“Watch the upstairs windows,” Ellie said.
Sameh just looked at her.
“And those barns and things over there.”
“Tell your mother how to give birth,” Sameh said. It meant the same thing as grandmothers sucking eggs, but was the hajji version.
Ellie grinned at her. She knew she was being fussy, but it was only because she was nervous about how this operation went. Sameh probably knew that too, and was being patient, by her standards.
Sameh got out of the SUV beside Ellie, and took her submachine gun with her. As she went past, Ellie pushed the muzzle down, towards the ground.
“Keep it there, okay?” Ellie said.
“Mother giving birth.”
“I don’t want them scared. Not yet.”
“Yep,” Sameh said, impatiently. “I get it.”
She kept the submachine gun towards the ground, but Ellie noticed the firing selector was on fully automatic. Sameh idly fiddled with safety catches sometimes, and Ellie wished she wouldn’t. Sameh might just have flicked the selector on when they stopped a minute ago, but Ellie had an awful feeling she hadn’t. Ellie had a feeling the selector had been on full auto for a while, and they’d been driving around with it like that in the back of the SUV.
She decided not to say anything. Sameh would just get annoyed if she did. She walked over to the house instead, watching the windows and door, cautiously.
She went up three steps, and onto the porch. The porch was made of wood, and creaked a little as she trod on it. She kept her hand on her sidearm, but didn’t take the weapon out. She tapped on the side of the door with her other hand, and called out, “Hello.”
She hadn’t been quite sure what to expect, but the door wasn’t barred or reinforced. It was just a door, closed against the morning cool, with a wire-mesh screen to keep flies out.
A screen, she suddenly thought, exactly like she remembered people having at home, in Australia, when she was young. She stood there looking at it, thinking about fly-screens and summer and heat. She thought about lawns, oddly, and how she hadn’t seen a lawn in years, but there was one here now.
She glanced over at it. It was a fairly nice lawn, all green and neatly cut.
She heard footsteps from inside the house, and turned back towards it. A man opened the door and looked out at her. He was older, and a bit bent over, and dressed fairly plainly, in much the same way as Ellie was.
That way of dressing was good, Ellie thought to herself. It meant Joe’s clothes bag was helping her fit in.
She looked at the man, wondering what to say. She knew his name. It had been in the message the corporate operations centre had sent her, probably taken from the local property records. She knew his name, and that his farm was barely making money and that he’d had medical treatment for an arthritic hip, but she didn’t think she should actually let him know any of that because doing so sometimes unsettled older people, who weren’t used to the idea of information being so readily available.
“Hello,” she said instead, then added, “Sir,” because she’d seen enough old American TV to know they talked to each other like that here.
The man in the house looked at Ellie, a little warily, apparently waiting to see what she did next. Ellie understood his wariness. She was armed, and at his door, and part of a military occupation force. He was wary, but he also hadn’t shot at her or run away, which implied he didn’t have a guilty conscience.
“I’m a security officer with the debt-recovery authority,” Ellie said, and held out her secureID in case he wanted to look, or scan it, or something.
He waved it away. He seemed to accept that she was.
“We’re looking for someone,” Ellie said, and took out her tablet to show him a picture of the kid.
The man’s expression changed. His face became stern. He shook his head, and said, “I’m not helping you find anyone.”
Ellie was surprised. Actually surprised. Until then, they had both been being reasonable.
“Why not?” she said.
“I’m not helping you,” the man said, and began to close his door.
“Sir,” Joe said. “It’s one of our people. He’s gone missing and his family is worried.”
The man in the house stopped closing his door, and looked at Joe, thinking.
Suddenly Ellie understood. Even though she’d been trying to look harmless, it hadn’t really worked. They still looked too much like a grab team, here to arrest someone. For all the old guy knew, that was exactly what they were.
“Sir,” Joe said. “This isn’t what you think. The missing boy is one of ours.”
The man looked at Joe, and thought for a moment. “That’s the truth?” he said.
“It is, sir.”
The man nodded, and then said to Ellie, “Show me.”
Ellie held out the tablet again. “Four days ago,” she said.
The man looked. “I haven’t seem him,” he said.
“He was near here four days ago,” Ellie said.
“And I haven’t seen him.”
“He was right outside,” she said, surprised.
“Like I said, miss. I haven’t seen him.”
“Does anyone else live here? Anyone he might have visited?”
“Just me.”
“And you were home four days ago?” Ellie said. “All day?”
“All week. I don’t get out much.”
Ellie stood there for a moment, wondering if the man was lying. Or if he was senile. She almost asked all her questions again, just to make sure, but then she decided it wasn’t worth it.
She was surprised the man didn’t know anything about the kid. She’d assumed the kid had visited, here and the other houses, but perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps something else was going on.
