The Chain

by Adrian McKinty

  Perhaps he shouldn’t be unduly alarmed. He’s not the only person being followed.

  He hasn’t quite moved to the top of the to-do list just yet. If he were to take a few days off or go on vacation or something like that he might be safe.

  But unfortunately for Erik the fire is in his belly now and he has no idea that his movements and, more important, his Google searches are being monitored, recorded, and sent for processing to The Chain.

  56

  Tom, Cheryl, Oliver, Margaret, and little Anthony are on a Caribbean cruise to celebrate Tom’s promotion to senior special agent.

  Tom and the whole organized-crime division of the Boston field office have been getting a lot of positive attention in the press. The Patriarca crime family, originally from Providence and once so powerful in Boston, has been crippled by rats, wiretaps, and sting operations. The Winter Hill Gang has been broken up, and Whitey Bulger himself is on the run. Tom is quite the golden boy at the Bureau. Sure, he has his temper issues, but who doesn’t? He works hard, and this vacation is well earned.

  Tom booked the family a junior suite near the promenade deck. For some reason little Anthony has his own bunk, while the older children, Margaret and Oliver, are forced to share a bunk.

  Margaret and Oliver actually don’t mind that much, and Anthony’s attempts to lord it over them are quietly ignored.

  The ship visits Nassau and leaves at dusk with a fireworks display. The cruise is nearly over and they are steaming toward Miami. It’s really been a great trip.

  Anthony feels a hand on his arm in the middle of the night. It’s Margaret.

  “Shhh,” she whispers. “There’s something really cool I have to show you on the deck.”

  “What?” Anthony replies sleepily.

  “It’s a surprise. A secret. It’s really cool, though.”

  “What is it?”

  “Maybe you should go back to sleep. It’s only for big boys. Oliver is up there now.”

  “Is it a whale?”

  “Come with me and I’ll show you.”

  Margaret leads Anthony to the ship’s stern. Oliver is indeed waiting for them.

  “What is it?”

  “Over there,” Oliver says, pointing into the darkness. “Here, let me lift you up and show you.”

  “No, I—” Anthony says, but it’s too late for that now.

  Margaret and Oliver have been planning this for months. They made sure the vessel they ended up on was an older one without CCTV cameras. They laid the groundwork with a couple of false reports about Anthony’s humorous sleepwalking adventures.

  They hoist Anthony onto the guardrail and push him over into the foaming wake behind the ship.

  57

  Another handover of Kylie in Newburyport. The girlfriend is the same one. The little blonde. Rachel is determined to pay attention this time and at least get her name while Kylie retrieves her complicated Starbucks order.

  “Rachel’s teaching college now,” Marty is saying to the girl.

  “Wow, that’s great,” the little blonde says.

  “I’m so embarrassed, I really am, but what’s your name again? I’m sure you’ve told me a couple of times, but I’ve been a bit out of it, as you can imagine,” Rachel says.

  Marty looks really concerned by this. Not angry, but actually concerned for Rachel’s mental health. Chemo can mess you up in many different ways. “It’s Ginger,” Marty says gently.

  “And what is it that you do?” Rachel asks.

  “Ginger, believe it or not, works for the feds,” Marty says, speaking for her again.

  Pete and Rachel look at each other, eyes wide. This information has clearly never come up before because Rachel can see Pete is as stunned as she is. Kylie has never mentioned it, which is less surprising. It’s been drilled into her that they can’t have anything to do with law enforcement.

  “The FBI?” Rachel asks.

  “The FBI,” Ginger says, doing a sonorous, deep movie-trailer voice.

  “She’s not just an agent, though, she’s also getting her PhD in criminal psychology at BU. Busy gal,” Marty adds.

  “That wasn’t my idea. The Bureau sort of forced me into that,” Ginger says modestly in a charming Boston accent.

  “PhD? You can’t be old enough—” Rachel begins, wondering if the woman is some kind of freaky Doogie Howser type.

  “She’s thirty,” Marty says.

