Booth. Clever.”

  Crystal nodded. “MI6 is now sure the terrorists have the Booth on the yacht here.” She pointed to a spot in the middle of the Mediterranean. “They’re headed in this direction.”

  Tim clucked his tongue. Son of a bitch. Right through the Strait of Gibraltar.

  “Okay. But they’re not stupid enough to bring a Karma Booth all the way across the Atlantic where they could be nabbed. Why not bring Wildman to Egypt and throw him into the Booth there to make their point?”

  Crystal was silent, wondering this as well.

  “In fact, why not just video his execution and escape?” Tim went on. “Why risk moving the Booth? And where would they—”

  “Northern Ireland.”

  “What?”

  “Northern Ireland,” she repeated. “Look at the route—through the Strait of Gibraltar. Exactly the way they’d have to go to reach there. It’s one of the staunchest anti-abortion spots in Europe. Unionist and nationalist groups both oppose it, and Sinn Féin only wants a limited relaxing of t
he laws. They’ll have allies there who can look the other way at customs, and when they execute Wildman they’ll be in the thick of supporters who will believe the ends justify the means. A terrorist attack is always meant to be theater. They’ll want an applauding audience.”

  “That’s why you didn’t want the Secret Service guys to tag along,” mused Tim. “You suspected this is where they’d take the Booth.”

  Crystal looked at the laptop screen. “Did I?”

  “So this is a show for the SAS.”

  “They’re the best in the world, Tim—no matter what Navy SEALs claim. If they’re making for Northern Ireland, you can bet my people will insist they handle the op.”

  “Fair enough,” said Tim. “So at what point do we keep up the pretense, and I let Washington know we’re on our way to Ulster?”

  “Let’s wait until we’re halfway across the ocean.”

  “Before we go, I think there’s one other place we should visit tomorrow so that you fully understand what’s going on here.”

  “Right, then,” she said. “Where?”

  “Pennsylvania. I want to introduce you to someone.”

  When Mrs. Ash came to the door this time, she didn’t bother with a greeting and showed no interest that Timothy Cale had brought along a stranger. She merely gestured for them to walk through the house and out the French windows to the expansive back garden.

  Mary Ash knelt barefoot on the grass in a flower print dress, her palms cupped protectively as if cradling a baby bird. Certainly, they could hear a high-pitched mewling and feverish shrieking, but the girl didn’t let whatever it was go. Her expression was blank, almost like that of a lab technician’s clinical detachment. She only looked up and smiled when Tim and Crystal drew near.

  “Hello, Inspector Anyanike.”

  “Hello, Mary,” Crystal answered politely, showing no surprise at being recognized.

  Tim had warned her about the girl’s jarring habit of knowing intimate things; about the hyperthymesia, what Mary Ash herself had defined as “the ability to recall vivid autobiographical detail according to dates”—only she’d rather do this with others.

  “I’m not sure I have anything new that can help you, Mr. Cale,” said Mary, her eyes still on what was in her cupped palms.

  “It’s all right,” he answered. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh… Looking for perspective.”

  “On what?”

  “On me.”

  She took her left hand away, and now they saw there was no baby bird or tiny creature in her grasp. Mary Ash was contained within the flat island of her own hand, growing out of the palm heel, close to the wrist. It was a miniature version of herself from little more than a year ago: naked with her filthy, lank hair hanging down over her eyes as she screamed in agony, her forearm and belly splattered with the blood of her amputated fingers. There was no version of Emmett Nickelbaum in this hideous portrait, just the tortured girl and her agonies, self-contained as if in some demented invisible snow-globe.

  Crystal screamed and staggered back.

  Tim jumped back as well, muttering, “Jesus Christ…!”

  “He kept making me ask him,” said Mary Ash. “He wanted me to ask him, ‘Are you hard?’ I had to ask over and over. After a few hours I just said it anyway. He didn’t even have to prompt me.”

  “Mary,” said Tim, trying to reach her.

  “He made me small,” said Mary Ash softly. “So I thought this scale fit better. I could make it larger, but that would be disturbing.”

  “Why would you want to see this?” Tim demanded. He was shaking. He looked to Crystal, and saw that they were both shaking, mirrors to each other’s shock.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mary Ash. “I kept it small.”

  Crystal swallowed hard. “Please… Please put it away.” She shut her eyes and looked down at the grass—doing all she could to avoid the image in front of her and expunge it from memory.

  “Mary, we came to talk,” Tim started again. “And see how you’re doing…”

  For which they now had their answer.

  Mary Ash brought her left hand back and pushed against the tiny version of herself, but it didn’t dissolve or shimmer in the mode of a cruel hologram joke. The mouth and clawing arms squashed and rolled into a grotesque ball of bizarre human Plasticine. The young woman was literally rubbing and smoothing the tortured version of herself back into her hand.

  “When he returns, he’ll look for me,” she explained. “I have to carry him around in my head anyway. So I thought, you know, if I can understand the appeal for him of what he did, maybe I’ll have a weapon. For what’s coming.”

