THE KARMA BOOTH

JEFF PEARCE

HarperVoyager an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2015

Copyright © Jeff Pearce 2015

Cover photographs © Shutterstock 2015, Cover design © HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd 2015

Jeff Pearce asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008101190

Version 2015-02-25

For Blair Cosgrove. My friend, my brother.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

About the Author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

They used the word execute for Emmett Nickelbaum, and even though he was the first to experience the procedure, no one would ever think of him as a pioneer. Emmett Nickelbaum was the first death row inmate to go. He was to be exterminated, eradicated, expunged.

They had a harder time describing what happened after the execution—and what terminology to use for the new arrival.

Emmett Nickelbaum was a thirty-eight-year-old mechanic. Caucasian, born and raised on the edge of Morningside Heights in New York City, back when it wasn’t impossible for a family to rent there, and he stood six foot four and had a build like a massive wall of solid, turn-of-the-century yellow brick. His coworkers at the garage where he worked—not his friends because he had no real friends—called him “The Fridge,” as in the old 1950s models with door handles like bank vaults. Nickelbaum had thinning hair and wire-mesh stubble, his disheveled features only adding to the intimidating effect he had on people. An effect he had discovered as a teenager and enjoyed right up to the day of his last crime. When he broke into the Queens home of one of his garage’s customers, she didn’t stand a chance.

Twenty-four-year-old graphic designer Mary Ash was only five foot one and weighed a mere hundred and ten pounds. Nickelbaum was a mountain in shadow that didn’t belong in the topography of her apartment, his huge palm covering her face and whipping her head into the wall with such force that the plaster broke.

The girl’s roommate Sita was away for a holiday week visiting relatives in Birmingham, England—a fact police were sure saved her life. Nickelbaum kept Mary Ash prisoner for seventy-two hours, during which time he raped her repeatedly and amputated two of her fingers with an electric turkey carver. It was Fourth of July weekend when Nickelbaum was at his most depraved, and no one heard Mary’s scream as the electrician’s tape, wet from her feverish terrified sweat and worn from her mouth straining to cry out, at last peeled away. Please, Mary Ash cried out. Please, and then please again, please until she died.

Nickelbaum didn’t mind at all filling in the details for police when they caught him. He had fantasized about causing Mary Ash pain, and the two police officers were sickened by the fact that under the cheap Formica table holding the Styrofoam coffee cups he had an erection as he described his victim’s last moments. There had been brief controversy when Nickelbaum was selected to participate in a college study (for which his family members would be paid), answering questionnaires from psychologists on what made him tick. The study had been canceled after an embarrassing article in the Times. Then Emmett Nickelbaum turned up as a candidate for a far more unusual research project that didn’t hit the papers and the TV news. Not then. And he would participate whether he liked it or not.

His execution was not formally announced, so there were no placards for or against his demise outside Sullivan Correction Facility in Fallsburg.

The booths. The booths taught Emmett Nickelbaum fear.

For the first time in his life, he understood that his fingers weren’t tweezers designed to pincer shrieking, tiny, helpless things begging for their lives. Beads of sweat polished his bare forehead under the receding hairline, and his mouth opened wide. His limbs were flailing in the shackles, because there were two booths ahead of him, and that suggested something would be done to him that would make him into something else.

“What is this?” he asked. “What the fuck is this?” Again, his bass voice climbed octaves with his terror: “What’s going on? You don’t need that thing for a lethal injection, man! I just lie on a table, and they gimme a fuckin’ needle! Where’s the needle—where’s the fuckin…? What is this?”

Nobody offered him an answer. No one cared particularly about Emmett Nickelbaum’s comfort, certainly not whether he left this world at peace with his personal god or sobbing for his mother. His shackles were locked to the rail inside the booth on the left. A note was made that a minor sedative should make the prisoner more controllable during the final transfer, but the use of shackles wouldn’t affect the procedure at all. Emmett Nickelbaum would not reappear like a magician’s bunny in the second booth on the right.

Some of the witnesses felt an abstract relief that no pain was supposed to be experienced in the final few seconds of life (but no one asked to be sure for the sake of the monster forced into the chamber). As Emmett Nickelbaum stared wide-eyed through the blue tinted window of the booth—a dull anti-climactic chamber with a thick index of specially tinted glass—he did, indeed, feel dread.

Faces with spectacles studied him with an impersonal, clinical detachment—the same kind of detachment Nickelbaum gave Mary Ash as he tortured her, as he watched her face run a gamut of expressions of agony. Then a brilliant white light filled the booth, faintly tinged with a bluish hue. No one could mistake it for a beam from Heaven.

Instead, the light seemed to carve his body, split it open to show a darkness with pinpoints inside. There were whorls, nebulae; yet even this dazzling view was perverted with flashes of gangrenous skin, flesh made necrotic by whatever technical or divine force scooped him from the inside out. And the smell… The smell was horrible, as if rot had been amplified and sped up on a dial and then served up as a dish from a cold meat locker.

But they were told—

They were told it wasn’t supposed to be a painful procedure.

No one said a word, watching from thirty feet away. It was agreed later that the inmate had screamed because of primitive terror, fear of death—not actual physical trauma. There was nothing, of course, to substantiate this assertion. The scientists simply wanted to believe it.

They also thought they would find something. Remains. Granules. Something. They didn’t.

It would be a good day when Emmett Nickelbaum left the Earth, but that wasn’t the only reason.

The light effect started in the second booth as they were busy examining the first. No one had typed on a keyboard, flicked a switch, turned a knob—done anything at all. No one had adjusted or touched the equipment or even considered it. They had been told to expect “a secondary effect” (whatever that meant), and that the booth on the right-hand side existed to contain this… whatever it was.

The whorls and flashes and peculiar reflections, the fading in and out of skin pigments, went on and on for the fascinated audience, and there was a different odor this time, defying description. Not a stench, thank God. Not a waft of destruction. Nobody dared to interrupt the process, even though none of them had no idea how long it would go on. And when it finished at last, they had company.

The researchers stepped forward even as the nude, pitiful figure backed up against the wall of the booth. A woman. Her head turned with feral, desperate sharpness, the eyes as frightened as those of Nickelbaum, but with the haunted blankness of a wandering refugee. Unwashed brown hair hung in her eyes, and when the girl’s hand lifted to touch the glass—

“Sweet Jesus, it’s her!” yelled one of the researchers. “It’s her, it’s her! It’s really her!”

The hand had two small stumps caked with blood. Two missing fingers.

Mary Ash was back among the living.

Doctors rushed forward now, the room filling with rapid conversation addressed to no one specific. Orders and suggestions were all fired at once but only a precious few had the good sense to take action. Get her a gown. Get her a chair. For Christ’s sake, doctor, shouldn’t we get her to the prison infirmary? Noise from almost everyone except the returning victim herself.

Nickelbaum’s execution had involved an experimental method, so it had been thought prudent not to invite members of the Ash family as witnesses. That meant her parents, her older brother who lived in Seattle—all the members of the Ash family—were absent for Mary’s return from the dead. Her eyes darted from face to face of these strangers in front of her as she whimpered in shock. Her hands were up in a fetal prayer with her arms close to her body, too afraid even for the modesty of the gown.

“Bbbbaaabbaaa… Bbbaaa!”

She could manage nothing else for the next fifteen hours. The prison doctor gave her a sedative that put her to sleep, during which time the researchers and physicians and experts all decided Mary Ash should be transported back to New York City. She would be monitored and kept in protective custody, while her parents would be contacted and trusted to help Mary recover.

No one even knew who should make the announcement or how to announce what had happened. How do you announce a miracle anyway?

Three days before:

There was the usual ripple of chatter at the beginning. It was the moment when a lecture hall is no different than a movie house. But as the man at the front took his place near the podium, the students settled down.

The professor would have provoked interest even if he hadn’t been waiting to speak. For one thing, he didn’t wear the typical faculty uniform of tweedy blazer with jeans. His suit was a three–thousand-dollar Armani—tailored, of course. And to some, he looked far younger than expected. Many guessed he was about thirty-five years old. He was, in fact, forty-two. The blond hair was beginning to thin, but with the delicacy of his full lips and high cheekbones, he looked boyish. If he had smiled, the effect would have taken yet more years off his face. But he looked at them now with a severe, almost imperious gaze.

This was Professor Timothy Cale, and each semester, his courses on political science were oversubscribed.

“We participate,” he started softly, “because we trust.”

There was a long pause, and the students didn’t look terribly impressed with this opener. A faint cough came from the back of the hall. Then the professor’s voice rose, filling the room as if every one of them was insultingly dense not to comprehend what he’d just told them.

“We participate because we trust,” he repeated.

Now they were all focused, each one of them very still in his or her seat, sharply aware they had better keep their attention.

“This room is a new country,” the professor went on, now stepping away from the podium. He walked with expansive, long strides, and they imagined he really did intend to claim the room as some obscure sovereign nation. The voice kept hitting them with bullets of staccato emphasis. “I’ve told you before: every day you walk in here, you will surrender your assumptions to my baggage check of your ignorance, which I assure you is monumental.”

Then Timothy Cale stepped out of the front area and walked briskly up a couple of steps into the aisle between the seats. He stopped at the second row and yanked a book from the little desk of a student, holding it up for all the others to see.

“Look at this, a biography of Chairman Mao,” explained the professor, as he walked down towards the podium. “Good ol’ Mao Zedong. ‘Power comes from the barrel of a gun.’ Oh, really? Bullshit.”

He made a point of tossing the book into a trashcan.

“If that was all there was to it, there wouldn’t be any literature. Any innovation—hell, there would be no change at all. People—we, the governed—may grant or withhold the one thing that cannot be stolen: our trust. We participate because we trust. And we will trust when we can participate. So how do we? How do you define yourself as a citizen? Machiavelli did not just write The Prince. In his Discourses, he explained that—”

A cell phone erupted in the middle aisles, obnoxiously playing a hip-hop mix. Tim Cale glowered at the twenty-five-year-old football linebacker in the vividly bright polo shirt and track pants.

