The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  And then Emmett Nickelbaum died. Or at least he seemed to die. It was more as if his body shriveled as a pear or apple would shrivel after days of being left out. When the eyes blinked, Maria Gigliotti burst into fresh sobs of trauma. It was too much to take, far too much to take.

  Mary Ash turned around and her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  She sunk down next to the terrified, sobbing girl and gently pulled the electrician’s tape off her mouth, but Maria Gigliotti couldn’t say anything for a full minute, only crying. She heard Mary Ash take the box-cutters and slit the tape binding her wrists, and it was so good to be free. In spite of the muscle ache from hours in that position, she found herself hugging Mary Ash like a toddler.

  And Mary Ash rocked her with a maternal embrace.

  “He didn’t get to do what he wanted to you yet, but he did enough. Here…”

  Maria looked up at her, not comprehending, and Mary Ash repeated here. Then Maria felt different. It was like fresh air in her lungs. Warm sun as you emerged from the ocean. She was naked and soiled, but it didn’t matter anymore. She felt clean. She felt as if she had woken up from a deep, restful sleep, all of her senses sharpened and honed and eager to be tested. As she stood up with the peculiar brunette girl, she felt something more, and then she understood what this sensation was.

  “Yeah,” said Mary Ash. “It’s good, isn’t it? I got to go now, but I think you’ll be okay. I’m sorry I used you, but… It’s good now, right? We’re good?”

  Maria Gigliotti slowly nodded, unsure why Mary Ash was still silently crying. It was as if Maria’s forgiveness would provide a temporary respite, but whatever this girl still carried with her would forever drag and scrape behind her like chained weights. Whatever Mary Ash had done for her, she couldn’t do for herself.

  “Good luck,” she said, and then she was gone.

  Maria Gigliotti found the tattered scraps that were once her clothes, did the best she could to cover herself, and then padded barefoot two floors down to knock on a door where she heard music. A Somali woman holding a six-month-old baby in her arms waved for her to come in, come in, and then she phoned the police, and they arrived soon enough. And Mary Ash proved correct. Maria Gigliotti knew she was okay.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Think of antibiotic resistance.”

  Tim had suggested he brief the others on his ideas down at the lab where the French allowed Miller to work. Crystal was paying close attention, while their neurologist looked impatient, bristling at Tim daring to use medical terminology.

  Noting his sour expression, Tim added, “It’s only a metaphor, Andrew. I don’t care for now if it’s imprecise, I’m trying to make a point. Evil, if we’re to accept the word of Emily Derosier, is real. I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t think of it as something outside human experience that’s supernatural. It only makes sense to me as a disease.”

  “You think Limonov is E. coli bacteria or something?” asked Miller, unimpressed.

  “No,” said Tim, arching his eyebrows at the bizarre idea. “I’m saying Limonov was exiled here and dumped on the bottom rung as Emily said. But if we evolve into higher forms with each incarnation—if we earn brownie points as we go, advancing up the line—how could Viktor Limonov stay evil? How could he grow in influence and power? Emily said his consciousness has never forgotten what was done to him. He’s never forgiven it lifetime after lifetime. So what about all the ones who have followed him? They can’t have come from the same realm, at least not all of them. Some must have been born here, and they must have led ordinary human lives once, just as Emily Derosier had.”

  Crystal nodded, understanding his point. “You’re saying over time, Viktor Limonov built up a resistance to the karmic power that would push him back down the evolutionary scale. He can’t wind up as a bug or a dog or a shark anymore, he can only bounce back into human incarnation.”

  “Exactly,” said Tim. “There are terrible things that people do—the regular terrible—and then there’s Pol Pot. Hitler. Stalin.”

  Miller frowned, still not quite sold. “So you’re saying beings like Limonov are the flip side of the karma equation?”

