Читать книгу The Karma Booth - Jeff Pearce - Страница 9

The start of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The ends of the First and Second World Wars.

The polio vaccine.

The John F. Kennedy assassination.

The announcement of Mary Ash’s return was added to a unique and truly exclusive catalogue, each entry a marker of when people around the world took stock of their era and their place in it. The Apollo Moon landing. The horror of 9/11. Where were you when you heard? What were you doing when this happened? A murderer had been executed, which was nothing new, but for the first time in history, his victim had come back after this was done.

The media dubbed the transposition equipment “The Karma Booth”—ignoring completely that two booths were used in the procedure.

A couple of fundamentalist Muslim clerics in London were asked to comment on the Karma Booth and promised it would be exposed eventually as a fraud. Mullahs in Iran’s Assembly of Experts went further, calling it the work of the “Great Satan” and an abomination that could undo the work of countless martyrs. The logic of this official statement was reported without much critical commentary in the West.

The Vatican withheld its judgment for a week and three days. Then at a Mass at St. Peter’s, the Pope made a reference to “a supposed scientific development that defies the natural balance of Holy Creation.” The condemnation was somewhat veiled, but in a later communiqué, the Vatican openly called for the booths to be dismantled and destroyed as an aberration against God and Nature.

Two simultaneous riots broke out near the Quai D’Orsay in Paris and in one of its more infamous banlieues, its lower-income immigrant suburbs, simply because of an Internet rumor. Word had spread that the United States government was willing to export the booth technology to several of its key allies. By the time the French government issued a denial, two policemen were severely injured and five immigrants from Mali and Algeria were dead.

Back in the States, several high-placed Republicans quickly suggested a bill be rushed through Congress that would put Karma Booth executions under federal authority. The rationale was that the Booth would prove too attractive for the state judicial system to resist, and technology of this magnitude should not be needlessly duplicated and therefore left open to potential abuse. The states’ rights argument barely rose above a whisper.

A story ran in the Los Angeles Times that several Iraq War veterans in Oregon were fleeing across the border to Canada, fearing that the Booth would be used on them if they were ever found guilty of war crimes.

Nothing had changed. And yet everything had changed. Because of fear, because of expectations, because the Karma Booth existed, because a new way of seeing had been created—even if the view was limited and it obscured and raised more questions than it answered. Nothing had changed, except for the possibility that certain people who were murdered could possibly one day be brought back to life.

And none of them would be prophets.

For the sake of security and to cope with the flood tide of media attention, the Karma Booth was carted onto a moving van and relocated to a federal building in White Plains. It was here that Tim, at Gary Weintraub’s invitation, saw the second use of the Booth. Weintraub was deliberately evasive over who the selected murderer was or who the scientists expected to emerge as the resurrected victim. “Let’s just see what happens.”

Tim was late in getting his BMW on the road to Westchester, and only moments after he arrived and showed his ID to the guards outside the test room, he walked in as the process was unfolding. Once again, light carved into the body of a death row inmate, revealing a fissure of amazingly bright pinpoints and whorls inside—and then there was that revolting odor that washed through the room like an abattoir stench. There was enough of the horrified inmate for Tim to identify who was being torn apart. He recognized the young face, the shark-like dark eyes and the peach fuzz stubble on the upper lip and chin.

It was Cody James, eighteen, and for three days of a single week about six months ago, he had been famous—particularly in Texas. In Austin, he had stolen a shotgun and a 9mm Glock pistol from the locked storage case at the home of a friend, whose father was a police officer. He then showed up at his old high school and began shooting. But unlike other school rampages and massacres, Cody James’s rage was not that of a nihilistic, disaffected outsider. He was considered a gentle, well-mannered boy. He played guard on the school’s championship-winning basketball team and was generally deemed an average if not always motivated student. No, something else had set him off.

At the moment, however, his torment and his grudges didn’t seem to matter because his face and body were becoming comet trails and nebulae, changing to tiny stars and dazzling, colored rings. And then a blinding whiteness filled the chamber, gradually fading until all that he was disappeared.

Tim walked briskly over to Gary Weintraub, his friend standing beside the arrogant young neurologist, Miller, watching another couple of scientists work the controls. “Gary, you picked Cody James?”

