The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  And then she was tugging him by the sleeve as someone handed him a folded set of top and trousers, plus a white belt. Tim remembered a pal from the State Department once dragged him to a karate dojo fifteen years ago, and he’d been kind of interested but never got beyond two, three lessons because of the demands of his job. He had long since forgotten how to put on the outfit. But no sooner than they were in the locker room than Crystal was stripping off her shirt and unbuttoning her trousers, completely comfortable with the quick change in front of him. All at once, she was in a purple bra and matching panties, and he could take in every flowing, gorgeous curve of her body, her full breasts almost spilling out of the bra cups, the shape of her strong legs…

  “Hurry up, they’re waiting for us!” she said, fixing up her hair.

  He swiftly unbuttoned his shirt and slipped off his pants, and she said behind his back, “The trousers have a drawstring. Those are simple enough. It’s the jacket and belt that give novices trouble.”

  When he turned around, naked to the waist, she was already dressed, looking incredibly elegant, even regal in her gi top, trousers and hakama. He put on the jacket, and she moved in close, tying the strings, then wrapping and knotting the white belt around his waist.

  “There,” she said softly, smiling up at him. “Done. Let’s go see how you do.”

  He laughed, because she had deflected all of her nervousness over being here. He would have been content to sit on a bench as a mere spectator, but she was letting him into her world.

  For the next hour, she was in her element, guiding the class in fluent French, showing them moves and throws with technical precision completely beyond his understanding. Every so often, Tanaka would interject with a point of his own, but more often than not, the teacher nodded approvingly. Tim was dazzled by her ability. It was one thing to catch a glimpse of it back at the Centre Pompidou, quite another to see the range and breadth of her skill. She would spin in a graceful arc, her subtle hand movements too fast for Tim to follow, and an opponent would go flying through the air, thumping to the mat and rolling away. She was incredible to him.

  Rolling was something he wouldn’t master in this one hour, landing in a heap—dizzy, sweating, bewildered. Every so often, however, his eyes would catch hers, and she flashed him a bright smile of gratitude and pure joy.

  They said that Viktor Limonov liked Shakespeare. Though born Russian, he was fluent in English, French, Arabic and could boast a working knowledge of some African dialects. He appreciated literature and didn’t just pose as an intellectual. His circle of associates claimed he could rattle off the entire scene from Henry V when the king demands a governor open a town’s gates, promising lurid horrors if the soldiers are forced to sack it.

  “The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand, desire the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters,” Limonov recited, giggling. His accent elongated the o vowel into lawks. “Your naked infants spitted upon pikes, whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused do break the clouds…”

  For most, these were lines from a play. But Limonov’s employees had actually witnessed him take a baby three months old in Chechnya away from its sobbing, hysterical mother. They had seen him jam the baby’s pink, soft body onto the sharpened point of a five-foot high wooden spike. And leave it there.

  Viktor Limonov didn’t simply trade in weapons. He also enjoyed using them in civil wars, coups and rebellions from Eastern Europe to Africa to Asia. It was Limonov’s weapons that had armed the Janjaweed militias that had made Darfur a hell on earth, and it was his rifles that had slaughtered entire villages in the Congo region so that companies could retrieve minerals for computer microchips. The military regime in Burma once paid him two million dollars in opium to help teach a lesson to the ethnic Shan people, who infuriatingly insisted on staying alive.

  Limonov, according to Human Rights Watch investigators, had ordered refugee girls to form a line in front of his tent. Some of the girls were as young as twelve. “Tell each mother,” he instructed his interpreter, “her daughter can lose her cherry or lose an arm.”

  When a woman ran forward, sobbing pitifully and throwing herself at his feet, Limonov’s long face cracked into an amused grin, and he said through the interpreter: “I thought all you people were supposed to be Buddhist! Don’t you know the Buddha says life is suffering?”

  The rapes by Limonov’s men and the Burmese military units had gone on into the morning.

