The Chain

by Adrian McKinty

  So if she wants to play with Marty O’Neill, she can. Marty is handsome, witty, and fun. Olly need not worry. She’s in control. She’s the spider. The annoying fly, of course, is the ex-wife. The nerve of her on Wickr today. People never Wickr’d once they were off The Chain. They normally were so grateful. Grateful and scared. Maybe it would be better to have the ex-wife disappeared. All it would take was one little phone call or message: We’ve added a new condition for your child’s safe return. A woman named Rachel Klein O’Neill who lives on Plum Island, Massachusetts—get rid of her by the end of the week. The body must never be found.

  Rachel can be removed from the picture at any time.

  “The children seem happy. I just saw Kylie on the deck,” Marty says, coming up behind her and kissing her on the back of the neck.

  Ginger turns to face him and Marty put his arms around her. “This is so good for Kyles. I’m not the world’s best judge of teenagers, but she seems to have been going through a really hard time in the past few weeks.”

  “Yeah, I did give Rachel the name of one of our therapists.”

  “Well, Rachel’s been out of it too, as you can imagine,” Marty says.

  Ginger’s phone pings to let her know that she has a message.

  “What’s up?” Marty asks as she reads the message from her brother.

  “Oh, it’s only Olly. Something about dinner, I’ll bet. No doubt Grandpa is going to try to burn the house down with his barbecue again. Hold that thought, I’ll be right back.”

  Ginger walks along the second-floor landing to her grandfather’s study, goes inside, closes the door, and sits down. Olly has that look of superiority he assumes sometimes, a look that would try the patience of a saint.

  “Yes?” she says. “What is it?”

  “You’ve been using The Chain for your own ends again, haven’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you have.”

  “It’s all for our own ends.”

  “You know what I mean. You’ve been meddling. Like you did with Noah Lippman.”

  “No.”

  “Or that girl crush you had on Laura what’s-her-name a few years ago. Poor Laura made the mistake of her life by rebuffing you, and then she vanished without a trace three months later. You waited a whole three months before unleashing The Chain on her. Very tactful.”

  “Noah’s still alive.”

  “Just about. We don’t use The Chain for our own personal vendettas, Ginger—we’ve discussed this.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Or to meet handsome young men.”

  Ginger groans. He’s onto her. “Do you know how difficult it is to meet people in this city?” she protests.

  “Not difficult at all. There are a million dating apps.”

  “I’m supposed to ignore any man who might have come in contact, even peripherally, with The Chain?”

  “Yes! You know the protocols.”

  “Who set up the protocols? Who invented The Chain?”

  “It’s a security issue, sweetie.”

  “It’s all my handiwork. It wasn’t you. It was me. I can do what I like with it.”

  Olly closes his eyes and sighs. All good things have to come to an end eventually, he supposes. He is surprised that it has lasted this long, actually. The models all said that The Chain would probably last only about three years before it collapsed. You could intimidate so many folks for only so long. The number of people involved grows almost exponentially, and no conspiracy can survive exponential growth. It’s a typical stochastic fast-slow system and when the breaking point comes, it will break spectacularly.

  Olly strokes the little goatee he has been cultivating without much success for the past few months. “We should have retired The Chain years ago,” he mutters. “I mean, why keep it going when we have enough money?”

  “Why stop it? You’re just jealous because it was my creation.”

  “Wasn’t the purpose of The Chain to set us up for life? It’s done that.”

  “Was that its purpose?” she asks with a sneer.

  He frowns and shakes his head.

  “You just don’t get it, do you?” Ginger says. Not for Olly the peregrine-hovering-over-the-hay-field thing. Olly isn’t a true predator like her. A true predator sometimes kills even when it isn’t hungry. “Wasn’t it us against the world? Remember?” she says.

  Olly’s frown deepens.

  “All right, what’s gone wrong?” Ginger asks.

  “It has to do with that notebook,” Olly says.

  “You’ve decoded it, haven’t you?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Then what?”

