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.