  He stood six feet, three inches tall, and had the carved, muscular physique of an Olympic athlete. There was a tautness to him as well that suggested he trained for survival, not for the sake of any masculine vanity. The face was long, with cruelty in the thin mouth. He had the nervous habit of scratching his chin with the backs of his knuckles, as if testing to see if his razor had done a good enough job in the morning.

  For close to two decades, he was practically untouchable as the UN failed to disentangle its red tape. It didn’t help that during the first Gulf War, Limonov was considered a valuable “asset” by the US military. But he didn’t play favorites, and Washington decided he had to be stopped when he counted among his customers the Taliban and Al Qaeda. They lured him to an arms contract negotiation in Bangkok, and he was escorted in leg-irons and cuffs and whisked off to an international criminal court in The Hague.

  Jetting around the globe to sell weapons, he had worn a series of racquetball polo shirts, faded jeans and high-top desert boots. Reduced to a gray prison jumpsuit, Limonov had served three years of a sentence at a maximum security prison wing on a military base outside Amsterdam. That was until it was decided by the powers that be that he should be sent through the Karma Booth.

  Before the procedure, he was kept in isolation from other prisoners but was allowed the privilege of books and newspapers. A guard asked him smugly if he knew what the Karma Booth was and what it was for.

  Limonov grinned to show he could take a joke. “As I understand it, you want to open a toilet that washes down to Hell and flush me.”

  The four guards escorting him burst out laughing. That’s right, they agreed, that’s right.

  “A man should know what he really is before he meets his end,” laughed a guard, trying to be profound.

  Limonov grinned at that remark, too.

  As the guards led him to the first booth, he looked past them to the technicians minding the controls. A woman at one panel averted her eyes. The man next to her kept his face poker-calm. He considered his work a distasteful but necessary duty.

  “Do you actually think,” Limonov said to him, since he seemed to be the only one paying any attention, “that all those people I supposedly killed will just dance naked in a… a what? A conga line out of that tube over there?”

  “If one innocent person steps out, it’s worth you going in!” answered the technician.

  The argument ended because the first chamber’s door was sealed with Limonov inside. He was manacled now to the metal rail. Lights and color danced behind the glass, and then the most infamous modern arms dealer and mercenary of recent times was gone. The guards and technicians waited. But it seemed Viktor Limonov had been right about one thing. None of his victims stepped out of the second chamber.

  Limonov’s execution had been anti-climactic, and everyone present wrote it off to another puzzling case where the scientists were left with more data, even if it was data about something that didn’t happen…

  In Paris, Tim’s cell phone went off at five thirty in the morning. The display told him it was Weintraub.

  “Viktor Limonov is still alive.”

  Tim rubbed his eyes. The words Gary was saying didn’t make sense to him, not yet. Limonov…?

  “Alive. Wow. After they sent him through the Booth? Did they give him a medical exam afterwards?”

  “They couldn’t,” answered Weintraub, “because Viktor Limonov stepped out of the second chamber of a Karma Booth in New Delhi.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The authorities in
India had followed closely how the news of the Karma Booth had evolved in other countries, and they didn’t want the headache of riots and controversial demonstrations. It was decided that instead of a prison facility or a military base, India’s Booth would be housed in a restricted wing of a hospital on the outskirts of the capital. This was why, officials explained later to their American and the British counterparts, that Viktor Limonov was able to escape as easily as he did.

  He emerged from the second chamber of India’s Karma Booth still in his prison jumpsuit, not naked like other arrivals. The single guard in khaki uniform turned on his heel as the light flashed in the chamber, his eyes popping and his lips swearing an epithet in Hindi. Limonov rushed out, swinging his elbow into the man’s jaw. As the guard dropped to the tiled floor, Limonov’s running shoe stamped into his throat, and there was a sickening crack of bone and crushed larynx. Then he snatched up the guard’s automatic rifle and fired two quick bursts at a pair of hospital staff rushing in from the monitoring room…

  As he pushed the doors of a fire exit, starting an alarm, he walked—purposefully, calmly, not in a rush at all—out to the parking lot with the rifle looped over his shoulder. By the time the gun registered with the young couple dropping off the man’s mother for gall bladder surgery, Limonov had shot the husband point blank in the head.

