The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “He may have pushed it forward by a hundred.”

  Weintraub stopped playing and lifted a hand. “Please, spare me the reasons. The White House sent me the briefing notes. Did it ever occur to you that he could have helped humanity by simply coming forward with what he knows and making it available? Let us work through the ramifications gradually?”

  “He had a plan. I understand it now, and I respect it.”

  “I see,” said Weintraub. He began to play a Miles Davis tune, “So What,” clearly knowing Tim would get the reference.

  “As much as I enjoy your passive-aggressive sarcasm through music, you have any other points to make?”

  Weintraub stopped playing. “Yes, I do. You were always against the Karma Booth, Tim. I could respect your caution. But now you’re asking us to abdicate our own emancipated collective will for this… this individual, whatever Orlando Braithewaite really is. As if he’s a god! You expect us to follow his agenda! You’re the one who always stood against that sort of thing.”

  Tim sipped his Scotch, sighing into his glass. “Gary, Braithewaite will shut off the power no matter what we decide. We’ve always been on his timetable. We simply didn’t know it. You may not see it now, but I think he might have done humanity an enormous favor.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever see it.”

  Tim downed his drink and turned to leave, knowing with sadness that this was quite possible. It frustrated him because science was supposed to be about the long game, and his friend was not prepared to come watch the great experiment that was about to unfold, that had to unfold. He walked out of the bar, knowing Gary Weintraub might perhaps never want to see him again and condemn him for a peculiar new breed of convert. And what a bitter irony that would be.

  He flew back to Paris, where Miller and Crystal were waiting. In the time that he had spent in New York City, Crystal had flown across the Channel for uncomfortable debriefings with MI6 and with the prime minister in 10 Downing Street. Downing Street had then called Washington, but in the end, the two allies agreed that Orlando Braithewaite should be left alone. So Crystal had gone back to Paris.

  Tim had not mentioned to Gary in the bar that there was another timetable for Braithewaite, for them all. All the Booths would be shut down save one.

  The one in Le Santé Prison.

  The only door left unlocked that Viktor Limonov could still try.

  Braithewaite had refused to admit any culpability over Limonov and the Booth. In the billionaire’s view, the Russian war criminal had always been a threat and would have kept on being one—constantly recycled through human incarnations—had the Karma Booth not presented him the opportunity for escape back to his former existence. Human authorities were the ones who sentenced Limonov and then put him in one of its chambers. It was on them.

  But Braithewaite had agreed to help stop him.

  “You’re not worried he’ll come after you?” Tim had asked back in Tanzania.

  Braithewaite had been stoic. “There is no Karma Booth here. And the power source is safely on the other side until a machine is switched on. There is nothing he can do but kill me, and he knows that will get him little. You see I have no ability for him to take. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Tim! I have comforts, but I’m quite as ordinary as you here. Limonov gains nothing, no extra strength to help his passage. I don’t even think he’ll go after Emily Derosier again. He knows that if he did, she could merely step through the Booth on her own and rob him of stealing her talents.”

  “You’re betting he’ll just make a run for the border, so to speak.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why not switch off the Paris Booth as well? Then he has no exit at all.”

  “You can’t bluff him that the machine still works when it doesn’t. He’ll know that. He’s extremely powerful now after all that he’s collected from the victims. Keeping the Paris Booth on will lure him out and give you a chance to catch him, to stop him. Of course, it’s a risk, but he has to be stopped. I believe Emily explained to you why.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” said Braithewaite. “Then you know he cannot be allowed to cross over. Don’t allow that to happen.”

  Now back in Paris, Tim could only cluck his tongue over how Braithewaite acknowledged their task but implied that it was simple enough. Don’t allow it to happen? What could they do to stop it? The last working Booth was in a French prison with guards, and Crystal had arranged for a crack SAS team, including some familiar faces from their Ireland trip, to provide extra security. No one doubted that bullets could injure Viktor Limonov. Their concern would be the nightmares he could inflict before a soldier got the chance to pull the trigger. And now they knew that even mortal wounds only delayed his coming back stronger in his next human incarnation.

