The Chain(12)

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.

She tugs at a loose thread on her blouse.

Her phone dings with another photo of Kylie—here she’s sitting on a mattress in a basement—and a message from Unknown Caller: Further instructions coming. Remember: it’s not about the money, it’s about The Chain. Move on to part 2.

Move on to part 2? Did that mean they received the money? She hopes she hasn’t screwed it up.

But of course, that was the easy part.

She closes the Mac and goes outside to the car.

What now? Back to the house? No, not back to the house. Now she has to get the burner phones and a gun, and the best place to do that is far from neighbors and prying eyes and the Massachusetts gun laws, over the state line in New Hampshire.

She runs to her Volvo, gets in, turns the ignition, and, with a growl of clutch and a squeal of brakes, heads north again.





10

Thursday, 10:57 a.m.



Everyone on the radio is talking about the shooting of a state trooper near Plaistow. There are only about four or five murders a year in New Hampshire, so this is big news and it’s on every station.

The reports unnerve her, so she turns the radio off.

Just over the state line in Hampton, New Hampshire, she finds the place she’s been looking for: Fred’s Firearms and Indoor Tactical Range. She’d driven by Fred’s a thousand times and never dreamed about stopping.

Until today. She parks the Volvo and goes inside. Her stomach still hurts from the punch in the gut and she winces a little as she walks.

Fred is a tall, heavy, amiable-looking sixty-year-old wearing a John Deere cap, a denim shirt, and jeans. His face is badly pockmarked but he’s still a handsome old geezer. The most distinctive thing about him, perhaps, is the gun belt he wears low on his waist. There are two semiautomatics in open holsters, which, Rachel assumes, are there to deter potential thieves. “Morning, ma’am,” he says. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m here for a gun. Something I could keep in my room for, you know, personal protection. We’ve had reports of burglars in our neighborhood.”

“You from Boston?” he asks with a look that seems to add That city of Noam Chomsky, the Harvard debating society, and Ted Kennedy?

“Newburyport,” she says and then wonders if perhaps she should have given a fake hometown.

“You’re looking for a pistol? A thirty-eight, something like that? Something simple?”

“Yes, exactly. I’ve brought my driver’s license.”

“I’ll put your name in the system. There’s a two-day waiting period while we check you out.”

“What? No, I’ll need something sooner than that,” she says, trying not to sound suspicious.

“Well, ma’am, today I can sell you a rifle or a shotgun, any of these,” Fred says, pointing at a row of guns. Rachel is five foot nine but they all look too big for her and too ungainly to hide under a coat while she’s sidling up to some poor kid.

“Do you have anything more compact?”

Fred rubs his chin and gives her an odd, penetrating look. She wishes then that she looked prettier. Attractive women didn’t get that sort of look…or not as much, anyway. In her twenties, Rachel had looked like Jennifer Connelly in Ang Lee’s Hulk, according to Marty, but all that was gone now, of course. Her eyes were hollow and ringed, and the bloom was permanently missing from her cheeks.

“The law puts a lower limit on barrel length, but what about one of these?” Fred says, and from under the counter he pulls out what he says is a Remington Model 870 Express Synthetic Tactical pump-action shotgun.

“This might do,” she replies.

“It’s a 2015, used. I could let you have it for three hundred fifty.”

“I’ll take it.”

Fred winces. Clearly he was expecting her to haggle him down but Rachel is so desperate she’s willing to pay the asking price. She sees him look out into the parking lot and note that her car is a beat-up orange Volvo 240. “Tell you what,” he says. “I’ll throw in a box of shells and a little lesson. Do you want me to show you how to use it?”

“Yes, please.”

Fred walks her to the indoor range.

“You ever fire a gun before?” he asks.

“No. I’ve held one. A rifle, in Guatemala. But I never fired it.”

“Guatemala?”

“Peace Corps. We were making wells. Me and Marty—my ex—were liberal arts majors, so of course they sent us to the jungle to work on an irrigation project. We had no clue. We had our baby girl with us. Kylie. Crazy, really, when you think about it. Marty said he saw a jaguar stalking the camp. No one really believed him. He hurt his arm when he fired the rifle.”

“Well, I’m going to teach you how to do it right,” Fred says and he gives her ear protectors and shows her how to load the weapon. “Tight against your shoulder. There will be a kick, it’s a twenty-gauge. No, no, much tighter. Brace it with your body. If there’s a gap, the weapon will drive itself into your collarbone. Remember Newton’s third law. Every force results in an equal and opposite force.”