“I couldn’t have gotten Kylie back without you, Pete.”
Rachel opens the Wickr app again.
There must be some way of getting off The Chain forever. Something I can do for you or some amount of money I can pay. A way to close things off permanently, so we know that we are safe. Please, for the sake of my little girl, tell me what it is, she types and sends the message.
They have to wait only two minutes for a response. Again it comes through Wickr, not the phone. She fires up the hunter-killer application.
You must be pretty stupid. What was the first thing we told you? It’s not about the money. It’s about The Chain itself. It’s got to keep going forever. Lose one link in The Chain and the whole thing collapses. OK, dummy? Wickr 2348383hudykdy2 replies.
The hunter-killer algorithm searches and recalibrates, and Erik’s GPS locator lights up but once more crashes with no result. Rachel’s phone freezes and she has to turn it off and on again.
“Nothing,” Rachel says.
“Shit!”
“I’ll try one more,” Rachel says.
Please. I’m begging you. For the sake of my family, is there anything I can do to get off The Chain? she types.
She shows it to Pete. “Send it,” he says.
She sends the message. This time there is no quick response.
Five minutes go by.
Ten.
“That’s it, then,” Rachel says.
Her iPhone rings.
She fumbles for it and drops it onto the floor.
It bounces on its edge and the screen cracks.
“Shit!” Rachel screams and grabs the phone and turns on Erik’s app. “Hello?” she says.
It’s the Unknown Caller. The voice, as usual, is disguised.
“There is one thing you can do for us, Rachel. Why don’t you kill yourself, you stupid bitch!” the voice says.
The hunter-killer algorithm flares to life and begins zooming in on an area of Massachusetts north of Boston.
“Please, I—”
“Goodbye, Rachel,” the Unknown Caller says.
Keep her talking, Pete mouths.
“Wait. Don’t go. I know things about you. I’ve found out stuff,” Rachel says.
There’s a pause before the voice asks, “What things?”
Rachel’s mind races. She doesn’t want to be associated with Erik in case they haven’t got the notebook after all. What things about The Chain could she have found out on her own?
“The woman who took my daughter was named Heather. Her husband accidentally told Kylie that her son is named Jared. It shouldn’t be difficult to find a woman named Heather with a son named Jared.”
“What would you do with that information?” the voice asks.
“We could start tracing our way backward to the very beginning of The Chain.”
“That would be signing your own death warrant, Rachel. You’re a very stupid woman, gambling with your life and your daughter’s life like this,” the voice says.
All the while they talk, the app zeros in on a smaller and smaller area of Massachusetts. A diminishing circle whose focus is now somewhere south of Ipswich and north of Boston.
“I don’t want to cause any trouble. I—I just want to feel safe,” Rachel says.
“If you ever contact us again, you’ll be dead by the end of the day,” the voice says. The call is disconnected.
But the app worked. The phone call was made in the Choate Island area in the marshes of Essex County. The cell tower nearest the caller is on Choate Island itself.
Rachel takes a screenshot of the map and shows it to Pete.
“This is it!” he cries.
“Let’s go!” Rachel agrees.
They run outside to the truck.
They speed south along Route 1A through Rowley and Ipswich. In Ipswich they get onto 133, a narrow road through Ipswich’s Great Marsh.
They drive as close as they can to Choate Island but there are no roads onto the boggy island itself, so they’ll have to walk if they’re going to find the cell tower. The fog isn’t so bad down here, but the rain is chilly and coming at them slantwise from the ocean.
They park the pickup and get out. They put on coats and hiking boots. Pete’s armed himself with the rifle, the Glock, the .45, and two flash-bang stun grenades that he thinks might come in handy. Rachel takes her shotgun. She’s shaking. She’s so afraid, she’s finding it hard to breathe.
“Don’t worry, Rach. There’s not going to be any trouble today. This is a scouting mission. We’ll get the info and call the feds.”
They walk along a trail into the swampy terrain near Choate. Despite the rain and the cold, it’s surprisingly insect-ridden. The land on either side of the path is choked and overgrown, dense and claustrophobic. Here and there they get glimpses of the Inn River, thick and sludgy under a layer of brown algae. The Inn is a tributary of the Miskatonic River, which curves through the mire somewhere to the north. The whole marsh seems to be caving inward, leaning toward some hidden center of mass. Something like Spanish moss is hanging from the trees; birds screech in the upper branches, and winter hasn’t had its usual culling effect on the biting flies.
Rachel’s spooked. They’re getting close. She can feel it.
The dreams and song lines and nightmares are leading here.
They have been warned off probing into The Chain, and here she is following The Chain backward along Ariadne’s thread.
But the labyrinth is not going to give up its secrets so easily.
They search the swamps and bogs on Choate for the next three freezing, filthy hours and come up with nothing.
No cell-phone tower.
No cell-phone relay station.
Barely any sign of civilization at all.
They stop at a little clearing and drink from their water bottles and then they start out again. More frustrating hours of this. By dusk, they are utterly soaked and exhausted and bitten raw by bugs. Rachel isn’t sure if they are on Choate Island or back on the mainland or on a different island in a different river system completely. They have crossed a hundred little streams and trails. She’s beat. Chemotherapy patients do not go trekking through bogs in December.
She gasps for air.
She’s dying right here, right now, out in the swamp. Pete can’t know this.
She looks at the threatening sky overhead. Towering gray-black clouds looming over the marshes to the west. “Didn’t the weather forecast say snow?” she says.
“Possibly, yeah. And we definitely do not want to be out here in the snow.”
“If you were going to build a cell-phone tower, where would you put it?” Rachel asks him. “You’re the engineer.”
“On the high ground,” Pete says.
“Is there any high ground?”
“What about that hill over there?” Pete says.
It’s a very little hill, maybe thirty feet above sea level. It’s five hundred yards away through the thicket.
“Why not?”
They are two-thirds of the way up it when they begin to see the outline of the cell-phone tower. It has fallen over, or perhaps it partially sank and tipped into the ground.
They reach the top of the hill, their breathing ragged.
From up here, you can see the whole Inn River system stretching to the west. The sickly green alluvial plain is vast, fetid, and unholy, as if it’s covering up a lost corsair city waiting to be exhumed from its own sewers.