The Karma Booth

“That just makes you the same as everyone else who’s tried,” replied Benson. “He gave us the goods, briefed Weintraub about it and then nicely buggered off on his Gulfstream. Anybody else, yeah, of course you ask about a gift horse in the mouth, but…”

“Yeah, I get it,” said Tim. “Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, Orlando Braithewaite.”

Yes, he knew about Braithewaite. He had known about him for decades.

“Look, if you can find him, more power to you,” said Benson. “The cabinet secretaries are expanding the parameters of their—your investigation. We need more than just your input as an ethicist. We need you to figure out how this damn thing works, Tim. What the long-term effects are, what kind of trouble we could get into, what our billionaire’s real agenda may be—everything, everything—”

“You need a scientist to make those kind of evaluations,” argued Tim. “And you’ve already got one with Weintraub. I’m not an investigator for State anymore, pal—I’m not even a diplomat. I’m busy raising the next crop of Oxfam workers and correspondents for The Economist.”

Benson stopped at a corner and dropped his voice to a whisper, pointing a finger into Tim’s lapel. “You are exactly the guy we need. You think for one second we’re going to get an objective view from Gary Weintraub? Are you shitting me? Get real! Yeah, sure, he’ll tell us what he knows for equations and physical effects, that’s it. I mean… Jesus, they go on and on about Oppenheimer and those other guys and their conscience over the bomb. Well, they still built the fucking thing, didn’t they?”

Benson stepped back and looked around them nervously, as if he had just confided a dirty little secret. “You get your retainer plus twenty-five percent above that. We’re giving you unlimited travel—first-class commercial when it’s regular business, private Hawker Horizon when it’s a priority, on loan from Justice.”

“What do I need a jet for when the Karma Booth’s right in New York?”

And as soon as he started the question, he heard his own words trail off, as if someone else had spoken them in a distant room. He had his answer. “Jesus Christ…”

“You got it,” said Benson.

“There’s more than one out there.”

“There’s several of them,” said Benson. “We should have known Mr. Braithewaite wouldn’t play Santa Claus only with the United States. The Japanese came to us on their own about their Booth after Weintraub’s news conference. The Israelis won’t admit they have one, and we’re not holding our breath over Saudi Arabia either. I’ve got a list of the others. Intelligence ops confirmed pretty early that Moscow has one. The liberals at State are bitching how Russia signed the European Convention on Human Rights, so capital punishment ought to be outlawed there already.”

Tim rolled his eyes dismissively. “It’s not like we can claim the moral high ground when we execute people. And these same geniuses should remember that Russia never ratified the protocols. Anyway, there hasn’t been an execution there in years—the last one was in Chechnya.”

Benson shrugged. “Hardly makes a difference, does it? I’m sure everybody’s rulebook is getting thrown out the window. By the way, we’ve discovered the regime in Iran is a complete bunch of hypocrites—their mullahs denounced it, but Iran’s got one.” He crouched down and snapped open his briefcase, fetching a file and passing Tim a large photo blow-up. “Do you know what this is?”

Tim pulled out his reading glasses and looked. The color photo took in a large swath of a city skyline, and it took him only an instant to recognize the Montparnasse district of Paris. After all, he used to keep an apartment there. But then he saw in the foreground what the picture was really about.

“La Santé Prison,” offered Tim. He tapped the grim, brown blockhouses stretching out like spokes on a wheel. “The French have a Booth? It’s one thing for the Russians to have one, but capital punishment is definitely against the French Constitution.”

“They do,” said Benson. “They’re taking the view that they’ll use it for terrorists—same rationale as the British, who, incidentally, are keeping their Booth in Wapping or some godforsaken place, can’t remember. But we have a new headache in Paris.”

He handed Tim another couple of photos. They were surveillance shots from CCTV cameras, ones looking down on a young woman who couldn’t be more than thirty years old. She had an ethereal beauty, with long black hair and pale skin, her lips full and her blue eyes inquisitive. And there was something else about her.

“How did she come back?” he asked. But he sensed he already knew the answer. It was about to be confirmed.