  The wife ran screaming as Limonov muttered to the corpse at his feet, “You nearly bled all over my new shirt…”

  He quickly yanked off the man’s trousers and shirt. Then he left his latest murder victim in his jockey briefs on the cement, driving away in the man’s Tata car. Police found the vehicle abandoned on the shoulder of the main highway to Mumbai.

  “You can’t blame the Indians, really,” said Weintraub as he briefed Tim over Limonov’s return. “After we let other countries know about Emily Derosier, attention has been focused on having medical standby. There’s round-the-clock surveillance, and guards are put outside the test room. It’s because we presume victims will show up, not…” He didn’t have to finish his sentence.

  “You’re right, it’s not their fault,” said Tim. “No murderer has ever stepped back out of the Booth.”

  “Until this one,” said Weintraub.

  Tim asked his friend to keep him posted and hung up. He thought of calling Crystal’s room, but the news could wait—no point in ruining her sleep, too.

  Ugh. Of all the psychopaths and murderers who could conceivably have knowledge of the machine’s secrets, it had to be one of the world’s worst genocidal maniacs. If the Karma Booth couldn’t exterminate Viktor Limonov, Tim had to wonder if anything on earth could.

  He knew he shouldn’t get ahead of himself. They still had to find the bastard. Others could solve the problem of how to contain or execute Limonov (again) after they had tracked him down. But now there was Limonov to find—plus they had to find Emily Derosier and Orlando Braithewaite.

  He stayed up for an hour, but with no epiphanies, he crawled back to his bed. He was woken again at eight by a call from the front desk. The hotel’s concierge asked, “Monsieur Cale, we need to know if you wish the package to be kept in the hotel safe or if you want it brought up? If you prefer, we can arrange shipment back to New York City for you. You have trusted us in the past.”

  “Yes, I have,” mumbled Tim, still half-asleep. Package? He wasn’t expecting a package. On other visits to Paris, he had taken advantage of the chance to shop for antiques, a few first editions and the occasional line drawing by one of the second-string Impressionists. As much as he was told art should be treated like an investment, Tim preferred to buy what he liked. If his personal finds ever depreciated monetarily, well, at least he had the comfort of enjoying what he hung on his walls.

  But he hadn’t made any shopping trips this time.

  “If you can give me half an hour, I’ll come down to take a look and decide,” he told the concierge.

  “Very good, Monsieur.”

  He took his usual breakfast in his room, glad that his European assignments had “civilized” him to appreciate things like a good meal. He munched on a croissant and ate his eggs, perfectly fluffy the way he liked them, while flipping through a set of the morning papers. He was unashamedly old school. To him, hard copies were easier than checking the online news links.

  The International Herald Tribune was leading with a story about corruption in the World Bank, plus the death of an influential French director who hadn’t made movies in twenty years but who still attended festival galas. Its third major item on the front page, matched by Le Figaro and the Telegraph from the UK, was a peculiar story about the murder of fourteen-year-old boy in Rhodes City, Greece—a Karma Booth resurrected victim. It immediately got Tim’s attention.

  The teenager had died the first time when an older boy stabbed him to death, all, predictably, because of an argument over a girl they both liked. There had been protests in Athens over the use of the Booth, not because of the technology, but because of an execution of one so young. But the Greek government, which had swung to the right in the past couple of years, wanted to remind its citizens of the deterrent effect of capital punishment. And so their fourteen-year-old victim came back. He didn’t, incidentally, get the girl who inspired the whole ordeal—she apparently found him “disturbing” after his return.

  She claimed that he frightened her now. That when they walked along down by the harbor, she would talk of her mother or a mutual friend or a teacher at school, and he would… change. His features would blur and suddenly be that of the friend or teacher, except that she was the only one who could see it. She thought for a while she was going mad.

