The Chain

by Adrian McKinty

  He sips coffee and reads an interesting paper by Maria Schuld, Ilya Sinayskiy, and Francesco Petruccione on prediction by linear regression on a quantum computer. Their algorithm is fascinating.

  But it is, he knows, a distraction, something for future analysis.

  Amazon’s Alexa is playing Physical Graffiti for the third time tonight. He stops to listen to the opening riff of “Trampled Under Foot.”

  He looks at the photograph of himself, his wife, and his daughter in front of MoMA, in New York. His wife’s favorite place in all the world. His wife and daughter are grinning while he looks pained.

  He shakes his head and fights the tears and looks at the bullet points on the screen that he will have to condense for his Chain notebook.

  Things are OK. While he hasn’t completely tested the app, he thinks it should work. And it should work only for Rachel.

  He reorders the list on his screen. These are the things he is fairly certain of now:

  At least two individuals. Two different signatures and modes of operation. Family members. Siblings?

  Boston-based

  Not organized crime

  Some kind of law enforcement background

  “Trampled Under Foot” ends and “Kashmir” begins.

  The woman has been watching him for ninety seconds now. Her heart rate is through the roof.

  Her instructions are clear: kill Erik, retrieve his notebook.

  She knows why The Chain picked her—because of her two previous breaking-and-entering convictions. They think she’s some kind of expert. She’s not. Those were teenage indiscretions. She’s a respectable fifth-grade teacher now. She got lucky that Erik’s back door was such an old lock. There was barely any skill required.

  She got lucky.

  Erik got unlucky.

  She has in fact killed before. A dog on the road out on Cape Cod. She’d hit it, and she had to put it out of its misery with a snow shovel.

  Maybe that’s what she’s doing to Erik.

  His wife is dead. His daughter is in an asylum.

  Yes, she thinks and aims the gun at his back.

  62

  Pete’s alarm goes off at five o’clock. He kills it before it wakes Rachel and quickly rolls out of bed.

  His skin and eyes and internal organs are craving the fix. It has been a full day now. One of his longest fasts yet. He is trying a technique called stretching that some guys in the program have recommended. You stretch out the time between hits as long as you can—you go a full day, then a day and a half, and then two days. He looks at the clock. Twenty-five hours and five minutes. Getting up there. Getting close to his record. He feels OK. So far.

  He makes coffee, does a few pushups, and goes into the bathroom and locks the door. What would happen if he boils half as much as normal? Can he wean himself off that way? Could that work? Half is crazy. Two-thirds, maybe.

  He measures out two-thirds of his normal dose, boils it up on a spoon, sucks it into the syringe, injects himself with the good stuff.

  He lies down on the sofa and the beautiful dreams take hold of him for an hour.

  He wakes up again.

  He could have gone longer. He’s feeling fine.

  He makes more coffee, showers, and preps the pancake batter. He thinks about the guns and for the third time goes to check that they’re still locked in his truck. They are. He examines the hunting rifle, the .45, Rachel’s shotgun, and the nine-millimeter.

  He took all four to the range yesterday and he’d gotten some good practice in. He’d been an engineering officer in the Corps, but no matter the job, every Marine is an infantryman first.

  Rachel wakes up next.

  She hasn’t really slept.

  She’d vomited in the middle of the night.

  Eleven days since her last chemo treatment, but it happened like that sometimes. Or it could just be the fear.

  The Boy Called Theseus will be phoning the Girl Called Ariadne at ten o’clock sharp.

  She comes out of the bedroom and sits at the living-room table.

  Pete kisses her on the top of the head. “You didn’t sleep?”

  “I did. A little. I had another dream.”

  Pete doesn’t need to ask what about.

  Another nightmare.

  Another glimpse into the future.

  Kylie finally wakes at eight and Stuart comes over promptly at eight thirty.

  “Pancakes, anyone?” Pete asks.

  He has just poured the batter into the frying pan when Marty and Ginger arrive in Marty’s big white boat of a Mercedes.