Her clothes. That was the first tip-off. The woman was wearing a green cotton dress and a broad-brimmed straw hat with a bow, almost as if the legendary Madeleine had grown up and left the old house in Paris covered with vines…

“The French claim there’s only been limited use of the Booth, and no executions of prisoners are held at night,” said Benson. “We have to take that on faith, but they seem genuinely stunned. After seven o’clock, there are no researchers in the facility wing containing the machine, so there’s no need for any guards to be in the actual room. But closed circuit cameras stay on in there just like everywhere else—”

New photos. Tim flipped through them and stared at the flare of white light in the grainy shot, the Karma Booth impossibly turned on, functioning with no scientists in attendance—and no condemned inmate to be executed. In the next shot, the woman appeared. She was nude, stunningly beautiful, but clearly disoriented as she staggered out of the second chamber. More photo stills of the surveillance. Snap…snap… snap, and she walked out of camera view. Tim looked up at Benson, who saw his new question forming.

“They haven’t determined how she got out.”

“It’s a prison,” said Tim. “She shouldn’t be able to get out at all.”

“We know. So do they. There’s no footage of her in the entire complex beyond that room. Then the street cameras pick her up from the Rue de Sèvres—how and where she got the clothes is also a mystery. She went into a Métro station and disappeared—no footage of her inside. Anywhere. But the Police Nationale had the presence of mind to lift fingerprints from where she touched that bench.”

“She doesn’t have a criminal record,” said Tim flatly. “She was a victim.”

“Okay, you’re so clever,” replied Benson. “If you’ve guessed that then maybe you’ve guessed the rest.”

Tim skipped back to the first shots of the woman walking along the street. Wearing the green cotton dress that was simple, stylish. No, this woman wouldn’t be in the regular database of unsolved murders. He could see it now, a subtle difference in the line of her jaw and in the oval of her face. People really did once look different thanks to diet and environment. Benson handed him a photocopy of a newspaper clipping, and he looked at the same beautiful woman in a posed photo and saw that the story had been printed in 1928.

The dress wasn’t signature flapper apparel, but similar enough to be from that era.

“Her name was—is—Emily Derosier,” explained Benson. “The last name is French, but she had a British father. She was a socialite and painter—or so the article says. I’ve never heard of her. She hung out with the celebs. Got stabbed to death in her Paris apartment, and the killer was never found.”

Tim scanned through the article. It was mostly a bio that recapped the highlights of the victim’s life. He would have to read it more thoroughly later.

“Great. So I’ve got to find Orlando Braithewaite, and it looks like I got to locate her as well. And I better find her fast.”

“Maybe ‘fast’ is overstating it,” said Benson. “Hell, she may rattle off the same gibberish as Mary Ash.”

Tim shook his head. “I don’t think so. Weintraub’s crew pulled Mary Ash from the other side. This woman is different. She walked back into our world of her own accord, after more than eighty years. She must have come back for a reason.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Tim had Matilda book a transatlantic flight for him in three days. Before that, he wanted to go and visit Geoff Shackleton, curious to see if the schoolteacher was “different,” as he had warned Weintraub and Miller.

It was raining as he drove back out to the White Plains facility, the sky a strange twilight blue behind the dark charcoal clouds. On his car stereo, he played Kind of Blue, the signature Miles Davis album. Tim’s father had heavily influenced his jazz tastes. Piano, bass, drums—that’s all you need, Dad said. Tim had found him to be right, and small 1960s combos were always the best musical sedative for him. Lee Morgan, Davis, Bird—yes, he had been right about music even though his father had never learned to play a note. But he had been wrong about so many other things.

His father was an electronics engineer, a man who believed in the firmly tangible and who spent the decades of his life at a workbench in front of an oscilloscope and a spot welder over circuit boards. His work was unfathomable to his son. It wasn’t until his twenties that Tim realized his father’s world view was almost entirely shaped by the evening news. Maybe that was what drove Tim to learn French and to grapple with Hindi, to pursue a career in exotic locales.

His father had died of pancreatic cancer last year, refusing to see his son in his final emaciated stages, and Tim had never told him about India. It was not something they could talk about: intrusive concepts of otherworldly realities or of life after death. His father was an intelligent man, but not an intellectual. He had been one of that last generation of superman dads; the kind who kept three saws in the basement and who could fix his own car, a man who could easily sail Lake Michigan when they took the family’s tiny boat out. Tim wouldn’t be able to find the carburetor in his BMW if he tried.