  “Capital punishment,” said Tim, thinking aloud.

  There was a young Algerian man sitting on the Métro train next to him, gently bopping to music. He pulled out one of his ear-buds. “Excuse me?” he asked in accented English.

  Tim offered a polite smile. “Sorry.”

  The young man returned to listening to his music and reading a French university textbook.

  Capital punishment, thought Tim. This is how it all started, with Braithewaite changing the rules temporarily for an issue that divided the world.

  Only he hadn’t changed anything, not really.

  The world was still divided over it.

  Viktor Limonov had demonstrated he was worthy of a noose, a firing squad, a lethal injection. And yet he had also defiantly proved—just as he’d taunted Tim in the street—that he was beyond such ultimate sentences. You could argue both sides of the issue with a Limonov, he thought. No one could pick a side in the debate and think he was left with clean hands.

  So what do we do with you? thought Tim. Or had Orlando Braithewaite, consciously or not, decided that the great push for humanity would start with how they dealt with this monster? And what a terrible thought that was, he decided. You had to wonder on whom a sentence was being passed.

  When he caught up with Crystal, she was in the Sainte-Geneviève Library, one of the most gorgeous libraries Tim had ever seen. Its reading room felt like a cathedral—fitting for a place associated with a centuries-old abbey. Tim strolled past long and simple wooden tables with quaint lamps, past shelves of rare volumes, but it was the architecture that stunned. There were columns with cast-iron pillars that shot into the ceiling and formed a spidery network of metal arches for barrel vaults of plaster. Gaining knowledge here would feel like taking communion.

  He found the disciple he was looking for at a table in the back, poring over a document encased in a protective plastic envelope. It looked to be written in Amharic, and Crystal was checking a translation. Finally, she noticed him.

  “Thought I’d hit the books again,” she whispered. “More research on those African gods and mythologies.”

  Half a beat behind her, he suddenly understood. It wasn’t so long ago that he had first met her, and she had been reading an antique volume from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

  “You could say I’m having a crisis of faith,” she explained, looking mildly embarrassed.

  “After all we’ve seen, who can blame you.”

  He was surprised to see she looked abruptly offended. “It’s so easy for you, isn’t it? Damn it, Tim, I watched you die. And you came back—Braithewaite sent you back. I suppose for you it’s no more than having woken up from a bad traffic accident. I don’t know what to think anymore, and you tell me that’s what he wants! He’s got one hell of a streak of cruelty!”

  People at other tables glanced at them irritably. Crystal whispered an apology in French and motioned to Tim that they should go. He waited as she returned her borrowed materials to the front desk.

  “I don’t think he’s being cruel,” said Tim as they stepped out into the busy street. “Braithewaite.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t now
, would you?”

  “Crystal,” he tried again, adopting a soothing tone, “you told me when you first met me that you believed Heaven is somewhere—that you didn’t give a tinker’s damn where the road signs pointed. No, it’s not easy for me, not as much as you’d think. God and Heaven used to be intellectual exercises that were as neutral for me as wondering if there’s life on other planets. You know something? My world view has been rocked more than yours, trust me! You can still have God out there. Braithewaite’s freed you in a way, all of you. He’s told you that death has nothing to do with God, if God exists. You can keep looking for Him in life after life, on level after level. But every atheist, every agnostic, now has to look beyond what’s tangible, what’s here—and adjust. Here, just here and the stars, were all we ever had to make our case—all the ego packed into what we could point to in front of us or through the lens of a telescope. Braithewaite’s a new Copernicus. As you Brits like to say, it’s ‘All Change’ for everyone.”

  She was quiet for a long moment, moving into him. Then she muttered, “Toss.”

  “What?”

  “I believe I said I didn’t give a toss how the road signs point to Heaven.”

