Page 132 of The Chain

“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 InnRiver.

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.

Olly looks at these final entries and is not impressed. Erik hadn’t gotten very far with his work. He had no suspects, he hadn’t made the connection to the Jalisco boys, his reasoning was all over the place.

Some of the last few entries are just random words and names.

There are hints about an app he was designing but no indication of what said app was supposed to do.

The very last entry in the book was clearly written very recently—perhaps a few days ago.

It says simply: ???

It’s a word that means “ewe” in Hebrew.

It’s a word that’s pronounced “Rachel” in English.

Olly sighs and looks out the window.

Marty, Ginger’s new boyfriend, has an ex-wife named Rachel, doesn’t he?