The Karma Retreat
THE KARMA RETREAT
GRANT FINNEGAN
Copyright © 2022 by Grant Finnegan
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ALSO BY GRANT FINNEGAN
The Seventh List
Flight 19, Part 1
Flight 19, Part 2
The Luxury Orphanage
For Sharon
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Epilogue – Part One
Epilogue – Part Two
Epilogue – Part Three
Coming in 2023
Keep in touch
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Every action has a consequence.
So always try to be good.
—Richard Eyre, British film director
Don’t
Stop
Me
PROLOGUE
How did this happen? he wondered. He was intelligent enough to understand most things, but this made no sense whatsoever. Seconds ago, he had been lying on a mat in a meditation class. He hadn’t even wanted to go to Bali, goddamn it. St Barts, in the Caribbean was his first choice, but his nagging wife had other ideas.
He remembered the pleasant earthy smell of incense, the guttural moans interspersed with words coming from the meditation teacher. It was all quite relaxing.
Seconds later, he opened his eyes.
Where the fuck am I?
He looked around. For some reason, he was in a dilapidated hut. The smell of incense been replaced by sewerage, rotting garbage and stale body odour. Movement in the corner of the hut made him sit up in fright. He locked eyes with a rat, before the rodent scurried out of a well-worn hole in the wall. By day’s end, he had realised that he was thousands of miles away from Bali and had woken up in the middle of the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh, coincidently, where the factories who manufacture much of his company’s apparel were located.
But that was just the start.
He was a 55-year-old man. And yet not anymore, at least on the outside. Instead, he bore the resemblance to a skinny, teenage boy, dressed in filthy clothing.
The humidity in the hut was so intense that he started to feel woozy.
This could not be happening.
He never believed in karma. It was complete bullshit. Only those hippie, yoga type weirdos sipping on their purple potato lattes gave it any credence, followed by jilted ex-lovers that hope a bus will come along to run over their cheating ex-partners.
But he was starting to question his beliefs, as the reality of his current situation became clearer.
It had come for him.
And he knew why.
CHAPTER ONE
Chad
Boston, Massachusetts, USA. February 2025.
‘You know how much I’ve been looking forward to this, right?’
Standing at the bathroom sink, Chad Miller glanced at his wife of fifteen years, who was waiting for a response.
‘Yes, you’ve been telling me every day for the last two weeks.’
‘But you don’t want to go, do you?’
She stood in the doorway with stony eyes.
It was 11.05 pm and the CEO of DOSTME Sportswear International had just arrived home. Conversation after a seventeen-hour workday never came easy; it was rare for him to come home before 9.00 pm these days. He turned to the mirror and took a long, deep breath. His blue eyes were lifeless, the lines below more pronounced by the day. A head of thick blonde hair was doing that middle-aged thing, receding into the netherworld, much to his chagrin. A strong square jaw, almost robot-like and thin lips below a nondescript pointy nose. Back in university, he had been the strapping, good-looking athletic type, but it had all slipped away due to neglect by the time he hit forty. His once lean and muscular body was no longer a priority to Chad. The company share price had taken its place.
It began about fifteen years ago, when his fortune broke through the $500-million mark. It was at this point that he started to believe the misguided notion that the money and status that he now had would make up for the lack of sex appeal. But what was he thinking? His wife was very attractive and far too intelligent to fall for that.
He shifted his eyes to his wife in the reflection, but Crystal’s eyes had glossed over. He knew she was miles away, and Chad begun to wonder how much longer she would have a hyphen and the word Miller stapled to the end of her name. He returned his gaze to his ageing face. Had the last fifteen years of her life really been a complete waste of time? And yet, deep down, he knew that money wouldn’t be enough to make her stay. Even with a long-winded prenup, she would walk away with more than enough money to live happily ever-after on her own. And anyway, no amount of money could give her back the last decade and a half of her life.
He pictured her with a microphone in her hand. She had recently retired from her job as a CNN sports reporter, and Chad reminisced about how stunning she was on camera. A long mane of blonde hair pulled into a shoulder-length ponytail bobbed from side to side, revealing a small set of almost elfish ears. Chad sighed.