  “Right, whatever,” he chuckled and kissed her quickly.

  Smiling, she took his hand, and they began to walk. “By the by, I have been busy with more than Heaven and Earth. Something Miller said has been bugging me.”

  “Lots of things Miller says bug me. Can you be more specific?”

  “Serious now,” she said. “You remember when Andrew asked why didn’t Limonov go after Mary Ash?”

  “Yeah, and you said, if I remember, that Limonov did. He probably sent Emmett Nickelbaum after her. Nickelbaum came to the States to kill the boy, the one who was reincarnated from Constable Daniel Chen.”

  Crystal nodded. “Right, but Andrew had an excellent point—Nickelbaum buggered off to Italy, and Viktor Limonov hasn’t made an attempt to kill Mary Ash at all.”

  “Then I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

  “What if Andrew’s only half-right? Yes, okay, let’s say Limonov has gone after the resurrected victims, moving from the weakest to the strongest. We’ve seen him barely hold his own against Emily Derosier.”

  “Okay,” said Tim slowly, not sure where she was going with this.

  Crystal stopped in the street. “Who says Mary Ash is the weakest of our victims? We know she took out Emmett Nickelbaum. I don’t think he wants to go up against Mary Ash. I think he doesn’t want to go near her.”

  Back in the hotel, she showed Tim on her laptop how she had traced police reports and then checked with MI6 to collate more incidents coming in from across Europe.

  In Rhodes City, Greece, a fourteen-year-old boy had come back through a Karma Booth, and he had been able to transform his features into the face of someone else in a friend or relative’s mind. You talked casually about this or that person, and the boy would change his face right in front of you and be that individual. Tim remembered. The boy had been beaten to death a second time, raped, and his body abandoned in a part of Rhodes City’s Old Town.

  Last week, police heard disturbing stories of a young girl, college age, who had visited those allegedly behind the attack. Mary Ash had found the suspects and persons of interest whom the police couldn’t charge for lack of evidence.

  But Mary Ash didn’t need evidence. She could recite the events on all the days of their lives, including that day.

  She did something to these young thugs.

  She did something that made one of them rip the flesh from his forearm with his teeth and gnaw through to the bone. As if his limb had been caught in a bear-trap, and he had been left with only this last resort to get free. But there were no markings on his limb, except for the impressions of his teeth. He died, insane, from blood loss and infection.

  She did something that made another one take the forefingers and thumbs of both hands and rip… Tim didn’t want to read the rest of the line on the laptop screen. There was a mention of how the suspect could no longer blink, of course, that there was a corresponding lack of ocular lubrication, but more than this, the suspect screamed and kept on screaming even after sedation.

  After days of sedation and emergency surgery.

  He died, too.

  She did something to all of them.

  She had started with Emmett Nickelbaum and then had moved on to Greece. In Bucharest, a sadistic rapist had been driven to castrate himself. In Prague, a woman in her fifties who ran a private daycare—later discovered to be a monster guilty of the worst kinds of child abuse—was found near death after repeatedly, obsessively bathing in cleansers and bleach in her filthy little bathtub.

  They were haunted, all of them, and those who didn’t die right away told of the girl with two bloody finger stumps who visited them and who spoke—always fluent in their language—in a distracted, singsong voice. Reminding them of what they had done. Telling them how their victims would forever be changed and could never be what they used to be. Tim recalled how Mary Ash had mentioned she had never seen Paris. Now she was an avenging Greek Fury, on a warped version of a college kid’s backpack tour of Europe, scalding the minds of the human monsters she visited.

  In Brussels, there was a crooked man named Jacques Binchois, and far from the Grand Palace and Cinquantenaire, on the outskirts of the city in a grim industrial park, he kept girls and women from China in a shipping container. They were all destined to be sold as domestic slaves to rich businessmen and trophy wives in the fashionable parts of town and as far away as Milan and Munich. When you got past the thick smell of rusting metal chains and slid open the vault-like panel door, you picked up the stench of unwashed bodies and excrement left in the only toilet, a bucket.