It was Miller who rose to the defense. “We didn’t pick Cody James, man,” he said testily, running a hand through his halo of unruly brown hair. His worn sneaker tapped the floor tile impatiently as he kept one eye on the Karma Booth chambers. “We picked Geoff Shackleton, the geography teacher he blew away in a cafeteria. His doctor says he was healthy. Forty-two years old, jogged to the park every weekday morning, no psychological or cardiovascular issues we might have to think about. You know…the shock of coming back and everything. And then you got—”

“Not my point,” snapped Tim, who went back to addressing Weintraub. “Gary, do you remember the story on the news?”

Weintraub looked like he was going to answer, then made a half-hearted shrug and took out a cloth to polish his spectacles. His round, normally jovial face went blank. He either couldn’t recall the details or didn’t want to admit he knew them. In the second chamber, bright light was flashing and made its familiar strobe pattern behind the tinted glass. The “secondary effect” had begun.

Tim knew the details of the school rampage well enough. They were sordid tabloid fare, all luridly chronicled before the trial of Cody James. It soon emerged that the young man was friends with one of the school’s seniors, Dustin “Dusty” Cavanaugh, who was sleeping with his English teacher—who also happened to be Geoff Shackleton’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Nicole. Dustin Cavanaugh was known around school as “Perv” even without his classmates learning about his affair with a teacher. Young Cavanaugh’s sealed juvenile record also somehow made it into the headlines. The most pertinent details involved how at the age of fourteen, he sexually molested both a boy of twelve and a girl who was thirteen years old.

He then played matchmaker between Cody James and Nicole Shackleton, who relieved him of his virginity. But after Cody slept with the teacher, Dustin insisted his friend repay him for the experience by sleeping with him in front of Nicole, who allegedly would find it “hot.”

Cody, feeling used and humiliated, as well as sexually threatened, went to fetch the guns.

Dustin Cavanaugh stopped laughing when the bullets slammed into his chest, but he lived because Cody hesitated as he pulled the trigger, fouling up his aim. He quickly regained his grim resolve and shot Amber Janssen, who was screaming and pulling out her phone as she rushed to the swinging doors. She survived, but was paralyzed from the waist down.

Geoff Shackleton had no idea what sexual intrigues were going on involving his wife and just happened to be in the cafeteria, talking to a fellow teacher about the latest revised curriculum. He went to tackle Cody, who killed him on the spot with a blast that took off a third of the teacher’s skull, leaving a gruesome stain of blood on the floor with tiny bits of bone and brain matter. Cody fired two more shots to keep everyone back and afraid, and then he abandoned the rifle to go hunt for Nicole with the pistol.

The vice-principal of the school had heard the shots, shouted to a student to call 911 on her cell phone, then smashed a trophy case and grabbed a hockey stick from a display. He slashed the stick across Cody James’s head as the boy stepped out of the cafeteria, knocking him down and making him drop the gun. Two of Cody’s football teammates nearly beat him to death before the vice-principal shouted for them to stop.

Nicole Shackleton was sent to prison for the statutory rape involving Dustin Cavanaugh, who just barely escaped life beyond bars himself over a female student stepping forward with a rape charge that didn’t stick for lack of evidence. At her trial, Nicole claimed that her husband had been a closeted homosexual who only needed her for social appearances, and in her sexual frustration, she had turned to a student. It didn’t really matter what Geoff Shackleton’s proclivities were; he was dead, and she was going to jail.

But now he was alive, naked and disoriented, half-stumbling out of the second chamber as the doctors ran up with a hospital gown and a syringe containing a sedative. Geoff Shackleton was a man entering middle age with a small paunch, a little gray at his temples. His eyes wide, he now asked, “Where…?”

More words formed on his lips, but he lost consciousness. The sedative wasn’t really required.

“He’s okay,” said Miller. Then with less confidence: “He looks okay. He’ll be okay…”

He ruffled his hair again and kicked the floor with a sneaker, jubilant that the Karma Booth had demonstrated it would consistently work. Weintraub merely peered through his spectacles, quietly absorbed as if he were watching fruit flies eating a plate of grapes.

