But after graduation, Oliver is headhunted by half a dozen Silicon Valley start-ups and Ginger is headhunted by the FBI, the CIA, and the ATF.
Ginger joins the Bureau.
There’s a lot of affection in the FBI for Ginger and her father. Shame what happened to your pop, real shame…
Ginger works hard and gets fast-tracked. She makes connections. I knew your old man. He was a hell of an agent. He and me, we used to—
Ginger burning the midnight oil.
Ginger slowly rising up the chain of command.
Sometimes she wonders if she’s doing this for herself or to please her grandfather or maybe to one-up her father. Is Ginger’s life a result of or a reaction to her relationship with her dad?
She takes classes at the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, where they have all sorts of shrinks and investigators who can help her explore these questions if she wants. One of her instructors quotes the German poet Novalis: “Inward goes the way full of mystery.” She likes that and she’d like to someday go on that inward journey to get at the root of why she’s the way she is, but it’s a journey she’ll make by herself. She’ll never trust any shrink with her past history and the thoughts in her head.
Oliver moves to California to work, first for Apple and then for Uber and then for a few riskier start-ups of which he has a piece. “When one of these hits, we’ll be millionaires.”
When one of these hits…he’s worked for two companies in a row that have gone bankrupt.
That doesn’t matter.
Ginger has come up with an alternative way to make money.
Serious money. Serious power.
Ginger hears about the Jalisco boys in the early 2010s.
The Jalisco boys brought north from Mexico an entirely new model of heroin distribution. The cartels and the gangs were too violent and too scary for Middle America. The Jalisco boys saw that and realized that there was a vast untapped market for their product if they approached the customers just right.
They gave out free heroin outside VA clinics, methadone clinics, and pharmacies to build up their clientele. Clinicians’ overprescribing of OxyContin had created a vast user base of opiate and painkiller addicts who were all slipping into panic mode now that the DEA was finally beginning to crack down on narcotics.
Brown-tar heroin filled the gap nicely. It worked better than OxyContin or methadone and it was free, at least at first. And the guys giving it away weren’t scary. The dealers didn’t carry guns and they smiled a lot.
The Jalisco cartel had a million users within two years.
They diversified into other criminal enterprises.
Ginger ends up on a Jalisco task force. She is looking into links between the Jalisco cartel and the Boston mob. Thanks to rats and FBI penetration, the Patriarca crime family is on the decline, but the Jalisco cartel is on the upswing.
Ginger comes across a Jalisco hostage scheme in which people who owe money are kidnapped until their families pay their debts, but there’s an element of humanity to it: a different member of the family can take the place of the kidnap victim.
The Jalisco boys’ hostage model works largely through minimal violence, but seeing its underutilized potential, Ginger wonders if it can be modified for her own ends.
She remembers how effective the chain letters were in her childhood.
She discusses it with Olly.
With the help of her programming-genius brother, The Chain is born in Boston in 2013.
It isn’t an immediate success. There are teething troubles. A little too much blood.
Needing to distance themselves from the wet work, they use Jalisco and Tijuana enforcers who are desperate for money. They don’t know who their employer is. The mysterious woman behind it all is known as the Mujer Roja or the Muerte Roja. They say she’s the wife of a cartel overlord. They say she is a Yankee follower of Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte.
The Jalisco and Tijuana assassins are somewhat trigger-happy. They don’t really understand that operations in the United States require finesse. There’s a little too much killing in the early days. The whole thing is on the verge of collapse.
Ginger gets rid of the Mexican assassins and uses her contacts in the dying New England Patriarca crime family instead. They understand the American way of death. They’ve been doing this kind of thing for decades.
Eventually The Chain begins to run like a well-oiled machine.
Things start to settle.
The Patriarca goons are disposed of, and The Chain begins to self-regulate.
Ginger sending out the letters.
Ginger making the phone calls.
Ginger calling in the hits.
It grows to become a million-dollar blackmail, kidnapping, and terrorism scheme run as a family business by Oliver and Ginger.
“It is,” says Olly, “the goddamn Uber of kidnapping with the clients doing most of the work themselves.”
If they could launch it as an IPO, he says, it could be worth tens of millions.
But as it is, they’re comfortable enough.
They pay off their college loans. They get rich.
They open bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.
The Chain works beautifully now and it’s foolproof.
Oliver has done several red-team failure analyses of The Chain and he sees only three areas of concern that might conceivably lead to trouble.
First, there’s Ginger’s often lazy tradecraft. He’s told her to use a new Wickr address, a new burner phone, and a new Bitcoin account at every new stage of The Chain. But she doesn’t always do that. It’s a big hassle and usually she changes the addresses and accounts only about once a month. He’s also told her never to make one of the anonymous Chain phone calls when she’s at work or when she’s at her house in the Back Bay or at Daniel’s house on the Inn River.
