The Chain Read online

  “I’m sorry, Rachel, I really am. If you’re looking for a contractor, I can recommend Abe Foley. He’s honest and he does a good job fast. That’s all I can do.”

  Rachel nods. “Thank you,” she says meekly and, thoroughly defeated, exits his office.

  8

  Thursday, 9:38 a.m.

  Hmmm, this one feels different.

  There’s no evidence, of course, that it is any different. It shouldn’t be any different. They always say the same things, act the same way, and then fall right into line. Human beings are boringly predictable. That’s why the actuarial tables work so well.

  And it’s just a feeling—that’s all. And she can shake this feeling and replace it with another. But she doesn’t want to do that today. She wants to sit with the bad feeling and experience it and have it explain to her why it’s here. If the feeling means anything at all, it’s almost certainly about the current person on The Chain.

  Perhaps it would be wise to take a look at the present state of play. She opens up the encrypted file on her computer and examines the current protagonists. Everything looks fine. Link negative two is Hank Callaghan, a dentist and Sunday-school teacher from Nashua who has done everything requested of him. Link negative one is Heather Porter, a college administrator also from New Hampshire who has done all she has been asked to do. Link zero is Rachel O’Neill or, as she calls herself now, Rachel Klein. A former waitress and Uber driver who will soon be teaching at a community college.

  Is Rachel the bad apple?

  It doesn’t really matter if she is. As Olly is always saying, The Chain is largely a self-regulating mechanism that repairs its own broken DNA with only a little nudging from the outside.

  “Don’t worry. It will all sort itself out,” her stepmother used to say. And she was right. It generally did all sort itself out. She was sorted out too in the end, of course.

  No, Rachel won’t be any trouble. None of them will be or could be. Rachel will fall into line like all the others; either that, or she and her daughter will die. And die horribly, as an example for the others.

  9

  Thursday, 9:42 a.m.

  On the street outside the bank, Rachel fights back tears and waves of panic. What is she going to do? She can’t do anything. She has failed at the very start. Oh my God, my poor little Kylie.

  She looks at the clock on her phone: 9:43.

  She sniffs, wipes her face, takes a breath, and goes back inside.

  “Miss, you can’t—” someone says as she marches back into Colin’s office.

  He glances up from his computer looking startled and guilty, as if he’d been Googling some particularly arcane pornography. “Rachel, I told—”

  She sits and resists the urge to jump over the desk, put a knife to his throat, and scream for the tellers to give her the goddamn money in nonsequential bills.

  “I’ll take any loan this bank offers at any rate of interest, no matter how predatory. I need the money, Colin, and I’m not going to leave this frigging office until I get it.”

  Her eyes, she knows, have a piratical, dangerous, bank-robber glint to them. Look at me, they seem to say, I am capable of anything right now. Do you really want to begin your day with the guards dragging me out of here kicking and screaming?

  Colin takes a deep breath. “Well, um, we do offer a ninety-day emergency home finan—”

  “How much can I get?” Rachel interrupts.

  “Would fifteen thousand dollars cover your, er, roof?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The rate of interest would be well above our…”

  She tunes him out and lets him spin her the blah-blah-blah. She doesn’t care about the rate of interest or the service fee. She just wants the money. When he’s done talking, she smiles and says that all sounds fine.

  “I’ll need to do some paperwork,” Colin says.

  “Can I have the money transferred directly into my account?”

  “You’d prefer that over a check?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can do that.”

  “I’ll be back to sign the paperwork in an hour,” she says, then she thanks him and goes outside.

  She looks at her hastily scrawled, extremely incriminating checklist.

  1. Ransom

  2. Burner phones

  3. Research target/victim

  4. Get gun, rope, duct tape, etc.

  5. Research place to hide victim

  She’s near the Newburyport library. Maybe she can do some research on a target/victim in that hour? Sure, yeah, move, Rachel, move.