About a month before, he’d come across one of her women’s magazines that Crystal had left open and had given the article a cursory glance. Something about a cheater’s guide to avoid being caught, from a woman’s perspective. Apparently if you were a man planning to have an affair, it said, then you should make sure your lover uses the same perfume as your wife’s favourite. He’d blanched when he read it. He’d made that mistake more than once. He’d wondered at the time if she knew, but then shook his head. Of course, she knew. It’s why she’d left the page open to begin with. Real subtle.
Chad watched as Crystal’s lips twisted into a smirk and for a moment, he believed that she was smiling at him. He smiled back, but his thoughts drifted to the amazing sex he’d had less than ninety minutes ago with a 23-year-old hooker. Okay, so her perfume was a bit overpowering, but wow, what she did with her legs was beyond impossible. He blinked, and his mind returned to the bathroom and recalled what he had agreed to do with Crystal and sighed again. Despite everything, he needed this vacation, even if it involved all this new age mumbo-jumbo she was into these days. Personally, he thought meditation was for idiots, nonetheless a tropical holiday did mean he would escape the dreary grey skies of Boston for a short time. And seeing her hips move beneath her silk dressing gown, had made him remember how magnificent she was, wearing next to nothing.
‘You got me,’ he said. ‘I would happily spend twenty-four hours in a plane, darling, if only to see you in a bikini.’
CHAPTER TWO
Angela
Bray, Berkshire, United Kingdom.
‘I met him once,’ Angela said, sipping on her white wine. ‘Heston.’
Suddenly, her face contorted with disgust.
‘This wine—,’ she met eyes with the man sitting across the table from her, ‘is lukewarm. For heaven’s sake, you’d think for the price of a set of diamond earrings at Harrods, they could serve it at the correct temperature. Waiter!’
Her son had already threatened that if she mentioned one more time that she’d met one of UK’s most revered chefs, Heston Blumenthal, that it would be the last time he ever brought her to the Fat Duck. But, since it was her birthday, it meant he had to swallow his annoyance at her perpetual, pompous behaviour, and she knew it. As she set the glass down and began waving her arms as though she were drowning, he caught sight of a woman at the main counter, who smiled at Jack, and Angela sensed his mood improve in a heartbeat. His girlfriend of five years had been the maître d’ at this restaurant for close to nine months now
. She shook her head from side to side and smiled at him, before the woman locked eyes with her.
Angela Jones was one of England’s most well-known oncologists. Her reputation in the field was legendary. So were two other things, the latter known to only but a few: the size of her ego and her unbridled, explosive temper. Thankfully, a waiter appeared, apologising, and swiftly swapped out her glass of wine for a new one. Angela sipped on the new glass of wine and sighed deeply. Crisis averted. Fifty-seven years of age. She sighed.
A solid woman, standing tall at about five foot eight, she had the sort of build more aligned to a rugby player. Angela’s hair was dark brown and always worn in a tight bun. She couldn’t recall ever wearing it any other way. A skincare regime had never been on her radar, and although she had been quite pretty in her youth, the process of ageing had not been kind to her. That morning, as she looked into the mirror, she saw thin, almost invisible lips and small grey eyes. But, she knew her stuff and had new patients lining up to be seen by her, so surely that was worth a few cosmetic sacrifices.
Jack, on the other hand, looked nothing like his mother, rather, he was the spitting image of his father. Six feet one, with a decent build, dark brown hair and big gentle brown eyes. The guy was a good-looking English lad.
Angela knew Jack had been making eye contact with Sophie from across the room. A smile crept across her face and Jack looked at her with curiosity, as if his girlfriend had spiked her wine with some sort of untraceable liquid amphetamine.
Sophie made an unannounced visit to the table after seeing the look of desperation on Jack’s face that he thought he had hidden from his mother.
‘Everything alright here?’ she smiled, standing closer to Jack than Angela.
‘The first wine was room-temperature-warm, but now it’s been rectified, my dear,’ Angela spoke in a condescending tone.
Sophie smiled.
‘How many hours until we get on the plane?’ she whispered to Jack with a tight jaw.
Angela pretended that she hadn’t heard her.
‘Darling,’ Angela handed the glass to Sophie with a nod, indicating that she’d like another.
Before Sophie could even register the look of disdain that Angela knew she reserved just for her, Angela cleared her throat.