They were already wheeling Geoff Shackleton out to the new emergency ward set up for arrivals down the hall.

Tim turned once more to Weintraub and Miller. “You do realize the life you’ve given back is in complete tatters! From what I’ve read, the poor bastard had no idea his wife was fucking students. He wasn’t gay or cruising bus stations as she claimed, but his rep at his workplace—and oh, keep in mind the guy worked down in Texas as a teacher—is ruined!”

Miller was indifferent. “Come on! All that stuff would have come out if he had lived. She would have said the same shit.”

“You don’t know that!” countered Tim. “And he would have been there to defend himself against her accusations. He tried to stop Cody James at the school, and he probably would have been treated like a hero, which would have mitigated her bullshit. The guy’s going to be devastated when he learns his wife is partly responsible for the whole nightmare!”

“And again,” said Weintraub patiently, “the man still would have had to face those unpleasant facts had he simply been wounded. What would you have me say, Tim? Do I personally believe Nicole Shackleton and that young man, Cavanaugh, share responsibility? Without question, of course. But the wife and that boy didn’t go collect firearms and shoot them in a crowded school—Cody James did.” “Gary, you’re missing the point,” said Tim. “I don’t have sympathy for that boy. The shrinks called him disturbed and unbalanced, and my heart doesn’t weep for him at all. The girl he shot in the lunchroom never did a damn thing to him, and the witnesses say the little monster laughed. He got a kick out of causing destruction and pain. I don’t know what your Karma Booth is but I don’t think it’s justice! That girl, what’s her name, Amber… Amber Janssen. She’ll never walk again. What does the Booth do for her?”

Miller stopped tapping his sneaker and folded his arms. In a calm and reasonable voice, he answered, “Nothing—you’re right. So you want to ignore what we can do for this guy? Shackleton is alive, and he will think, he’ll feel, he’ll go on with his existence despite the time gap.”

“But we’re not talking about minutes, we’re talking about months, and he could be different,” said Tim. Again, he appealed to Weintraub. “I went and saw Mary Ash, Gary. She’s not the same person.”

“Jesus, you know this after meeting her for the first time?” scoffed Miller.

“Her own mother is afraid of her.”

Tim broke off, realizing there was no point. The neurologist wasn’t in the mood to listen. Besides, he was learning nothing from this argument and something new had occurred to him—something he had almost forgotten in the light show of the Booth chambers.

“Hold on. Cody James hadn’t exhausted all his death row appeals.”

Weintraub and Miller exchanged a look, but both were curiously silent.

“How did you speed up the legal process?” asked Tim. He realized as he finished the question, he had his answer already. “You didn’t, did you? You didn’t have to. Did they just give you carte blanche to go ahead and use it for convictions?”

Still, the two scientists said nothing. At last, Weintraub shook his stubby fingers in a gesturing circle, confessing, “They’ve sanctioned the Booth for cases where the murders are beyond any factual mitigation or doubt, and yes, I know, Tim, you’ll ask who decides that, but we get authorization from the Attorney General. Look, given that you remember so much about the Cody James case, you must know that students at the school caught the shooting on their phone cams. He did it. He was clearly guilty. The appeals were nothing but a formality.”

“Oh God, Gary, is that why you did it?”

Weintraub sighed. “We needed to know.”

Tim understood: to know if the Karma Booth worked on its own laws, not on the laws of Man. And now they had their answer.

The Karma Booth remained a constant source of news, near-news and speculation. You couldn’t turn on the TV anymore without hearing discussion about it. It filled blogs and sold magazines. It inspired sick jokes on late night talk show monologues.

Two weeks after the lights flashed and dazzled in the test room in White Plains, Tim walked down Sixth Avenue in New York with Michael Benson, the under-secretary of Homeland Security who had got him involved. Benson was five years older than him, with a tuft of lank black hair at the front of his scalp while the rest had long since retreated. The man’s vanity was focused on his body, and he often bragged about four games of racquetball a week and his morning jogs.

“Little shit from the Congressional page staff beat me,” laughed Benson, rubbing the hair on the back of his head, still wet from his sports club’s shower. “Better play a couple more times a week.”

“What’s surprising is that you think you can still slaughter seventeen-year-olds on the court,” replied Tim.

