The Chain

by Adrian McKinty

  “You’re talking like The Chain has a life of its own.”

  “That’s exactly what it has. It’s a monster demanding a human sacrifice every few days.”

  “I don’t know, Rachel. Sleeping dogs.”

  “They’re not sleeping. That’s the issue. I’ll call this number on a burner phone.”

  “Maybe I should call. I don’t think anyone at The Chain knows my voice. If it’s a trap, I mean.”

  “I’ll disguise my voice. I’ll do my grandmother’s accent.”

  Pete gets the bag of burner phones from the closet and they select one at random and go onto the deck so as not to wake Kylie. Pete looks at the clock. It’s only six thirty in the morning. “Too early to call someone?”

  “I want to call before Kylie gets up.”

  Pete nods. He doesn’t like any of this but it’s Rachel’s show and he just has to go along with it. She dials the number.

  A male voice answers immediately: “Hello?”

  “I’m callink about ze ad in ze paper,” Rachel replies in an approximation of her grandmother’s Polish accent.

  “What about it?” the man asks.

  “I’ve been having trouble vith a chain and I vas vondering if you vere having ze same trouble and vhether ve could help each other,” Rachel says.

  There is a significant pause on the phone.

  “Are you the one who wrote the blog?” he asks in a deep baritone that also has a tinge of a foreign accent to it.

  “Yes.”

  Another long pause.

  “I don’t know if I can trust you. And you should be wary about trusting me. Don’t give out any personal information at all, OK?” he says.

  “OK.”

  “They could be listening. In fact, they could be you. Or me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you really understand? The danger is real.”

  “I know. I’ve seen it up close,” Rachel says, kind of abandoning the accent now.

  A few seconds pass. Then: “Since you’re calling yourself Ariadne, you can call me Theseus. Perhaps we shall go into the labyrinth together.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope you are not a fool, Ariadne. Your blog was foolish. This call was foolish.”

  “I don’t think I’m a fool. I’m just someone who wants to put a stop to this.”

  “That is ambitious. What makes you think you can stop this entity?”

  She looks at Pete. “I’ve figured out a few things.”

  “Have you indeed? All right, Ariadne, this is what I want you to do. Go to Logan Airport today at noon. Buy a domestic ticket going anywhere that departs from terminal A. Go through security and wait in the departures lounge. I have the number of this phone. Bring it with you. I may call you; I may not. Trust no one, least of all me. Recall that one builds a labyrinth not to hide but to lie in wait.”

  The line goes dead.

  “Well?” Pete asks.

  “I’m going.”

  “Trust no one. Not even him.”

  “This needs to end. I’m going,” she insists.

  “No. You’re not going. This is crazy.”

  Pete is genuinely concerned, but his misgivings are also partly due to his own difficulties. Rachel doesn’t know that the methadone isn’t fixing him as well as it should. When you’re coming off pure golden-brown, high-altitude Mexican heroin, Bayer methadone is not the solution that the VA addiction-and-recovery counselors think it is.

  He’s jittery, buzzing, not thinking clearly. To take on this new project now in his condition? With Rachel in chemotherapy?

  It’s insane. They’re out of it. Better to let it go.

  “You can’t tell me what to do, Pete. I’m sick of people telling me what to do!” Rachel says.

  “Your life is at stake here. Kylie’s life.”

  “I know that! Don’t you think I know that? I’m trying to save our lives!” Rachel takes his hands. “We have to do this, Pete,” she whispers.

  Pete looks at her.

  Rachel is being literally poisoned every other week at 55 Fruit Street.

  She’s surviving. She’s coping. She’s still alive.

  “OK,” he says. “But I’m going too.”

  51

  Rachel has never liked Logan. People are always on edge; 9/11 began here. The long lines. The bad vibes. The Red Sox merch.

  She and Pete go to the Delta counter and buy tickets to Cleveland.

  They go through security and wait. She has her sunglasses on and her Yankees cap pulled down low, as if that will help.

  Noon comes and goes.

  “What now?” Pete asks.

  “I don’t know,” Rachel replies.