“Mr. Harding, please bring that down to the front.”

The student fumbled with the phone. “I’ll turn it off, sorry—”

“No, Mr. Harding. Bring it here.”

Shamefaced, the football star came forward like a ten-year-old caught chewing gum. He surrendered the phone to his professor, who efficiently and quickly removed the SIM card and smashed both it and the phone.

“Hey, that’s my fucking phone, man! You know how much it cost?”

“Far less than what your father paid for your wasted education, Mr. Harding,” the young-looking professor answered. “And this new land that you’re in is not a democracy.”

But the student didn’t know when to quit. “New country? So you can do what you like? Fuck that! It’s ridiculous!”

Tim shoved his hands into the pockets of his gray trousers and strolled away from the furious linebacker. He was talking to the others now. “Is it so ridiculous? Let me ask—sit down, Mr. Harding. Sit. You either comply or face exile from the kingdom. Let me ask all of you: How many people—and at what point when they develop an organization—does it take before you recognize them as a state?”

The students looked to each other, none wanting to debate or challenge him. Barely anyone paid attention to Harding slinking back to his seat. At last, one of their ranks ventured a challenge.

“It’s… silly. I mean, it’s like, preposterous. With a political state, you know, you got history, you got geography—”

“I have tenure here,” Tim cut in, his voice gentle and reasonable. “Same lecture hall I’ve always taught in. Why can’t I be a state?”

With a shrug, the challenger decided to press on. “You already gave us the answer.”

“Which is what, Mr. Bell?”

“Maybe we don’t trust you.”

There was a wave of nervous laughter helping to break the tension and then a sprinkling of appreciative applause.

“I mean, hey, you’re an authority,” added Bell. “You’ve demonstrated force, that’s all.”

“But you are participating,” Tim pointed out.

“Because we need something from you. We want to learn, so we go along for a while. That doesn’t make us citizens—or subjects.”

Tim nodded, apparently pleased with the brave reasoning. “Very good. Mr. Bell here has lived in Europe. He knows what it’s like to tolerate the rules of others. Oh, don’t look embarrassed by it, Mr. Bell. Okay! Okay, here, right here is our problem in these United States! And it’s in all of you. The assumption that worldly means ‘privileged’—that you should actually be embarrassed for being smart and having seen other countries.”

Tim scanned the rows of faces, seemingly taking them all in and tossing them back, shaking his head as he began to pace again. “Less than twenty-five percent of Americans own a passport, and to me, that is pathetic. It means you trust CNN and Fox News more than you want to go see what’s out there! Now some in this room want to go save Third World orphans—when you probably couldn’t get out of Newark airport if you tried.”

He made a point of stopping in front of a lovely young redhead in the first row. Her eyes flicked left and right, and she settled on a patch of the broadloom carpet. Tim mercifully walked on, his stare fixed now on one of the male students in the back row.

“Some of you—God help us—want to run for political office.”

Before the others could be sure exactly who he meant, he was already moving on, walking up the aisle and stopping in the middle.

“Some of you are hiding. You think education is camouflage, and a degree is a passport. Perhaps. But in this room, you will learn to think. And your understanding of what a nation is, what power is, will be broadened as we go along. For instance, how many people here believe in non-violence?”

There was a substantial show of hands from the seats. Tim let out a cruel laugh.

“What a delightful bunch of liberal pussies!”

There was more nervous laughter at this, but above it all was a new whispered chatter over his language.

“Oh, my words are offensive? They’re sexist? If you can’t handle words, how can you possibly help a man tortured in a cell or who’s got a rifle to his head? Every political action in history began as an extreme. Passive resistance is passive.”

“That’s not true!” piped up a girl in the seventh row. “People filled Tiananmen Square and—”

“And what, Ms. Wong? They sat. Woooowwww! And when the tanks rolled in a few thousand of your distant relatives got shot. As I recall, you told me your parents immigrated here in 1989. Well, did they leave because they won? Do you ever ask them what morally questionable things they had to do so that little Michelle could get her degree in America?”

She glared at him, not bothering to answer.

“Gandhi admitted he could never fight Hitler with his methods,” the professor continued. “Why? Because non-violence relies on shame. What if your enemy feels no shame? Non-violence is a political response to a matter of warfare. It means you are not willing to do everything you can for your noble goals, so how important were they? No? Anybody?”

The students traded looks, checking up and down the aisles, and just as it became clear that no one had a response for this, their professor pointed his finger at them like a gun.

“Bang.”

As the students filed out of the lecture hall, Timothy Cale packed up his reference texts and files. He was mildly annoyed by the man shifting from foot to foot, hanging back reluctantly like a slow buzzing insect at the edge of his peripheral vision. The man wore a boxy suit with a flat texture, the kind that was a wife’s compromise purchased at Sears. He had a weak chin and watery eyes, and his black hair was going silver. He was a man in his late forties who gave the opposite physical impression of Tim—aging faster than he actually was. Everything about him looked like it had been arrived at by compromise.

“Professor, my name’s Schlosser. I was sent out by the Justice Department.”

If he expected Tim to give him his full attention, he was disappointed. A student with the typical self-absorption of his years pushed forward and asked the professor a question about his thesis. Tim frowned as he flipped through a Steno notebook packed with scribbles, and then he rattled off a time for the afternoon.

“So McInerny must be sending you on this errand,” said Tim, already heading for the door.

“No, it goes higher.”

“Weatherford then,” said Tim, stopping in mild surprise. He made it sound more like an accepted fact than a question.

Schlosser nodded. “Yes, Weatherford. This is right from the top.”

Tim arched his eyebrows then started walking again. Schlosser moved fast to grab the door as Tim let go of it, not caring if it slammed in his visitor’s face.

“Do you actually believe the ideas you suggested in there?”

Tim allowed himself a tiny smile, perhaps over an inside joke known only to him.

“Mr. Schlosser, don’t be obtuse. My job here is to get these cognitive amputees to actually construct a logical thought—perhaps for the first time in their iPad-carrying, game-playing, Netflix-watching lives. Go ask a university student in Vietnam or Zimbabwe what democracy is, and he probably can’t give you a textbook definition, but he won’t be apathetic in searching for an answer. He’ll be invested.”

Schlosser shrugged, a way of saying fair enough. “The department has a job for you, but it’s not about politics.”

“Then don’t ask me how I teach political science.”

Schlosser bristled. This wasn’t the reception he’d expected: curiosity, perhaps even gratitude, maybe a polite rejection with an acknowledgment that it was flattering to be asked. Not this rudeness. Timothy Cale didn’t even wait. He was already heading into the hall.

“I asked about your theories because they’ll listen—the cabinet secretaries will listen, I mean—in part to what I have to say about you,” said Schlosser. He tried not to walk so quickly that it was obvious he was struggling to keep up.

Tim was merciless. “No, they won’t. The ones making the decisions already know who I am and everything relevant in my career. McInerny does, Briggs does. You showed up on my doorstep because you wanted to put your two cents in, and you didn’t have anything on paper about me that hadn’t made the rounds and could be assessed by others. You need something new.”

He suddenly stopped walking and stood in place, waiting for Schlosser to grant his point. Schlosser licked his lips, glanced down the long hallway at the students making their way to classes, and wondered why his impulse was to deny the truth. They had warned him that Timothy Cale had insight. But they had said nothing about him having a laser that bored right into you and got to the heart of your intentions.

“You want to tell me what this job is now so I can say no and stop wasting both our time?”

“No, Professor. Let’s talk about India.”

“If they had any lingering concerns over India, they wouldn’t have sent you. And technically, it was barely in India. It was on the border.”

“I have concerns.”

“Go to hell.”

“You’ll want this job, Professor.”

“I have a job, thanks,” said Tim, on the move again and quickening his step. “And I actually have no ambitions to return to diplomatic service—or to work for government in any other capacity again.” He pushed hard on the door leading to the green lawn of the courtyard.

Schlosser followed him out to the sunshine. “You’d be a private contractor on this one.”

“Don’t care. If they let a paper-pusher like you ask about that incident then that’s enough to suggest there would be more interference.”

“This is the last time you see me,” said Schlosser. “As for how others interact with you… Well, I can’t make any guarantees. You’d be well compensated.”

Another cocky smile. “I make enough now when I see corporate clients.”

Schlosser had disliked the man from his department bio, and he despised him thoroughly now. He felt no one should ever be fully confident in his own security. It allowed him the privilege of indulging his own beliefs instead of following carefully developed policies. When he got back to Washington, he promised himself he would complain about being assigned the task of enabling such a man.

“There are other rewards to consider, Mr. Cale.”

“Oh, this is rich! An appeal to my intellectual vanity?”

“Not your vanity, Professor. Curiosity. Now assuming they take you on with my recommendation, you’ll do this job not for your own ambition or for any monetary gain, but so you can learn certain things—perhaps some things you’ve wanted to know for a long time.”

Tim didn’t break stride, looking straight ahead. “That’s a hell of a display of logic! Jump to conclusions of motive before you’re sure of my course of action! Mr. Schlosser, in less than five minutes, we’ve learned only two things. One is that you don’t know me, and two is that you’re a pompous ass.”

Schlosser was tired of both the walk and the verbal humiliation. “You’re right, I don’t know you, but Dr. Weintraub claims he does. He says you’ll be interested.”

Tim stopped again. “Weintraub could have phoned me himself.”

“Departmental formalities.”

“Uh-huh. Meaning Weintraub recommended me, but this has to go through the department… whatever it’s really about. Go back to Washington, Schlosser. Tell them I’ll speak with the Attorney General myself. Direct. I’ll send my fee request to his office.”

Schlosser pulled out his cell. “Okay, I’ll phone and get you the email for his executive assistant.”

“Don’t need it. I have Weatherford’s own email.”

“Mr. Cale, I don’t know why I ask, since it sounds like I already have the answer,” sighed Schlosser, “but they’ll want to know: What are your views on capital punishment?”