  “Near the end, crazy Erik didn’t write everything in code.”

  “And?”

  “What did you say your new boyfriend’s ex-wife’s name was?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Sometime in the last week or so, Erik apparently met with a woman named Rachel.”

  “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “Come on, spill.”

  Now it’s Ginger’s turn to sigh. “You know what your problem is, Olly? You’re completely bloodless. You’re like Spock or something. You should probably see someone about that. It’s not normal.”

  “This is serious, Ginger. This is crash-bag, fake-IDs, flee-the-country stuff.”

  “How much do we have in Switzerland?”

  “Enough.” Olly goes to the gun cabinet, unlocks it, and opens it. “I always thought that if we were going to go down, it would be because of you tangling emotions with business.”

  She smiles. “Christ, Olly, that’s how everybody goes down in the end. Didn’t you know that? You can’t fight biology.”

  “You can try,” he says.

  68

  Back in the master bedroom, Marty is looking through the plate-glass window at the oak-tree stump between the house and the swampy, scrubby woods beyond. Snow is falling in big powdery flakes on the river and the living trees and the dead oak. It’s a frickin’ Robert Frost poem.

  Lovely down here. Ginger undersold it. This is no crazy old cabin in the middle of a swamp. This is some spread. A beautiful house. Art on the walls. Expensive shit. The old man, Daniel, must have a chunk of change. And as advertised, he’s a character.

  The kids are loving it and Ginger is loving showing it off. She’s a good one, he thinks. Rachel was a mistake. They were both so young. He’d told everybody that he’d fallen in love with Rachel reading her brilliant book reviews in the Crimson, but that was crap. It was a physical thing. They really didn’t have much in common.

  When you got past thirty, you had better judgment. Tammy was merely a fling, but Ginger’s different. Special. With her he could settle down. Live in the city. Have a couple more—

  “I was just thinking about you,” he says as Ginger comes back into the room holding her handbag.

  A strand of red hair is curling down between her breasts.

  He has a sudden urge to throw her on the bed and ravish her.

  “Ginger, do these doors lock? I know there’s kids wandering around, so I—” he begins, but something in his peripheral vision catches his eye.

  He turns to look at it.

  “What is that?” he says to Ginger.

  “What?”

  “Is that someone coming toward the house from behind that tree?”

  “Where?”

  “I thought I saw someone coming through the snow. Yeah, look…oh my God! You’re not going to believe this, but, um, I think that’s my ex-wife,” Marty says.

  Ginger takes the Smith and Wesson .38 out of her handbag and points it at his head.

  “I believe you,” she says.

  69

  Rachel puts the shotgun against her shoulder and aims it at the guard.

  “Hold it right there,” she says.

  The guard spins to face her. “Whoa! Take it easy, lady. I don’t think you know what you’re doing with that thing,” he says.

  “You’
ll be thinking something else when I blow you in half with it,” Rachel replies.

  Pete picks up his .45. “Drop the shotgun, pal,” Pete says.

  The guard places the gun on the ground and puts his hands up.

  “Lie facedown on the ground,” Pete orders and the man complies as Pete kicks the gun away.

  “You don’t have to hurt me. There’s duct tape and rope in the garage. I got the garage-door opener in my jacket pocket,” the guard says quickly.

  “How many armed men inside the house?” Pete asks.

  “I’m the only—” the man begins.

  “Nobody move!” someone says, and there’s the sound of a gunshot.

  A spotlight comes on. Standing at the front door are Ginger and a man about her age—her twin brother, Rachel assumes. Both of them have handguns.

  “Rachel, is that you? What’s going on?” Ginger asks innocently.

  Ginger? What the hell? Doubt courses through Rachel. Did Erik’s tracker somehow cross signals with the GPS tracker they put in Kylie’s shoes? Did Kylie transfer the GPS tiles after all? Was this whole ridiculous hunt through the swamp an enormous mistake?

  Oh my God, yes. If it’s a mistake, Kylie is safe. Yes! Rachel has to explain before someone gets hurt.