  “Exactly. He and others like him don’t build up ‘merit’ if you want to put it in Buddhist or Hindu terms. They grow stronger with each failed attempt to inoculate the universe against them. The Booth couldn’t take him elsewhere because all those neighborhoods on the other side don’t want him! Or, if you want to keep it in karmic terms, he just plain hasn’t earned his graduation. But he’s had one clear advantage over regular sadists and psychopaths like Dmitry Zorich and Emmett Nickelbaum. He has the knowledge of what he was and of these extraordinary, imported natural laws Emily talked about, the things the resurrected victims can do.”

  “So what’s he trying to do with them?” asked Miller. “He’s killing them off so he can, like, collect them or something? I mean, how does that work?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” said Tim, shaking his head. “I don’t know if what he’s doing works at all, or if he just thinks it will. Emily said he has to be stopped. That implies to me he could become successful.”

  “Shit,” muttered Miller. “I think… I know.”

  Tim and Crystal waited.

  “Think of the octopus again,” explained Miller, and when the two of them looked at him blankly, he added, “Camouflage? Bait-and-switch. Hiding, you get it? Okay. You guys told me this Derosier chick said the stuff that’s fantastic still has to be real and follow rules.”

  “She said,” Crystal corrected him, “that there are natural laws, and even if something fantastic has broken through into our reality, it still has to follow the laws of where it came from.”

  “Okay, sure, whatever,” Miller went on impatiently. “My point is Limonov can’t escape our reality through the Booth the way he is. He’s, like, worked his way up from spider to wildebeest to human but that’s as far as he can go, if Tim here has got it right, and I think he has.”

  “Thanks,” said Tim.

  “No problem.” Miller sat down, propping his sneaker up on a countertop, his hands gesticulating in wide circles. “Okay. The Booth ‘reads’ a murderer and a victim, and it scans Limonov and kicks him back, right? It spits him out—yech. But the Booth victims all came back human plus.”

  “You’re saying,” said Crystal, “he’s collecting these abilities they have in order to fool the machine or whoever the gatekeepers are on the other side?”

  “That makes sense,” said Tim, nodding to Miller. “Look who Limonov targeted first. Gudrun Merkel, who may not have known what she was. She was vulnerable. She didn’t fight back. He moved on to Edward Brewah. By then he might have suspected we were on to him, so he sent Emmett Nickelbaum to kill the boy. And your theory explains why Limonov has wanted to find Orlando Braithewaite.”

  “In case he fails with the camouflage effort,” said Crystal.

  Miller shrugged. “If you can’t get the car started, nice to have the mechanic nearby. You guys got to stop him from killing any more resurrected victims.”

  Tim looked at his watch. “Crystal and I have an appointment. It just might help with that.”

  Michael Benson, lugging his laptop under his arm, his thumb clicking a reply to a text message on his phone, took his time strolling to the end of the Pont Neuf Bridge where it connected with the Île de la Cité.

  It was a pleasant walk to the island that was home to some of the oldest structures in Paris, and if you knew where and how to look, you could find houses that dated back to the sixteenth century. But Benson was busy with his phone and all the work from DC waiting on his laptop, and he hadn’t come to Paris to sightsee anyway. He had come to straighten things out with Timothy Cale, who was waiting for him up ahead with his arms folded, a lock of blond hair almost in his eyes and looking uncharacte‌ristically grim.

  Next to Cale stood a beautiful young black woman Benson assumed had to be the British police detective, Cry
stal Anyanike. And there was a second man waiting that Benson didn’t know or recognize. Terrible suit, watery eyes, weak flabby face, everything about him saying managerial bureaucrat; the kind of person an airline sends to crash victims to express condolences and make sure nobody sues.

  “We participate,” said Tim quietly as Benson came up, “because we trust.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” asked Benson, mildly annoyed.

  “It means sometimes we trust too much.”

  Timothy Cale had demanded that Benson change the time of their meeting after his flight, and he hadn’t bothered to offer an explanation. Benson would normally be miffed and bark that a contractor, no matter how self-important, is the one who gets summoned. But he had received an email from the Department’s Deputy Secretary no less; in carefully worded but strict language, it warned: you will comply. Not only was he to go, but alarm bells had gone off for Michael Benson that the Deputy knew about this meeting.