“I’ll make them clear if I ever wind up having to kill somebody,” snapped Tim. “It’s amazing you can move around at all, Schlosser, dragging all those assumptions around.”

“You never answered my question.”

“If they want to know, they can ask me themselves,” replied Tim. “And you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

He turned on his heel and left Schlosser standing there.

There were only four witnesses to the Nickelbaum execution that weren’t in lab coats. One was the warden. A second was the administrative and theoretical head of the R and D team, Gary Weintraub. The third was a general electrician in overalls, a fellow who had no idea what was going on and was there just in case the power was lost or there was an electrical fire. And like the warden, he had signed a legal statement that prohibited him from telling anyone what he saw. The fourth person was the least known to the scientists, Timothy Christopher Cale.

When the murderer disappeared in the carvings of light and the wretched figure of Mary Ash was led out of the booth like a frightened animal, Tim Cale was as shocked as anyone else—and the most quiet person in the room.

He supposed the researchers had a right to be curious about him because, only two hours before, the head of their team, Gary Weintraub, had ushered him around without volunteering what he did or why he was there. The researchers all assumed he was a bureaucrat sent to babysit, so they sneered the “Mister” next to his name as if it were an insult. Tim’s sense of mischief was tempted to correct them, but he had seen enough class and status nonsense to last him a lifetime back when he was posted in London. And today had given him much to think about, just like the others. He decided to be self-effacing in the circle of experts and lab coats, not gushing over the astonishing thing they had just witnessed and not congratulating them at all.

As doctors accompanying the young girl left for the private hospital in Manhattan, the remaining witnesses filed into a conference room, and Tim joined the slow exodus to a long table. They could barely contain what they felt, and few wanted to sit. This was one of the rare moments when scientists could be children again.

Tim watched them whisper and talk, voices climbing over each other, pairs of hands gesticulating. Others scribbled down estimates and equations. One of them—there would always be one—was the oracle of caution, suggesting the phenomenon might not be easily repeated. Weintraub, now free to talk about certain details more candidly, was busy saying things like “No, no, it will work again.”

Tim already knew Weintraub from university symposiums and presidential committees. He was a man in his sixties with a moon face and spectacles who didn’t mind at all that his students had nicknamed him “Bunsen Honeydew” after The Muppets character. Weintraub had first achieved fame as a documentary host, and since the media liked physicists to be interesting personalities (it was easier than trying to understand what they said), much was made of his distinctive nasal voice, his amateur skill at jazz piano and how as a young man he’d made a pilgrimage to study with one of his scientific heroes, the equally eccentric Leó Szilárd (when Szilárd didn’t like someone, he liked to pull out his colostomy bag and show them). Weintraub was arguably the smartest man in the room. Tim Cale was certain he was.

The multiple conversations grew to an insect hum, and at last Weintraub raised his hands.

“Okay, okay, first of all, there is no possible way I can expect this won’t leak out, legal documents or not,” he said, wearing the same self-congratulatory smile as the staff. “We do have an official announcement drafted and a news conference scheduled—we prepared all this in advance in case things went well.”

A new buzz around the table: their director had apparently known what to expect, while the others had been left mostly in the dark. But the lab coats’ resentment couldn’t last. It was crushed to insignificance by what they had seen.

“The media doesn’t always go through proper channels so if you are asked, please, please, be careful in your use of language. Don’t use any words of religious connotation—I’m sure they’ll happily go overboard on those themselves. Make sure they understand we followed a procedure, and it won’t be up to us how the transposition booths are assigned. That’s a matter for the courts and the legislators.”

“We don’t even have to go there, do we, Gary?” piped up one of the scientists. “Don’t we have years of research ahead of us before we try to repeat what we saw?”

The arguments and counter-arguments all ran for a few seconds with Weintraub unable to restore order.

“Come on, how do you test and research this? What we’ve got to do is ensure the safety of an arrival who—”

“People will not want to wait for years of clinical—”

“Look at in vitro fertilization and the stigma that was attached to—”

“You can’t compare the social history of decades ago to a completely new radical—”

“How does it work?”

The most innocent and direct of questions came from their guest. There was a sudden hush around the conference table, all the scientists now facing Timothy Cale. And he saw a remarkable, almost tangible shame in their expressions. I’ll be damned, thought Tim.

Because he realized: They don’t know.

Weintraub spoke for them all. “We’re not completely sure.”

“Meaning you don’t have a clue, right, Gary?”

He and Weintraub liked each other. Tim knew Weintraub didn’t have a molecule of condescension in his body for laymen, nor was his ego so fragile that he couldn’t admit to ignorance. They could speak plainly here.

“What you must understand, Tim, is that we had nothing to do with the manufacture of the transposition equipment or its original R and D,” replied Weintraub.

“What? Are you kidding?”

“I assure I’m not. We served as oversight on its health and safety aspects and on the scientific evaluation. Washington gave the green light, and we went ahead and… Well, we needed to figure out protocols, to make sure it does what we were promised it will do…”

Tim was incredulous. His friend hadn’t given him a clue what he would see today, and neither, in fact, had Schlosser or those out in Washington. He had expected a bit of a magic act from Gary Weintraub—he always got one. The man’s theatrical flair was part of his professional success both on campuses and on television. But nothing like this, nothing with such ramifications!

“Now wait a minute,” Tim tried again. “How can you go ahead with something this momentous without knowing how the damn thing fundamentally works?”

“Hey, uh, Mr. Cale,” interrupted one of the scientists, an up-and-coming physics star who looked barely old enough to shave. “Before Gary answers that, can you, like, tell us a little bit more about what you do and how you came to be here?”

Tim smiled at the naked challenge. “If it helps, I’m here at the request of both the US Attorney General and the Secretary of Health and Human Services. I’m a consultant.”

“What kind of consultant, Mr. Cale?”

“The expensive kind.”

There was hesitant laughter over the quip, but the faces were so earnest, he knew he should offer a more definitive response. After all, he was asking them plain enough questions.

He made eye contact around the table and explained, “My career is somewhat eclectic, ladies and gentlemen. I used to be with diplomatic services stationed overseas, posted at various legations—mostly in Asia. I conducted investigations that involved any high-profile American national. But over time, I’ve fallen into what can loosely be called, for lack of a better term, ‘risk management.’ I don’t pretend at all I have your scientific background or anything close it, but because of umm… well, a few personal experiences, which I won’t go into today, the White House likes to use me from time to time to write reports and investigate certain phenomena—though up to now nothing on the scale of what we all saw today.”

The young expert who had challenged Tim leaned forward. “And where did you have these experiences, Mr. Cale?”

Tim looked down the table and met his gaze evenly. “India… South East Asia.”

Tim knew the smirks would begin first and then the traded looks. He had seen it all before, and he didn’t care. He didn’t have to prove his credibility here or with the White House, certainly not at the contract price he was charging, and there were fortunately others in positions of influence who were less dogmatic.

“Dr. Weintraub?” he prompted. “Gary? About my question?”

Weintraub leaned forward to respond, but another of the scientists jumped in.

“Listen, Mr. Cale. Tim, is it? Tim, there have been countless scientific innovations where the discovery and our reaping of benefits preceded our full understanding. Penicillin for one—”

“I am familiar with the history of penicillin, thank you, Mister…?”

“Doctor Andrew Miller,” answered the scientist. “I’m team leader for Gary’s neuroscience division.”

His straight brown hair almost reached his shoulders, looking like it could use a wash, and his large hazel eyes were fierce in their direct stare. No doubt, he used all this Byronic intensity with girls. Tim knew his type from his university classes.

“Good for you, but I know about penicillin, Doctor Miller,” Tim said calmly. “That was a time when—”

Miller wasn’t listening. “Fine then, look at the recent tests that demonstrate adrenaline can play a factor in memory. We don’t fully understand them, but they began with mice running around a drum full of water. Drug trials went ahead even though researchers didn’t know exactly what was going on. Look at atomic energy—”

“Maybe that’s a bad example,” one of the scientists interjected.

“Hippie!” joked Miller, and he got a good laugh.

“We’re talking for the moment about applications ahead of full comprehension of potential,” said Weintraub, wanting to get them back on track.

“There is only one application,” said Miller. He sighed as if satisfied with his judgment and laced his fingers behind his head. “We’ve seen its potential. We know it! We know the results.”

“Really?” asked Tim.

Miller leaned back in his chair and pushed a sneaker against the edge of the table, tilting his chair back. “Frankly, even if we did understand the scientific process behind this machinery, it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell you. I don’t mean you personally—I mean any layman.”

“Make it personal if you like,” answered Tim. “What’s your rationale in keeping it secret?”

The rest of those seated around the conference table could hardly believe the naïveté of the question. There were gasps and pens tossed on notepads, more squeaking of pushed chairs and mutters under the breath.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” sneered Miller. “We’re going to catch enough flak from people bitching and whining the old saw that ‘just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should do it.’ Jesus… You want this process out there where it can be abused?”

“That isn’t where I’m going,” replied Tim. “And your logic is flawed. You assume that by limiting those knowledgeable to a select few, the technology isn’t vulnerable to abuse. But here’s the thing.”

He had their attention.

“By not explaining the science, making it absolutely crystal clear how this thing works, you already begin an abuse of the technology. It makes the whole apparatus into a kind of Ouija board—something occult. It’s the natural product of ignorance.”

Miller drummed his pen on the table and tipped his chair back another inch.

“Ignorance is something we’ve always had to tolerate.”

He glanced around the table and smiled to the other faces, but they were unconvinced. Tim thought he looked too young to have tolerated much of anything yet.

He rose to leave. He could see he would get nowhere with them for the moment. “I’m sorry, I’ve worked several years in diplomacy, but I have to say that’s one of the most irresponsible, stupid things I’ve ever heard. You’re scientists. You’re not supposed to tolerate ignorance—you’re supposed to cure it. Oh, and trust me, time has a nice way of curing hubris.”

CHAPTER TWO

India. But not India. Not quite. It was what changed everything for him, and it was likely why the government needed him now. Let’s talk about India, that government man had asked him. What was his name? Schlosser. But he didn’t talk about India with anybody.

