The Debt Collectors War

by Tess Mackenzie

  She hoped she could make him understand as clearly with words as she could with a gun. And at least, she thought, she would try.

  “I’m looking for someone,” she said. “This someone.” She held out her tablet with a photo of the missing kid showing on the screen. “And I’ll hurt you all badly unless you tell me where he is.”

  Terry just looked at her face. He didn’t even glance at the tablet.

  “Take a look,” she said. “Please.”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “I’ll hurt people,” she said. “You heard that bit, right?”

  “I heard.”

  “Well?” she said. “Why not just tell me whether you’ve seen him, and save yourself the problems?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to tell me?” she said.

  “Easier for you.”

  Ellie sighed. “Why not just tell me?” she said. “Please?”

  “I’m not going to help someone like you. I don’t think anyone here is.”

  “Of course not, not by choice,” she said, trying to be reasonable, to give him an excuse, a way to keep his pride. “That’s why I said I’d hurt people.”

  Again, Terry didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll hurt people if I have to,” she said. “You must know I will, from what’s happened so far.”

  He shrugged.

  “You know I will,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  “I know you will.”

  “So spare everyone that. Please.”

  He shook his head. “You’ll have to do what you have to do.”

  “People,” Ellie said, in case Terry had missed that part, hoping he cared more about his friends than himself. “I’ll hurt other people. Not you.”

  He just looked at her.

  “You get to watch,” she said. “Are you prepared for that?”

  “Everyone here knows what standing up to the recovery corporations means. We’re prepared for it.”

  “But are you?” Ellie said. “You personally. For just watching, while it happens? Watching your friends die, one after another? Are you sure you can stand that?”

  He just shrugged again.

  Ellie supposed he had just watched his friends die, one by one. That might make a difference to him.

  She sighed. She was starting to feel like she was repeating herself, that she was talking too much, going on and on, and that the more she talked, the less believable her words became. It was probably starting to seem to Terry as though she was talking to avoid having to hurt anyone, talking herself out of torture because she wasn’t brave enough to do it. That was bad. That was exactly the opposite impression to the one she wanted to give.

  “Please,” she said, a little desperately. “Please don’t be an asshole here. This is your last chance to tell me before people start getting hurt. I don’t want to do this, I really don’t, and I’m trying to be nice about it, but if you make me beat everyone here to death, then I will. Don’t doubt that for a moment.”

  Terry seemed to be thinking.

  “I mean it,” she said. “I’m sick of killing people and I’m sick of what I’m going to need to do in a moment if you force me to. I don’t want to do it, but I will if you make me.”

  “I’m not making you…”

  “You are, because you won’t help me. I don’t have a choice about this either.”

  He looked a little unsure, now, but he still didn’t answer.

  “Help me,” she said, pressing him, hoping she was getting through, finally. Hoping he could see that she was telling the truth. “Help me and I’ll help you. Please. Then no-one gets hurt.”

  He shook his head again, but slowly, as if he was thinking.

  “Fuck,” Ellie said. “Come on. You must know how this works. There’s plenty of people here to pick from, so I can be as unpleasant as I need to be, for as long as I need to be. In the end someone’s going to tell me, so it may as well be you, now, and then you save everyone the misery.”

  “I don’t know…” he said.

  “No-one gets hurt, I promise. Not unless you make me hurt them.”

  Terry hesitated, then said. “Or arrested?”

  “Not that either.”

  “We won’t be arrested?”

  “Not by me.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and suddenly his face was hostile once more. Suddenly he was looking skeptical, resigned, as if his expectations had been confirmed. “That’s it, though, isn’t it?”

  “What?” Ellie asked.

  “Not by you. Of course it won’t be by you.”

  Ellie hesitated. She was losing Terry again. He was angry, and seemed to feel betrayed. She could guess why. He thought he’d caught her in a lie. He thought she was being clever, playing games, trying to be devious about the technicalities of who arrested who.

  “No,” she said. “Nothing like that.”

  He shrugged, now apparently disinterested in what she had to say.

  “No,” she said. “I mean it, you won’t be arrested by me. I’m trying to be honest with you. Because yes, you’re right, my people know we’re here. They know who you are, and our data feeds are probably being monitored right now, so yeah, someone might turn up here and arrest you later on, but if you help me, if you tell me what I need to know, then I’ll talk to whoever I need to talk to, to help you. I’ll do my best to make sure no-one gets arrested, if that’s what you want me to do.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said again.

  “I will,” Ellie said. “I promise.”

  Terry looked at her, and seemed to be thinking again.

  “I promise,” she said again. She touched her tablet, and connected it to her personal cloud data, and then flicked through the small number of mostly older photos of Naomi she had until she found one of the more recent. “My daughter,” she said to Terry. “Who is being held until I find the kid I’m looking for. I want to find a less unpleasant way for us to sort this out, but I’ve got everything to lose here, so if you make me, then I’ll do the most horrible things I can imagine and won’t hesitate for a moment.”