“You go ahead and grow old gracefully, pal. I’m going to fight it every step of the way.”

Tim had known the exec as an ambitious player who had moved up through the management ranks of the CIA and then saw the potential in Homeland’s growing new department. It didn’t surprise him at all that Benson was taking point over something as controversial and explosive as the Karma Booth. The man had always liked keeping a hand in plots to hurt the credibility of the latest Saddam or Osama, and his ego loved a consult from State over how to flatter the newest French prime minister. The Karma Booth offered power over life and death—impossible for a political addict to resist.

“Enough chit-chat about your impending mid-life crisis,” said Tim. “Let’s talk about this rush you and your pals in the corridors of power have to set off a bomb.”

“What can I say, Tim? The Republicans had the Senate seats to pass the bill. It was rushed right through committee.”

“Then I’m even happier you couldn’t persuade me to move to Washington.”

It was a regular friendly and not-so friendly duel between them whenever he was summoned to the Beltway. He had no desire whatsoever to live in the capital. Benson always argued it would make life easier… for him. Tim always reminded him that he charged enough that his clients could, and should, damn well come to New York.

“So they’ve decided to use it, even though they still don’t know how it works.”

Benson was philosophical. “Nobody is ever sure how the biggest scientific breakthroughs—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.” Tim sighed wearily, knowing Benson was about to drag out the penicillin defense again. He was getting so tired of that one. “So I take it my services are no longer needed. You certainly don’t need an ethics assessment.”

Benson pursed his lips, surprised. “On the contrary. We need your assessment more than ever now.”

“What on earth for?” Tim asked gently. And Benson’s face told him it was just as he feared. The final decider was politics. The technology had to be used because they did have it. He struggled for another tack. If they wanted him to do his job, they could at least clear a path for him.

“Look, if you don’t know how it works then tell me where you got the technology from. And I’m not going to buy that it’s the latest tech toy from the NSA or CIA.”

“It’s not,” said Benson, looking mildly embarrassed. “I suppose the best way to categorize it is… It was a gift.”

“A gift? A gift from who?”

“Does it matter?”

“You’re kidding, right?” replied Tim. “You’re telling me an earth-shattering technology is just given to American authorities? And no one bothers to do the necessary homework or get briefed on what it—”

“Weintraub was briefed,” Benson said tightly.

“He knew?” And as Benson nodded, Tim wondered aloud, “I cannot believe the government gave him carte blanche like this. How could they?”

He ran his hand through the straw-blond comma of hair over his forehead, always a classic sign that he was trying to work something through. It was unbelievable. The technology would be fascinating no matter how the booths had been developed, but to learn of this naïve, irresponsible adoption of them and then blindly putting them to use—

“Weintraub made his case for human trials,” Benson was saying.

“How? How could he make a case for human trials with absolutely no empirical evidence of his own to demonstrate what they can do?”

“The way I hear it, our good doctor told the cabinet secretaries something like this: ‘Put aside all the conspiracy theories, all the bullshit. Just imagine for a moment that there’s incontrovertible evidence that Oswald did shoot JFK in Dallas. And that you have the Karma Booth to fix that.”

Tim sighed in disbelief. “Aw, come on, that doesn’t fly. That whole hypothetical shows you exactly what problems we’re going to get with this thing. There are still doubts to this very day over Oswald’s involvement. Great! What happens when you do have a case that sparks public outrage but the evidence isn’t clear-cut?”

Benson offered a lopsided smirk. “Come on, Tim, that’s why they invented appeals. Yes, I know they fast-tracked the Cody James case, but they’ll come up with a new process. What? You think if they fried Oswald, and he didn’t do it—”

“Go ahead, tell me what happens.”

“Nothing happens!”

“Nothing happens? You’re sure? How do you know? How can you possibly know, Benson, until it happens?”

And as he saw Benson grapple with that one, he nudged the man’s elbow, urging them to keep walking. The walking always helped him to think. He just wished it worked for others. He didn’t want to be distracted into the tired arguments for or against capital punishment. Those in the pro-Booth camp had the ultimate trump card, and yet no one was pausing over the enormity of a far more humbling truth of the machines.

“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.”