Timothy Cale had been at his mid-level posting in Delhi for a year when the American embassy got a strange request to mediate in a violent ethnic clash. Of course, the details were so few as to be practically useless for any preparation. He was told that a remote village on the border between Nepal and the Indian state of Bihar had been invaded by a group of rebels, their exact affiliation vague and obscure.

It wasn’t clear to him even why a US representative should get involved in what seemed like an internal dispute, especially when there were no obvious American interests. It didn’t matter. He would go. Sure, the assignment was at his discretion, and as one of the principal secretaries of the embassy, he could have easily turned it down. In looking back on it later, he cursed his own ambition and an almost juvenile urge for thrill-seeking. His Paris and London appointments had been junior postings, but it was the locales that held the glamour, not the office work itself: pushing papers, handling tourist complaints and making sure the colleges for overseas students were behaving themselves. This might be something substantial.

As he boarded an ancient-looking Bombardier turboprop commercial plane, he secretly hoped for adventure, with the equally childish wish that, of course, he’d come out on top and his resolution of the affair would help his career.

All he knew of Bihar he had picked up from the backgrounders written up in neat Times Roman 12 point type from the policy office and from his dog-eared Lonely Planet India guide. He stepped off a plane into Patna, gasping over the pollution and the rampant poverty, which was clear from the minute a US Consulate limo picked him up in the Bankipur district. It would take him to where he would rendezvous with an armed Indian escort for the next leg of his journey.

He got a fleeting glimpse of the Ganges, and then the city became another Third World blur with naked, dirty children, a clamor of street noise and sizzling grills for kiosk food, all contrasting sharply with the opulence of the modern glass castles for the city’s rich businessmen. There were pungent spices. There was the almost crippling stench of decaying shit in the alleys and backed up sewers, and the coppery smell of stale blood—whether from accident or violent robbery, you could never tell and didn’t want to know. Auto-rickshaws buzzed like dragonflies near the Ashok Rajpath, the main market.

Bihar was practically marinated in religion—the Buddha had walked this countryside, and there were lavish Hindu festivals to last you for ages. The last, tenth Guru of Sikhism was born right in Patna. A cynic would have enjoyed pointing out the fact that, amid all this faith, the province had an appalling rate of illiteracy, poverty, inter-caste warfare. The Bihari people faced a revolting degree of bigotry and ridicule in the rest of India.

And here he was, the fair-haired American boy from Illinois, thinking himself sophisticated after his years in Paris and London and a brief stint in Bangkok. Fool. He knew nothing. But that didn’t stop him. And where he was going was a dot on the map with the name of a Bihari–Nepalese subgroup of a people, a similar but unique culture with a name he couldn’t even pronounce, on the knife edge of a border. A no man’s land that would make even the Himalayas—so many miles away but still familiar from photos and news reports—a touchstone of reassuring normalcy.

He was briefed in minutes that “the situation hasn’t changed,” and he didn’t even get the chance to ask what the hell the situation was before the Indian soldiers in their neatly pressed khaki uniforms insisted he climb into the SUV. It was monsoon season, but they would have good luck with the roads—little report of flooding. Just potholes.

He couldn’t detect the passage of time. Bumped and rocked for hours, with only brief rest stops, he tried unsuccessfully to doze and ignore a pounding headache as the rain hit the vehicle’s roof in torrents. There were streaks of glistening drops across the windows, while bullets of moisture dug into the brown soil and made the road into a slippery obstacle course. It was late at night when the engine stopped, and the five Indian soldiers reached for their rifles, the interpreter telling him, “This is it.”

“It” was a village of ramshackle houses and a few lights, with a single two-story Victorian building up on a hill and a ring of dark silhouettes, waiting.

His escort had rifles. He could see none carried by the “rebels.”

But there were bodies at their feet. Men and women in what looked like traditional clothing, woolen caps and coats associated more with the Nepalese than the northern Bihari. They lay on their backs or with their faces in the mud, and they were all paler than corpses. Tim had seen dead, and this looked worse than dead. Those whose faces weren’t obscured by the brown clay of the soil held an expression of demented shock, mouths slack and open. Frozen.

He stopped at one victim then turned to one of the soldiers and asked to borrow his flashlight. If the shadows up ahead had waited this long for their mediator, they could spare a few more seconds. Tim shone the beam of the flashlight on the dead man at his feet. He was clearly Asiatic, yet his eyes, wide in horror, were a vivid Nordic blue.

He swung the beam of light to a woman sprawled a few feet away. Her eyes were open as well. On the blurry halo edge of the light, he could see all of their eyes were open, each and every one of the victims lying dead on their backs or on their sides staring into nothing.

And each one had vividly blue eyes.

He knew next to nothing about genetics, but his instinct told him that was impossible, even as a hereditary trait in a relatively closed community. He read somewhere that doctors believed that light triggered the production of melanin in the irises of newborn babies—it was why baby eyes change color over time. Disease, injury—they could affect eye color, too. But this…

He had no idea what it meant, or if it meant anything at all.

Set after set of bright blue eyes, staring.

It magnified the rictus of horror on each face. The expressions looked almost canine, animalistic in their dread, and their decomposing skin was beginning to look waxy under the constant monsoon shower.

“Mr. Cale,” called the interpreter. It was a faintly disguised plea. In other words, let’s get the hell away from this place.

Only they couldn’t. They were going to meet those who did this.

Their hosts didn’t raise any weapons at the soldiers. One of them simply lifted a hand in the universal sign that meant: This is as far as you go. Then the man in the center turned a palm up, closing it with a flip-flip-flip for Tim to step forward. As the interpreter followed half a step behind, a flat baritone voice told the man in fluent English, “Your services won’t be needed.”

Tim was grateful to at least be out of the downpour. He was led into a sad-looking structure with stained plywood walls but with a tent roof, the light provided by a Coleman camping lamp. He was waved to a rough-hewn table. His chair was the most beautiful thing in the room, elaborately carved, as if by a traditional master craftsman.

Now he at last had a chance to study who was responsible for the crisis, but these people’s clothing and manners told him little. Men and women stood in religious robes like those worn by monks—except their color scheme was unusual, not like anything Tim had seen on monks in other countries. They weren’t saffron or gold; instead, a mauve and forest green shade that seemed to bleed into the backdrop of the squalid room. And over the robes, they wore traditional woolen vests and jackets and brightly colored scarves of the local people as protection from the weather. Yet somehow they acted as if they barely felt the rain or wind at all.

There were a few young ones, but the older ones stood out to him, their eyes like doll beads and their ruddy golden cheeks lined and cracked with thousands of minute folds and character lines. The man who had beckoned to him took the lead, sitting down in front of Tim, his forehead half in shade, half in light from the lamp. Tim found it difficult to detect an actual personality to the man’s face, it was so tortoise-like, ancient and mummified; yet the smile was guardedly polite and the eyes were alert.

Tim was vaguely perplexed over why the man still wore his set of woolen mittens indoors, his sleeves pulled tight to the wrists, as if he felt a chill specifically reserved for him. The gloved hands rested casually on the scratched, worn table.

“Mr. Cale.”

Curls of incense smoke floated between them from pink joss sticks planted in a wide pan to catch the ashes. The air was thick with the aroma of sandalwood.

“Listen,” Tim started. “I won’t pretend to understand the history of your conflict with these people, but if you’ll outline your grievances, maybe we can find some common ground. My goal here is to avoid any more bloodshed. Now if you’ll tell me who you—”

“That’s not important,” said a woman near the doorway.

“Especially when you don’t know who these people are,” said a boy on the other side, close to a corner. He couldn’t have been older than thirteen, his golden face round and smooth, almost androgynous.

All three fluent in English. With no accent.

“We will tell you who these people are,” said the tortoise-head ancient at the table. “We will tell why they have to die and why some have already died.”

“I came all this way to prevent death,” explained Tim.

“That is not your function here,” said the woman near the door.

Before Tim could ask the obvious follow-up, the man at the table was speaking, his voice vaguely hypnotic with its evenness, and Tim found himself struggling to see him through the veil of incense smoke.

“This village exterminates its girl children. In ages past, it left them to die of exposure in the surrounding hills or took them down to a river to drown them. They spared a few for dowry marriage and breeding and servants. But no love thrived here for daughters, Mr. Cale. When doctors could offer amniocentesis, the villagers used that to prevent girl children. Last year, they sold a group of girls—some as young as four—to a pedophile ring that offers its wares between Sonepur and Kathmandu. Their evils singe and putrefy the air. And there is not one blameless adult, not one that is not stained by this barbarism.”

“So your solution to the stain is ethnic cleansing?” demanded Tim quietly. He was incredulous. “Damn it, it’s clear you’re educated people! And you must know these things happen in the rest of India, in other parts of the world. Why are you talking about wiping out an entire village? And who are you people?” He calmed down, realizing it must be only a threat. He was here, and if he was here, that meant nothing was decided. “What do you want? What are your terms?”

“There are no terms,” said the woman at the door.

“We’ve explained our reasons,” said the boy in the corner.

“At certain times, there can arise a collective evil,” said the man at the table. “The rot grows and eats, feeding like mold off the soul of a land. It is not a question, Mr. Cale, of what needs to be done. The course of action will take place.”

He didn’t understand. They were talking. He could hear them talking, yes, but competing for his attention was the sound of the pattering rain beyond the door of the room, and the incense was making him feel lightheaded. He heard distant screams coming from a street away. The woman didn’t turn to look. The boy didn’t react at all. One of the soldiers of his army escort stormed into the room, but the people in robes stopped him with a glance. The soldier looked to Tim, making a silent appeal.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Tim pleaded. “This isn’t necessary. You can’t slaughter a whole village! There must be someone! At least one innocent here! And even if they’re all complicit, these people must have children who have done nothing—”

He sifted his mind desperately for arguments; tried to summon a bulwark of compassionate rationality to prevent this. Come on, he ordered himself, come on. A handful of men with rifles could prevent nothing here if they started their promised massacre—it was up to him. But the situation was unraveling. He couldn’t accept that it was deteriorating so quickly, his role reduced to that of an audience member for this grotesque play.