  She runs down State Street to the library, sprints up the library steps, and finds an empty study cubicle in the Lovecraft Wing. First thing she does is Google the Williams family of Dover, New Hampshire. A grisly robbery/home invasion gone wrong, the police thought. A mother and her two children and her new boyfriend were tied up, and all of them were shot in the head. The children had been killed hours before the mother, so she’d had plenty of time to suffer and think about it.

  Utterly chilled, Rachel begins researching potential targets.

  How had they found her? A pin in a map? PTA records? Uber profile?

  Facebook. Goddamn Facebook.

  She fires up her MacBook Air, logs on to Facebook, and spends the next forty-five minutes scrolling through names and faces of friends of friends.

  There are a breathtaking number of people whose profiles and posts are public and can be viewed by anyone. George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won’t be the state that keeps tabs on everyone by extensive use of surveillance; it will be the people. They’ll do the state’s work for it by constantly uploading their locations, interests, food preferences, restaurant choices, political ideas, and hobbies to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. We are our own secret police.

  Some people, she discovers, helpfully update their Facebook and Instagram feeds every few minutes, giving potential kidnappers or burglars intimate temporal and geographic information on their whereabouts.

  It’s all good stuff and Rachel decides to hunt for targets in the Greater Boston and North Shore areas. Successful, together men and women who are unconnected to law enforcement, who have big houses but small families, and who look as if they can pay a ransom and continue The Chain.

  She takes out her notebook and makes a preliminary list of candidates.

  Then she closes the computer, picks up her leather jacket, puts the list in her zip pocket, and goes back to the bank.

  Colin is waiting for her. She signs the forms and when all that is done, she says she’ll wait while he transfers the money into her account. It’s the work of a moment.

  She thanks him and goes to the Panera Bread on Storey Avenue. She orders a coffee and takes a booth in the corner, then logs on to the free wireless, fires up the Mac, and downloads the Tor search engine, which looks seriously untrustworthy. Nevertheless, she clicks the icon, and just like that, she’s on the dark web. She’s heard of the dark web and knows it as a place where you can buy guns, restricted prescription drugs, and narcotics.

  She finds a place to buy Bitcoin, reads through the procedures, sets up an account for herself, and buys ten thousand dollars’ worth of Bitcoin with her Visa. Then she buys another fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of Bitcoin using the recently deposited money in her First National account.

  She finds the InfinityProjects Bitcoin account and transfers the money. The transaction takes less than a second.

  And just like that, the ransom is paid. Jesus.

  So what happens next? Would they call her? She looks at the phone and waits. She sips her coffee and stares at the other people in Panera. They have no idea they are living the dream. They have no idea how bad it can get on the other side of the looking glass.

  She tugs at a loose thread on her blouse.

  Her phone dings with another photo of Kylie—here she’s sitting on a mattress in a basement—and a message from Unknown Caller: Further in
structions coming. Remember: it’s not about the money, it’s about The Chain. Move on to part 2.

  Move on to part 2? Did that mean they received the money? She hopes she hasn’t screwed it up.

  But of course, that was the easy part.

  She closes the Mac and goes outside to the car.

  What now? Back to the house? No, not back to the house. Now she has to get the burner phones and a gun, and the best place to do that is far from neighbors and prying eyes and the Massachusetts gun laws, over the state line in New Hampshire.

  She runs to her Volvo, gets in, turns the ignition, and, with a growl of clutch and a squeal of brakes, heads north again.

  10

  Thursday, 10:57 a.m.

  Everyone on the radio is talking about the shooting of a state trooper near Plaistow. There are only about four or five murders a year in New Hampshire, so this is big news and it’s on every station.

  The reports unnerve her, so she turns the radio off.

  Just over the state line in Hampton, New Hampshire, she finds the place she’s been looking for: Fred’s Firearms and Indoor Tactical Range. She’d driven by Fred’s a thousand times and never dreamed about stopping.

  Until today. She parks the Volvo and goes inside. Her stomach still hurts from the punch in the gut and she winces a little as she walks.

