The Karma Booth

“Benson, listen to me,” Tim tried again. “I’m not a physicist or a medical doctor, but it baffles me that I should be the only person waving the red flag here. Let’s say these things work properly—they bring back a victim while they execute the murderer. Then we have physical laws of Nature that may actually follow a moral principle. Can you wrap your head around that one? Because I can’t!”

Benson licked his lips, eyes downcast, clearly wanting to speak some truth to the issue. “Tim, listen, the Booth can still be used,” he said slowly. “If it does follow a moral principle then we have scientific means to guide us in—”

Tim cut through him brutally. “Project past your wishful thinking. The Booth has this enormous power. It was built—by a man or a team—somewhere. That means somebody already has insight into how these mind-boggling principles work. They may even be able to manipulate these principles, whatever they are. You comfortable with that one, too?”

Benson allowed himself another long pause to consider. “Maybe that’s why the tech is a gift. The responsibility is so huge.”

“So I’ll ask again: Who gave it to you?”

“Orlando Braithewaite.” Benson waited for the surprise then nodded as he saw something else on Tim’s face. “That’s right, they say you met him once. Had some kind of enlightening special meeting with him and your dad.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it that.”

Benson shrugged. “Call it whatever you want. Find him, and you’ll get your answers.”

“It’s not like I have Braithewaite on speed dial and can get an appointment.”

“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 (#u857d0de1-d5fe-5a18-9aa6-1c5e02da8da3)

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.