“The children have been removed,” said the old man at the table. “They will be cared for at other villages.”

“Wait—wait! Why am I here then? Why was there any need for me to come? I don’t understand. If you didn’t want mediation—”

“You are here because you are still untainted,” said the woman.

“We had to go miles to find one who was,” said the boy.

“Untainted?” snapped Tim. “Do you actually think I could agree with your type of morality? That I’m going to watch you carry out mass murder?”

The eyes of the old man blinked, disappearing briefly into the fleshy pouches of aged skin. The thin mouth pursed its lips, and he said patiently, “That is not what we mean by untainted.”

“The word ‘receptive,’” said the boy, “might be more applicable. We assumed you would be receptive to us.”

Tim knew he wasn’t getting anywhere, and it crossed his mind that perhaps he had blundered into a trap. Maybe they always intended to assassinate an American official as their main goal. His panic rose like acid-burning vomit in his throat, and a gloved hand reached across the table and took his wrist. It took his arm gently, with no threat in the motion at all. But it happened so fast.

“You’ll leave here safe and sound in a few minutes,” said the old man.

“Do you remember your Greek mythology, Mr. Cale?” asked the woman near the doorway. She tugged on the winding folds of her wrap.

“Argus Panoptes,” said the old man. He let go of Tim’s wrist and began pulling off the mitten of his right hand.

“He’s a giant,” said the boy with a triumphant smile of white teeth, sounding for the first time like a child. He tugged off his knit woolen cap with the strings, and a few strands of his black mop were pulled up for an instant. Just like any boy.

“Servant of the goddess Hera,” said the woman. The English and Greek words sounded strange from that wise Asian face. Then her scarf was removed, her neck bare—

“Panoptes, meaning in Greek, ‘all seeing.’”

The old man’s glove was off, and he cast aside his woolen jacket as the classical reference finally clicked in Tim’s mind—

He pushed back his chair and jumped up. The wooden legs scraped the floor, and the chair timbered back with a crash.

Yes, Hera’s giant, his body covered with eyes.

And in front of him the old man stayed calmly in his seat, the dark forest green and mauve garment folds running like a toga over one shoulder, but the shoulder itself, his chest, his arms covered in eyes. There were eyes on the body of the woman. Eyes were blinking from the flat, adolescent chest of the boy. The effect was like seeing skin marked with a pattern of yellowish whiteheads, of boils, but each pupil had a lid and an eyelash, some of them blinking out of sequence with others.

The Indian soldier near the entrance backed away from the woman, one foot out the door.

“What are you people?” Tim whispered.

“We told you, it doesn’t matter,” said the boy. “Not now, in this moment. It’s sufficient that you are… receptive.”

“There is a cost for the rebalancing,” said the old man. “And so we have adopted an eye for each of these villagers who have lived in destructive blindness. Understand: we are not without a comprehension of degrees of guilt. Those who did less are the ones you found as you arrived. For the others…”

His gnarled hand reached into the drapery of his robes and slowly withdrew a dagger.

Oh, God. He grasped immediately what the man was about to do, and because it was impossible, he could not understand how to prevent it.

He was left to watch as the blade dug like a scalpel into the soft white of a blinking egg imbedded in his flesh, and Tim heard himself scream no no no as the old man hissed and gritted his teeth in genuine pain. Warm blood poured down the arm, hideously blinding more of the blinking eyes and dripping down to the sawdust floor, and Tim heard the corresponding wails from beyond the shelter.

“Stop it! Please stop it! You can’t believe this is right!”

“This is for those who did these unspeakable acts,” said the old man. “And for those who allowed them to happen, seeing is believing.”

The soldier made a guttural sound—not quite a yell but a kind of bark of his revulsion and fear. He ran out, and Tim heard his boots stomp in the moist earth. As the woman and boy brandished their own knives, Timothy Cale rushed past them into the rain. He knew where the soldier was going—the soldier was joining the others who had been guarding the SUV. People ran now into the main thoroughfare of the village as distant screams rose over each other. Shouts grew louder in the native dialect, and there was a string of gurgling cries. The soldiers could do nothing.

Tim couldn’t bring himself to step closer to the silhouettes of villagers, some staggering into the road, others falling to their knees.

All of them were clutching their heads, their fingers on their foreheads or at their temples…

Dazed in his shock, he looked back at the rectangle of spilled light from the doorway, and he saw a curving, trickling stream of blood pouring out. It mingled with the puddles of rain.

He couldn’t stop the impulse to be sick.

His eyes felt the salt-burn of tears, his forehead still soaked with rivulets of rain, while his throat was scorched with bile. He pulled himself up and forced his senses to register again, but this time the people of the village were missing. No, not all of them, they couldn’t be. Could they? The first ones, yes, he could tell that the first ones who had shouted and run into the street were… gone. A mysterious banishment that was the crowning touch of the strangers. But the others? A whole village gone. He heard the ugly metal chunk as one foolish soldier prepared his rifle to fire, but there was no staccato burst. Something stayed his hand, forcing a reappraisal.

You’ve got to do something, thought Tim. You can’t stay just a witness to this.

He started to run through the unpaved narrow streets, his shoes splashing through the puddles of mud and rainwater, looking for… he didn’t know what. Survivors, those who hadn’t been claimed yet. He had pleaded with them: There must be someone! At least one innocent here! He couldn’t find anyone. Bodies, yes. Bodies and more bodies like those they first spotted on arrival, each one with staring blue eyes, but others were missing. Others were taken. He felt a growing hopelessness—then panic, because the soldiers might start up the SUV and leave him behind. Through the sshhhh of the relentless rain, he spotted an old woman, curled up, hugging her knees near packed metal chairs behind a market stall table.

Oh, Christ, he didn’t speak the language. Maybe… Maybe if he just held out his hand, and if his tone was gentle enough, he could persuade her. “You have to come with me! It’s not safe for you here!”

She said something that sounded like a fatalistic complaint. Telling him he was mad, that it was pointless. Her voice was high and sharp and raw, the whine of a gnarled tree branch being snapped off. She was horrified at what was happening around her, but she couldn’t see escape.

“Please,” he called over the rain, still holding out his hand. “Please!”

After a moment, she picked herself up with an effort, her limbs trembling either from fear or the palsy of her age, stepping out from her hiding place. She could walk surprisingly quickly, but he wished she could run. They had to get away from this place. The strangers in the robes had either overlooked her or were busy reaping other souls. He found himself pulling her along by the arm, cursing himself for his fear.

He heard the small boy from a side alley, calling out for someone. Mother, father, it hardly mattered. Scared brown eyes under a mop of black hair, his tiny limbs at his sides, but his neck turning this way and that, looking, hoping… He was small, and given the diet and environment here, it was difficult to tell the his age. He could have been anywhere between four to seven years old. Tim scooped him up, and the boy cried out, but the old woman said something to shush him and comfort him.

As they approached the SUV, the interpreter looked close to a nervous breakdown. He barely heard Tim calling for them to leave, shouting that there was nothing they could do but go. The man was gibbering and nodding, but he didn’t move to call to the soldiers in Hindi. Tim yelled in English to one of the soldiers up ahead in the road, brandishing his rifle but with nothing to fire on, telling him the obvious: We have to go.

He heard the soldier call out four names, but only three men returned. They piled into the SUV and drove away, and no one looked back.

There was silence in the vehicle for a long time, and then at last, Tim tapped one of the soldiers on the shoulder. No point asking the interpreter—the man was traumatized to a sobbing wreck.

“Ask her their names.” He meant the old lady and the boy.

Most of the soldiers looked haunted by what had happened back there. The soldier he addressed looked vaguely angry, and he took it out on their guests, snapping Tim’s question at the old woman. She answered him back in a low but firm voice, and Tim didn’t think he needed a translation. She had told him in so many words to go to hell. His kind wasn’t trusted in their province, and they would be avoided even more after tonight. The soldier gave her a contemptuous look and shrugged at Tim. The old woman looked out the window, and the little boy moved closer to her, trying to nestle to her bosom. She patted his arm absently.

About twenty miles passed, and then the woman spoke up in rapid staccato bursts of her dialect, pointing out the window. Tim couldn’t imagine how she could identify anything through the storm, but she clearly wanted them to stop.

The angry soldier barked back at her, refusing, and Tim leaned forward. “What? What is it?”

“There’s another village here,” explained the soldier. “She wants to go there, says she and the boy will be safe. I have told her to shut up and do as she’s told.”

“Let her out,” ordered Tim.

“You do not understand these people, sir. They should not be indulged with their—”

“Let them out. You’re here as my escort, and we have no right to detain this woman. I coaxed her into the car so that she would be safe. She probably knows every village and resident from here to Patna! If anyone can find a relative for this kid to take care of him, it’s probably her. I mean, what do you guys want to do? Take the kid back and stick him in an orphanage? Now stop the goddamn car!”

The soldier driving pulled up on the side of the muddy road leading to a set of pinprick lights in the distance. Tim opened the car door for the old woman, and she mumbled something to the boy. He slid his small bottom along the upholstery of the seat and jumped out, taking her hand.

“You’ll be okay here?” he asked needlessly. He knew she couldn’t understand a word, but he asked anyway.

She muttered something back and then made a scattering, waving motion with her hand. Go away now. Leave. The soldier reached for the door handle and shut it with a slam. Then the SUV roared away, and Tim could barely see the old woman and boy navigating the muddy path to the new village. There was silence in the vehicle all the way back to Patna.

Coming into the outskirts of the city, Tim pressed the button on his window, listening to the whrrr of the electronics for the door and held his palm out to feel the beaded curtain of rain. These drops, he knew, were real. They were the most tangible things in his world now that the old woman and boy were gone, and so he focused on them. Feel the rain, his mind insisted, trying to shut out the memory of the horror they had witnessed. Listen to the rain, feel the drops, feel them…

This much, he knew, was still real.