  “Why don’t you call the number from the paper?”

  She waits five minutes and calls.

  “I’m sorry but this number has been disconnected,” an automated voice says.

  Twelve thirty arrives, and finally her burner phone rings.

  “Go to Legal’s Test Kitchen near the Delta shuttle gates and order a Cthulhu black ale and a chowder. Come alone,” the voice says.

  “I’m with someone. He helped. We’re in this together,” she says.

  “Hmmm. OK, order two Cthulhu ales and two chowders. Table number seventy-three seems to be available. It’s a booth on the left-hand side.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we’ll see, won’t we?”

  They go to Legal’s, sit at table 73, and order the beers and two cups of clam chowder. They have the feeling that they are being watched, which, of course, they are.

  “Who do you think it is?” Rachel asks, looking around at the customers and the staff. The place is packed. There are a lot of people glancing in her direction. It’s impossible to tell which one is the one.

  She pulls her cap lower.

  “This is a bad idea. Now they know who we are but we don’t know who they are,” Pete mutters.

  Rachel nods. Her instincts have been to trust this person, although why should she? Pete’s paranoia would have been the safer default position.

  But she is so desperately worried about Kylie. Every choice she has is a bad one. Action is bad. Inaction is bad. It is a classic zugzwang situation. You have parachuted into the minefield and there is no safe way out. Maybe this is how The Chain tests people, by sending someone out as bait for potential defectors? Any person in here could be The Chain’s agent. And now she and Pete are going to have to—

  A large man wearing glasses shuffles over and sits down in the booth with them. “You took a hell of a risk coming here,” he says with a hint of an Eastern European accent. He holds out a large hairy paw. “I suppose I am the bold Theseus. You must be the brilliant Ariadne.”

  “Yes,” Rachel says, shaking his hand.

  He’s very tall, six five or six six, and he’s big too, somewhere between 275 and 300 pounds. He’s maybe in his early fifties. He still has most of his hair, which is long and straggly. His scruffy beard is turning gray. He’s wearing faded brown jeans, Converse sneakers, and a trench coat over a corduroy jacket and a T-shirt with an image of the cover of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He doesn’t seem like the diabolical mastermind behind The Chain. But you never can tell, can you? He’s holding what looks like a double Scotch or bourbon.

  Pete offers his hand. “You come with her?” the man asks, shaking it.

  Pete nods.

  The man gives them a vulnerable, weak, rueful, scared kind of smile and swigs the remainder of his drink. “Well, you can’t have gotten guns or knives or nerve poison through security, but that’s only delaying the inevitable, isn’t it? If you’re from The Chain, you know who I am now, and I’m dead,” he says. “However, if I’m from The Chain, I know who you are and you’re dead.”

  “Would you really know us? How many people do you think have been through The Chain? It must be hundreds,” Pete says.

  “You’re right. Hundreds. Maybe thousands; who knows? My point is that y
ou’ll have a photograph of me by now and you can match it up against the database and have me killed as soon as I leave this airport. Just add me to the to-do list of whoever is currently on The Chain and they’ll kill me and my daughter. Anyone can be gotten to. You can kill presidents and kings and heirs apparent and pretty much anybody if you’re motivated enough.”

  He takes off his glasses and sets them on the table. His hazel eyes are keen and intelligent and sad, Rachel thinks. And there’s a professorial or clerical air about them. They are, perhaps, a pair of hazel eyes to believe in.

  “We’ll have to trust each other,” Rachel says.

  “Why?” the man asks.

  “Because you’ve got the look of someone who has gone through what I’ve gone through.”

  The man examines her carefully and nods. “And you?” he asks Pete.

  “I helped. At the end. I’m her ex-brother-in-law.”

  “A military man, by the looks of it. I’m surprised they allowed that—or did you try to sneak that past them?”

  “He’s retired, and they said that he was OK. I really had nobody else,” Rachel explains.

  “The Chain is a cage always in search of the most vulnerable birds,” the man mutters, and he stops a passing waiter and orders another double bourbon.