‘I know I’ve not spent any time with you lately,’ she said to Jack. ‘So, I’ve made a decision which will change that.’
Sophie’s face dropped.
‘What would that be, mother?’ Jack said, his words tainted with fear.
Angela grinned at them both this time.
‘I’m going to come on the tropical holiday with you. We can finally spend some quality time together!’
Sophie made eye contact with Jack, in a look that Angela knew could only mean, kill me now. She wondered if Jack was thinking the same thing.
CHAPTER THREE
Amelia
Holmby Hills, California, USA.
It was a picture-perfect Hollywood day in the City of Angels for Amelia Langston. No hint of any clouds, or for once, smog, and she breathed in deeply, and smiled. Pierre, her personal assistant, had just texted her, and it had her grinning. She couldn’t resist snapping a selfie and looked at it for a moment. Not bad at all. After a bit of tweaking, she would upload it to her social media accounts.
Amelia was in a playful mood. She asked Pierre for the ‘code-word,’ a word only the two of them knew, after being hacked a few times in the past.
She didn’t have to wait long.
Another pinging sound from her phone and there it was in front of her. She smiled.
Sitting on the lounge chair next to her pool, she felt a tingle of excitement pass through her with the news. Her ranking on Twitter had just broken into the top twenty-five. Pierre decided not to tell her NASA was still one spot in front of her. Ouch.
Amelia scrolled down the Twitter rankings until she spotted the woman currently ranked number eleven. She pursed her lips. Personally, she had nothing against Kim Kardashian, but the twist in her gut as she studied the woman’s smile in the photo was driven purely by jealousy.
Amelia just wanted everything the Kardashian had. The family, the fame, the sisters, her looks and her body. Not happy with the hundred-or-so million that she’d amassed, or the fact that for many years she was one of the America’s most recognisable actresses, she knew that most people would give anything to have her life. But as Amelia sipped on her Bloody Mary, the only thought in her mind at that moment was what was on the screen of her smartphone. A ping and pop up box told Amelia she’d received another message. She assumed it was one of her girlfriends congratulating her about her change in Twitter rankings.
It was Pierre again.
She cursed his name as she swung her legs off the lounge chair.
‘Pierre, stop bothering me on your day off,’ she said.
Amelia was due to fly out tomorrow and her assistant was reminding her to pack.
Her destination – Australia and a four-week shoot in Far North Queensland. Fit and lean, she’d trained in Karate since she was a young child, but although Amelia didn’t train as hard as she used to these days, she had made sure she stepped it up for the last three months. Having her own state-of-the-art gym and Dojo, she wanted to look as good as she could for this film, and making a movie with an Aussie heartthrob was surely worth the long flight and the extra training. But before she arrived in Australia to drool over Chris Hemsworth in person, Amelia would be making another stopover and if it hadn’t been a stone’s throw away from Australia, she would have found an excuse to opt out.
Amelia was in no mood to go to Bali with her friend Gemma before the shoot, but even she had come to realise that her list of legitimate friends was getting shorter by the day.
‘Bali, here I come,’ she said to the glistening pool as she reclined in the sunshine.
CHAPTER FOUR
Logan
Vaughan, Toronto, Canada.
Logan Jackman took one final deep draw of his e-cigarette. He’d spotted someone who resembled his wife from across the car park and wanted to get one more puff in before she walked any closer. As the large plume of vapour came billowing out of his mouth, he turned and made his best attempt at a smile.
As Bethany, his wife of ten years, came closer, he could see the snarl on her face. She thought the e-cigarette thing was a joke. It was his latest attempt at giving up smoking. He may have given away the Belmont King Sizes a couple of years ago, but these things were just as bad in her opinion. To her, it was still smoking. Albeit without the yellow stains on his fingers and the wretched odour on his breath.
Being a Friday in the shortest month of the calendar year, it was still winter and both Logan and Bethany wore typical winter jackets, measured in the thickness of inches, like anyone who’d lived in Toronto all their lives.
‘Beth,’ the car salesman said.
‘Logan,’ his wife replied.
The ensuing few seconds of silence was awkward – a typical exchange for most couples standing in front of this nondescript building, in Jane St, Vaughan.