It wasn’t over after he returned to Delhi. The Indian government managed to keep it out of the media, but its leaders, as well as the US ambassador and the State Department, were fiercely interested to know how the entire population of a border village could disappear. After all, the houses, the market stalls and the modest headquarters of the single local official were all intact, which proved no rebel group had gone on a mad spree.

Even the bodies with their blue eyes were now missing.

While pools of blood had been detected from satellite photos near the sad building where Tim met the robed strangers, it wasn’t a large enough quantity to suggest this was where systematic butchery was carried out. No, all the people had been taken elsewhere. Everyone wanted to know where.

The soldiers who had been Mr. Cale’s escort told a preposterous story, and the interpreter tried to hang himself but botched the job. He was left with the mind of a retarded child after his brain was deprived of oxygen.

What could Timothy Cale tell them? He couldn’t say the escort fought back. Their rifles hadn’t been fired, and the proof of that was that each gun magazine still had all their rounds. He didn’t have a scrap of evidence to back up a plausible lie. For a week, the ambassador let him have compassionate leave, inclined to believe Tim had suffered post-traumatic stress disorder from having seen something terrible. “But when you come back, we need answers,” he was told.

Sitting behind his desk again, feeling as if he had been away for years, Tim felt the draft of the rumbling air conditioner and sipped the strong coffee the Indian staff always liked to brew. He looked at his incident reports and knew he had no answers. He didn’t know what to tell his boss at his two o’clock appointment.

And then there was “a development,” as it was discreetly put.

During his leave, a warrant officer and lance corporal of the Army of Nepal had discovered the old woman and the little boy living not far from where the SUV had left them on the muddy road. They claimed to be from the empty village. The boy turned out to be close to seven years old, and the old woman had been born into a lower caste. She had suffered much from her neighbors. The two were driven to Patna where police and government bureaucrats questioned them. Yes, they had seen the visitors in robes. No, they didn’t know who these bizarre strangers were. They had felt searing agony and then nothing.

Obviously, they had been returned… Minutes before Tim Cale had discovered them and had them whisked away in the vehicle.

So, thought Tim. Those deadly beings had found two innocents after all.

You thought you rescued them, but maybe you were part of the plan.

The Indians decided the matter was closed. The Americans did not. They sent Tim home under a neat disciplinary rule of the service that involved a gag order, and they kept him on a desk in Washington until it dawned on him that he would never get a foreign posting again.

He had done minor studies in medical ethics, as well as business ethics, and he had a large enough network of Washington and New York contacts that he could launch his own consultancy business. As far as the Beltway was privately concerned (but never to his face), the boy and the old woman who survived the village massacre were a peculiar vindication for Timothy Cale. He began to land assignments that involved the seemingly unexplainable, the fringe science that occasionally spelled disaster when it found gullible congressmen as advocates or when his former colleagues in the diplomatic corps fell prey to “magicians” in Bangkok or Manila.

He racked up a lot of billable hours and air miles casually exposing frauds when he wasn’t tapping out reports on stem cell research. He prospered. He didn’t think too often about the village near the Indian border. He tried not to think about why the strangers in robes had selected him to be their witness. Receptive, they had called him. Whatever that was supposed to mean, it made his flesh crawl.

And now the booths.

The government had brought him into this mess because of what had happened in Bihar. But the border incident years ago fell under the category of the supernatural. These amazing transposition booths were science. “Doesn’t matter,” he was told on the phone. “You are the only sane American we’ve got who’s had experience with, well, for lack of a better word, resurrection.”

Word of the booths didn’t follow anyone’s schedule, least of all the one Weintraub had. Yes, he had an announcement ready in case of a leak, but he argued the biggest issue to resolve before breaking the news was organizing what little concrete data they had.

“Wrong,” countered Tim, who argued there was a more urgent priority. “They’ll come at you like jackals. But they’ll descend even more on the girl.”

On Mary Ash. Reporters would expect her to have answers, and Tim guaranteed they would form a mob outside the Ash family residence until they got their clips and their quotes and their background stories on poor Mary’s high-school romances, her college ambitions and her day-to-day habits, what music she listened to and who she voted for and any other scrap of useless info to fuel further speculation. Nickelbaum’s victim, Tim argued, needed privacy to recover. She was entitled to it.

But the compassionate grace of fate was too much to hope for. By Thursday of the following week, the BBC broke the story first on their investigative show, Panorama, admitting they had been tipped off to a possible new execution method that bypassed federal and state requirements. CNN was next, and then Fox News weighed in, suggesting a cover-up. Great, Rupert Murdoch’s crew is taking its usual hysterical approach, Tim grumbled to himself.

Matilda, his personal assistant, came into his office without knocking as usual and switched on the news. “You’ll want to see this,” she told him. More often than not she anticipated Tim’s needs correctly, but she had the knack of making it sound like a command, which always amused him.

She was plump and graying, the least likely woman of fifty-eight you would expect to know how to score pot to help her friends handle chemotherapy. Tim hired her on the spot at the end of her job interview—right after she noticed Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War on his bookshelf and told him how, for a high-school essay, she had tracked down an extremely elderly aunt, blind and half deaf, who recalled Sherman’s March to the Sea. Matilda was brusque and opinionated, but she made sure Tim was on time for his appointments. She cleared his desk and kept him organized. She was his secret weapon and professional treasure.

Tim sat back in his leather office chair and deferred to her wisdom in switching the mute button off and changing the channel. Gary Weintraub was on, a weed patch of microphones surrounding him, giving a clue as to how enormous the media scrum was. But Gary was in his element. Tim once teased him about seeking the spotlight, and Gary Weintraub had given him a cockeyed grin and arched his eyebrows.

“Of course, I do, and you should be glad I do,” he insisted, jutting his sausage fingers in a tight fist, thumb on top, as if he needed to push an elevator button right away. “You know why the majority of teenagers come out of the secondary education system, and they can’t solve a basic algebra equation or know five elements on the periodic table? Because there are so few superstars in science. These children come out with dreams of being in the NBA and the NFL. Nobody wants to be in science. It’s all government subsidized or academically funded or pharmaceutical-based. Group endeavor. Now I ask you, Tim, who would want to be a part of that?”

But these days, Weintraub could have it both ways. Even those who never watched PBS or read Scientific American knew who Gary Weintraub was—their lovably eccentric moon-faced TV “uncle” who hosted shows about space and dolphins. They probably assumed the breaking news was about a discovery of his own. Those who knew better likely felt he was the best of all possible front men.

Tim couldn’t help but notice the neurologist, that kid with the cloud of shoulder-length brown hair—what was his name? Miller. He stood behind Weintraub, wearing a lab coat and a self-satisfied grin, enjoying the spectacle. Ambitious enough to learn exactly where the cameras would include him.

“—subject is female, yes,” Weintraub was confirming now for the reporters. A question from the scrum was muffled and got lost, but his reply explained what it was. “In her early twenties. No, I don’t think it’s prudent to specify more than that—”

“Are you denying then that it’s—” A reporter threw out the name of another one of Nickelbaum’s victims.

For the first time, Tim detected the exasperation in his friend’s voice. “I am not confirming it, nor am I denying it,” he said with a nervous laugh.

“Come on, Professor Weintraub, there’s only one victim he was ever convicted of murdering!” piped up a more aggressive reporter. It didn’t take much logic to narrow the possibilities down to Mary Ash.

“All I can tell you at the moment is that the subject is recuperating with the help of doctors and her immediate family.”

The reporters weren’t ready to let it go. “If it is her, is there a correlation then between the legal system and what the equipment does?”

“Good gracious, no!” said Weintraub, forgetting himself for an instant. “That is to say, we don’t know that, and there is nothing so far to even remotely suggest that idea.” He began to walk away from the microphones.

“Yes, but—”

“Jesus, people,” said Miller with a hand on Gary’s shoulder. “He’s a physicist, not a metaphysicist!”

There was a ripple of laughter from the scrum. You could tell what would be the top clip used from the news conference on the six o’clock cast, and Tim had to admit it was a good line. Ten points for the smartass.

“Son of a bitch,” Matilda muttered under her breath as she stood beside Tim’s desk. “This is incredible. And you saw this happen? This is the big thing you couldn’t talk about yet?”

“This is it,” said Tim, still frowning pensively at the screen. “And so far the wolf pack is keeping to the script.”

“What do you mean?”

He waved a lazy hand towards the television set. “They’re all asking about the girl. They want to know where she came from, how she came back.”

“So do I!” replied Matilda. She sounded mildly affronted that he shouldn’t agree with the obvious.

“But no one’s asking about him.”

“Him who?”

“Nickelbaum,” answered Tim. “They’re not bothering to ask what happened to him.”

She stared at him blankly.

“Where did he go?” he prompted, not really expecting an answer.

He waited, knowing it would sink in after a second. He watched her expression and saw exactly what was going through her mind. It would be the same if he asked a dozen of his students or people on the street. Nickelbaum had been dismissed, ignored, forgotten, because he had always been scheduled to die, to be extinguished. Of course, the return of Mary Ash was more interesting; it was downright fascinating and compelling. And Tim had no more pity for Nickelbaum than others, but—

“He’s the other half of the equation,” he pointed out, as Matilda looked vaguely embarrassed at forgetting this detail.

“When he went,” she started tentatively, “she came back. So there must be…” She trailed off with a shrug.

“A connection? Sure, but what kind? People are working on a couple of very tenuous assumptions.”

“But he’s gone now, and the girl came back from the dead!”

“Which means what exactly?” asked Tim. “Where is ‘dead’? How the hell do we even define ‘dead’ anymore? How did his execution bring her back? There’s no logic to it, not at all, because we don’t have sufficient information yet. And if Nickelbaum went to the same place his victim was in, then Weintraub’s right, and a court decision and our standard morality might play no factor at all in the actual process. Chew on that one for a while! But okay, sure, suppose he went somewhere else. Suppose he went down there. That’s if you want to get biblical about it. We’re still left with a whole mess of problems.”