  Pete turns down the gas on the stove and he, Rachel, and Kylie go out to greet them.

  “Well, if it isn’t Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts,” Marty says, slapping Pete on the back and kissing Rachel and Kylie.

  “And if it isn’t…” Pete says, but he can’t think of a good response.

  Marty’s definitely the one who got the family’s gift of the gab.

  They’re an attractive couple, Rachel thinks. Ginger’s hair has grown some and she has washed out all the dye, so that now it’s a pretty copper color, which suits her much better. Marty’s eyes are somehow greener.

  “Pete’s made pancakes and I’ll fry up some bacon,” Rachel says.

  They sit at the living-room table and eat breakfast.

  “These are good, big brother—did you make them from a mix?” Marty asks.

  Pete shakes his head. “I’m with Mark Bittman. Pancake mixes are the sign of a decadent civilization.”

  “My childhood was exactly like that,” Marty tells Ginger and Kylie. “You ask an innocent question and you get some lecture about everything that’s wrong with the world.”

  “He’s lying. He was the spoiled one in the family,” Pete says.

  “What was your childhood like, Ginger?” Rachel wonders.

  “Wow. Crazy. Don’t get me started. I don’t even remember the commune years. We lived all over before coming back to Boston,” Ginger says.

  “Is that why you were attracted to the FBI? For stability?” Rachel asks.

  “Not really. My dad was an agent, my grandfather was Boston PD, so I guess it’s the family business,” Ginger says.

  “Are you sure it’s OK that we dump two kids on you?” Rachel asks Marty in private when breakfast is over.

  “I talked it over with Ginger. She’d love to have Kylie and her little pal down to her grandfather’s house. It’s a big old fun-packed place on the Inn River. Kids will go nuts down there. Love it.”

  “A lot of those old houses in that part of Massachusetts, on the floodplain, are dangerous. Just be careful, OK?”

  “Don’t worry, the house is gorgeous—they’ve spent a lot of dough doing it up.”

  “Ginger does come from money, then? Lucky you,” Rachel says.

  “Yeah, it must be family money, because you don’t make that much as an FBI agent,” Marty replies.

  “Unless she’s one of them corrupt cops,” Rachel jokes.

  “Come on, Rach, look at her—she’s from law-and-order central casting.”

  Stuart and Kylie are finally ready, and Pete and Rachel walk everyone to the car. “Look after the kids,” Rachel says.

  Ginger hugs her. “Don’t worry, they’ll be safe with us,” she promises.

  Yeah, family money, Rachel decides, looking at Ginger’s bag, a small but gorgeous Hermès Birkin.

  Hugs and kisses all around, and the four of them are off.

  Back in the house, Pete places a map of New England on the table.

  “Somewhere in here,” he says.

  “Now we just have to wait for Erik’s call. I’ll check that the GPS tabs we put in her shoes are working.”

  She turns on her phone, and, yup, there is Kylie heading south.

  They check the weather. Drizzle, maybe some snow flurries.

  Could be worse.

  They wait for Erik’s call.

  Ten o’clock comes and goes.

  Ten fift
een.

  Ten thirty.

  Eleven o’clock.

  Something is wrong.

  “What do we do?” Pete asks.

  “We just wait, I guess,” Rachel replies. But something terrible has happened, she knows it.

  Pete knows it too. It’s that feeling you get a minute before the alarms go off and the ordnance comes raining down.

  Eleven fifteen.

  Eleven thirty.

  A thick sea fog is rolling in from the Atlantic. Ominous pathetic-fallacy weather.

  At eleven forty-five, a text comes through to Rachel’s burner phone.

  If you are receiving this text, it means I have been compromised or incapacitated. Most likely I am dead. I am sending you a link to a place where you can anonymously download the hunter-killer app for phone communications and text messages. A reminder: The longer you are in direct communication, the closer you will get to finding who you are talking to, so if you choose to use it, keep them talking as long as you can. I was not able to get the app to work properly with Wickr or Kik or other encrypted apps. If they communicate with you that way, it will not work properly. Maybe version 2.0 if I’m still alive. Good luck.

