Page 131 of The Chain

Sometimes she wonders if she’s doing this for herself or to please her grandfather or maybe to one-up her father. Is Ginger’s life a result of or a reaction to her relationship with her dad?

She takes classes at the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, where they have all sorts of shrinks and investigators who can help her explore these questions if she wants. One of her instructors quotes the German poet Novalis: “Inward goes the way full of mystery.” She likes that and she’d like to someday go on that inward journey to get at the root of why she’s the way she is, but it’s a journey she’ll make by herself. She’ll never trust any shrink with her past history and the thoughts in her head.

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.