  “What the hell is this, Tim?”

  “You know, that’s the funny thing. I don’t think I’ve ever called you ‘Michael’ once, but you’ve always been quick to use my first name. You’re everybody’s pal, aren’t you?”

  “I’m informal,” snapped Benson. “Fuck’s sake, I know we’re in France, but you call me down here for a lesson in etiquette?”

  “No, we dragged you down here because I have a feeling you call Limonov ‘Viktor.’ You see, we’ve been asking ourselves how he could trace and kill resurrected victims from the Booth. We don’t think he could see people’s lives the way Mary Ash can, and I don’t think he can move folks in and out of buildings the way Geoff Shackleton does. He got on a plane to get to Germany. There’s still plenty of human in him. So how is he doing it? How is he finding them? And then Crystal here thought of something. And I remembered you’re a holdover from the last administration.”

  Benson was indignant. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “When you were still with the CIA, you brokered the services of Viktor Limonov for half a dozen ops. That psycho Russian sold weapons to both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, but I guess you didn’t know that until that paperback bio on Limonov came out. What was it called, Soldier of the Biggest Fortune or something?”

  Now Benson laughed in his face. “Jesus, Tim, you want to screw over your contract and go back to Poli-Sci classes? Is that it? What am I hearing? A warm-up for your fall semester lecture? If you want to post-mortem State Department hypocrisy, go work on your blog! I helped draft the executive order that called for Limonov’s extradition! Remember? That was back when he trained death squads in the Congo.”

  “Mr. Benson, you’re not very tech savvy, are you?” asked Crystal.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “In 2012,” explained Crystal, “foreign spies left corrupted memory sticks lying around where defense personnel would plug them into CENTCOM network computers. A code was downloaded into these machines that allowed the spies to follow military traffic. They could view documents and interfere with steps taken by the Pentagon. Personally, my money’s on Russia behind it. Could be China, I don’t know. Your DOD’s not saying, but it was nice enough to warn our Ministry of Defence in Britain, which, of course, told MI6—which told me.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re—”

  “Your office computer was subject to a regular intelligence security sweep two years ago,” she pressed on. “But you personally ignored a direct order to have all personal laptops, smartphones, BlackBerries and mobiles checked during that same period.”

  “That’s about the time you were still dealing with Viktor Limonov,” said Tim.

  “The code on your notebook, Mr. Benson, is the same code used to get past the firewalls and security checks at the US Department of Defense,” Crystal went on. “We know you met Limonov years ago on more than one occasion, and you probably traded information with him as partial payment. You remember, don’t you? Back when you needed his services in places like Libya and Mali. I reckon you two must have been in a café or somewhere, and he pulled out the memory stick himself to make the download faster. Am I close?”

  Benson paled, his lips parting to make sounds, but no words came out.

  “You called me here in Paris the night Crystal got taken to the hospital,” said Tim. “Right after Zorich slashed her with his knife. My mind was distracted, but still, I wondered why you were so pissed at me for going after Limonov. I just assumed it was politics. I mean, any embarrassing ‘State Department hypocrisies’ as you call them would have come out at his trial in the Hague. Arms sales, dealing with dictators… But you were scared shitless over something else, right?”

  “The Pentagon learned about the memory sticks and debugged their system ages ago,” said Crystal. “But Viktor Limonov must know you’re a creature of habit. Same files, same laptop. After he got all the information on the Booth victims, he could flit around the globe as he pleased. You couldn’t very well go to your tech boys and own up to your mistake now, could you?”

  Tim shook his head. “You stupid bastard.”

  Benson leaned on a stone wall as if he had trouble standing up. “Tim, I got you this contract! I recommended you! I got her in on this—”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” said Tim. “Crystal got her gig on her own. You only rubber-stamped the recommendation of London. And as for me, that’s also a crock! Justice Department brought me in, and my guess is you volunteered to play my babysitter.” He pointed to the gray, listless figure who had said nothing up to this point. “This man’s name is Schlosser. He’s the first person to ever tell me about the Karma Booth. He showed up at my university one day and claimed he was from Justice, but of course, that was a lie—he’s from your department. A little dark corner of your department, Benson. They keep him for dirty jobs like this.”

