“He has his own apartment.”
“Yeah, of course he has. But has it been searched?”
“Not well. Again, not thoroughly. Not to collect that kind of data.”
“Because of his family?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck,” Ellie said. “That’s great. Thank you. Tell whoever decided that, thank you a fuck of a lot.”
“The parents decided it.”
“Well, they might just have killed their kid.”
There was a silence. An awkward, uncomfortable silence. Ellie took a slow breath, then said, “Don’t actually tell them that part.”
“No, ma’am.”
“It won’t help anything to repeat that,” she said, even though the conversation was obviously being recorded and reported to very senior corporate officials. It didn’t matter to her especially if the parents knew what she thought, but she felt a little sorry for them, since it wasn’t really their fault their kid had gone bad, or that Naomi had been taken as a hostage, either. There was no real need to upset the parents, especially when their cooperation might be useful to help get Naomi back.
“Could someone contact the parents?” she asked. “And try and explain to them how serious this is. Explain that I need to know as much as possible right now, so I can decide whether the militia I’m with are telling me the truth.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do that, explain that, and then have the kid’s life in Shanghai pulled apart. Take off the protection his family gives him. Check everything, but especially check for political involvement, for attendances at meetings or rallies, for paper books hidden around his house, things like that.”
“Of course.”
“Try and see if this makes sense. Find out if there’s anything in his life to confirm what I’m being told.”
“We will.”
“And tell the parents this is very important. I need to know this. I need to know whether he’s sympathetic to these people, or if this is utter bullshit and the militia are still holding him somewhere else. I need to know that now.”
“We’re making contact right now,” the operations centre said. “We’ll be checking very soon, and get back to you as quickly as possible.”
“Thank you,” Ellie said, and tapped her earpiece to break the connection.
Terry was still watching her. “It’s true,” he said. “What I told you about the boy was true.”
She shrugged. “I’m just doing my job.”
Terry nodded slowly.
*
Ellie waited. She stood watching Terry, watching the other militia too, and waiting for the operations centre to get back to her. Behind her, Sameh would be watching the militia as well, covering them, but also keeping part of her attention on the drone and sensor net, making sure no-one was trying to sneak up behind them and cause trouble.
Several minutes passed in silence.
“There’s something you should see,” Terry said suddenly. “Something that might help.”
Ellie looked at him. He seemed a little worried. Whatever was bothering him, he must have been thinking it over while everyone was quiet.
“It might help,” he said again.
“Yeah, okay,” she said. “What?”
“I can’t… I need to show you.”
“Of course you do,” she said, disinterested again, assuming it was some kind of trick. “Um, no. Keep quiet. That isn’t happening.”
“This is important,” he said. “Please?”
He sounded almost desperate. Desperate enough that Ellie thought about it for a moment. Terry volunteering information might be a trick, but it might also mean she’d got through to him, and her slightly unconventional interrogation strategy had actually worked.
“And you’re suddenly telling me this because…?” she said.
“It will be worse for my family if I don’t.”
“How do you mean?”
Terry hesitated. He looked around at the other militia, uncertainly.
“You might as well explain what you mean now you’ve said that,” Ellie said. “Since we’re all just standing here…”
He nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“Well…?” she said.
“I was never comfortable with this,” he said. Probably as much for the rest of the militia, who were listening, as for Ellie. “I told you there’s people in the movement who go further than I would.”
“Further?” she said, suddenly feeling a little chill of alertness. She had an awful feeling she was about to hear something that made this all much worse. She looked at him, and said, “Go on.”
“This is just one cell of the Brotherhood. I have to do as I’m told.”
Ellie nodded.
“I don’t always agree with what I’m told to do,” he said.
“Of course not,” she said. “Same for me. Go on.”
“There’s more happening here than you think. There’s more that you don’t know yet about this kid.”
“What is it?” she asked, then she stopped, and said, “No, wait. First, tell me why I should believe you.”
It was better to verify information before hearing it. That way she heard it with some idea of how reliable it was, and could assess it as she listened. That way she knew whether or not she intended to believe Terry before she heard too much of what he had to say.
“What?” he asked.
“Why should I believe you? Why are you suddenly being helpful?”
He looked at her. “Like I said, my family.”
“How do you mean?”
“What’s about to happen will have consequences for my family.”
“You mean…”
“Retaliation. From people like you.”
