The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  “Zorich!” he called.

  He didn’t bother to wait for an answer. The surge of adrenaline was making him sweat though he had done little so far, and he tried not to think of the Russian’s blade sinking into him if he failed to pay attention. Stupid to die like that, he told himself. It’ll only happen if you don’t watch out, and she’s hurt back there, and this psycho mercenary should have some answers so don’t fuck this up. Don’t let him get out.

  “Zorich?”

  One second, two.

  “What do you want, Cale?”

  So. I know him, and he does know me.

  Zorich’s English was reasonably fluent, but with the vowels stretched. He asked again, “What do you want, Cale?”

  “What do you want with the artist?”

  “Go fuck yourself, American! You think I explain myself to you?”

  “You want to kill her for yourself or for Limonov?” asked Tim. He followed the Russian’s voice back towards Political Science and History. “Which is it, Zorich? I’m guessing you’re on a chore for Limonov. I mean, you followed him to every crater of hell around the world, so why not do one more errand for him, right?”

  “He will free us!”

  “Free you?” asked Tim, genuinely mystified. “What the hell is Viktor Limonov going to free you from, Zorich? He’s on the run! What, you think he’s indestructible or something after the Booth? They’ll just shoot him or gas him or—”

  The knife flew and sunk into a book past his left ear. Son of a bitch.

  “You talk too much, Cale.”

  Tim rounded a corner, raising the Glock. Zorich had made the mistake of going down an aisle with no way out.

  “He didn’t free Ana Tvardovsky, did he?” asked Tim, holding the gun level at the Russian.

  Zorich was backed against a bookshelf but looked coiled, ready to spring.

  All you have to do is hold him here, thought Tim. You told Crystal you’ll just delay, you won’t fight.

  There were sirens in the distance. Sirens were good. He took a deep breath and tried to hold the gun steady, but the Glock shook in his hand with the tension of the moment, and Zorich smiled.

  “Whatever Ana Tvardovsky was or could be is gone because she went on that fool’s errand with you,” said Tim. “And that was for Limonov, too, wasn’t it? That was all in the name of whatever bullshit he sold you.”

  “You never fire gun in your life, have you, Cale?” chuckled Zorich.

  “It’s simple, I press the trigger,” bluffed Tim. “Like you change the channel on your remote.”

  “And you think that will finish me, yes?” asked Zorich.

  “You were an animal before, right? Like Nickelbaum. So you’ll be an animal again. Or my guess—something lower.”

  Zorich took a step, still looking as if his whole body was loaded for a desperate tackle. “Clever, clever! You learn a couple of things.”

  “Just stay right there,” warned Tim.

  “Do you have any idea of how ignorant you really are about existence?” demanded Zorich. “Most everybody—they forget. They do not know. You do not know what you were before—or what you were before that and before that and so on and so forth! Now imagine you remember.”

  He took another bold step.

  “Be smart,” said Tim. “Care about this life you have in this second. Because I will shoot you, asshole!”

  “You see on television, Cale? When animals go insane and attack human being for no reason? Out of blue, they kill and need to be put down. You never wonder why that is? Think of waking up in lower consciousness, knowing where you are…”

  And Tim tried to keep his hand steady, but still he took a step back to keep the distance. Yes, he could imagine it. He knew what the Russian was driving at. Maybe it was true. Maybe most people didn’t remember, they couldn’t know. And if there was an order to things, it stood to reason that the slate was wiped clean, memory gone. But suppose there were ones who did remember? Imagine your soul, your sentience still with you as you were startled awake in a lower incarnation.

  “Trapped in body of what you call it? Snail. Or ape. Or leopard. Whatever. You know that you were once human and are now in this form.”

  He took another step forward.

  Trapped, thought Tim. A human mind suddenly aware of where it was while surrounded by creatures that communicated and filled their needs on regular animal terms. Surrounded by beasts, living their beast lives, and you are trapped. With them. A mind trapped with a soul that self-aware would go mad. He thought of the Montana grizzly making its rogue attack…

  Yes—yes, the news had reports almost every week these days of such senseless, unpredictable rampages. A gentle elephant at a zoo in California tramples the handler who cared for it for years. A killer whale swims into shallow waters to turn on a vacationing bather for no apparent reason.

