“Oh my God.”
“She never recovered from the ordeal. She began having seizures, hearing voices. A year later, she tried to kill herself by cutting her wrists in the bathtub and she’s now in a psychiatric hospital in Vermont. When I go to see her, sometimes she doesn’t even know me. My own daughter. She has good days and bad days. Very bad days. My beautiful, intelligent Anna, in a bib, being fed baby food with a plastic spoon. The Chain has ruined my life and my daughter’s life and ever since then, I have been looking for a way to kill it.”
“Is there a way to kill it?” Rachel asks.
“Perhaps,” Erik replies. “Now it is your turn to speak. What’s your story?”
Pete shakes his head. “No, this isn’t a quid pro quo. Like you say, we don’t know you from Adam—”
“They took my daughter,” Rachel says. “I had to take someone else’s little girl. I’ve been having nightmares ever since. My daughter’s in a very, very bad place.”
“And you have cancer,” Erik comments.
Rachel smiles and unconsciously touches her thinning hair. “You don’t miss much, do you?”
“And you are from New York,” Erik says.
“Maybe I’m just a Yankees fan,” Rachel replies.
“You are both. And you are a brave Yankees fan. One who does not mind getting dirty looks from every single person in this town.”
“I’d be happy if it was only looks,” Rachel says and manages another smile.
“I have been researching the entity known as The Chain for over a year now,” he says and passes his notebook to Rachel and Pete. They undo the elastic strap and open it.
It is filled with dates, names, charts, observations, data points, extrapolations, diary entries, essays. All written in black in a spidery, tiny script. Written, they note, in a cipher.
“At first there was nothing; fear kept people quiet. But then I dug deeper and I found references to The Chain in anonymous personal ads in newspapers. I noticed one or two obscure hints here and there. An odd crime report that did not add up. I did a sieve-map analysis, statistical-regression analysis, Markov chain modeling, a temporal-event analysis. I collated the results and regressed them, and I have come to a few conclusions. Not many, but a few.”
“What conclusions?” Rachel asks.
“I believe The Chain began sometime between 2012 and 2014. The regression analysis leads back to a median date of 2013. The ones who run it, of course, want us to believe that it is an ancient entity that has not been bested in scores, even hundreds, of years, but I think this is a lie.”
“An ancient provenance makes it seem even more unbeatable,” Rachel agrees.
“Exactly. But I do not think it is ancient,” Erik says and he takes another sip from his glass.
“I don’t think so either,” Rachel says.
“What other conclusions have you reached?” Pete asks.
“Obviously, the builder of The Chain is very intelligent. College-educated. Genius-level IQ. Very well read. Probably around my age. Probably a white male.”
Rachel shakes her head slowly. “I don’t think so,” she says.
“I have done the research. Predators like this generally operate within their ethnic group. Even allowing for the pseudorandom element in victim selection. He’s around my age or perhaps a little older.”
Rachel frowns but says nothing.
“The Chain is a self-perpetuating mechanism whose purpose is to protect itself and make money for its founder,” Erik goes on. “I believe The Chain was designed by a white male in his late forties early in this decade, perhaps as a response to the recession and banking crisis. Possibly adapted from Latin American replacement-victim kidnapping models.”
Rachel takes a sip of her Guinness. “You might be right about the inception date but you’re wrong about the age and the gender.”
Erik and Pete both look at her with surprise.
“She’s not as old as she pretends to be and she’s not as smart as she thinks she is. She was bluffing with me when she was talking about philosophy,” Rachel continues. “That’s not her area of expertise.”
“What makes you think it is a woman?”
“I can’t put my finger on that. But I know I’m right. I was talking to a woman who was using a voice-distortion machine.”
Erik nods and writes something in his notebook.
“Were you contacted by burner phone and the Wickr app?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He smiles. “The Chain has protected its security very cleverly. The anonymous phone calls using burner phones, the anonymous Bitcoin accounts that last a few weeks and disappear, the anonymous encrypted Wickr app whose ID gets changed periodically. The hiring of proxies to do the dirty work. Very clever. Almost foolproof.”
“Almost?”
“Some of it is unassailable. In my opinion, it would be impossible to backtrack through all the links of The Chain to find its origins. This is, of course, because of the pseudorandom element in the selection of the victims. You had a free choice of target, as did I, and so on and so on all the way back. Attempting to trace that trail to its origin will not work. I know. I have tried.”
“So how do we find the people who run The Chain?” Pete asks.
Erik picks up his notebook and flips through it. “For all my research, actually, I have come up with very little in the way of solutions. I—”
“You’re not telling me this whole meeting was a waste of time?” Pete interrupts.
“No. Their methods are good but when you are dealing with human agents, mistakes can be made. No agent is perfect in his or her tradecraft. Or so I suspect.”
“What mistake has The Chain made?”
“Perhaps they have become a little complacent, a little lazy. We shall see. Tell me about your last interaction with them.”
Rachel opens her mouth to speak, but Pete puts a hand on her arm. “Don’t tell him anything else.”
“We have to trust one another,” Rachel says.
“No, Rach, we don’t,” Pete says.
He doesn’t catch his own mistake but Rachel does and Erik does. Erik takes the notebook and presumably writes down Rachel.
We’ve come this far, she thinks. “It was a month ago. The first week of November,” Rachel says.
“They called you?”
“Yes.”
“And used the Wickr app?”
“Yes. Why is that so important?”
“The Wickr and Bitcoin accounts are protected by the highest levels of encryption commercially available, which would take tens of thousands of hours of supercomputing time to break. And I am certain that, at least in the beginning, they changed their Wickr app ID periodically for extra security. And, of course, there may be various layers of redundancy and dummy accounts. But even so, I believe I have found a flaw in their method of communication.”
“What flaw?”
The waitress opens the door and pokes her head in. “Will you be wanting to order food?” she asks in a Scottish accent.
“No,” Erik says coldly.
When she’s closed the door, he begins putting on his coat. “She’s new,” he says. “I don’t like new. Come on.”