Tim’s mother had died ten years before from multiple sclerosis. Frightened and confused near the end, she had asked for a minister. Dad refused to get her one. Tim wasn’t religious and didn’t even consider himself spiritual—he was no seeker. But he had hated the old man for a long time over that denial of comfort for his mom. More than that, he hated how his father had easily accepted the doctors’ diagnosis of his own fate—that cruel sentence of three months left—and just obediently, quietly, died by their schedule.

He didn’t think about his father much afterwards. Theirs had been a distant relationship once Tim had grown up. The Karma Booth stirred up all this old business.

On the stereo, the Davis album ended and he heard Dexter Gordon play “Cry Me a River.” Serves you right, thought Tim, smiling at the irony. It was fitting on this drive for another reason. The music had come from Gary Weintraub; his friend had found a rare live performance by Gordon in a Berlin jazz club and had the old vinyl converted to digital for Tim. A wonderful Christmas present three years ago.

Tim parked across the street from the federal building and held his valise over his head, trying not to get soaked as the security man in the navy blazer held the door open for him. After his postings in Asia, rain was always a time-travel mechanism for him, making him recall the monsoon seasons in Delhi and Mumbai and the way drops hit the tin roofs of squalid huts and formed instant lakes out of the cracked alleys.

He thought fleetingly of the night in the remote village, pushed it from his mind.

“It’s really coming down,” said the security guard.

“Yeah.”

“Everything quiet here?”

The security guard nodded, knowing what he meant. He had been staffed to the project even before the Booth had been shipped out for its first use at the prison, and he had watched the mushrooming of publicity, protests and curiosity seekers since Mary Ash’s resurrection. He had also become Tim’s first antenna for when Weintraub and his scientists were excited over a development. Today he gave Tim another stoical nod. All was quiet.

Tim went up to the seventh floor and discovered the guard was right. He walked into the test center’s infirmary room, and an ordinary middle-aged man looked up from his hospital bed at him with the curiosity you give any visitor. Geoff Shackleton had been prescribed mild anti-depressants—that was after Gary Weintraub felt he ought to explain the background of the shooting and what had happened to Shackleton’s wife.

Tim wondered if he had “guilted” Gary into breaking the news personally. It didn’t matter. Shackleton deserved to know the truth, and he would have learned in time. At least the guy was in a controlled environment where he could get counseling and any medical follow-up. He was affable towards Tim, though he looked a bit subdued, even drained, by the mood drugs he was on. That was probably to be expected. Tim began to relax, figuring the teacher’s responses must be very much those of a coma patient on waking up.

“They’ll probably keep you in this facility for a couple more weeks,” Tim informed him.

Shackleton pulled the food tray on its swing arm and brought a bottle of water within reach. “That’s okay,” he answered with his mild Texan drawl. “I mean, it’s not like I have anywhere really to go. They let me call my insurance company, and that’s… What a mess! They said technically I’m not injured even though I was pronounced dead, and since I’m back alive, they invalidated my life insurance policy. Thieves. Goddamn thieves. Just as well—my wife was the beneficiary.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no, I’m… Hey, I shouldn’t bitch like this, should I? I ought to stay grateful. I’m alive. What they did, it’s amazing. And I’m only the second person to go through this? They told me there’s a girl from Manhattan who got killed by some psycho, and she was the first, right?”

“That’s right.”

“My God. Incredible. How’s she doing?”

Tim decided to be neutral. “She’s fine. Have you spoken with your wife at all?”

“Not much point in that, is there?” Shackleton stared at the beads of water pattering on the room’s windowpane, withdrawing into himself for a brief second. Tim waited patiently.

“My bank accounts have been closed,” the teacher said slowly. “They tell me my house was foreclosed on when Nicole went to jail. I can’t afford a lawyer—not yet. The only word I want her to get from me is in divorce papers.”