  “Either of you ever done any kriging or matrix programming or regression analysis?” he asks.

  “Kriging?” Rachel asks, wondering what the hell he’s talking about.

  “It’s a Gaussian-process regression. A tool for statistical analysis. No?”

  Pete and Rachel shake their heads.

  He taps the table number. “The number seventy-three means what to you?”

  “John Hannah, offensive lineman for the Pats,” Pete says quickly.

  “Gary Sanchez briefly wore number seventy-three when he first came up with the Yanks,” Rachel says.

  The man shakes his head.

  “What does it mean to you?” Rachel asks.

  “It is the twenty-first prime number. The number twenty-one has prime factors seven and three. A pleasing coincidence. Table seventy-seven is also free over there. It’s not prime, of course, but it is the sum of the first eight prime numbers and the atomic number of iridium. Iridium is how they finally proved what killed the dinosaurs, which was the big mystery when I was a kid. The iridium-marker layer in the K-T boundary. Atomic number seventy-seven was the harbinger of death for the dinosaurs. It’s an ending number. All books should end on the seventy-seventh chapter. They never do, though. But we’re beginning something here, aren’t we? Hence table seventy-three, which is a little more appropriate than seventy-seven, yes?”

  Rachel and Pete look at him in utter bafflement.

  He sighs. “All right. Mathematics is not your forte, I see. Well, that’s not important. The story’s more important than the technique. How long?” he asks.

  “How long what?”

  “How long have you been out?”

  “About a month.”

  A hungry look plays across his face. A grisly smile. “That’s good,” he says. “That’s what I was hoping for. I’ve been out three and a half years. The trail has gone cold. I need someone with the scent still on them.”

  “For what?” Rachel asks.

  His bourbon comes and he drinks it in one. He stands and leaves a fifty-dollar bill on the table. “I guess you’re right, I guess we are going to have to trust each other,” he says to Rachel. “Him, I don’t like. I can’t read him. But you—you’re no liar. Let’s go.”

  Pete shakes his head. “I don’t think so. I think we’re fine here.”

  The man runs his hands through his stringy hair and ties it back in a ponytail. “Well, I’ll tell you what: I’ll be at the Four Provinces pub on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge in about forty-five minutes. I’ll get one of the private rooms at the back of the pub. They’ll let me have it. I’m a regular. Maybe I’ll see you there. Maybe I won’t. It’s up to you.”

  “What’s wrong with this place?” Rachel asks.

  “I want a bit of privacy to tell my story. And for us to make our plan.”

  “A plan for what?”

  “The reason you’ve come here,” he replies.

  “And what’s that?” Pete asks.

  “To break The Chain, of course.”

  52

  They are moving again. This time it’s back east. This time it’s closer to home: Boston. They pack boxes. Decide what to keep, what to donate, what to throw away. Little Anthony and Tom will miss LA, but the twins and Cheryl have never really fit in here.

  Maybe Boston will be easier. Tom’s dad lives nearby and dotes on the grandkids.

  Anyway, it’s another moving weekend.

  Cheryl shifts the dresser in the twins’ room.

  She finds the Polaroid Oliver took of Jennifer with no clothes on. The girl is in front of her house, and the photograph was probably taken from Oliver’s bunk in his bedroom.

  She shows him the photograph and demands an explanation. Oliver can’t think of one. He doesn’t deny he took the Polaroid, though. Cheryl calls him a little pervert and slaps his face. “Wait till your father gets home,” she says. Tom returns with boxes from the supermarket. He’s been away a long time. He stopped at a bar on the way back.

  Oliver and Margaret are waiting upstairs. They hear Cheryl talk to Tom. They hear Tom say, “Jesus H. Christ!”

  Tom comes upstairs. He grabs Oliver by the collar of his T-shirt, drags him down from the top bunk, and throws him against the wall.

  “You little sicko! You know what I think? I think they put LSD in your baby food. Who knows? I mean, Jesus, you might not even be my goddamn kids!” he yells.

  Anthony has come upstairs to watch the fun. Margaret sees him standing in the doorway grinning. It’s a grin that is going to cost Anthony his life.