  Rachel can’t figure out if he’s saying that apologetically or boastfully. A woman nearly his own age? Who’s a grown-up with a grown-up job? Boastfully, she decides. “You barely look eighteen,” Rachel blurts out. “You must be…” She trails off, not sure how to complete the sentence.

  “Bathing in the blood of virgins every night?” Marty finishes for her.

  “I wasn’t going to say that,” Rachel says, but her little protest is lost in Ginger’s gales of laughter. She thinks Marty is hilarious.

  “Just a healthy skin-care regimen,” Ginger says.

  “Where exactly did you two lovebirds meet?” Pete asks, taking more of an interest in Ginger himself now.

  “We almost literally bumped into each other jogging on the common,” Marty says.

  “He’s done that before,” Pete says. “That’s assault, buddy. One day it’s not going to work and you’ll be headed for the Big House.”

  Ginger laughs at that too. She thinks both brothers are a riot.

  She’s pretty, she’s young, she has a great sense of humor, and she’s smart; if she comes from money too, that’ll just about seal it for Marty, Rachel thinks. “So you’re a local, Ginger?” she asks.

  “Oh my God, is my accent that outrageous?”

  “No, that’s not what I was getting at. I just wondered what high school you went to. Maybe you guys went to the same one. I’m not from around these parts.”

  Marty shakes his head. “Nah, she went to Innsmouth High,” he says. Rachel hasn’t heard of it. “Redneckville,” Marty explains.

  “I guess I was a real boonie kid,” Ginger says. “Lucky to get out.”

  Yeah, yeah, Rachel thinks. Real boonie kids don’t get PhDs at BU. Although, Jesus, she shouldn’t talk. Harvard. I mean, come on. Partial scholarship, yes, but even so.

  “So what do you do in the FBI?” Rachel asks with another quick look at Pete.

  “Profiling, right?” Pete suggests.

  Ginger laughs. “You’d think, huh? I’ve been angling for the BAU for years, but the Bureau in its ineffable wisdom has stuck me in its white-collar-crime division.”

  “Fun work?” Rachel asks.

  They talk about evil bankers for a bit and in a lull, Marty asks how Kylie is doing in school. Rachel shakes her head. “She’s been under a lot of stress.”

  “Have you read those e-mails her teachers have been sending?”

  “Yeah,” Rachel replies. “I don’t think we should talk about this, er, you know, here.”

  “No, sure, of course,” Marty says. “Only, um, if Kylie is going through something, Ginger works with psychologists and psychotherapists.”

  “We already tried a psychotherapist. It’s complicated,” Rachel replies.

  “I do know some really good people,” Ginger says helpfully. “Both inside the Bureau and out.”

  “Drop it. Here she comes,” Pete says.

  Despite her family’s concern, Kylie is all smiles. She’s got some crazy Starbucks concoction with a bunch of whipped cream and chocolate on top.

  “We should go,” Marty says.

  “Really? Can’t we all just sit together for a minute?” Kylie begs.

  They sit at the window table and talk as the sky threatens snow. Marty observes that New England does Christmas better than anywhere else.

  Rachel smiles and tries to contribute but Pete sees that she’s getting tired. They all say their goodbyes, and he takes her home.

  She can’t hold down food that night.

  She can’t sleep.

  She sits in bed with a cold c
up of tea.

  Again that thought to punish herself: If she had succumbed to the cancer a year ago, none of this would have happened.

  58

  And still they don’t stop. The dreams. The man in the snow. The fear. The bed-wetting. The stomach cramps. Every day, Kylie is getting weaker. She puts a brave face on it but Rachel sees. Rachel knows. And she is getting weaker too. Fading away. The longer the cancer treatment goes on, the longer the process of recovery.

  They have to strike now.

  Pete counsels against the plan. He has his own demons. The pain is coming back. The hunger. He is failing too.

  Kylie’s nightmares. Rachel’s nightmares. Kylie crying behind the bathroom door. Pete sneaking off in the Dodge Ram to be by himself. Rachel’s hair coming out in clumps. Kylie refusing sleepovers because she doesn’t want anyone to find out. They have all sipped from the Drink Me bottle. They have all unwound the clew of red thread. They have all fallen through the looking glass.