  “I’m so sorry, Ginger. This must look completely crazy. I was just telling this gentleman here—”

  The garage door opens to reveal a skinny old geezer with white hair holding what looks like an assault rifle. “What are you doing here on my property?” the old man demands.

  “Grandpa, we’ve got this!” Ginger’s brother says.

  “Olly’s right, Red, we’ve got it under control,” Ginger says. “Rachel, you and your friend should really drop your weapons.”

  “Everyone, please, I think we’ve made a huge mistake. I’m sorry. I put a GPS tracker in Kylie’s sneakers. I thought she’d been kidnapped.”

  “Drop your gun, please, Rachel. Why on earth would you think she’d been kidnapped?” Ginger asks.

  “It’s complicated,” Rachel replies.

  Ginger is under the floodlight above the door, and Rachel can see her face.

  She sees her clearly for the first time.

  That copper hair. Those blue eyes. Those beautiful blue eyes. A cold blue. A chilly bottom-of-the-abyss blue. Blue eyes that are watching this whole scene with cool disdain.

  Ginger seems to be enjoying it, even.

  And then Ginger’s eyes meet Rachel’s and the two women look at each other for what seems like an age but is perhaps little more than a second.

  That second is enough.

  They recognize each other.

  You.

  You.

  Rachel knows and Ginger knows, and Ginger knows that Rachel knows.

  Erik’s app hasn’t made a mistake.

  The Chain leads here and Ginger is not going to let any of them leave this place alive. They have uncovered the secret, and to protect it Ginger is going to have to kill all of them. Rachel, Pete, Marty, Stu, and Kylie.

  Rachel had been about to tell Pete that they should drop their weapons and put their hands up. But if they do that, Ginger will murder them on the spot.

  Rachel turns to Pete. She looks up at the floodlight above the porch. Pete follows her gaze.

  “She’s The Chain and she’s going to kill us,” Rachel says.

  Pete nods.

  The twins are behind a low wall. Hitting them will be difficult, so instead, he raises the .45 and shoots out the light.

  70

  Immediate darkness and confusion. Yelling and an arc of yellow flame from the garage as Daniel opens up with the automatic weapon.

  “Hit the deck!” Pete shouts.

  Rachel throws herself to the ground.

  Tracer rounds fly from the barrel of the gun and hurl themselves into the space where Rachel had been seven-tenths of a second ago. The rounds miss and continue to spin on their long axes, traveling thousands of yards across the night.

  Then all the guns open up at once. A .38, a nine-millimeter, and that big assault rifle again. Fire from several angles triangulates two yards above Rachel’s head.

  She buries her face in the snow and screams.

  None of this matters. The guns, the gunfire, the sickly-sweet smell of gunpowder. What matters is Kylie. She’s in the house somewhere and Rachel is going to get her. Pete is doing a ten-count in his head. Ten seconds on automatic will burn through the magazine on the assault rifle in the garage.

  After ten seconds, he looks up. The shooters on the porch have slipped back inside. The old man has gone through his mag and is reloading.

  Pete shoots three rounds into the garage to give the man something to think about and then scrambles to a new firing position. Shoot and move. Shoot and move. That’s what kept you alive in a limited-cover firefight, and the big ACP rounds would take you down with a shoulder shot at this range. Might even take you out.

  He rolls into the snow to his right, crawls behind a bush, and shoots again. His whole body is aching with need for the fix, but he’ll fight it and them. “Rachel? Are you OK?” Pete says.

  No answer.

  He has to think of a plan. Any plan. In infantry training, they tell you that a sloppy plan executed immediately is better than a great plan executed an hour later. They’re right about that. Out here he’s going to die. He has to go in.

  Maybe fifteen seconds have passed since the shooting began.

  Here goes, he thinks.

  “Not so fast, smart guy,” someone says, grabbing at him. He ducks a fist coming at his face and blocks a knife coming at his rib cage.