  “It was just a joke,” Oliver says.

  “I’ll show you a joke,” Tom says. He picks Oliver up off the floor, drags him to the bathroom, throws him into the shower, and turns the cold water on.

  Oliver yelps as the water hits him.

  “This is funny, isn’t it?” Tom says.

  Tom keeps the shower on for two minutes and then finally turns it off.

  Oliver is bawling his guts out. Tom shakes his head, puts his arm around Anthony, and leads him downstairs.

  Oliver is sprawled in a corner of the shower, still sobbing. Margaret climbs into the shower next to him and takes his hand. Oliver is ashamed of his tears and everything that’s happened.

  “Go away,” he says.

  But he doesn’t mean it and Margaret knows he doesn’t mean it.

  His sobs turn to whimpers. The day lengthens. The sun sets right down Orange Avenue, silhouetting the planes landing at Long Beach Airport.

  “It’s OK,” Margaret says, holding her twin brother’s trembling hand. “We’ll get them.”

  53

  The three of them are in a private room at the back of the Four Provinces pub in Cambridge.

  Rachel and Pete are sitting opposite the big man. There’s a festive air in the pub but not in here. Three pints of Guinness and three double Scotches in front of them, which should keep them from being bothered by waitresses for a while. Rachel takes her baseball cap off and sets it next to her pint. She looks at Pete, but he merely shrugs. He isn’t sure how this is supposed to commence either.

  Rachel checks her watch. It’s 2:15 now. Kylie is going over to Stuart’s after school, and Stuart’s mom will be picking them up. Stuart’s mom is a tough-as-nails attorney and completely dependable. Stuart’s father is ex-army; he works from home and is still in the Massachusetts National Guard. Outside of Marty, Stuart’s mom and dad are just about the only people Rachel trusts to keep Kylie safe. But still, time is marching on. Rachel wants to get back before dark. “One of us is going to have to go first,” she says.

  The big, shambling, sad-eyed man nods. “You’re right. I contacted you,” he says. “First things firs
t. Security. No blogs, no e-mails, no paper trail, and when we meet, you make damn sure you’re not being followed. Get off the T at random stops, French Connection–style. Do it again and again and again until you know you’re not being tailed.”

  “Sure,” Rachel says absently.

  The man’s expression darkens. “No, no sure. Sure is not good enough. You need to be certain. Your life depends on this. You took a hell of a risk meeting me at the airport. And coming here? How do you know I didn’t lure you here so I could kill you both and slip out the back?”

  “I wasn’t armed at the airport, but I am now,” Pete says, patting his jacket pocket.

  “No, no, no! You’re missing the point!”

  “What is the point?” Rachel asks gently.

  “The point is you have to be vigilant. The last few weeks…well, I don’t know. There was a break-in in the math department. They ransacked half a dozen offices, not just mine. But that could have been cover. Even though I’ve been discreet, I’ve been making waves. Ripples in the pond. Maybe I’ve stirred things up. Maybe I’m being researched. Targeted. I don’t know. And more important, you don’t know. You don’t know me from Adam.”

  Rachel nods. A few weeks ago she would have thought this kind of talk was crazy paranoia. Not now.

  The man sighs deeply and takes a battered notebook out of his raincoat pocket.

  “This is my third journal on The Chain,” he says. “My real name is Erik Lonnrott. I work there,” he says, pointing behind himself with his thumb.

  “The kitchen?” Pete asks.

  “MIT. I’m a mathematician. Coming to Cambridge was the worst thing that ever happened to me and my family.”

  “What did happen?” Rachel asks.

  Erik takes a large swig from the Guinness. “I’ll begin at the beginning. I was born in Moscow, but my parents moved to America when I was thirteen. I grew up mostly in Texas. I went to Texas A and M. I got my PhD in mathematics there and I met my wife, Carolyn, there. She was a painter. Huge, beautiful canvases, mostly with religious subjects. We had a daughter, Anna, when I was doing my postdoc in topology at Stanford. Those were the good days.”