The Debt Collectors War

by Tess Mackenzie

  “Not especially.”

  “Not even for me and Sameh?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Because we could fly, if we need to,” Ellie said. “Now we’ve linked up with you, we could call in a helicopter and hop to there.”

  Sameh stirred in the back seat, but Ellie ignored her. Sameh was a soldier. She knew sometimes they needed to fly on operations.

  “It should be fine,” Joe said. “They’re militia, and they’ll fight if a debt-recovery team tries to repo anywhere near them, but only then. We won’t be stopping, and they don’t interfere in highway traffic, anyway.”

  “Ever?”

  “Very rarely. It draws too much attention. From your people especially, but also from some of the other groups on our side of the border.”

  Ellie thought.

  “People leave the highways open,” he said, after a moment. “It’s better for everyone that way. And driving’s more discreet than a helicopter, too. If you want to be discreet, I wouldn’t fly that far in from the border.”

  “People will notice?”

  “People absolutely will.”

  Ellie nodded. “Then we drive.”

  Behind her, Sameh sighed, sounding relieved.

  *

  They drove. They travelled a little further on the winding local road, twisting and turning along beside the river, then they suddenly crossed an overpass bridge, and went down what was obviously a curving on-ramp, and joined a wide smooth highway.

  It was the highway on the map, and it seemed in fairly good repair. Ellie hadn’t expected that. Even at night there was a fair amount of traffic, though, which might explain why. Much of the traffic was heavily-guarded convoys of debt-recovery freight-drone trucks, but there was a substantial amount of local traffic too, Měi-guó traffic, older cars and trucks with human drivers. The road surface was smooth, and the concrete over-bridges seemed well-maintained, and there were far fewer potholes than Ellie expected.

  Joe sped up, and they began to make good time.

  “It’s a good road,” Ellie said.

  “Surprised?” Joe said, grinning.

  She ignored him.

  They went south and then east, heading inwards, towards the middle of Měi-guó.

  After a while Ellie glanced back at Sameh and said, “Get some sleep if you like.”

  Sameh nodded, and leaned her head against the door.

  Ellie stayed awake. She and Sameh didn’t know Joe, so for now they would take turns sleeping, or at least keep a locked door between him and themselves while they did.

  Sameh slept, and Ellie watched the highway as they drove, and it was oddly, surreally calm. All this traffic, and all this peaceful busyness, in a country which had fallen apart so completely it wasn’t even a country any more.

  *

  Later, Ellie slept.

  Sameh woke on her own after a couple of hours, so Ellie took the chance to sleep. She got comfortable the same way Sameh had, with her head on the door on a rolled up jacket and her hand underneath her shirt, resting on her sidearm.

  She slept, deeply, needing the rest, until Sameh woke her by reaching around the seat and putting her hand on Ellie’s shoulder.

  She woke, and looked around. It was close to dawn, from the clock on the dashboard, and from the first paleness in the eastern sky.

  She fished in a pocket and found dental gum. She preferred it to a toothbrush, when she was in the field, even if, technically, it didn’t clean her teeth quite as well. Chewing was easier than brushing, and she had a lingering, slightly silly worry that someone could sneak up on her as she brushed, as well. Brushing made noise, a surprising amount of noise, inside your own head. Enough to cover quiet footsteps behind her, Ellie had always thought.

  She opened the gum, and chewed for a moment, and looked around, a little bleary.

  “Where are we?” she said.

  Sameh handed her a tablet, so she could see. The circle that marked their vehicle, in the centre of the screen, was now very close to the cluster of dots that were the last financial and tracker locations for the missing kid.

  “Was there any trouble with the militia?” Ellie said, realizing they had driven past that part of the map in the night.

  “None,” Sameh said.

  “Nothing?”

  Sameh didn’t answer. She didn’t usually bother repeating herself when Ellie asked her stupid questions.

  Ellie looked at Joe. She thought about saying that he’d been right about the militia, so that he knew she’d noticed, and to affirm him as a part of their team or whatever. Then she decided not to bother. He’d heard the conversation she just had with Sameh because he was sitting beside her. He knew she’d noticed, and Sameh had too, and probably didn’t need it said again.

  “Do you need one of us to drive?” she said instead.

  He shook his head.

  “You’re not tired?” she said.

  “I’m fine for now.”

  “You’ve been driving all night.”

  “On a highway. I’m fine.”

  “I want you fresh.”

  “I’m fresh.”

  Ellie kept looking at him, wondering if he was.

  “A highway,” Joe said. “Not a real road. It’s not the same.”

  “If you say so.”

  He looked over at her, and hesitated, then he said. “I drive. Only I drive my car.”

  “Oh,” Ellie said, and wanted to grin. “Yeah,” she said. “Fair enough.” She’d grown up with people like him, she thought to herself, back at home, long ago.

  “Say if you’re tired,” she said, and took a meal bar out her shirt pocket and chewed on it slowly as she watched flat countryside go past. Sameh passed her a water bottle and a packet of caffeine pills from a bag in the back seat, and Ellie smiled at her, grateful.