  Fred is a tall, heavy, amiable-looking sixty-year-old wearing a John Deere cap, a denim shirt, and jeans. His face is badly pockmarked but he’s still a handsome old geezer. The most distinctive thing about him, perhaps, is the gun belt he wears low on his waist. There are two semiautomatics in open holsters, which, Rachel assumes, are there to deter potential thieves. “Morning, ma’am,” he says. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m here for a gun. Something I could keep in my room for, you know, personal protection. We’ve had reports of burglars in our neighborhood.”

  “You from Boston?” he asks with a look that seems to add That city of Noam Chomsky, the Harvard debating society, and Ted Kennedy?

  “Newburyport,” she says and then wonders if perhaps she should have given a fake hometown.

  “You’re looking for a pistol? A thirty-eight, something like that? Something simple?”

  “Yes, exactly. I’ve brought my driver’s license.”

  “I’ll put your name in the system. There’s a two-day waiting period while we check you out.”

  “What? No, I’ll need something sooner than that,” she says, trying not to sound suspicious.

  “Well, ma’am, today I can sell you a rifle or a shotgun, any of these,” Fred says, pointing at a row of guns. Rachel is five foot nine but they all look too big for her and too ungainly to hide under a coat while she’s sidling up to some poor kid.

  “Do you have anything more compact?”

  Fred rubs his chin and gives her an odd, penetrating look. She wishes then that she looked prettier. Attractive women didn’t get that sort of look…or not as much, anyway. In her twenties, Rachel had looked like Jennifer Connelly in Ang Lee’s Hulk, according to Marty, but all that was gone now, of course. Her eyes were hollow and ringed, and the bloom was permanently missing from her cheeks.

  “The law puts a lower limit on barrel length, but what about one of these?” Fred says, and from under the counter he pulls out what he says is a Remington Model 870 Express Synthetic Tactical pump-action shotgun.

  “This might do,” she replies.

  “It’s a 2015, used. I could let you have it for three hundred fifty.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Fred winces. Clearly he was expecting her to haggle him down but Rachel is so desperate she’s willing to pay the asking price. She sees him look out into the parking lot and note that her car is a beat-up orange Volvo 240. “Tell you what,” he says. “I’ll throw in a box of shells and a little lesson. Do you want me to show you how to use it?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Fred walks her to the indoor range.

  “You ever fire a gun before?” he asks.

  “No. I’ve held one. A rifle, in Guatemala. But I never fired it.”

  “Guatemala?”

  “Peace Corps. We were making wells. Me and Marty—my ex—were liberal arts majors, so of course they sent us to the jungle to work on an irrigation project. We had no clue. We had our baby girl with us. Kylie. Crazy, really, when you think about it. Marty said he saw a jaguar stalking the camp. No one really believed him. He hurt his arm when he fired the rifle.”

  “Well, I’m going to teach you how to do it right,” Fred says and he gives her ear protectors and shows her how to load the weapon. “Tight against your shoulder. There will be a kick, it’s a twenty-gauge. No, no, much tighter. Brace it with your body. If there’s a gap, the weapon will drive itself into your collarbone. Remember Newton’s third law. Every force results in an equal and opposite force.”

  Fred pushes a button and a paper target comes up on a roof runner and stops twenty-five feet away from them. There’s a claustrophobic smell in here of grease and gunpowder. The target is a scary-looking man also carrying a weapon; it’s not a terrified little kid.

  “Pull the trigger, that’s it, go on, easy does it.”

  She squeezes the trigger, there’s an enormous bang, and Fred is right about Newton’s third law. The barrel pounds into her shoulder. When she opens her eyes and looks at the paper target, she finds that it has been obliterated. “Twenty-five feet or closer and you should be OK. If they’re farther away and they’re running, let them run. You get my drift?”

  “Let them run toward you so you can kill them or let them run away and call the police.”

  He winks at her. “You catch on quick.”