“I can make a couple of phone calls,” Tim offered. “Your situation is unique, but there are already victim services in place, and I imagine if they keep using the Karma Booth, they’ll have to set up a whole new extension of those programs for people who come back. Help them make a transition back into their old life.”

“Or a brand new one,” said Shackleton.

“If that’s what you want. I’m sure it’ll take time, but you’ll find your way.”

Tim rose to go, muttering about how he wanted to beat the traffic into the city. As much as he felt sorry for the teacher, he felt oddly reassured by this meeting. This man seemed fine. Then what had happened with Mary Ash?

Shackleton was talking to him.

“Mr. Cale?”

“I’m sorry, my mind was elsewhere.”

“That’s okay. Umm… You said you were hired to assess the impact of this thing, didn’t you? What do you plan to recommend?”

“I don’t know,” said Tim honestly. “I’ve barely begun to examine all the issues involved and learn about the Booth. It’s early days. How do you feel about it?”

Shackleton made a small, self-deprecating chuckle. “I don’t know. I’m kind of the lab rat in the maze, aren’t I? But it’s bigger than me. You know I actually used to be against capital punishment.”

“You still can be, Mr. Shackleton. Your beliefs haven’t been compromised—you were never given a choice about being brought back.”

“Yes, but who would say no?” asked the teacher.

“There are bound to be those who will,” replied Tim. “Maybe we’ll all have to carry around little cards like they do for organ donation, ticking off whether we want the procedure. Maybe we’ll see ‘wrongful life’ suits in the courts. Are you upset by the fact that they executed Cody James?”

Shackleton sat in silence for a moment, mulling over the issue. Tim could hear a distant thunder roll through the window.

“Are you a God-fearing man, Mr. Cale?”

“No, I’m an agnostic.”

Shackleton nodded. “Yeah. New Yorker, a professor, a diplomat—didn’t peg you as a church-going fellah. Honest truth is I don’t know how I feel about Cody. Or God anymore.”

“Oh?”

“Men resurrected me, Mr. Cale. Not God. That’s clear.”

As Tim left, he marveled at how it was the last thing he expected a Christian schoolteacher from Texas to say. Well, he had warned Matilda the Booth was guaranteed to upset the whole range of belief systems. He punched the button for the elevator, and still distracted by the conversation, breezed through the sliding doors—

He felt the rain first, drops pelting the shoulders of his coat and wetting his forehead, jolting him back to attention to his surroundings.

He had been in the elevator.

Now he was on the street.

No, he couldn’t have just sleepwalked his way out of the building. There were security checks and sign-out sheets before he was ever allowed to hit the pavement. But when he whirled around, he was facing the eastern wall of the block, the front entrance around the corner. There was a kra-koom of loud thunder, and a fork of lightning hit the ground behind the skyline of shiny boxes of office buildings.

Blink, and you’re standing outside.

You’ve been moved. Plucked out of a point in space and a linear direction in time. Shifted elsewhere. What the hell…?

As he walked briskly back in, the security guard matched his confusion over how he could have got past him. Tim flashed his ID and snapped, “Forget it, it doesn’t matter.”

“But you were inside. How did—”

“Look, I’m here now, just let me through.” Then he was back on the elevator, heading for the infirmary.

“Forget something?” asked Shackleton, looking genuinely surprised to see him.

“We’re seven flights up,” said Tim. “I stepped out of the elevator onto the street. You did it.”

Shackleton’s features went blank, as if he were a foreign tourist trying to decipher the words of a hotel desk clerk. “You said your mind was elsewhere.” Tim stared at the schoolteacher, hearing the words but no sense in them. Shackleton repeated it as if now it might sink in. “You said your mind was elsewhere.”

“So you helped me? To get there…? Into that moment when I wanted to be outside…?” Shackleton’s expression was still innocent. “It’s so simple, if only people would pay attention.”

Tim nodded a silent goodbye and walked out again.

Benson’s words came back to him in the car on the way back into the city. We need you to figure out how this damn thing works, Tim. What the long-term effects are, what kind of trouble we could get into, what our billionaire’s real agenda may be.

Oh, is that all? Surely they had to know themselves that to understand the Karma Booth meant finally learning the nature of existence itself. Maybe they did.

We need you to figure it out, Tim. Everything, everything.