  The next text is a link to a site where they can download Erik’s application.

  She shows the message to Pete and turns on the TV news.

  It takes another forty-five minutes for the news to hit WBZ Boston.

  “An MIT professor was murdered this morning. Erik Lonnrott was shot three times at his home…”

  The report goes on to say that there were no witnesses to the incident. The police’s working theory is that this was a robbery gone wrong, as the house appeared to have been ransacked and various items were apparently stolen.

  “He wrote my name in his notebook,” Rachel says.

  63

  A few weeks after Cheryl’s death, Tom promises the kids a new start. He’s a changed man and a better man, he says. He’s going to book that trip to Disneyland. He’s going to work less. He’s going to make them the focus of his life.

  The better-man shtick is convincing for about ten days. Then something at work annoys him and he stops at a bar on the way home.

  The bar becomes a regular watering hole on his drive back from the FBI.

  One night he meets someone at the bar and doesn’t come home at all.

  Oliver and Margaret don’t mind.

  They’re self-reliant. Oliver spends much of his time on his home computer. Margaret is still reading a lot. Detective novels and romances are her favorites. She’s writing too. Anonymous letters.

  A boy she liked asked another girl to the school disco.

  The girl got a letter that convinced her not to go to the disco.

  The teacher who gave her an F got a letter threatening to expose his secret. It was an old trick she’d read in a Mark Twain book, but the teacher came in the next day as pale as a ghost.

  Margaret has another project she’s working on. She spends a lot of time copying and perfecting her father’s handwriting.

  On the one-year anniversary of Cheryl’s death, Tom comes home drunk.

  The kids can hear him downstairs in a royal rage about something.

  They wait trembling in their bedroom for Tom to come crashing up the stairs.

  They don’t have to wait long.

  Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp.

  The bedroom door is kicked open.

  “Where’s the meat loaf?” he says, which is such a silly line that Margaret almost giggles.

  He turns the light on and the laughs evaporate. Tom has taken off his belt.

  Tom had asked Margaret to save him some of the meat loaf, but she and Oliver finished it. There was nothing else in the refrigerator.

  “Do you ever listen, you stupid little shit?” Tom says and he pulls her from the bed so hard that he dislocates her shoulder.

  He slaps her twice with the double-folded belt and then he tells her to stop crying because he barely touched her.

  He storms back downstairs.

  Margaret is in agony all night and it’s the school nurse who finally sends her to the hospital the following day. Tom is guilty and remorseful. He stops drinking. He starts going to church and to Promise Keepers.

  Margaret and Oliver bide their time.

  Church doesn’t last.

  A couple of months later, the drinking begins again in earnest.

  One night when Tom is blind-drunk on the sofa, Margaret removes the revolver from his shoulder holster. She and Oliver gently open Tom’s mouth and put the barrel of the revolver between his lips, and together they pull the trigger. Then they wipe their fingerprints off the gun and place it in Tom’s right hand.

  They put the suicide note they’ve written on the coffee table.

  They work themselves up into fake tears and dial 911.

  After being taken into foster care, the kids are dumped with their grandfather Daniel at his fly-ridden tumbledown house by the Inn River in a swampy part of Massachusetts.

  Grandfather Daniel is retired Boston PD.

  They haven’t seen a lot of him but he sure as hell remembers them. He remembers them when they were only so high and living on a commune in upstate New York.

  Daniel doesn’t go into the city much anymore. He lives by fishing, hunting, and trapping, and his house is decorated with the skulls of many different animals.

  Daniel meets the woman from social services with a broken-open shotgun over his shoulder. Margaret and Oliver give their grandfather a hug.

  The woman from social services is relieved that the kids seem to know and like the old man.