Matilda frowned, trying to think it through, looking at him innocently as she ventured, “I don’t see why. Should make the Christians ecstatic.”

Tim let the air out of his lungs, lacing his fingers in front of his chin. “Don’t bet on it. Again, you’re assuming our Miss Ash was busy with the angels. We now have a technology that rudely—perhaps even cruelly—yanked her out of Heaven, presuming that exists, and you’re presuming she came from there. That means we’re messing around with the grand plan. No, Matty, I don’t think they’re going to be happy about this one at all. This is going to get worse.”

After a moment, Matilda crossed her arms and said with a faint note of mischief, knowing her employer’s views, “You don’t think she came from Heaven.”

“No, I don’t.”

“She was dead,” said Matilda gently.

“Yes, she was. And then she wasn’t. Which is another thing that troubles me.”

Her eyes widened, already guessing his fresh point.

“If she can be dead and then suddenly not dead, who says Nickelbaum will stay where he is?”

CHAPTER THREE

Weintraub sent him an email with an attachment—his preliminary report for the government on how the equipment was thought to work. In the body of the email itself, Gary had informed him in his usual rushed, sloppy typing style: “WE DON’T DARE TAKE THING APART BE A DISASTER.”

Okay, thought Tim. They’re afraid if they dismantle it, they won’t be able to get it to work again. They choose, instead, to learn all they can from experimental use. And they wonder why I’m concerned.

There was a schematic diagram that showed the two chambers, but a picture wasn’t worth a thousand words here. Instead, the report had several thousand words, almost all of it conjecture. But there was just enough, Tim realized as he flipped the pages, to suggest Gary Weintraub and his staff had made some brilliant guesses. The white light tinged with blue when Emmett Nickelbaum was executed was perhaps a unique form of Cerenkov radiation—the electromagnetic radiation that’s generated when charged particles pass through an insulator at the speed of light. It was why nuclear reactors had their blue glow. This much Tim could follow, and though he had barely passed physics in high school, it intuitively made sense to him. There was, however, no easy explanation for the bizarre light effects and patterns that flashed in the chamber when Nickelbaum was torn apart—nor for the ones preceding Mary Ash’s arrival.

But Weintraub and his fellow scientists would have had plenty to talk about even if Nickelbaum had not vanished, screaming, or if Mary Ash had not come back into their plane of existence. As they videotaped and measured the transposition equipment, they discovered it had the equivalent of about seven times the power—all of it contained within the two chambers—that was needed for the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, the biggest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.

Within seconds, the booths had proved the Higgs boson was real.

Weintraub and his team had measured other particles that were once only hypothesized in university papers and research: sleptons, photinos, squarks, the so-called “sparticles” that winked quickly out of existence in a ten trillionth of a nanosecond after the Big Bang. The booths proved they could exist. They did exist.

The booths proved something else. They proved the existence of a particle that had been the wet dream of physicists for decades, the one first proposed by Gerald Feinberg in 1967, a crutch for science fiction movie plots ever since: tachyons.

These particles had flashed and disappeared in the booths. They were tantalizingly there for slices of infinite time, then gone. And the fact that they blinked in and out as part of the riddle of human existence itself made these proofs somehow irrelevant and small and yet desperately essential at the same time.

No, Weintraub and the other lab coats definitely did not want to take the equipment apart.

They don’t know, thought Tim.

They don’t know how it works. They don’t know all that it can do.

They simply don’t know.

It was unfathomable to him, too, that the research and development of such a machine could be done and then production carried out with complete secrecy—all benchmarks, findings, assigned personnel, initial test trials hermetically sealed. With not one word of publicity or a single media leak. Tim could hardly believe it. How had they pulled that off?

If the machinery had been a government project, leaks were inevitable. Impossible to prevent. If a private corporation had developed the equipment, yes, of course, staff could be required to sign gag orders as part of their contracts. But you would think at each stage of development the company’s PR department would want to herald its sensational discoveries from CNN to Scientific American to Nature magazine. If you didn’t want to make a noise for the sheer benefit of branding prestige, fine, then how about the more immediate concern of attracting capital for future development?

But nothing, Tim realized. No story about the booths had appeared until after the Nickelbaum execution.

The booths had seemingly come out of nowhere.

Gary’s report indicated that his team couldn’t even identify yet what parts were actually included in each of the chambers.

Inside both of them, mounted on the inside roof of the booths, could be seen astonishing equipment that looked “as if someone had miraculously miniaturized a Tevatron.” Tim read this line in Gary’s report and had to look up what the hell a Tevatron was—turned out it was a huge circular particle accelerator.

Only the guts of the machinery were incredibly more sophisticated. Weintraub’s team spotted something akin to a Cockcroft–Walton voltage multiplier—what an accelerator would need first (Tim figured he would have to take that one on faith). But there was no ladder-network of capacitors and diodes. It was more like an insect eye pattern of capacitors, and the whole mechanism had no leads or cords or hook-up to an external power source.

To measure voltage, after all, you need current. But the baffling mechanism suggested the thing didn’t run with regular electrical current at all but on something else.

Weintraub and his colleagues had to switch on the control panel to start the procedure, and the panel, at least, had to be plugged into an ordinary, humble wall socket.

But they couldn’t detect any radio beam or satellite signal linking the panel to the booths.

Yes, there were indicator lights and narrow screens to measure the pulse, blood pressure and EEG of booth occupants, but no one understood either how this data was relayed back.

And that was the sum of their knowledge without disassembling the equipment. They could turn the machinery on and off and start a sequence. That was it.

After turning a switch, they knew nothing about the exchange of a murderer for his or her slain victim.

Not encouraging, thought Tim. Well, he couldn’t help his friend Gary Weintraub find technical answers from the booths. But he could speak to the world’s first booth arrival.

The Ash family home stood in a distinctly rich, white-dominated part of greater Lancaster, southern Pennsylvania. The house at the end of the tree-lined block was distinctive enough that you didn’t need to check the rising address numbers. Mary Ash’s father was a retired architect, and the long structure with the sloping roof and overhangs resembled one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Prairie Houses.”

The mother came to the door and showed no surprise over finding Timothy Cale on her porch step. Obviously someone in Washington or New York had thought the decent thing to do was to call ahead, whether Tim wanted the Ashes to be warned or not. He could hardly fault the polite gesture.

Mrs. Ash, an older version of Mary in a sleeveless dark sweater and green slacks, seemed to carry a resignation towards the infinite. The resurrection of her daughter was something she would have to cope with long after this stranger imposed on her. Tim took in the dark gray rings under the woman’s eyes, her mouth pinched in a line, and he wondered himself how he could have the nerve. He had it, he knew, because he had no choice. He needed answers. They all did.

“Mrs. Ash, I’m not a journal—”

“I know you’re not, Mr. Cale,” she replied, her words coming out in a tired breath.

“Do you know why I’m here?” he asked, trying to make it sound less of a challenge.

“They gave me some idea,” she said. Turning with her shoulders slightly sagged, she walked back into the house before she realized he was still waiting on the porch, needing an invitation. “Come in, Mr. Cale, come in.”

The décor was what he expected. Tasteful, coordinated, like a layout in a home furnishings magazine, right down to the wooden curios the Ash father and mother probably bought on holiday in Peru. Mrs. Ash waved him to a cream white couch and asked him if he wanted tea or coffee. He didn’t want either, thank you. Then Mrs. Ash confirmed that yes, her daughter was home—in fact, she was upstairs in the room she had grown up in, but “you’ll want to ask me some questions first.”

“I will?”

“They all do,” said Mrs. Ash. “Everyone who comes to see her. The doctors, the government men—I think they’re afraid of her.” Her face looked pinched again for a moment, as if on the verge of either tears or a strained smile that seemed to tell him: I’m afraid, too.

She was past the exuberant joy of the miracle, of a reunion with her daughter that involved grateful hugs and tears, of excited confusion over how she could possibly be back. Now there was living with the miracle; with the knowledge that her child was still a victim, even if revived.

“I’m supposed to know her. I’m her mother. Do you have children, Mr. Cale?” But she didn’t wait for the answer. “I’m supposed to know her,” she said again with more emphasis.

He stopped himself before he offered the clichéd answer, the obvious answer: that even if Nickelbaum hadn’t murdered Mary Ash, she had been tortured and repeatedly raped, sometimes with foreign objects. There was no way the girl would have woken up from this horror in a hospital bed without being a different person, forever changed. But he was sure Mrs. Ash already knew this.

She must know it, he thought, because she had made a family impact statement at Nickelbaum’s sentencing. She had given a five-minute speech that didn’t curse her daughter’s murderer or talk about the robbed life of a sweet young girl, only how someone capable of such depraved acts must have so little human empathy that he merited extermination. She had got her wish. And she had got more.

Tim watched her go to the sideboard and pour what looked like a rye for herself. She lifted the bottle to him in afterthought. He shook his head.

“Her fingers are back,” said Mrs. Ash, sipping her drink. “The ones that monster cut off. They were just—suddenly—back. I noticed them on her fifth day with us. The doctors told us on the second day that all the… damage to her insides was gone, no scar tissue. They chalked it up to some reviving effect of this … this booth thing. All right, I can accept that. I’m not a religious person, but I can accept that my daughter’s privates are healed after the things he did to her and the way he violated her. But people don’t grow back digits like salamanders.”

“No, they don’t.”

“You think I’m ungrateful.” She took another long pull of her drink. Through the French windows to the back yard, Tim saw the shadows growing longer on the grass.

“No, I don’t,” he said carefully. “It sounds like you were doing your best with your grief, and now a stranger has been foisted on you.”

“Please don’t patronize me, Mr. Cale.”

“I’m not, Mrs. Ash. Quite the contrary. I imagine you have all sorts of people looking to you to help explain what’s happened or worse. They pretend they actually know what’s going on.”

“Yes, they do. But they don’t know at all, do they?”

“No, they don’t.”

She deserved the truth.