  Rachel and Pete sit on the cold deck behind the house.

  Atlantic breakers. A sickle moon. The chilly, indifferent winter constellations.

  Pete is waiting for her decision.

  She finishes her Scotch and hugs herself.

  “We have to do it,” she says.

  Pete shakes his head. “We don’t have to do a goddamn thing.”

  “Erik is—”

  “He can do it. He can take the risk.”

  “He can’t do it without us, without me—you know that.”

  “We’re out. We escaped by the skin of our teeth. We were lucky. This thing nearly got all of us,” Pete says.

  She looks at him. This doesn’t sound like the Marine Corps officer who’s done five combat tours. Doubt is crippling him. Or maybe now that he has something to lose—a family—he has become more cautious. He doesn’t realize that the family will be lost if they do nothing.

  “It’s not a thing, Pete. The Chain isn’t mythology. It isn’t self-perpetuating. It’s human. It’s made up of humans. It’s fallible, vulnerable, just like we all are. What we do is find the human heart at the center of it and break it.”

  Pete thinks for a long time and then nods. “OK,” he says quietly.

  “Good.”

  Rachel calls Erik’s number. “We’re in,” she says.

  “When?”

  “I want my daughter away. Safe.”

  “So when? It must be soon, before they change the protocols.”

  Marty and his girlfriend can probably take Kylie on the weekend, Rachel thinks. “Saturday,” she says.

  “I’ll call you at ten in the morning. You’re going to have to provoke them. You’ve got to make them call you back.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s going to be dangerous.”

  “I know.”

  “Until Saturday comes.”

  59

  Marty laughs with pleasure. “I would love to have Kylie. Actually, it’s perfect. Ginger suggested we go meet her grandfather this weekend. I’ll take the Kylester.”

  Rachel’s heart skips a beat or two. “Wow, you’re at that stage already? Meeting the parents?” she says, trying to be jocular and lighthearted, but she doesn’t feel that jocular. Marty would never have married someone like Tammy. But a whip-smart FBI agent who is still young enough to give him the couple of boys he’s always wanted?

  “It’s nothing like that. I’m not going to ask for her hand in marriage. And it’s her grandfather, not her dad. Nothing serious. Just a meet-and-greet. Her twin brother’s going to be there too. But I’d like Kylie to come. And you’re welcome too. And Pete. They’ve got a big old tumbledown house by a river, apparently, lots of swings and woods to play in if the weather stays mild.”

  “That sounds lovely but I’m just going to take it easy this weekend.”

  “Why don’t you do something fun, if you’re feeling up to it? A spa day. Send me the bill.”

  “Maybe I will. You know, as ex-husbands go, you’re not too bad.”

  “Damning with faint praise.”

  Rachel says goodbye and goes upstairs to tell Kylie the plans.

  “You goofed, Mom. Stuart’s supposed to stay here this weekend. His parents are going to his stepsister’s graduation in Arizona,” Kylie says.

  “Oh, crap, yeah.”

  She calls Marty again. “We can’t do it. I’m an idiot. Sorry. Stuart’s staying with us this weekend. His mom is going to Phoenix.”

  “Stuart? That weird freckly kid? He can come too. Ginger won’t mind.”

  “You’ll have to ask Stuart’s mom. I doubt she’ll say yes. She doesn’t completely trust me, and therefore, by association, she won’t trust you.”

  “No, it’ll work the opposite way. She’ll see that I am the dependable one. Text me her number and I’ll call her.”

  Rachel texts him the number and of course Marty works his charms with Stuart’s mom. The weekend is Rachel’s.

  Any other chemo patient would spend that time taking it easy and recovering.

  Rachel is going to hunt for the monster’s lair.

  She goes downstairs to Pete.

  “I mean, it’s sensible, right? If we find them with Erik’s app, they won’t be able to track us or anything, will they?” she asks, looking for reassurance.

  “I guess as long as you don’t piss them off too much, we should be fine. We’re just doing the equivalent of a phone trace. They won’t even know we’re looking for them. I doubt we’ll find them, but if we do we’ll let the authorities take care of it. An anonymous call to the FBI should do the trick.”