  “Don’t you wonder, Cale?” taunted Zorich. “They kill because they need to die. We become desperate, mad—locked in lower forms of incarnation. Murder is the door out.”

  “Maybe that’s how you climbed up to the next rung,” answered Tim, and he willed his arm to stop shaking, to hold the gun level. “But hey, you’re also insane. Now step back, damn it!”

  “You know these things, these incredible things,” said Zorich, shaking his head at him as if Tim were the fool. “I remember! I know! And you dare ask me why I follow that man?”

  “Last warning, maniac.”

  “I don’t fear death anymore, Cale. I fear the cycle. But he is not part of it, and so he can free us. Shoot me, and it doesn’t end. It delays. Why don’t I prove it to you?”

  “Great, you mean I have to wait around while you grow up in your next form? Step back!”

  “No, I think you will tell me from your next incarnation!”

  The Russian let out a cruel laugh as the cloth of the windbreaker’s pocket bulged out, and Tim suddenly understood he’d been played all along. Zorich was only waiting for his moment. Tim had been spellbound by his relentless steps, when all Zorich wanted to do was to slip his hand into his jacket—

  The shot was impossibly loud, bursting through the cotton and polyblend of the jacket, but Tim ducked out of the room at the last second, cursing himself for a fool. Idiot. Sucked you in. But what he said… The madness of a trapped soul in lower forms.

  He needed to duck back to find Zorich again and aim, but as he made his quick shuffle, an impossibly strong hand gripped his wrist and pushed up, and his shot went wild. Zorich was bellowing, using his body weight to ram Tim into a set of shelves, and he was too strong, far too strong, and the gun was twisted out of Tim’s grip, skidding under a book trolley. Zorich was a mercenary, a trained assassin and soldier for hire, and there was no contest. Tim felt a blow in his stomach, and he doubled-over, suddenly desperate for air, and then the Russian was hurling him across the room. Tim fell in a heap, with books in a landslide striking him in the head and on the arms. And then Zorich was on top of him, his big hands around his throat, his teeth bared as he strangled him…

  The blade of Crystal’s hand swung like a cleaver into the side of Zorich’s neck, and anybody else would have fallen in a heap. Zorich staggered, but he didn’t collapse. Crystal whipped her leg in a blur, and her boot nailed the Russian in the ribs, and that was what finally got him off Tim. He roared in pain and fresh rage, standing up, ready to fight the detective. Tim was in a daze, coughing, gulping air and rolling on his side. He watched as Crystal leaned against a bookshelf, her service Glock now in one hand, the other cradling her slashed belly.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she told the Russian. Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact. She was making it clear. She wasn’t Tim; she wouldn’t hesitate.

  Zorich gambled. The Glock roared, and then he was staring up at nothing as his jacket bloomed with the wet, crimson petals of flowing blood.

  Tim tried to get to his feet. Crystal hissed through her teeth, feeling the pain of the knife slash.

  “If you want to borr
ow my things, make sure you hang onto them,” she told him, breathing hard. “I had to crawl on the floor to get this back. Your friend should dust his place more.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell him,” promised Tim.

  Zorich lay gurgling in pain, and he didn’t have long—Tim didn’t need to be a doctor to see that. Jesus, how awful to die like this, bleeding life away, thanks to a gunshot.

  “This wasn’t necessary,” mumbled Tim. It sounded insipid in his own ears, but he didn’t know what else to say. The Russian was dying in front of them.

  Zorich struggled to speak. “I won’t fall far. You think… I will? I have strength now… Grow old, Cale… Twenty… Twenty-five years…”

  Tim grabbed a dusty cloth off a shelf, needing something to put pressure on the wound, staunch the blood. Hopeless. He felt a hypocritical fool for even trying. But he had to try. If only for the sake of the information the thug might give them.