He felt he was back on familiar ground, conducting an investigation that was international in scope yet had clear “suspects” to find and interrogate. This specter of a woman who had slipped from the 1920s into their own century—she must know things. Mary Ash did but either couldn’t or didn’t want to communicate them with him and the rest of the world, at least not yet. Without a doubt Orlando Braithewaite knew things, if only Tim could find him to ask his questions.

That’s right, they say you met him once.

Braithewaite.

Had some kind of enlightening special meeting with him and your dad.

He had lied to Benson. A small lie, but a lie nonetheless. It had indeed been a special meeting, back when he was a boy. But his father hadn’t been present at the time.

Tim had been nine years old. Old enough to know who the Great Man was, and the touchstone of that experience prompted him to follow the billionaire’s career in the news ever since. It was almost as if he felt a vague curiosity or obligation to keep track of a notable relative. The software developments of Braithewaite’s computer corporation. The acquisition of rare works of Leonardo da Vinci by one of his foundations, to be donated to a modest school for girls in Pakistan. The astounding development of yet another Braithewaite foundation, setting up a research facility in Norfolk, England, where a lichen-like biomaterial organism would grow into a livable structure decades and decades into the future.

And now here Braithewaite was again, back on the world’s radar. Tim couldn’t help but feel that Braithewaite had unleashed on the world an alchemist’s trick, what looked like blindingly bright gold but was, in fact, a lead anvil of new responsibilities and new horrors.

He got into town, checked his messages and emails with Matilda, and it didn’t surprise him at all when the office receptionist for Orlando Braithewaite told him she would pass on his message, but that he shouldn’t expect to get an appointment. Mr. Braithewaite wouldn’t care that Timothy Cale was calling on behalf of the White House. Mr. Braithewaite didn’t have to care because he was in Africa. It afforded him the luxury of keeping the arrogant, developed world at a distance, the same way the developed West had ignored the continent for decades.

Tim decided the only thing he could do was besiege the man’s personal assistant in New York with messages and more and more requests. But of course, eventually, he would have to go to Africa. A trip there would be such a small thing. Especially to find out what waited beyond the whole world.

He had been nine. Though his father didn’t like to travel and he absolutely hated flying, one of Braithewaite’s companies had thrown enough money at his dad to lure him out to Thailand, of all places. Tim had begged to go with him, his imagination so easily fired by exotic locales, and since it was summer and the boy was already fairly independent, Henry Cale had caved in, while Tim’s mom had stayed at home. Thailand was lush and green and humid, and there was plenty to dazzle an impressionable nine-year-old boy.

The project his father was working on had to do with robotics—mimicry of animal movement to get machines to be more graceful. Most people would have accepted that purpose, but even then, Tim was suspicious. “But Dad, what’s it all for?”

“What do you mean, kiddo?”

“Well, does this Braithewaite guy want ’em for weapons to sell to the Pentagon or give everybody a robo-butler or what?”

His father had laughed. “I actually don’t know, son. If you got enough money, you can pay guys like me to tinker around and figure out what you want to do after.”

Fair enough. A long flight to London then their connecting flight to Bangkok and then a trip by car to a remote spot in the vast green expanse of jungle and rainforest. There was the lab complex, a neat row of bungalows for senior staff like his dad, and a village about a mile up the dusty road. It wasn’t long before his father had to leave him to amuse himself. It was fun for a couple of days to watch the whrrring and screeching steel beetles and animatronic dogs scuttle around a gravel and sand courtyard for a while. But the novelty soon wore off, and Tim turned to his packed books and to exploring the village. When he had got his fill of the strange looks of the local people, he trudged and crunched his way through the magnificent vegetation.

After a while, he learned to pick his way quietly and more carefully because he realized if he did, he would take more in; fabulous insects and animals that wouldn’t start at his approach. On the fourteenth day of his trip, he gasped in surprise as he spotted a great hornbill on a low tree branch. Wow. The most stunningly vivid yellow, white and black bill, reminding him a lot of a toucan, and according to his travel guide, the bird not only ate figs and insects, but it would even hunt small squirrels and birds. It looked to be hunting a gecko right at that moment.