She promises to work on the tradecraft, although it’s hard to hold down her job in the Bureau, study for a PhD, and run a very sophisticated criminal enterprise all at the same time. Still, there are many layers of encryption between them and The Chain. Encryption, Faraday cages, redundancies…
The second major area of concern is Ginger’s use of The Chain to settle personal scores. Three times (that Olly knows of) she’s done this. Ideally, the business and the personal should never mix, but with human beings there’s always going to be some blurring of the lines. And improvising a set of rules to delineate the system was always going to seem contingent on and provisional to that system’s inventor.
Some of this score-settling ties into the third area of concern—Ginger’s sex life.
Olly realizes that he’s a bit of an odd duck, relationship-wise. He’s never had a serious girlfriend or a real romantic interest of any kind. He’s an introvert and he doesn’t like parties or physical contact. Maybe the hippies really did mess with his brain chemistry early?
Ginger, however, is thoroughly engaged with the world. They would be a neat example in any psychological study of twins. She had boyfriends throughout high school and college, and she has dated a dozen different men since joining the Bureau, two of whom were married.
Sex is important; Olly appreciates that intellectually. Sex is the joker that keeps mammalian DNA forever changing and one step ahead of all the viruses and pathogens that are trying to wipe the species out. Olly understands this on a scientific and mathematical level. But sex is still a wild card, and love—God forbid—is an even wilder card.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And when you mix power with sex, well, you get what Ginger has occasionally done with The Chain. Several times he’s caught her using information from the FBI databases for purposes unrelated to Chain business. He suspects there are other incidents he doesn’t even know about.
It isn’t good.
He has to get her to put a stop to it.
Oliver sits in his grandfather’s study with Erik Lonnrott’s notebook in his hand. There’s a fire burning
in the grate. He can see snow flurries through the window.
Olly examines the notebook carefully. It’s mostly a fair copy of a previous notebook. Or even notebooks. Erik has been working on this for some time. Olly was aware that someone was looking into The Chain and he had suspected that Erik might be the one. Erik had shaken off too many tails for him to be entirely innocent, and a lot of search histories and analyses led straight back to the computers at MIT.
They hadn’t been able to find Erik’s laptop or phone, but the notebook was on his person.
Erik took the trouble to write most of his text in cipher. Olly isn’t too bothered about that. There is no cipher devised by man that is unbreakable. Additionally, poor old Erik had gotten quite excited in the last few weeks of his life, and instead of carefully coding all of his entries, he had simply written them down in Russian or Hebrew. As if that would conceal anything. The poor deluded fool.
Olly looks at these final entries and is not impressed. Erik hadn’t gotten very far with his work. He had no suspects, he hadn’t made the connection to the Jalisco boys, his reasoning was all over the place.
Some of the last few entries are just random words and names.
There are hints about an app he was designing but no indication of what said app was supposed to do.
The very last entry in the book was clearly written very recently—perhaps a few days ago.
It says simply: רחל
It’s a word that means “ewe” in Hebrew.
It’s a word that’s pronounced “Rachel” in English.
Olly sighs and looks out the window.
Marty, Ginger’s new boyfriend, has an ex-wife named Rachel, doesn’t he?
This little family get-together is going to be a lot more interesting than he initially expected. He picks up his phone and texts his sister: Ginger, can you do me a favor and come talk to me when you get a chance?
66
Rachel tries to call Kylie but she can’t get through.
“No signal,” she says. “Thank God she’s safe, though.”
Pete, however, is looking worried. “Shit. Maybe not,” he says.
“What is it?”
“Look at the time stamp on the GPS trace in her sneakers.”
“Oh my God. She’s been at the Adidas store in Boston for nine hours!” Rachel says. “I know what happened. She bought new shoes, threw the old ones out, and forgot about the GPS.”
“How could they have taken her in broad daylight from the mall? It doesn’t make sense,” Pete says.
Rachel is poleaxed.
Her world has been pulled out from under her.
Again.
And this time it’s 100 percent her fault. They had warned her. They told her to leave well enough alone, and she had blundered ahead with this idiotic plan.
She feels sick.
Dizzy.
Nauseous.
She dry-heaves.
The old thoughts: You stupid cow. You stupid bitch. Why didn’t you just die when you had the chance? Everyone would have been better off.
They have taken her beautiful, innocent, wonderful girl.
Her fault.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!
Stupid no more.
She unslings her shotgun. She’ll go in the back door under the balcony. She’ll shoot the lock off if she has to and she’ll kill everyone inside and get her daughter out of there.
She brushes snowflakes off her face and heads for the house.
“Where are you going?” Pete asks.
“To get Kylie.”
“You don’t know what or who is in there,” he says.
“I don’t care. You can stay here, I’m going in,” Rachel says.
Pete grabs her arm. “No. We’ll both go. Wait here for two minutes and I’ll scout ahead.”
“I’m going with you.”
Pete shakes his head. “I’m the expert, Rachel. I did the Marine Corps recon course. I’ve done this kind of thing many, many times.”
“I’m going with you.”
“Just hold on here for two minutes, OK? Let me check it out first.”
“Two minutes?”
“Two minutes. I’ll signal you from under the deck. Wait here.”
Pete knows he should have done this whole thing by himself today. What was he thinking, bringing a cancer patient?