  “Grow old, Cale,” Zorich softly implored him again. “I’ll be somewhere… doesn’t… Doesn’t matter. I’ll wake up to the truth… again. And I’ll find you as an old… man, and slit your throat.”

  “Or maybe I’ll teach him how to shoot properly,” snapped Crystal.

  “Or maybe we get an ambulance, and you’ll rot in a cell,” said Tim.

  “No… No, we will win… He’ll find her, Cale… before…”

  Then Zorich was gone.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  All at once, it was pandemonium with the new shouting voices and the blue of the cruiser lights flashing along the walls and book spines. Crystal put up a fuss, but she finally lay down on an ambulance gurney, and then there were too many questions from policemen, Ron, paramedics…

  Tim’s mind was still busy with a pair of snow leopards in India from years ago, coming down from the mountains to tear open the throat of an old woman and a young man. An attack that was all too deliberate and coincidental.

  It was a two-hour wait at the hospital while Crystal was patched up in the emergency ward. He sat in one of those ugly molded plastic chairs, listening to a six-month-old baby cry, stuck with his own inner debate on Zorich’s revelation. Contemplating, brooding over those “locked in lower forms of incarnation”—and those who woke up and realized where they were and what had happened to them.

  What, he wondered, is truly behind a cat’s eyes? Cat brain, cat consciousness or something more? Were Hindus right that we commit genocide with every oblivious wave of the fly swatter? Too simple, and yet part of it was true according to Miller’s latest findings.

  He thought of the Russian’s final taunts. So Viktor Limonov was, indeed, keenly interested in finding Emily Derosier. Zorich and Tvardovsky had been his catspaws. So what did the war criminal need her for? Or was it that she was an enemy who could defeat him?

  The baby kept on crying. Who were you before you were this infant? Then there was Zorich’s pitiful threat, like a mafia don, to come back and avenge on Tim himself in twenty, twenty-five years. Zorich “feared the cycle,” yet he sounded sure he would be human in his next incarnation.

  A baby crying. An older couple bickering. In a distant corner, a ragged, filthy man held his gashed arm swathed in toilet paper and rocked back and forth, humming. His years in Europe had made Tim sympathetic to a national health care system, but he could have done without the interminable Soviet-era waiting periods you seemed to get with one. His cell phone rang.

  Tired, he was surprised to see it was Benson on the call-display, and then he reminded himself of the obvious: the man was six hours behind Paris. Not that Benson ever remembered that.

  “You know, I might have been sleeping.” He didn’t care if he sounded cranky. Crystal had saved his life yet again, now getting stitched back together, and he hadn’t even saved the situation by keeping Zorich until the cops swooped in.

  “Tim, what are you doing, going after Limonov? You asked to rush back to Paris so you could chase your socialite ghost! And track down those thugs at the Pompidou Center.”

  Tim groaned. He could tell Benson now or save it for a report. He didn’t feel like a late night debriefing. “We can multi-task, Benson. Why are you suddenly micro-managing your contractor?”

  Over the line, Benson let out a calculated weary sigh. Its effect was useless in swaying Tim’s confidence. “There are countless Interpol agents, not to mention assigned special agents of the FBI, staff for the International Courts of Justice, plus Christ knows how many other alphabet soup law enforcement types who can chase down Viktor Limonov. He’s not your assignment.”

  “He is my assignment,” said Tim patiently. “He’s killed at least two people resurrected from the Booth. He’s the only convicted murderer to be executed and not die. That dumps him squarely on my plate. I’d think you’d want me to track down this nutcase with the same zeal we had for Desmond Leary.”

  There was a pause on the line and then Benson’s voice came back, now more reasonable. “You’re right. I guess that wasn’t fair of me. Thought you might be stretching yourself too thin. Oh, and I’ve been trying to allocate you some additional resources.”

  I’ll bet, thought Tim. Into the phone, he said, “Thanks. But I still get to decide where and how I deploy those extra resources you send me. There’s a damn good reason I make my contracts airtight so that I’m calling the shots.”