  “Their stepmom wasn’t too fond of me or this place, but I seen the kids a couple of times,” Daniel explains.

  When the social services woman has gone, Daniel takes them into the kitchen and gives them each a can of Budweiser, which they accept nervously. A butchered hog is hanging upside down over the large kitchen sink. Its white skin is black with flies.

  Daniel shows the kids how to open the beer cans. It’s just like with a Coke. He tells them they can call him Red or Grandpa. He asks them what they want to do with their lives. Oliver says he wants to make a lot of money, maybe in computers, and Margaret says she wants to be an FBI agent like her dad.

  Daniel considers that. “We’ll see,” he says. “First thing we have to do is fix them names.” He looks at the boy. “We’ll call you Olly. You like that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Olly says.

  He examines the girl. “And with you, it’s obvious. That mop of yours. We’re going to call you Ginger.”

  64

  The monster is out there, right out there through the glass in the fog.

  It killed Erik and when it finds the name Rachel in the notebook, it will kill her too. Her and Kylie and Pete and Marty and Ginger and everybody connected with her.

  There’s no choice now. Choice was always an illusion.

  There’s only one thing to do.

  Her hand is trembling.

  Pete is looking at her expectantly.

  She knows what she is going to do next.

  First of all, she calls Marty to check that Kylie is safe and sound. Kylie isn’t answering her phone, as usual, but the GPS locator has them at the mall at Copley Place.

  Marty answers immediately. “Yeah, she’s fine, we’re just finishing up at the mall,” he says.

  “You have her in your line of sight?”

  “Yeah, of course. She’s at the Adidas store with Stuart.”

  “And then you’re going to Ginger’s dad’s house?”

  “Grandfather’s house. What’s the matter, Rach? I can tell something’s up.”

  “I just want to know that Kylie’s safe.”

  “She’s safe. Ginger’s twin brother will be there, and Ginger is an actual card-carrying FBI agent, and her grandfather is ex–Boston PD. I can’t think of much safer than that.”

  “That’s good, Marty. Keep her safe, OK?”

  “I will, sweetie
. You take care now. Take it easy this weekend, for God’s sake. You need your strength, okay?”

  “I will.”

  They say goodbye and hang up.

  “What now?” Pete asks. “The cops?”

  Rachel ties her hair back in a ponytail. “Kylie’s safe but they are going to be coming for us. We need to get out of this house.”

  “What’s the plan?” Pete asks.

  “We download the app, see if it works. If we can find them, we’ll locate their residence and call the police.”

  “And if we can’t?”

  “We call Ginger and tell her everything and ask her to take Kylie into protective custody. Then I guess we turn ourselves in.”

  Pete looks at her. “How long do you think we have?”

  “I don’t know. Hours? Let’s get started,” Rachel says.

  She turns on Erik’s app. It has downloaded successfully but when she tries to open it, a message flashes on the phone’s home screen: For this app to work you need to enter the next number in this sequence: 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 20…If you enter the wrong number your phone will be locked and all devices associated with your account will be disabled for twenty-four hours.

  Rachel shows the message to Pete.

  “That is a powerful bit of tech. We need the exact digits or we’re screwed,” Pete mutters.

  “What about the number pattern? Recognize it?”

  He shakes his head. “It’s not prime numbers. It’s not the sum of the numbers before. It’s not any series that I know of offhand.”

  “We get only one shot at this. If we mess this up, we won’t be able to get back in until tomorrow.”

  “And tomorrow will be too damn late.”

  “Eight, nine, ten, fifteen, sixteen, twenty,” Rachel says aloud.

  “I’ll Google it,” Pete says, but all he gets are links to YouTube videos teaching kids how to count.

  Rachel closes her eyes and tries to think. What sequence is this? It’s something she has seen before somewhere.

  “An additional security protocol makes no sense at this stage, does it, Pete?” she says, thinking out loud. “I mean, Erik knows that the only person who is going to download this app is me. Right?”