  “I’m here to take over as liaison, Mr. Benson,” said Schlosser. “And to ask you politely to surrender your phone and laptop computer. There are federal officers who will come and take them from you, sir, if you don’t.”

  Benson made another appeal to Tim. “You know what you’re doing will cost me my job. You know that, don’t you? It could have happened to anyone in the department! It could have happened to you, Schloss—whatever the fuck your name is, you basset hound prick!”

  Tim watched. He remembered his own rudeness to Schlosser and how the man didn’t appear to be fazed. He was unruffled now as well.

  “Mr. Benson,” said Schlosser quietly. “I will only ask you a second time. After that they send the federal agents to your house. They like to do it around six o’clock when the neighbors are coming home from work and will be interested. You know… for maximum effect.”

  Benson dug his cell out of his coat pocket and slapped it into the bureaucrat’s hand. Then he dropped the notebook computer under his arm onto the cement before walking away. Schlosser picked it up and nodded a silent goodbye to Tim and Crystal.

  “Viktor Limonov won’t have the names of the newest resurrections, but it won’t matter,” said Crystal. “He knows where every Booth is located around the globe. If Andrew’s right, and Limonov wants to use one to get back…”

  “He can go almost anywhere,” Tim finished for her. With a gallows smile, he added, “Damn it. Just when Miller stopped being a smug pain in the ass, he turns out to be right about the end of the world.”

  Later that afternoon, Tim and Crystal drifted back to the hotel and made love, taking their time, treating each other by turns with passionate hunger and affectionate, languorous care. Crystal called it her “celebration” over her belly stitches being removed. They dozed, spooned into each other. Lying together, suspended in their cocoon of all too brief intimacy.

  After a long shared shower in Tim’s suite, they joined Miller, who gave them a put-on sour expression, pretending to resent the fact that Crystal had made Tim her choice of lover. Dinner for three was a somber affair at Bofinger
in the Rue de la Bastille. As they sat at their table in the restaurant’s downstairs under the coupole, the stained-glass dome, there was little small talk until after the plates were removed.

  Then Miller commented, “You know I went into neurology because I wanted to be an explorer. I mean, I was going to be the dude with the answers! I saw Gary Weintraub in his first documentary for PBS, and I thought, ‘I want to be him.’ I was over the moon when I got on his team.”

  “You’re still the guy with the answers,” Tim assured him, reaching for his wine glass.

  Miller squinted at him as if he were a specimen under a microscope and asked, “Why did you go into diplomacy?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” laughed Tim.

  “No, dude, it’s fine! You’ve done great. I just mean it sounds like you could have been one of those CIA guys like Benson—hey, no face! Don’t give me that face! I didn’t mean like Benson exactly. Or you could have gone into politics or hell, just gone into being a prof to start with! You end up with ethics consulting—and that’s cool. But all the globetrotting shit, that’s… wild.”

  Tim was conscious that Crystal was paying close attention in her seat next to him. He looked down at the linen tablecloth and then took in the sweep of other diners reflected in the great Art Nouveau mirrors.

  “It may surprise you to know, Andrew, I wasn’t very confident when I was young. I never felt comfortable in my own skin. I didn’t realize I had a different way of seeing until it was pointed out to me. I got it into my head that if this was true, it would help me if I worked somewhere away from English, away from American culture.”

  Crystal reached for his hand under the table. “It seems to have served you well.”

  “What about you?” Miller asked her. “I’d never pick you out as the bad-ass cop type.”

  Crystal laughed and arched her eyebrows. “Thanks! I think? There’s no big revelation for you, I’m afraid. They came to me. I just thought: Well, this beats working in a Tesco’s deli like my cousin or grading painfully stupid undergraduate papers.”