  Chapter 7

  They left the highway, and drove for another ninety minutes, until they reached the area where the missing kid had last been online. There was a rough circle of tracker blips and financial transactions centered on a small town in the middle of nowhere.

  It was actually the middle of nowhere, that far from the highway, and it was away from any noticeable landmarks like rivers or hills, too. Just a town in a flat plain that was there because every so often you needed a town, Ellie supposed.

  They drove slowly along the main street. It was still very early, only a little after dawn, and no-one else was around. What few shops there were all seemed to be closed. There weren’t very many shops, though, Ellie noticed. It was a very small town, and there didn’t seem to be very much here.

  It was strangely small town, Ellie suddenly thought. Strangely small for a wealthy corporate heir to be taking a holiday in.

  She wondered whether that was significant.

  She would have expected someone in corporate intel to have thought of this, and to have checked, but if they had then they hadn’t told her. She decided to make sure. She got out her tablet and asked it whether anything had ever happened here, but it found nothing. This wasn’t a historic site, the nearest of those was a hundred miles away and something to do with nineteenth-century railroads. It wasn’t the birthplace of someone famous, which was what Ellie had wondered for a moment, or the death-place either. If the kid had been on some kind of a pilgrimage, then Ellie couldn’t work out what he’d been coming to see. She searched more broadly, and the only tourism hits were very old ones, and exactly what she’d expect. People had used to come here to fish, and to get away from cities. Houses had once been cheap, and there had been agricultural shows, long ago.

  It was just a small town, a long way from anywhere, and there didn’t seem to be any reason for the kid to be here.

  It was odd, Ellie thought. It was odd, and something to keep in mind, in case it actually mattered. She decided she’d think more about it later on.

  They drove along the main street, which took less than
a minute. The actual town was only three or four blocks long. The town didn’t properly start or stop, though, rather the side-by-side buildings in the main part of town became more widely-spaced at the edges, until they were separate houses on larger squares of land. Not really farms, Ellie thought, just older houses in the middle of bits of grass, sometimes with trees or animals around them.

  The sky was big, Ellie noticed, and there weren’t many clouds, and when she opened the window, the air was cool and dry.

  They drove a little further, and found a roadside lay-by at the very edge of town, with a small permanent settlement of mobile homes at the end of it, next to a toilet block. They had been seeing fewer encampments like this, the further they got from the border, but transient debtors were still around.

  That camp seemed quiet, and settled. All the inhabitants were probably still sleeping.

  “Stop here,” Ellie said and pointed to the far end of the lay-by.

  Joe pulled up where Ellie had indicated, and they all got out and stood beside his SUV. They got out because the SUV wasn’t armored, so they weren’t any better protected inside it than outside. Since they weren’t better protected inside, they were actually safer standing outside, where they could see and hear properly, and had a clearer view of their surroundings.

  They stood in a small circle, and Ellie looked at her tablet. Sameh watched the transient debtor camp, and Joe just looked around.

  Ellie thought about what to do.

  She didn’t know very much about the locations she’d been given. She didn’t know what they actually were, other than what she could see from the satellite imagery and some fairly minimal tagging. Without much idea of what each location was, they were probably going to need to check them all, and that was going to be a bit of a nuisance.

  She’d wondered about simply going to the last location first, and seeing if their missing heir was still there, but she didn’t think that was a good idea. If the kid had been grabbed by some kind of ransom-group, then the place he’d been taken from might very well be being watched, precisely in case a team like Ellie and Sameh and Joe turned up.

  Ellie didn’t actually expect the kid to still be there, anyway, and if he was, that almost certainly meant a bad outcome. If the kid was still in the same place as where he’d lost his tracker after four, almost five days, then they would be finding a body, not someone alive. That location was some kind of restaurant, too, judging from the satellite image, a diner of some sort, which meant there ought to have been plenty of people moving around. If the kid was there and dead, someone really ought to have seen him by now. A passerby ought to have found him lying somewhere, or the rubbish skip he was inside or behind ought to have been emptied, or the car he was hidden in opened. The corporate intel people were monitoring the local and governmental data feeds in the area, so news of a dead foreigner should have reached Ellie. It hadn’t, so Ellie was pretty sure the kid wasn’t at his last location. They’d check it anyway, sometime, but it wasn’t a priority.

  She wondered where to start instead.

  She showed Joe the map, and said they needed to go to each location. Joe thought for a moment, then suggested they start with the private houses, since it was still early, so their residents would probably be home.

  Ellie nodded. She called the operations center on her comm, and asked them to check the tracker co-ordinates against the company databases and satellite imagery and work out which of the locations were residential.

  They told her they’d be a few minutes, so Ellie looked at the view.

  She was looking out into a field. She’d turned so she wasn’t staring at the debtor camp. It was a nice field, she thought. She liked the field. And there wasn’t a goat in sight either, which she liked as well.