  He seemed to be thinking. “That’s really your daughter?”

  “It is.”

  He kept thinking.

  “A lot of people are dead here,” Ellie said. “There don’t need to be any more. Help me out and no-one else gets hurt.”

  “This kid you’re looking for,” Terry said. “What are you going to do when you find him?”

  “Talk to him. Take him back to his family.”

  “Arrest him?”

  Ellie was confused. “What?” she said. “No, of course not.”

  “You’re not going to arrest him?”

  “Not arrest,” she said. “No… I mean, just take him back to his family…”

  Terry seemed confused, and Ellie was confused too.

  “Why?” she asked. “What did you think…”

  He shrugged.

  “I’m not going to arrest anyone,” she said. “Stop worrying about people being arrested.”

  Terry was looking suspicious again, looking like he thought Ellie was trying to trick him. She didn’t understand. He seemed to think she was hunting the kid. And in a way, she supposed, it was an obvious thing to assume, given what debt-recovery corporation security usually did, and the way she and Sameh had attacked the compound. It was obvious, but it also wasn’t, since the kid obviously didn’t belong around here.

  She thought for a moment. She was starting to wonder if there was more going on here than she’d expected.

  “Why would I arrest him?” she asked, carefully.

  “To interrogate?”

  “But why would I do that?”

  Terry seemed confused, too. “Because that’s what people like you do to patriots.”

  Ellie was still having trouble understanding. “Do you mean…” she stopped and thought. “Is he with you? Is that what you’re saying? Is he part of this group?”

  Terry seemed surp
rised. “Of course. Why, what did you…”

  They looked at each other. They both seemed to realize the misunderstanding at about the same time.

  “He joined you?” she said.

  “You didn’t know?” he said.

  Ellie looked at Terry, thinking. Suddenly a lot about this situation began to make more sense. The kid’s trackers going silent, for a start. The kid knew he had trackers, and so he probably also knew how to disable them, because people just learned things like that. He’d probably used some kind of static electricity discharge to his arm, Ellie thought. That was what people usually did when they wanted to disappear. There was an airport somewhere with an famously staticky carpet, so staticky that too much shuffling on it and then touching a wall caused a discharge which zapped both tracker chips and credit cards. So obviously, people flew there and disappeared, dozens, sometimes hundreds a day. Usually because they were so badly indebted they would never escape their debts, and would rather become identity-less refugees than keep going as they were. Usually that, but people had other reasons too, and there was plenty of advice online about how to organize such disappearances, on websites which kept reappearing no matter how often the debt-recovery authority tried to have them taken down.

  The trackers going silent had always seemed odd to Ellie, and the kid being involved in his own disappearance helped make sense of that. That, and a lot of the other information she had learned besides. The wandering paths the kid’s tracker had recorded before it was disabled, say. Now those seemed innocent too. Probably she’d been right, and the kid had been in a car, and was just driving around, looking at things, while he waited to meet with whoever he knew from Terry’s militia. Probably he had been in a car, and someone had driven to those houses, running errands or for whatever other reason. It didn’t matter. And probably he had simply been eating in the café in town, too, and talking to people just to talk to them, like a tourist. Probably, all along, he’d only been in this town at all to make contact with Terry’s group of militants, to then be passed on to another group, because that was how insurgent groups operated. Probably nothing else he’d done meant anything, and he’d just been filling in time while waiting to be met, and nothing else.

  Probably Terry was telling the truth, Ellie thought, because suddenly everything about this situation began to make much more sense. Probably Terry was, but she would be careful all the same. She would think before she believed, and ask questions, but what Terry had told her, about the kid being mixed up with the militia, that felt true. It fit with everything else she already knew.

  “He joined you,” she said.

  Terry looked at her and nodded.

  “He joined you,” she said again. “Fuck.”

  “Is that so surprising?”

  “Um, yes. Given who he is. Given his family.”

  “That might be why he did.”

  “But you’re terrorists,” Ellie said, still slightly confused, still having trouble with that.

  “Well, you would think that…”

  “No,” she said. “Actually. I don’t think anything particular, but groups like this one murder people and blow people up.”

  “Not groups like us.”

  “Militia groups. Debt-resistance groups.”

  “Some people in the movement do terrible things…”

  “Like blow people up?” she said, sharply.

  “Like harm innocent people, yes.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you…?”

  Terry looked around, at the ruins of his compound, at the dead lying nearby and the drone still hovering above them.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I suppose.”

  “We all do what we have to do,” he said.

  “I do it for the right reasons.”

  “The reasons you think are right.”

  Ellie sighed. She’d had this conversation with people like Terry dozens of times before. People who believed always believed their cause was right. They believed it so firmly it usually wasn’t worth arguing.

  “This group,” Terry said. “The Liberty Brotherhood, we only strike military and debt corporation targets.”