“Oh,” Ellie said. “Yeah, I see.”
Now she understood. She knew how corporate security did counterinsurgency operations. It tended to be heavy-handed, quite deliberately. She had been heavy-handed herself, at times. Sometimes you had to be.
Heavy-handed probably wasn’t what Terry wanted for people he cared about. Heavy-handed might be enough to make him think twice about whatever he had planned.
*
Ellie looked at Terry, and thought for a moment.
Insurgencies were tricky. They were tricky because they meant fighting an enemy hidden in among a civilian population, which usually meant killing civilians, and that was usually a bad idea. It was a bad idea because civilians were also consumers, and tended to stop consuming when they were dead, or being threatened and hurt by a security force, and a slowdown in consumption usually caused a loss of business confidence, and that usually upset shareholders and corporate officials. And that did no-one any good.
Insurgencies were a terrible nuisance, and as long as there had been insurgencies, there had really only been two ways to deal with them. One was to give in, or seem to give in. To make some gesture towards resolving the insurgents’ complaints, and smother the insurgency with kindness. Usually this worked. Usually it was done quite easily by corrupting the leaders, making them part of the system, subverting a few people to subvert a whole movement, since very few people believed in anything so much they couldn’t be bribed to abandon their cause. Kindness was the best way, but sometimes kindness failed, and then the only other way to defeat an insurgency was through unending, unspeakable violence. To overwhelm it with suffering and horror, even though it was made up of hardened terrorists, by killing and keeping on killing until the suffering became too great for the insurgency to stand. To become utterly brutal.
Brutality was needed because in the end, nothing else worked, and the simplest way to be brutal was to hurt a lot of people. Insurgents and suspected insurgents and insurgents’ families. Their friends and neighbors, their customers or clients, or anyone else nearby. In the end, it didn’t especially matter who got hurt, because the point was to cause such widespread suffering that the whole society turned against the insurgency. Because then, deprived of support and encourag
ement, it would eventually wither away.
It was callous, but it worked. It had worked in the MidEast, for the most part, to defeat the endless conflicts there, and it was working in Měi-guó, too, as far as Ellie knew.
In Měi-guó, brutality had to be the way. Kindness wasn’t possible, since what the debt-resisters wanted was completely removed from what the debt-recovery corporations could concede. In Měi-guó, unfortunately, the debt-recovery corporations had to be unhesitatingly brutal. When they found insurgents, they arrested whole towns, and killed any who resisted. They burned houses, and sold insurgents’ families into debt-servitude to pay for the damage debt-resisters had caused, and when the debt-resisters’ atrocities were especially awful, when corporate officials were hurt or infrastructure damaged, then the insurgents’ parents or children were usually executed, too.
It wasn’t nice, Ellie had always thought, but it was how such wars had to be fought. It was just what had to be done. And it worked. It created fear. Now, that fear was paying off.
Because of it, Terry was willing to talk to her.
*
Terry knew as well as Ellie what would happen if he turned out to be part of some kind of larger attack on a debt-recovery corporation. He knew, and Ellie did too, and so she understood why he might decide to be honest with her.
He might decide to be honest, she thought, but he might also be trying to trick her. She needed to be a little careful.
She thought he was telling the truth, mostly because the consequences would be terrible if he lied. All the same, she needed to be a little suspicious.
“So why make trouble at all?” she asked. “Why start this? If you knew what would happen.”
“Not everyone thought it would end like this.”
“It did.”
Terry nodded.
“So why risk it?” Ellie asked.
“I suppose they thought it wouldn’t be traced back here.”
“They?”
“Yeah,” Terry said. “They.”
“You didn’t think that?”
“No, not really.”
“You were right though,” Ellie said. “It was traced here.” She wasn’t trying to be clever, especially, she was just pointing it out. She was here. Terry had been right. He should trust his instinct to fear retribution.
“Yes,” he said, a little sadly. “Yes, it was.”
They looked at each other for a moment.
“Okay,” she said. “Yes, I suppose that changes things. I get why. Keep talking.”
“I never thought we should get involved,” Terry said. “But not everyone agreed with me.”
“Why not?”
“You’d have to ask them,” he said, and glanced at the dead man on the ground, the man who had used to be the group’s leader. “Like I say, I assumed it would end up like this. One way or another. Not everyone else did.”
“And you wouldn’t have risked that?” Ellie asked.