Their kid might well have just walked past, and not gone up to the house. The tracker data wasn’t so spatially precise that Ellie could be certain he’d actually gone inside any particular building, and as well, trackers worked on ten-minute blips, to conserve power, so she had a series of approximate points she knew the kid had been, rather than a linear path of his every movement. That ten-minute window complicated things. The kid might have been standing where Ellie was right now for as long as nineteen minutes, or equally easily, he might simply have happened to be walking past, on his way somewhere else, at the moment the blip was sent. There could be another house entirely, a little way down the road, which the kid had visited, and where he was known. He could be in that house right now, but because the blip hadn’t gone off then, Ellie would never know.
Or the man in front of Ellie, the old man in this house, he might be lying. That was a possibility too. And if he was, Ellie wouldn’t know that either, because she hadn’t thought to switch on a voice analyzer before she spoke to him.
She suddenly realized how stupid that had been.
She was annoyed at herself. She should have thought of it.
It was her mistake, not the old man’s, so she decided not to punish him for it. She decided to stay polite, to stay civil, at least for now. She could come back later if she had to.
“You don’t know anything?” she said. “You can’t think why our data might be wrong?”
The man shrugged, and shook his head.
Ellie decided there wasn’t much else she could do. “Thank you for your time,” she said.
The man in the house nodded.
“Sorry to have bothered you,” Ellie said, and turned around, and walked back to the SUV. Joe said thank you as well, and followed her.
The old man watched them go.
Sameh seemed a little surprised, as Ellie went past her, but she got into the SUV willingly enough when Ellie did.
“Thank you,” Ellie said to Joe as well, once he was in too. “For stepping in and helping.”
He shrugged, and started the SUV.
“Go,” Ellie said, and Joe began to drive, and as he did, Ellie reached out the SUV’s window and dropped a sensor packag
e gently. It was only a basic package, a signal interceptor that would lie inert in the grass, and couple of cambots which would right themselves on their stumpy little legs and scuttle to some hiding place with a good field of view, then watch the house, uploading a video stream, though the satellites above them, to corporate operations centre, where it would be monitored. Ellie had plenty of sensor packages, so she left one behind just in case. Just in case, as soon as they were gone, the old guy ran out to a car and drove away. Just in case he started making phone calls, or sending messages about having a visit from the debt-recovery authority.
She looked at her tablet, and checked all the sensors were working, then she showed Joe the map and pointed to the next house on their list.
Joe drove.
*
They asked at four more houses, all within a few miles of each other. Each time, Ellie made sure to say it was one of her people missing, not an American. Each time she was polite as she asked. She still learned nothing. No-one had seen the kid, and no-one remembered him especially, and now Ellie was using a voice analyzer and so she knew that all these people were telling the truth.
Ellie didn’t understand that. Someone should remember the kid. Someone ought to have seen something. She didn’t push, though, not yet. She just asked them to think again, and when they did and still didn’t remember, she thanked them and left. She stayed calm. She stayed polite. She didn’t insist, or call anyone a liar. She just talked, and thought, and wondered.
After the third house, Ellie took out her tablet, and overlaid her tracker’s movements over the kid’s, and looked at the map that made. She zoomed the map in, and saw how closely his track matched her own, near these houses.
Except that she walked up to the doors.
She realized what had happened.
The kid had been in a car. Now she was looking at the tracker paths, it was obvious. He’d sat in a car, which had visited these houses, but he hadn’t actually got out.
She didn’t know why he’d have done that, but it fit the data she had. It fit, and that meant these house visits were a complete a waste of time.
Ellie showed Sameh and Joe the map, and explained what she was thinking.
Joe just nodded, and seemed to agree, and Sameh said, “Just like home.”
Sameh meant Afghanistan, and the way high-value target searches mostly ended up like this. It was, Ellie thought. It was exactly like that, and Joe seemed to understand, too. At least, he didn’t bother to ask what Sameh meant.
They went to the fourth house anyway, just to know that they had, even though Ellie wasn’t hopeful that anything would be different. She wasn’t hopeful, and it wasn’t different. The people there hadn’t seen anything useful, either, so she simply said thank you and left.
Then she sat in the SUV and wondered what to do.
She sat there brooding, thinking about the people. She thought about their willingness to answer questions, once they knew no-one would be arrested. She thought about how they came to their doors at dawn and spoke to her, just because she asked them to. She had wanted to think that meant something, that it implied innocence. She wanted to think that, but she had a suspicion that wasn’t why these people were being so cooperative.
She thought about TV again. She thought about all the movies she’d ever seen, and all the TV shows she’d watched, year after year.
Suddenly she knew why these people were being so polite and helpful. She knew, and it wasn’t a very pleasant reason.
This wasn’t Australia, where the police knocked on the door and showed a warrant. It wasn’t the MidEast either, where if someone knocked, you and your neighbors formed a crowd and surrounded them in the street. This was Měi-guó, where authority came with a broken-open door in the night, with masks and automatic weapons and stun grenades and no warning, and had done so for generations.
She should have realized that sooner. It didn’t especially matter, and didn’t change very much about the result today, but she ought to have realized sooner, because she’d been watching this happen in movies all her life.
The way she was going about this wasn’t at all how the Měi-guó authorities would have conducted a search. The people she was waking up, who were getting out of their beds to speak to her, they were willing to talk because they were just glad it was only a conversation.