He slithers across the open ground toward the carport under the house. There are five vehicles parked here: a white Mercedes, a red Mustang, two pickup trucks, and a Corolla. That could translate to a lot of people. He goes low past the cars. A security light comes on and he freezes, but no one comes out to investigate and he slowly moves on again. Next to the carport is a drive-in garage and next to that appears to be the front door and the large windows of a lower living room. Pete can’t risk going past those, so he goes back the way he came. He tries the door next to the garage. Locked. The garage door itself, however, is not closed properly. There’s about half an inch of clearance between the bottom of the door and the ground. He lies down on his belly and slides his fingers underneath. If it’s just a buckle in the aluminum, it wouldn’t do them any good, but if it’s a damaged torsion spring…
He puts two hands under the door and tries to lift, and the door gradually begins to rise.
This is how they’ll get in, Marine Corps urban warfare–style. You gain entry, you clear the room, you move to the next room, you work level after level until the house is secured. Unknown number of unfriendlies, but he and Rachel have surprise on their side. He gets to his feet and staggers a little.
Oh no.
He feels dizzy.
His skin’s on fire.
It’s the hunger.
He’s screwed himself this morning. Can’t suddenly start messing around with your fix, you know better than that, Pete.
Soon there will be a million ants crawling up his legs and arms, into his mouth, down his throat…
Stop it! he tells himself. Stop it now!
Hubris to play the hero card. Rachel would be the better scout in these circumstances. Gotta get back, he thinks, and he turns and runs straight into a man holding a shotgun.
“Yeah, I thought I heard something,” the man says.
Pete thinks about a move, but instead of thinking about a move he should have actually moved. Flashlight into the man’s skull. Boot into his knee. Gun butt to face. One guard taken out. But he’s done nothing. Too slow. Too slow not because he’s too old or because he doesn’t have the muscle memory; too slow because he has damaged himself with heroin and oxycodone and every other opiate he has been able to get his hands on.
And now Pete has Rachel’s exact thought: Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Stupid and weak. The man takes a step back and points the shotgun at Pete’s face.
“Drop the flashlight and the gun,” the man says.
Pete drops the flashlight and the nine-millimeter.
“Now, with two fingers, take that forty-five out of your belt and drop it on the ground too.”
Pete takes out his precious .45 ACP and lets it fall into the gathering snowflakes at his feet. Now he feels naked. The ACP had belonged to his grandfather in the U.S. Navy. The old man had fired it in anger once—at a kamikaze ramming his ship at the Battle of Okinawa. It had been Pete’s good-luck charm in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Shit,” Pete says.
“Yeah, pal, you’re in the shit. Daniel don’t tolerate nobody on his property. And by ‘don’t tolerate,’ I don’t mean he’s gonna turn you over to the local cops. Put your hands on your head.”
Pete puts his hands on his head. “This is all a misunderstanding. I got lost,” he begins, but the man shushes him.
“We’ll see what Daniel has to say about that. He’s got his grandkids with him today. I don’t believe he’ll be right pleased. Kneel on the ground, and keep your hands behind your head.”
The guard kicks him in the back and Pete goes down.
Dirt. Gravel. Snow.
&nbs
p; Pete’s mind is racing. He’s trying to think. Nothing comes.
“Now, you just lay down there, boy, you just lay there while I ring the doorbell and bring everybody running.”
67
Ginger walks into the big remodeled master bedroom feeling pretty pleased with herself. The Chain has neutralized the Erik Lonnrott threat, and her new boyfriend is getting along like a house on fire with Daniel. They are both big Red Sox fans and Marty can throw out names like Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, and Roger Clemens and know what he is talking about. Daniel told Marty he could call him Red if he wanted. A rare honor.
A big decision, bringing him here. It’s not every partner she brings to meet her grandfather and her brother. But Marty O’Neill is special. He’s funny. He’s smart—Harvard College and Harvard Law; I mean, come on. He’s very good-looking if you like dark-haired, green-eyed, and Irish. And she does.
It’s true that he has a daughter, a thirteen-year-old daughter, a slightly annoying thirteen-year-old daughter, but her recent tribulations have obviously taken the wind out of her sails, and the thirteen-year-old is very appreciative of both Marty and his new young girlfriend who has an awesome job and who taps into the coolest hipster frequencies.
Oliver would no doubt be furious if he found out that she had met Marty by stalking him through The Chain, but Marty wasn’t exactly a victim or anything. His ex-wife had kept him out of it. And she’d just chanced upon his Facebook page sort of accidentally while researching her.
Sort of.
True, she had The Chain get Marty’s previous girlfriend, Tammy, out of the picture, but that’s as far as it went.
This time.
If Olly knew how many times she has used inside knowledge from The Chain for her own little adventures, he would no doubt have a fit, but what’s the point of having all this power and ignoring it? It’s fine to dip your toe in from time to time. It would be perverse not to.
The Chain is her invention, after all. Her thing. All Olly’s talk of IPOs and internet millions is just talk. The Chain got Olly his house in San Francisco, her house in Boston, and the apartment on Fifth Avenue. The Chain. Her idea.
The Chain Page 26