  It’s the guard who’d originally found him. He’d forgotten all about that asshole. The man has grabbed his gun hand and is trying to kill him with a large hunting knife. The knife slashes at his face; Pete flinches, and the knife nicks his left cheek. Pete kicks hard into the darkness and connects with soft tissue. He frees his gun hand and shoots once.

  There’s a hollow, sickening thump and then silence.

  “Pete?” a voice says next to him.

  “Rachel?”

  “I’m going into the house,” she whispers. “Through the garage, it’s the only way.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “We go inside the house, rescue the kids, and kill everybody who isn’t Kylie, Marty, or Stuart,” Rachel says.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  71

  They enter the garage. The shooter is gone but boxes holding something flammable have caught fire and are burning furiously next to a dozen cans of paint. They can’t stay here.

  “There’s a door that leads to the main house,” Rachel says.

  She’s up for this. It’s the moment she’s been subconsciously training for all her life. The radiation, the chemo, those hard days in Guatemala, those long shifts waitressing at the diner, the midnight Uber runs to Logan. All of it was preparation for this. She’s ready. It’s all for family, isn’t it? Everything is for family. Even an imbecile knows you don’t get between a grizzly-bear mama and her cub.

  Pete fishes one of the two flash-bang grenades from his coat pocket. “I’m going to open the door and throw in a flash-bang. Close your eyes and cover your ears,” Pete whispers to Rachel, then tosses the stick as he opens the door. A second later, the flash-bang goes off with a deafening roar and a white juddering light. It’s an essentially harmless weapon meant to stun at close quarters. It won’t hurt the kids, but it’ll scare the shit out of people who don’t know it’s coming.

  “Wait here,” Pete says and goes through the door.

  A dozen smoke alarms begin ringing. It’s an old house but it’s been remodeled, and in one of those remodelings a sprinkler system has been installed to protect the artwork the grandchildren have been collecting. Rachel has never been in a home that has its own sprinkler system and she’s shocked when cold water starts pouring down on her. She has no idea what’s happening.

  Pete pops his head around the doorway. �
��No one there now. We should go. Those paint tins are going to start exploding in a minute.”

  “Which way?” Rachel asks, coughing.

  Pete has no idea. “Room by room. Stay behind me. Check my blind spots,” he says.

  Pete forges ahead but he wonders if he can last much longer. He’s having trouble breathing. Adrenaline is putting off the collapse, but that won’t work forever. Hang in there, Pete, he tells himself, until you get Kylie safe.

  The house has been haphazardly extended so that now it’s a maze of rooms and corridors and alcoves.

  A hallway.

  A room.

  A big TV, a sofa, hunting trophies.

  Another door.

  Dining table, chairs, artwork.

  A distant scream.

  “Kylie!” Rachel yells.

  No answer.

  Back to the hallway.

  Pete kicks open another door and swings his weapon into the corners of a kitchen. “Kylie! Stuart!” he says.

  Nothing.

  The house lights flicker as smoke from the garage fire fills the entire ground floor. Water is still dripping from the sprinklers and pooling at their feet. The smell is pungent, sour, Neolithic.

  In a downstairs bedroom, Rachel spies Kylie’s coat but no Kylie.

  The lights fail and come back on again, a dim, yellow goblin glow.

  The bedroom connects to another room.

  Pete eases the door open and looks inside.

  Empty, but they can hear footsteps outside in the hallway. Rachel points to the door and puts her finger over her lips. Pete takes his remaining flash-bang from his pocket, violently tugs open the bedroom door, and throws the grenade into the corridor.

  Another loud explosion and a burst of white light followed by machine-gun fire. Pete waits until the shooting stops and then in one clean, fast movement he goes out with Rachel, swinging right as Rachel swings left.

  There, in front of her, at the end of the hallway, a man is reloading an assault rifle. The old man again. Not one of the twins. His hair is white; his stance is remote, tough, confident. He’s the one that Olly calls Grandpa and Ginger calls Red.