And that they still had a door, and probably a bed to go back to.
It was horrible, Ellie thought, what this place had made itself into. It ought to be like Australia, and relatively calm and peaceful. Instead it was this, and that it was all so very pointless somehow made it worse.
It was pointless because the MidEast made a kind of horrible sense, in that what it was now had been inflicted on it, created by people like Ellie, acting as they did, for decades. Měi-guó was different, though. In Měi-guó, they had chosen this. In Měi-guó they had actually believed the lies governments told them, and had obediently done as they were told, and so, when everything had gone wrong, they had been left with nothing. With less than nothing.
Perhaps people were right, Ellie thought. Perhaps some cultures were just so backwards and broken and credulous they were incapable of anything but debt-ridden poverty.
It almost made Ellie feel miserable. It almost made her feel like she should just give up on people. It almost did, but she forced herself to be sensible instead. To get some distance, and stop feeling sorry for herself. To focus, and be less sympathetic, because in the long run, sympathy would accomplish nothing and it would just upset her. This wasn’t giving spare food to orphan kids in Kabul. This was a problem too big and complicated and profoundly wrong to ever fix. It was too big to fix, and she ought not to be feeling the way she was, anyway. Not when she was fairly sure her sympathy was only because these people looked a little bit like her. She didn’t want to behave like that, or be like that, and she didn’t want Sameh to realize she was, either. Not when Sameh had to work, year after year, in that situation. Seeing people who looked like her, hearing people who talked like her, and pushing them around and searching their houses and arresting them, all the same.
Now Ellie had to as well, and suddenly she was having doubts, and getting squeamish, just because the faces she was seeing had changed.
It was slightly pathetic, she thought. It wasn’t her.
She made herself concentrate on the actual operation, and decide what to do next.
*
Several hours had passed while they visited the farmhouses. It was mid-morning now, and the businesses in the town should be open. One of the buildings the missing kid had visited several times was a café and bar at the edge of the town.
A social hub like that seemed the best place to go next.
Ellie asked Joe to drive there, and they parked down the street, and watched it for a while. Sameh slumped in the back, and seemed to go to sleep. Ellie and Joe kept watching the café.
It looked cheap, and old. It had paper advertising posters on the wall. A performance space and bar, Ellie thought. It was probably struggling in a town like this.
They watched for a while, trying to work out what they were seeing. Young people’s fashions and identity-groupings had fractured, even since Ellie was that age. She couldn’t keep track any more, even in Měi-guó, even with years of TV watching, which ought to have kept her up to date. She watched, and people came and went, probably having coffee and breakfast.
She watched people go past, and couldn’t see anything special about most of them. Then three teenagers left the cafe, and Ellie sat up and said, “Them.”
In a lot of his photos, their missing kid had black hair and clothes and eye makeup. The three leaving the cafe did too.
Sameh woke up, and opened her door. Ellie and Joe got out the SUV.
Ellie went down the street, after the young people in black. Down the street, and around the side of a building, into an empty square of land, covered in weeds, and also conveniently out of sight of the main street of the town.
“Hey,” Ellie called. “Hold on a second.”
The three young people stopped and looked at her. Two were girls, and one was a boy. There was a lot of dark-dyed hair and heavy old-fashioned jewelry and smudgy eye makeup, and all three of them wore bright pink socks and wrist-bands as well. Ellie didn’t know what the pink meant, and she didn’t especially care. It was the dark hair and eyes, like their missing kid, which she was interested in.
“We’re looking for someone,” Ellie said to them.
“Good the fuck for you,” the boy said.
“I’m trying to be polite,” she said.
They all just looked at her.
“Fine,” Ellie said. She grabbed the nearest arm, one of the girls, and twisted her around and into the wall. Joe grabbed the other girl, and just held her, his arms around her chest, trapping her. Sameh punched the boy, then twisted him into an arm-lock against the same wall Ellie was using.
Sameh probably hadn’t needed to actually hit anyone, but Ellie didn’t really care.
The three kids were secured, so she glanced around, quickly. A man had come out of a doorway nearby and was standing there looking at them.
“Deal with that,” Ellie said to Joe. To the girl Joe was holding, she said, “Stand there and don’t move.”
Joe let go of his girl, and walked towards the man, saying something in an authoritative voice, a bossy voice. That they were debt-recovery and he should move along, something like that.
The girl he’d let go just stood there helplessly, a bit overwhelmed, looking at her friends. That was exactly how Ellie wanted her.
“I tried to be polite,” Ellie said to the other girl, the one she was holding against the wall.
“So?” the girl said. She was tough, or acting tough. She probably had to be, growing up in Měi-guó.
Suddenly Ellie was annoyed. Suddenly the morning’s irritation spilled over.
“So be fucking civil or I’ll get a lot less polite,” Ellie said.
The girl struggled anyway.
“Stop,” Ellie said, and tapped the girl’s face against the wall. Not hard, but the wall was brick, and rough, and that was enough. The girl stopped struggling and went still.
The Debt Collectors War Page 10