  The boy didn’t seem to be doing it on a conscious level. Instead, it was some kind of sympathetic impulse of temporary transformation.

  The boy was later found beaten to death and sodomized in a dark, cobbled cul-de-sac of the Old Town. The police had a theory that friends of the executed teenager had exacted revenge, thinking they’d never be caught or that the Booth couldn’t be used to bring him back a second time.

  “So they’re not immortal,” Tim muttered to himself.

  The articles said nothing about whether the boy had been jumped from behind or not, but even if he was, he might have still used that frightening face-changing ability on his attackers. Who wouldn’t back away from that? Run away from this bizarre being?

  And yet if he had used it, it didn’t seem to buy him any time or allow him to escape. Maybe the boy had expressed that peculiar detachment Time had noticed in Mary Ash.

  He tore a couple of the articles out of the newspapers and looked up a website for the Hellenic Police, the Elliniki Astynomia, to make life easier for Crystal. She was the one who should liaise with them to find out forensic details. By now he could anticipate what she would say: That if you took out the boy’s resurrection, the case wasn’t exceptional and didn’t merit their interest. He could only counter that the Booth’s role in another anonymous life made all the difference in the world.

  The Guardian newspaper had learned about the suicide of Desmond Leary and was demanding to know in an editorial what had happened to the Booth stolen from Egypt—and the fate of poor Dieter Wildman. Shit, thought Tim. Well, he’d know there’d be heat when he’d pushed Crystal to have the damn thing destroyed. The President and a couple of cabinet secretaries would pretend to be pissed off over him causing friction with London, but in the end they would be privately glad there was one less of those things in the world beyond the reach of the United States.

  In the background, the news of Limonov’s startling escape was being played for all its worth on CNN, where the headline at the bottom read: “MALFUNCTION OR MESS-UP?” Fortunately, it looked like the news services had only half the story and were running on the assumption that Viktor Limonov had—for reasons nobody could quite pin down—been transferred from Amsterdam to Mumbai.

  Tim reached across his plate and tapped quickly on his tablet. Fox News was suggesting Holland had deliberately
let Limonov out of its jurisdiction—part of a sinister agenda to undermine US foreign policy. After all, weren’t these Dutch all pot-smoking, prostitute-frequenting leftists who believed in assisted suicide and abortion?

  Maybe, thought Tim, this is better than people knowing the truth, though it was only a matter of time before Limonov’s… what? Teleportation? Leaked to the world.

  He dressed and went downstairs. The concierge greeted him like a long-lost brother. Of course, at four-star hotels in Paris, AmEx Black Card holders are always long-lost brothers.

  “Ah, Monsieur Cale! Did you sleep well?”

  “I always sleep well here, Marcel,” he lied.

  “Right this way, Monsieur.”

  He led Tim into a convenient back storage room, where one of the desk clerks pried open the five-foot-high crate, then clipped the twine and ripped away the brown foolscap wrapping.

  It was a painting; a stunningly beautiful painting of a blonde, nude woman, her breasts and legs blurring into the tableau of a café scene with street musicians. The light in the composition was an afternoon ocher, a four-in-the-afternoon time when the evening promises infinite diversions, a time Tim loved. The picture was Miro-esque and Picasso-like, but at the same time it wasn’t, because he recognized the style in the shimmering colors.

  Emily Derosier.

  “There’s a card, Monsieur,” said the concierge, plucking it from the wire on the back of the frame. He handed it to Tim, who tore open the small envelope.

  Both the paper and the envelope were special stationery, quality stock, like the kind once used by people who had the money to impress. In a tidy, swirling handwriting, the note urged: Thursday, Au Dauphin, 1 pm please.

  Au Dauphin. He knew the place.

  Tim shoved the note in his pocket and turned to the concierge. “Can you please have it brought up to my room for now?”

  “That’s not a problem at all, Monsieur. It’s an exquisite piece you will enjoy very much, and if you ever decide to part with it, I think the manager would be most interested in making you a handsome offer.”