Her fingers drummed on her glass tumbler for a moment as she looked out the window to the garden. The shadows were still lengthening, as if darkness could acquire weight. Then she said, “You can go up and see her now if you want to.”

He muttered a thanks and went up.

It was quiet in the hall.

He knocked softly on the door to the girl’s room, and the light voice that answered adopted a formal tone: “Yes?” No grown-up child that’s come home ever answers Yes to a knock at the door like that. You call out Mom or Dad or say Come in or say Hey. Maybe Mary Ash had heard the doorbell about half an hour ago or was getting used to the parade of visitors.

When he pushed the door open, he found her sitting on her bed with a large charcoal sketchpad. The pad was propped up against the improvised drafting table of her knees. She smiled at him pleasantly but with no effort to rise or to interrupt her drawing. It was the smile of a self-absorbed toddler greeting a polite friend of her daddy’s. A pleasant enough smile. The eyes, however, weren’t young. They were a wise and vivid green, so striking that he almost took them for another color, one that belonged on a flower from the family garden or on a bright, newly born grasshopper chewing its leaves, knowing what its singular purpose and arrival was for.

“Mary, my name is Tim Cale.”

She nodded and smiled again expectantly, reaching out her hand to shake his without a word.

The hand with the re-grown fingers.

Her touch was cool, with a limpness thanks to a tutored grace. And then her eyes were down, back to the drawing.

The room itself told him very little, relentlessly neat and clean like the lounge below. Whatever she was now, Mary Ash had once favored pastel colors, and the acrylic paintings on the wall owed a lot to the European Fauvists. There was a framed computer store ad on the wall—obviously one of her first compositions as a professional graphic artist.

With the high angle she had for the sketchpad on her knees, he couldn’t see what her composition was. Not yet.

“Mary,” he tried again. “Mary, I know you’ve had a lot of visitors, and I’ll probably have the same questions…”

Her eyes flicked up from the sketchpad and down again as she let out a soft giggle. “I doubt it.”

“You do?”

She hadn’t invited him to sit, but he sat down anyway in the white wicker chair, making it crunch. I doubt it. He could infer a lot from those three little words, and he was instinctively certain he didn’t have to explain what his job was or why he was here.

Okay, he thought. If she expects you to ask different questions, go ahead and ask them. You planned to anyway.

He wouldn’t ask her what she remembered of Nickelbaum’s attack. He wouldn’t ask if she had any consciousness of the… transition to wherever she went. He wouldn’t ask where she had been all this time before her return. Others had inquired, and the girl had shaken her head dully or told them she couldn’t remember. She was just… back.

“Mary, what are you going to do now? I mean, after you’ve rested. Will you go back to your old job? The design firm will probably be glad to have you.”

Her eyes lifted off the paper with new interest.

“What did you feel like doing after Paris?” she asked.

After Paris…?

Don’t show it, he thought. Don’t show surprise. Don’t show you’ve been rattled. It was possible someone had filled in the girl about details of his career.

Her voice remained soft, almost ethereal. The charcoal pencil scratched the page.

“Well, it’s not like I was ever murdered and brought back from the dead,” he answered reasonably.

“No. But you felt like Europe was ruined for you after she died, and you needed to get away for a while.”

Thérèse. The girl was talking about Thérèse. Again, he resisted the urge to ask how she could know anything of his life. Instead he shrugged and replied, “That happened a long time ago.”

“Nooooo, it didn’t,” she said, her voice rising in a singsong. “Not really. Eight years ago, August twenty-fifth, you formally requested a transfer to Asia. It was after you knew you couldn’t help her. You blamed yourself for the breakup, and maybe if it hadn’t happened, she wouldn’t have gone out with the man who worked at the consulate in Lyon. He raped her after he lured her up to the embassy’s corporate hotel room off Rivoli, and he beat her, detaching her retina. She tested positive for HIV. It’s why you delayed visiting me. It’s why you feel conflicted about the Booth. You want punishment, but you also know terrible things change people forever. And you felt there was no pattern to life after Thérèse died in a car accident in Hamburg—”

“I think you’ve made your point,” he whispered.

Don’t ask how, he ordered himself, his mind racing. The how doesn’t matter right now because she obviously picked up this trick from wherever she went.

He forced himself to consider the why of her spouting the details of his life. She hadn’t done it with the others who’d come with their clipboards full of questions.

That meant she had singled him out for this mind game. It also meant he had an advantage, leverage. If only he could figure out what it was and how to use it.

He sat very still, hoping his breathing wasn’t fast. He couldn’t hear it. He was only conscious of Mary Ash, still drawing but not looking at the paper.

“I suppose you can tell me where I was August twenty-fifth last year,” he suggested, playing for time.

“Not an interesting day. You got your teeth cleaned at the dentist’s in the morning. You were upset with a foreign exchange student in the afternoon lecture, a Chilean who thought the CIA was right to topple Allende.”

“February sixteenth, 1985.”

The pale green eyes blinked then held him steady as she recited, “You were twelve and still living in Chicago. It was cold. There was snow on the ground, and you kissed Heather Dershowitz in your family’s basement rec-room while working on a history project together about World War One. You were embarrassed because your erection pushed out your jeans. She was eleven and scared she might get pregnant, and you had to show her books that proved it was impossible.”

She turned to look out her window briefly and added, “They call it hyperthymesia: the ability to recall vivid autobiographical detail according to dates. I don’t think it’s very impressive to remember stuff about yourself.”

“So you remember it about others.”

Her eyes fell gently on him again as she offered another fleeting smile. “Yes. You don’t have to worry, Mr. Cale. I’m not reading your mind, and the effect doesn’t last. And no, it has nothing to do with the physical contact when we shook hands either.”

“You just meet a person and…?”

“You know that quantum physics is responsible for how a television works, but you don’t know how. You still go on watching television, don’t you? Because you can.”

“Do you know about quantum physics?”

“Of course not!” she laughed.

With a flash of insight, he leaned in as he asked in a murmur, “You grew your fingers back, didn’t you?”

She lifted the charcoal pencil as she answered pleasantly, “Well, I do need my fingers, Mr. Cale.”

He nodded without saying a word, taking it in.

“I need to take a nap now, if you don’t mind,” she said.

“All right. Thank you for talking to me, Mary.”

“Not at all, you’re a very intelligent and interesting man,” she said as he rose to go. “You’ve been fortunate to see special things. You’ll get to see others.”

“What other things?”

She shrugged, just like a young woman trading casual gossip in the street, having run into an acquaintance. “I don’t know. I just know you’ll be near the center of it. You’ll feel better when you remember something.”

“What’s that?”

“That when you’re here, you must be here, Mr. Cale.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know how to explain it better. I volunteered at this daycare once. I went to help blind kids with a sculpture class, and I realized they’ve never seen red. So how do you explain what red is to them?”

“Have you seen these things you’re talking about?”

“No. Sorry. They’re for you. You’re still untainted.”

He stared at her.

Then she broke into a mischievous giggle. “I’m just messing with you, Mr. Cale. They didn’t send me back. But if I could know about your girlfriend in Paris, I could know about them, couldn’t I?”

He was still staring at her.

“You should be happy, Mr. Cale. You learned what you wanted. I had terrible things happen to me, and I’m not changed.”

He stood in the doorway and saw the mother hovering at the top of the stairs, wearing the same anxious expression as she had in the living room. He had one more question for the girl, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. It was too terrible.

Mary Ash fixed him rigid in her stare, saying, “It’s all right, Mr. Cale. I told you I can’t read your mind, but you’re giving your question away on your face. It’s okay. No one else would bother to think of it, not because it’s wrong, but because they don’t have your way of seeing. And the answer’s no.”

As he nodded his goodbye, he caught a quick glimpse of Mary Ash lowering the pad of paper.

There was nothing on it. Blank.

But he had heard the scratching of the charcoal. She had drawn, erased, sketched again and shaded with strokes.

There was nothing on the paper.

The mother waited until he was at the door before she asked what Mary meant. “She said ‘no’ to your last question, but you didn’t ask it. What did you want to ask her?”

“It’s okay, Mrs. Ash,” he said. “I’m sorry I imposed on you.” He walked back to his car, wanting to get away from the house as quickly as possible.

No, he wouldn’t burden the mother with the question that had been on his lips. The poor haunted woman didn’t deserve to agonize over that idea, and he barely wanted to consider it himself: whether Mary Ash had somehow actually chosen—from whatever mysterious place she inhabited—to “kill Emmett Nickelbaum back.” And if this was what had allowed her to return into their world.

CHAPTER FOUR

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.”

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.

Then Tim heard a buzzing drone. It would have been comical if it weren’t so inconvenient and irritating. One of the robotics models from the R and D team back at the facility had somehow strayed into this jungle. This kind of thing happened when a command pathway got stuck in its programming, and the engineers and assistants had to go forage for their escapees. Now Tim was sure this fluttering metal thing, designed to look like a bird, but flying more like a drunken bumblebee, would spook both the hornbill and its prey.

“Not to worry,” whispered a voice behind him. “It sees it, but it’s not scared.”

Tim looked over his shoulder. Just behind him stood Orlando Braithewaite. Tim would remember that even then the billionaire seemed ancient, though he could only have been about fifty that year. A man in an open-necked white dress shirt and tan khaki pants, his doughy face topped with a frosting of white hair, he smiled at Tim as if they were both partners in this casual expedition, and Tim felt himself smiling back, grateful for the company.

Every so often, Tim had spotted the CEO strolling the compound and knew he was supposed to be polite to this important man. Now Braithewaite gave him the impression that he was fleeing the tedium of the engineers and scientists just as much as he was.

“You’re Henry Cale’s son, aren’t you?” The tone of his voice suggested he already knew.

“Yes, sir.” Distracted by the bird, Tim burst into a happy laugh. The hornbill seemed to be studying the lazy, droning model. Tim thought perhaps he should go back to whispering, but the hornbill didn’t seem to care anymore that he and Braithewaite were here. “Huh! Look at that! It doesn’t know what that thing is!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the CEO gently. “Maybe it’s getting inspired.”

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