8
Thursday, 9:38 a.m.
Hmmm, this one feels different.
There’s no evidence, of course, that it is any different. It shouldn’t be any different. They always say the same things, act the same way, and then fall right into line. Human beings are boringly predictable. That’s why the actuarial tables work so well.
And it’s just a feeling—that’s all. And she can shake this feeling and replace it with another. But she doesn’t want to do that today. She wants to sit with the bad feeling and experience it and have it explain to her why it’s here. If the feeling means anything at all, it’s almost certainly about the current person on The Chain.
Perhaps it would be wise to take a look at the present state of play. She opens up the encrypted file on her computer and examines the current protagonists. Everything looks fine. Link negative two is Hank Callaghan, a dentist and Sunday-school teacher from Nashua who has done everything requested of him. Link negative one is Heather Porter, a college administrator also from New Hampshire who has done all she has been asked to do. Link zero is Rachel O’Neill or, as she calls herself now, Rachel Klein. A former waitress and Uber driver who will soon be teaching at a community college.
Is Rachel the bad apple?
It doesn’t really matter if she is. As Olly is always saying, The Chain is largely a self-regulating mechanism that repairs its own broken DNA with only a little nudging from the outside.
“Don’t worry. It will all sort itself out,” her stepmother used to say. And she was right. It generally did all sort itself out. She was sorted out too in the end, of course.
No, Rachel won’t be any trouble. None of them will be or could be. Rachel will fall into line like all the others; either that, or she and her daughter will die. And die horribly, as an example for the others.
9
Thursday, 9:42 a.m.
On the street outside the bank, Rachel fights back tears and waves of panic. What is she going to do? She can’t do anything. She has failed at the very start. Oh my God, my poor little Kylie.
She looks at the clock on her phone: 9:43.
She sniffs, wipes her face, takes a breath, and goes back inside.
“Miss, you can’t—” someone says as she marches back into Colin’s office.
He glances up from his computer looking startled and guilty, as if he’d been Googling some particularly arcane pornography. “Rachel, I told—”
She sits and resists the urge to jump over the desk, put a knife to his throat, and scream for the tellers to give her the goddamn money in nonsequential bills.
“I’ll take any loan this bank offers at any rate of interest, no matter how predatory. I need the money, Colin, and I’m not going to leave this frigging office until I get it.”
Her eyes, she knows, have a piratical, dangerous, bank-robber glint to them. Look at me, they seem to say, I am capable of anything right now. Do you really want to begin your day with the guards dragging me out of here kicking and screaming?
Colin takes a deep breath. “Well, um, we do offer a ninety-day emergency home finan—”
“How much can I get?” Rachel interrupts.
“Would fifteen thousand dollars cover your, er, roof?”
“Yeah.”
“The rate of interest would be well above our…”
She tunes him out and lets him spin her the blah-blah-blah. She doesn’t care about the rate of interest or the service fee. She just wants the money. When he’s done talking, she smiles and says that all sounds fine.
“I’ll need to do some paperwork,” Colin says.
“Can I have the money transferred directly into my account?”
“You’d prefer that over a check?”
“Yes.”
“We can do that.”
“I’ll be back to sign the paperwork in an hour,” she says, then she thanks him and goes outside.
She looks at her hastily scrawled, extremely incriminating checklist.
1. Ransom
2. Burner phones
3. Research target/victim
4. Get gun, rope, duct tape, etc.
5. Research place to hide victim
She’s near the Newburyport library. Maybe she can do some research on a target/victim in that hour? Sure, yeah, move, Rachel, move.
She runs down State Street to the library, sprints up the library steps, and finds an empty study cubicle in the Lovecraft Wing. First thing she does is Google the Williams family of Dover, New Hampshire. A grisly robbery/home invasion gone wrong, the police thought. A mother and her two children and her new boyfriend were tied up, and all of them were shot in the head. The children had been killed hours before the mother, so she’d had plenty of time to suffer and think about it.
Utterly chilled, Rachel begins researching potential targets.
How had they found her? A pin in a map? PTA records? Uber profile?
Facebook. Goddamn Facebook.
She fires up her MacBook Air, logs on to Facebook, and spends the next forty-five minutes scrolling through names and faces of friends of friends.
There are a breathtaking number of people whose profiles and posts are public and can be viewed by anyone. George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won’t be the state that keeps tabs on everyone by extensive use of surveillance; it will be the people. They’ll do the state’s work for it by constantly uploading their locations, interests, food preferences, restaurant choices, political ideas, and hobbies to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. We are our own secret police.
Some people, she discovers, helpfully update their Facebook and Instagram feeds every few minutes, giving potential kidnappers or burglars intimate temporal and geographic information on their whereabouts.
It’s all good stuff and Rachel decides to hunt for targets in the Greater Boston and North Shore areas. Successful, together men and women who are unconnected to law enforcement, who have big houses but small families, and who look as if they can pay a ransom and continue The Chain.
She takes out her notebook and makes a preliminary list of candidates.
Then she closes the computer, picks up her leather jacket, puts the list in her zip pocket, and goes back to the bank.
Colin is waiting for her. She signs the forms and when all that is done, she says she’ll wait while he transfers the money into her account. It’s the work of a moment.
She thanks him and goes to the Panera Bread on Storey Avenue. She orders a coffee and takes a booth in the corner, then logs on to the free wireless, fires up the Mac, and downloads the Tor search engine, which looks seriously untrustworthy. Nevertheless, she clicks the icon, and just like that, she’s on the dark web. She’s heard of the dark web and knows it as a place where you can buy guns, restricted prescription drugs, and narcotics.
She finds a place to buy Bitcoin, reads through the procedures, sets up an account for herself, and buys ten thousand dollars’ worth of Bitcoin with her Visa. Then she buys another fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of Bitcoin using the recently deposited money in her First National account.
She finds the InfinityProjects Bitcoin account and transfers the money. The transaction takes less than a second.
And just like that, the ransom is paid. Jesus.
So what happens next? Would they call her? She looks at the phone and waits. She sips her coffee and stares at the other people in Panera. They have no idea they are living the dream. They have no idea how bad it can get on the other side of the looking glass.