  “Of course you do,” Ellie said.

  “We do.”

  “The targets you think are military ones?” she said. “Until they turn out not to be?”

  She was skeptical. She was bored. She’d heard all this before, as well. The claim about some targets being proper targets for terrorism was one people like Terry always made. Hajjis made it, debt-resistors made it, and the oil-smuggling gangs in West Africa made it too, at least the ones which claimed to be community activists rather than simply criminals. As if bombs cared, or mass-shootings counted less against some buildings and some people than against others.

  Ellie sighed again. She’d almost felt sorry for Terry, just for a moment. She’d almost liked him as they talked, but he turned out to be just another murderer. A murderer just like she was, except that unlike her, he was lying to himself about what he was.

  “We’re careful,” he said.

  “Yep,” she said. “You people always are.”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t understand. Some members of the patriot and resistance movements go too far at times, but our group, the Liberty Brotherhood, we never do. We only ever strike military targets.”

  Ellie noticed he’d said patriot and resistance movements like they were two different things, but she didn’t bother asking. That was something for the intel people who tracked memberships and leaders to worry about. Asking would just get her a long, long speech about schisms and heresies and who’d once said what and who wasn’t pure enough for who. Insurgent groups always had factions. It didn’t matter whether they were hajjis or debt-resistors or whoever else. People in hiding, people who lived in the shadows, they spent too much time in dark cold rooms on their own, which meant they spent too much time brooding and thinking up imagined grudges against one another. There were always factions, always, and working those out was what intel operators spent most of their time doing.

  It bored Ellie. She was glad she did combat ops, not intel. She didn’t care enough to listen to Terry, so she interrupted him before he could explain it all to her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “I swear,” he said. “Only military targets.”

  “Yeah,” she said, losing interest. “Whatever. I don’t really care.”

  “We’re careful.”

  “And I don’t care. A debtor is a debtor. A resistor is a resistor. It doesn’t matter to me. Tell me about this kid.”

  “What about him?”

  “Everything,” she said. “Just tell me anything. Tell me why he’s here.”

  “He’s a patriot,” Terry said.

  Ellie looked at him for a moment, thinking. It was an odd word, and an old word, and his saying it now didn’t quite fit with what Ellie thought it meant, not for a privileged heir from Shanghai. But she thought she understood. From Terry, it was praise, a compliment, meaning someone who was part of his cause.

  “He’s really part of your group?” she asked, still thinking about that, still unsure.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “He came here to meet you?”

  Terry nodded.

  “He knew you already?” she asked. “He’d met you, what, over the internet?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s with your group,” she said, beginning to believe it.

  Terry nodded again.

  “For how long?” she said, curious.

  “He’s been speaking to us for three or four months. I think he’s been in contact with sympathizers in the resistance movement for a year before that.”

  Ellie nodded again. So a bored, spoiled heir, stricken with guilt about his privileged upbringing, had suddenly decided to make amends by helping the debt-ridden and poor. It made sense, she supposed. At least, it made a lot more sense than a spoiled rich brat deciding to holiday in the middle of Měi-guó.

&nb
sp; She just wished he hadn’t somehow dragged her family into his crisis of conscience, along with his own.

  Chapter 13

  Ellie tapped her comm, and explained what she’d learned to the operations centre as quickly as she could. It wasn’t that quickly. It took several minutes, once she’d also given the reasons why she was willing to consider believing Terry.

  When she was done, she said, “I need more information to decide whether this is true. I need everything we have on the kid, and I need to check how complete that information is, as well. Whether this kid’s life has been searched properly at the Shanghai end, mainly, and whether we can profile him properly.”

  There was a pause, then the voice on the comm said there might be a problem.

  “Of course,” she said, a little bitterly. “What problem?”

  “We don’t have much information,” the operations centre said. “And the investigations in Shanghai were fairly… minimal.”

  “I imagine,” she said. “How much do we know?”

  “Very little, I’m afraid.”

  “Why not?” Ellie said. “For fuck’s sake. At this point in this op, why don’t we know anything?”

  “They couldn’t search thoroughly, ma’am. He had his tablet with him, and he didn’t use the cloud for much.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So, what, they just didn’t bother?”

  “As I said, ma’am, not really. Not thoroughly.”

  “Fuck,” she said, annoyed. “So basically, we don’t know anything about him at all?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not who he associates with? Not if he’s had any contact with the militia here?”

  “I’m just looking now. He hasn’t made contact through his primary mail and social accounts…”

  “Which doesn’t mean much,” Ellie said.

  “No.”

  “Has someone searched his bedroom at home? As in, gone and actually looked to see what logos are on his clothes, and what media channels he watches?”

  There was another slight pause, she assumed as the operations centre checked, then the voice said, “He has his own apartment, apparently.”

  “Oh,” Ellie said, then surprised, “What?”