  It was the end of summer, and the air was still a little cold, even an hour after the sun was up. There was some kind of grass growing in the field, perhaps a grain, which had turned all brown and yellow. Ellie wasn’t sure, but she thought she could see seeds ripening on the stalks. She was used to seeing ripening seeds because she watched them ripen, year after year, in the MidEast. This didn’t look like the same kind of wheat plant as she saw in the MidEast, though, and she wondered why. After a while she decided the MidEast plant was probably patented, and that might be why it looked different. The farmers here probably couldn’t afford licensed biotech, so the Měi-guó plant would be either an older public domain variety, or one of the charity-backed license-free strains. Either way it would look different, and probably not grow as well. Not that she cared much. Identifying grain on stalks was about all she knew about agriculture, and she wasn’t going to eat anything that had grown in a field, anyway. Especially not from a field right next to a transient debtor camp.

  She stood there, and watched the grass, and decided it was going to be a warm day later on. There was something about the feel of the air that was familiar from Afghanistan.

  After a few minutes, her tablet chimed in her hand. She looked down at the screen. The operations center had sent her a list of three definite residential locations, and two more probables. It looked like they were all farmhouses, on narrow roads and among fields, spread out on the east side of town.

  She looked at Joe and Sameh, both still standing there, waiting for her. They had been watching her stare at the field.

  “We’ve got locations,” she said.

  Joe nodded, and Sameh just grinned, and they all got back in Joe’s SUV.

  *

  They went to a house on a road at the edge of the town. The house was older, probably more than fifty years old, from before standardized modular housing, and seemed to have been built as an individual item, by hand, and of distinct natural materials like wood and brick, rather than pre-formed panels which snapped together.

  Buildings made that way needed more maintenance, Ellie supposed. This house had been painted recently, which probably needed doing regularly to keep it looking tidy. The front garden looked tidy, too, but Ellie made herself not notice. Half the houses she’d ever dragged people out of in the middle of the night looked tidy, and the people who lived there were good people, and she dragged them outside anyway. She didn’t like it especially, but she’d got used to it as part of her job. Got used to it, and decided that all she could do for people, really, was to try not to be too rude, or break too much, and to get it over with as quickly as possible.

  Ellie sat in the SUV and looked around. They were on a graveled driveway in front the house, and there was a lawn and garden beds beside them, and some trees and barns in the distance. The sky was still vast and big and clear, like it was in Afghanistan. Ellie decided she was starting to get used to it.

  All three of them would go up to the door, Ellie decided. All three of them was safer, since they could cover one another. They would all go, but they were just going to talk for now. They would be polite, rather than insist on answers, or search the house, or do anything heavy-handed. For now, she was simply asking questions, inquiring politely if anyone had seen the kid.

  She decided that was best.

  She took her corporate secureID out of a pocket and hung it on a cord around her neck, ready to show to whoever opened the door. She would identify herself, and she would leave her submachine gun in the SUV, and hopefully she would look harmless. Hopefully the people inside the house would understand she was trying to look harmless, too.

  “Am I safe just walking up to the door to talk?” Ellie said to Joe. Just to check.

  “Here?” he said, looking the house. “You should be.”

  “They won’t shoot as soon as they see me?”

  “Why would they?”

  “I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

  “Do we think they’re militia?” Joe said, as if he thought Ellie might have intel he hadn’t seen.

  “No,” Ellie said. “Not as far as I know. I just mean, what’s normal here? Do people just walk up to doors and knock?”

  “Usually.”

 
“I mean, we won’t surprise them, and get shot, like we might at a hajji house?”

  “Oh,” Joe said, and looked around at the flat empty farmland. “Well, they probably saw us drive up, so I don’t think they’ll be surprised.”

  Ellie looked at him for a moment. “Don’t be an asshole,” she said.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know, but don’t say it like that.”

  Joe grinned.

  “So it’s safe?” Ellie said, to make sure she understood. “I’m asking you explicitly, native guide. It is normal here just to walk up to the door? Rather than shouting hello from over here or something?”

  “We should be fine going to the door.”

  “They won’t shoot at us?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, no.”

  “You’re coming too,” Ellie said sharply. “How sure are you?”

  “Sure enough I’ll go with you,” he said, and grinned again.

  “Good,” Ellie said. “And we shouldn’t wear tactical armor, either?”

  Joe looked doubtful. The heavy armor was to protect them against close-quarters automatic rifle fire, but it was bulky and thick and hot to wear, and it had a helmet and visor, too, covering the wearer’s face, which didn’t usually give the kind of friendly impression Ellie wanted.

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “No. Not if we’re being friendly and just talking.”

  “Being an asshole again,” Ellie said. “Don’t be clever.”

  He grinned some more.

  Ellie sighed. “Come on,” she said, “both of you,” and got out the SUV. “Stand beside me,” she said to Joe. “And try to look all helpful and local.”

  “How do I do that?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Try and look harmless.”

  He didn’t seem sure but he nodded.

  Ellie leaned back inside, through the open door. “Hop out but stay back here,” she said to Sameh. “And cover us, okay?”

  She nodded.