  “So we’ll be safe?” Rachel asks again, thinking more about Kylie than herself.

  Pete nods.

  “OK,” Rachel says and she knocks the wooden tabletop as a charm against the possibility of something going wrong.

  60

  A house in Watertown, Massachusetts, in the late 1990s. It’s another one of those Spielbergian suburbs filled with kids shooting hoops, riding bikes, playing street hockey. There’s the sound of trash talk, skipping rhymes, laughter…

  But 17 Summer Street is a house of mourning, not a house of mirth.

  It’s been six months since the Princess Cruise from Nassau. Cheryl isn’t over it. How do you get over something like that?

  She’s been going to therapy and she’s on several different antianxiety medications. None of that helps.

  What helps is being numb.

  Every morning, as soon as Tom and the twins are gone, she makes herself a vodka tonic that is mostly vodka. Then she puts on the TV and swallows a Klonopin and a Xanax and zones out.

  The morning creeps by.

  At eleven thirty, the mail will come. When she was a little girl, there were two deliveries a day. Now there’s only the one, at eleven thirty.

  She knows what the postman will bring.

  A few bills, some flyers, and another one of those letters.

  She closes her eyes, and when she opens them, the sun has moved across the sky and it’s time to check the mail.

  She ignores the junk and the bills and opens the letter that is addressed to her. Dear Whore, it begins.

  The rest of it accuses her of being a slut and a terrible mother who is responsible for her son’s death.

  This is the thirteenth letter she’s gotten like this. All of them written in block capitals with a black ballpoint pen.

  She puts it with the others in a shoe box in the linen closet.

  She makes herself another vodka tonic. She finds a cocktail umbrella and floats it in the glass. She watches a bit of Days of Our Lives and goes upstairs.

  She sits on the bathroom floor and opens up a bottle of Nembutal. She pops one in her mouth and takes a drink. She pops another in her mouth and takes another drink.

  She swallows the entire bottle and lies down on the bathroom floor.

  At four o’clock, Margaret and Oliver come home.

  They’ve gotten used to walking home from school by themselves. />
  Oliver turns on the TV. Margaret goes upstairs to read. She’s a good reader. Two years above her grade level. She’s reading The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin. It’s very gripping but eventually she needs to go to the bathroom. She finds Cheryl lying on the floor in there.

  There’s foam around her mouth, her pupils are fixed and dilated, but she’s still breathing. Margaret brings Oliver upstairs and both children stare at Cheryl.

  “The letters,” Margaret says.

  “The letters,” Oliver agrees.

  They look at her for a while. Her face is the color of the wallpaper in Tom’s study, a kind of pale yellow.

  Tom doesn’t get home until seven thirty. The kids are in front of the TV eating microwaved pizza.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asks.

  “She must have gone out,” Margaret says. “She wasn’t here when we got home.”

  “But her car is parked across the street,” he says.

  “Oh, really?” Margaret says and goes back to the TV.

  “Cheryl!” Tom shouts upstairs but there is no answer. He storms into the kitchen and grabs a Sam Adams from the fridge. He takes a bite of pizza.

  When he does finally go upstairs, it’s too late. The Nembutal has induced respiratory failure leading to cardiac arrest.

  He sinks to his knees and takes his wife’s cold hand.

  He begins to cry.

  “What have I done to deserve this?” he wonders out loud.

  And then he remembers.

  61

  Erik’s been at it all night. He is five cups of coffee in. He is six layers down in the Russian doll of anonymity and fake identities. He has scrubbed the traces and is using a brand-new MacBook with a bogus IP address that locates it in far-off Melbourne, Australia. He is deep in the maze, but he is safe. Or thinks he is.

  He’s pleased with his research. All the building blocks are in place.

  Always were in place.

  The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions are optimal. The information is there if you know where and how to look. All those hints, all those personal ads, all those confessions. Every new person introduced to The Chain adds a geometric level of instability. The thing has been teetering on the verge of collapse for a long time. It’s just figuring out a way to harness the data points into a shape.