  She takes the shells and pays with her flood money. She thanks Fred and goes out to the car and puts the shotgun on the passenger seat next to her. If they’re monitoring her through her phone somehow, hopefully they will see that she’s serious and that she’s getting things done.

  11

  Thursday, 11:18 a.m.

  The Hampton Mall is the perfect place to buy burner phones. She slides the car into a spot in the parking lot, opens up the trunk, and rummages around looking for Kylie’s Red Sox cap. Her own Yankees hat sometimes attracts attention; a Sox or a Pats cap never gets a second look. She finds the cap, puts it on, and pulls it low over her face.

  Her phone rings and her stomach lurches. “Hello?” she says automatically without waiting to see who it is.

  “Hi, Rachel, this is Jenny Montcrief, Kylie’s homeroom teacher.”

  “Oh, Jenny, um, hi.”

  “We were wondering where Kylie was today?”

  “Yes, she’s sick. I meant to call the office.”

  “You have to call before nine.”

  “I will next time, I promise. I’m sorry. She won’t be in today, she’s not feeling well.”

  “What’s the matter? Anything serious?”

  “Just a cold. I hope. Oh and, um, vomiting.”

  “Oh, dear. I’m sorry to hear that. Hopefully we’ll see her tomorrow. Rumor has it she’s cooking up a great presentation on King Tut.”

  “Tomorrow, um, I don’t know. We’ll see. These things are unpredictable. Listen, I better go, I’m getting some medicine for her right now.”

  “How long is she going to be out?”

  “I don’t know. I have to go.” Another call is coming in, from an Unknown Caller. “’Bye, Jenny, sick daughter, have to run,” Rachel says and answers the incoming call.

  “I hope you’re working hard, Rachel. I’m relying on you. My boy won’t get released until you get someone to take his place,” the woman holding Kylie says.

  “I’m doing my best,” Rachel tells her.

  “They said they sent you a message and told you about the Williams family?”

  “They did.”

  “If you get out of this, you have to keep quiet or the blowback will get you like it got them.”

  “I’ll keep quiet. I’m cooperating. I’m doing t
he best I can.”

  “Keep going, Rachel. Remember, if they tell me you’re trouble, I won’t hesitate to kill Kylie!”

  “Please don’t say that. I’m—”

  But the woman has hung up.

  Rachel looks at the phone. Her hands are shaking. The woman is clearly on edge. Kylie is in the hands of someone who sounds like she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  A young man gets out of a car in the row opposite. He looks at her strangely for a moment and then nods grimly at her.

  Is he another one of The Chain’s agents?

  Are they everywhere?

  Suppressing a whimper, she puts the phone in her bag and hurries through the double doors of the mall.

  The Safeway is open and already filled with people. She grabs a shopping basket, speeds past the displays of Thanksgiving merchandise, and finds the rack selling those inexpensive cell phones. She picks up one that looks good, an AT&T cheapo that can still do photos and video. It’s $14.95. She puts a dozen of them in the basket and then throws in two more. Fourteen. Will that be enough? There are only six phones left on the rack. Hell with it. She takes those too.

  She turns to see Veronica Hart, her eccentric neighbor who lives five houses down from her on Plum Island. Oh God. The very reason she’d come up here was to get away from anybody who might possibly know her. If Veronica sees the phones, she’ll ask her if she’s prepping for the end of the world and then she’ll point out that come the apocalypse, zombies will tear down the cell-phone towers. It’ll be a whole thing. Rachel lurks behind the unsold Halloween merchandise until Veronica pays and leaves.

  She scans the phones at the self-serve checkout counter. After that, she goes down to the Ace Hardware and buys rope, chains, a padlock, and two rolls of duct tape.

  The cashier is a hipster with long Elvis sideburns and sunglasses. “Thirty-seven fifty,” he says.

  She hands over two twenties.

  “You’re supposed to say ‘It’s not what you think,’” the cashier says.

  Rachel has no idea what he’s talking about. “What?”