  “Mary, Emmett Nickelbaum is gone,” Tim put in quickly. “We can protect you. I can call now and get a police detail to watch your house and your family, but if you know things—”

  Mary Ash looked up at him. “I can’t see the future, Mr. Cale. You know what I can do. May twenty-third, he eats fish. May twenty-fourth, berries of some kind, I don’t know what they are. May twenty-fifth, fish again, but you’d expect that. Crystal Anyanike’s father is knocked down and bruises his hip against the curb of Whitechapel High Street after the police constable uses the N-word. It was so… nasty. Coarse. He won’t tell her mother because he’s had two other episodes like this already, and she can’t understand why he’s angry all the time. She thinks he must bring the trouble on himself. They never speak of it to their daughter.”

  “My father’s dead,” said Crystal.

  “Your mother isn’t,” replied Mary Ash. Her voice was sonorous; it could have recited a death toll. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell how the pieces get preserved but the memory is there. They’re all there. I wish I could describe it, but I do art. I mean I did art. I think in pictures. I don’t want to die again in an ugly way.”

  “You won’t,” said Tim. “We’ll protect you. But Mary, how can you know he’s coming back?”

  Mary Ash sighed. She seemed to be making a great effort to stay patient with them, as if she had to simplify the blue of the atmosphere and the ripples in a lake for a child. “I have to carry him around in my head, Mr. Cale. People say, ‘We’re all connected,’ and people always say that as if it’s a good thing.”

  Crystal shot Tim a look. She knelt down and sat across from the girl with a slow wariness, as if fearing their Booth victim might decide to shift the ground beneath their feet. And Tim couldn’t say she was wrong to be cautious, not when Geoff Shackleton had moved him outside the White Plains building weeks ago.

  “I miss drawing,” the girl said sadly. “But there’s not much point anymore.”

  “Why?” asked Crystal.

  Mary Ash let out an amused theatrical groan. “Ohhhhh, too many steps. He’ll be coming back, Mr. Cale, because he’s not part of the cycle. Same as me. I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want to think about it too much. It still hurt but it doesn’t anymore. I want to fight back this time, if I can figure out the best way how. Others can go like spilled milk, but you know, I’ve always wanted to matter while I’m here, and maybe I can in a little way.” She offered another sad little smile. “My mom would probably like it if I matter.”

  “You’re talking like you’re going to die again,” said Crystal.

  “I told you,” Mary Ash reminded her. “I can’t see the future.”

  “But you’re still being cryptic,” said Tim.

  “I don’t mean to be,” replied the girl. “You’ve tried to talk to the boy but you can’t.”

  Tim marked this. So she could see into the head of the blond boy, too; the one who was once an Asian police officer. Constable Daniel Chen.

  “It’s not so magical, is it?” she went on. “You’ve tasted his music, but that doesn’t mean you can cook a symphony.” She suddenly laughed, but the tinkling notes from her throat were dissonant, a sudden pounding on piano keys. “You know he’s miserable, right? He’s miserable because, yeah, he knows he’s visiting, and you have no way of getting him
home where he’s supposed to be. And before you ask, Mr. Cale, there’s nothing I can tell him on your behalf or translate for you.” She sighed and added, “I told you before. Sometimes you wear your questions on your face.”

  Tim didn’t know what to say. It was clear neither did Crystal.

  “I don’t want to be this way to you.” Her fresh laughter sputtered and collapsed into something like a sob, more human and reminiscent of what cried out minutes ago in her palms. “I want to help, but it takes every ounce not to float. You can see that, can’t you?” She looked at Tim with moist eyes and added, “I mean, you tell your students that old line. You read it at thirteen years old. It was a day in March, with the gray snow still on the ledges of the brick buildings, and your boots made a crunch—just like when you feel the old plastic sleeve on a library book. That crunchy sound. ‘The past is a foreign country.’ It is, Mr. Cale.”

  He knew better than to respond; he and Crystal knew nothing of how she lived these days.

  “But I want to live,” she said after a pause. “I just have to think of a way to fight back this time.”

  “I told you, Mary. I’ll get a police detail arranged as quickly as possible.”

  The girl nodded. “Thank you. I told you last time, didn’t I? I’ve never seen Paris.”

  Tim looked back towards the house, where Mary Ash’s mother hovered with a fresh highball, too scared again to go near her daughter. He should have had answers for this woman by now. Damn it, there was still no comfort he could offer her in terms of information. Then he was distracted as his eyes wandered to the ground, and alarmed, Tim tugged on Crystal’s arm, urging her to rise.

  “Hey!”

  The grass was red underneath her legs, yet it didn’t stain her skirt or limbs. Crystal got to her feet and quickly inspected herself but assured him, “It’s not mine.”

  Now they could see the pattern. The blood in the grass formed a vivid new composition. The soaked red blades stood in for the wire-mesh stubble, and the eyes soon coalesced into their sadistic familiarity in clotted pools. But the expression in them was very much like the last one Emmett Nickelbaum had in life as the Karma Booth tore him to atoms.