  Jacques Binchois opened the container this evening because he had to pluck one of his charges out and get her cleaned up. She would need his typical splurging of a McDonald’s Happy Meal and a shower, and he considered himself merciful to actually grant one of these human commodities a single night’s sleep on an office cot before he handed her over to a customer (it didn’t help business if a client phoned him back and complained how “listless and dull” the girl was before she started work).

  It was, truth be told, a pain in the ass doing this chore, but he preferred to do it himself. When he had given the job to his men, they had occasionally messed around with the product. He didn’t give a shit about that either, but one of them gave a girl a dose, which she then passed on to a customer. That was also not good for business.

  So he grumbled and spat and smoked his tenth cigarette as he unlocked the chains and prepared himself for the unbelievable stink. The familiar odor hit him as he yanked the panel back, but there were no girls moaning and whimpering and shading their eyes from the sudden fluorescent bulbs.

  There was only one girl, and she was white. She was plain and thin and brunette, and she looked up from hugging her knees on the cold cement floor with the most depraved sunny smile, as if Daddy had come home and brought her a present.

  She brushed back a lock of hair, and Binchois interrupted his disgusted what-the-hell-is-going-on outrage to feel natural sympathetic horror over the two bloody finger stumps of her hand.

  “There you are,” she said cheerfully.

  He understood enough English to know what she was saying, but when next she spoke, he heard it in perfect French. Her light, thin voice overrode all his blustering demands of who are you and what do you think you’re doing and where are my girls so that all he heard was, “It’s going to be very cramped for you.”

  Jacques Binchois didn’t know what this strange girl meant, but he instantly understood it was to be something terrible. He kept a weapon under the seat of his car, but he had grown lazy and hadn’t had any trouble with competition for months. He never took it along to the container anymore. She was a girl, just a girl. He shouldn’t need a weapon. But she frightened him. And now she got to her feet—

  “Mary.�
�

  And then Binchois was no longer important.

  Timothy Cale stood in the shaft of light pouring into the great cave of rented containers from the parking lot. Belgian police officers would be coming along soon, driving up with no lights and no sirens because that was how Crystal had arranged it. It was understood that Tim had to go in first. Because if he didn’t make his case, it wouldn’t matter how fast the police arrived.

  “Hello, Mr. Cale. It’s nice to see you again.”

  “Mary, please,” said Tim softly. “The police can take care of this garbage. You’ve sent all the girls home, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah, they’re fine,” she said absently, her eyes still fixed on Binchois. “That nice schoolteacher let me keep his gift—he doesn’t want it back. It’s kind of cool. I mean, it’s very convenient.”

  “I imagine it is.”

  She looked over to Tim at last and smiled. “You surprised me. I mean, like, I knew you were looking for me. Thursday, four o’clock, outside the Centre Pompidou, Crystal Anyanike said to you, ‘Do we get her to help us or beg her to stop?’ And you said, ‘Knowing Mary, she already knows that we’ve tracked her. The question is whether she’ll come to us if we ask nicely.’ You don’t have to be afraid of me, Mr. Cale.”

  “I’m not, Mary.”

  She laughed her tinkling laugh and said, “You surprised me. I guess you figured out I know where everyone is every minute but if I turn my attention somewhere else… That’s really clever. You waited until the last minute, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, Mary.”

  “How did you know I’d pick him?” She meant Binchois.

  “I didn’t. Crystal and the police are waiting outside a murderer’s home—we thought you might have gone there. The Belgian cops have kept their eyes on him for some time. Like this one.”

  Binchois—confused, pissed off, frightened—turned and ran towards the parking lot. But Tim didn’t go after him. He knew he had to appeal to Mary Ash.

  “Mary, don’t! Please don’t! The police are right outside, they’ll get him and put him away.”