  “Hey, Tim, come on! No one would ever to try to tell you how to do your job—”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “But come on, these are unusual circumstances. So whatever your contract said, buddy boy, the lawyers can sort that out when the smoke clears. Jesus, Tim, you sat in the Oval Office with the President basically telling you, ‘Don’t fuck it up.’ You think she didn’t tell us right after you left, ‘Don’t let him fuck it up?’ I’m sure the lady will want to know if you’ve made any headway in reaching Braithewaite.”

  Terrific. The one task he could definitely report no progress being made.

  “Not yet… It’s late here, Benson.”

  “Yeah, sure. Look, Tim, I’m on the five o’clock Saturday into de Gaulle airport. I need you to bring me up to speed by ten thirty that morning, and please don’t give me your regular shit that you’re busy. Try to be a team player for once in your fucking life, will you, man? Honestly, I’ve got your back, but I also got a job to do.”

  He made a quick goodnight and hung up.

  Tim shoved his cell back into his pocket. In retrospect, he should have expected this. The intrusion was probably overdue, even with the dubious “success” of taking one of the Karma Booths out of terrorist hands. Of course, Benson could have stuck his nose in far earlier. Was he rushing over now because of pressure from the White House? Tim doubted it. Melinda Grant was the kind of commander-in-chief who would have dialed Tim’s cell if she were unhappy with how the job was getting done.

  Saturday morning. Just as well. Benson would be coming after he was due to meet Emily Derosier at Au Dauphin on Thursday, assuming their artist showed up for her appointment. Maybe by then they’d have more information to placate their Washington handler.

  Benson’s timing still struck him as odd. And why shouldn’t they go after Limonov?

  Tim scribbled the 10:30 morning appointment into his day-planner and wondered if he shouldn’t place a couple of calls to trusted allies in DC to find out what might be going on.

  It was time to panic, as far as FBI Agent Gordon Fraser was concerned.

  They had warned him about Mary Ash, how creepy she could get and the disturbing things she could say, but no one had suggested she would become difficult regarding Protective Detail. From what Fraser had been told, the girl wanted protection, ostensibly from a man who no longer existed.

  Gordon Fraser had ten years invested with the Bureau. A black man who stood six foot two with a rugged frame, he had once had a shot at a professional basketball career until a minor tendon injury. He liked Protective Detail because it was not routine, though lately he’d been taking courses so that
he could move on to the white collar fraud unit (friends assured him it was a good career move). Fraser was known to be patient. He had a mortgage, a sixteen-year-old daughter who struggled with dyslexia, and he wasn’t at home as often as he liked, but in every personal activity or professional job, he prided himself on being committed to the moment.

  They had “given” him Mary Ash to look after thanks to his reputation for not being easily rattled or baited. Gordon Fraser was steady. He listened to traumatized witnesses without giving away too much of his personal life or letting himself get sucked into the vortex of their grief. He ignored the taunts and manipulative comments of the Klansmen, fanatical terrorists and prime time psychos he occasionally had to escort to facilities. He knew better. You take down what they say discreetly, but don’t engage. You do your job.

  Mary Ash, however, could grow things out of her hands. Horrific, bleating, misshapen things. And she had talked—incessantly—when Fraser walked by her side along New York’s Sixth Avenue.

  “Not India,” she’d muttered. “They’ll think it’s India because of him. Or somewhere closer in Europe, like her. Doesn’t have to be—doesn’t have to be at all. He’s still limited, but he’s got enough strength. September fifteenth. Olives are off the trees. The fridge is cold.”

  “Take it easy, Mary,” Fraser had said, with a calming hand on the girl’s shoulder.

  Stupid thing to do: agreeing to day trips out in the open, where any fool reporter could stroll up and complicate things or a whack job could appear with a gun. Word was that the parents couldn’t take it anymore—they had “thought it best” that Mary graduate to the next step in her recovery. And that meant the girl should move back to New York and try to find a new job as a graphic designer.

  In the time it had taken with continuances and motions for Mary Ash’s killer to be brought to trial, then convicted and to lose his only appeal, the girl’s old roommate had naturally found someone else to share their old apartment. But Sita had generously agreed to help locate a new one for Mary in Brooklyn and help her get back on her feet.