Terry looked around the ruined compound. “No.”
Ellie thought. She was beginning to understand. There had been an abrupt change of policy in this militia cell, over the past few minutes. A quite sudden change, and probably right then, while they were all standing around waiting for the ops centre to get back to her. Terry had thought things over, and decided that he was going to cooperate.
“All right,” she said. “Maybe I believe you. Maybe I’m listening. So what is it I need to know?”
“See,” Terry said. “Something you need to see.”
Ellie shrugged. “All right. So…?”
“I need to show you,” he said. “I need to get something out my pocket.” He moved his hand towards his side, then stopped and waited.
Ellie nodded, watching him carefully.
Terry took a tablet out from inside his jacket. He took it out slowly, and then showed it to Ellie, so she could see what it was.
Ellie moved as soon as she saw the tablet. She raised her sidearm, deliberately, and pointed it at Terry’s face.
“Yeah,” she said. “I really don’t think so.”
He could have anything on that tablet. Remote trigger apps for bombs, or a messaging system to alert other militia cells that he had been raided, or apps which silently activated when the tablet was powered up, purging data or launching counterattacks against the sensor net. Even an app that automatically detonated explosives in the buildings all around them as soon as the tablet was switched on.
“Put it down,” Ellie said.
“It’s just a tablet,” he said.
“Put it down. Now.”
Slowly, Terry did. He laid it on the ground in front of him, then stood back up. “It will help if you just let me show you,” he said.
“Not a chance,” Ellie said. “And if you try and touch that tablet again before we’ve finished talking about this, I’ll kill you.” She kept her sidearm pointed at him to make sure he knew she meant it. “What am I supposed to be seeing? On the off-chance I’m feeling stupid and decide to look?”
“A video of the boy you’re looking for. It might make this clearer for you.”
“It might,” she said. “Except that it’s on that tablet. Which you aren’t going to touch.”
“I won’t,” he said.
“Don’t. Absolutely don’t.”
Terry nodded and stayed still. He seemed quite calm. He seemed to have no intention of trying to reach for the tablet again, which made Ellie feel a little calmer too. She stood there, thinking, watching him warily. They seemed to be at an impasse. She didn’t know what to do.
She thought for a moment. “Is the video anywhere else?” she asked. “A server on the internet, maybe?”
Terry looked over at someone else. The technical officer, Ellie assumed. Or the closest thing he had to one. She looked too, but the tech officer didn’t answer.
“Tell her,” Terry said.
“It’s on a server,” the tech officer said, a little reluctantly.
“Do you know where?” she asked.
The tech officer nodded.
Ellie put away her sidearm, and took our her own tablet. She opened a browser window on it, and said, “If I go where you tell me and something bad happens to this computer…”
The tech officer shrugged.
“Do you understand?” she said, sharply.
“Yeah.”
“And you’re still sure I should do this?” she asked. “Because if this goes wrong, if this is some elaborate way to infiltrate the corporate datanet, the consequences will involve your family, I promise.”
“Nothing will happen.”
Ellie stood there and looked at him. She waited. She tried to make him nervous.
Her e-glasses were still operating in their data view, so as she looked at him she saw his name floating superimposed beside his head. She tapped her comm, and gave the operations centre his name. She told them to look up his next of kin. The operations centre told her several names, and Ellie repeated those names out loud, and then their last known addresses. Then she said, “Are you still sure I should look at this website?”
The tech officer glanced at Terry, a little uncertainly, but then nodded.
Ellie decided he was telling the truth. Or he was committed enough to this trick that asking questions wasn’t going to help. “All right,” she said. “Tell me where to look.”
He gave her the name of a website, and then a username and password. The website was a blank login screen, an unconfigured host without logos or branding. Ellie typed in the user details she was told.
The login screen went away, and she saw a video. It was a file, ready to distribute, not something that was meant to play here.
“Should I play it?” she said, to the tech officer.
He nodded.
She tapped the video file, so it opened. She let it run.
It was their kid, making a speech.
It was his martyrdom video.
Everyone had to make martyrdom videos now. Even debt-resis
tance militias who would probably be enslaving the hajjis themselves if they ever got their world back again.
It was the kid’s martyrdom video, and Terry was right. This whole situation was far, far worse than Ellie had expected.
*
Ellie watched the martyrdom video for a while, then stopped it and emailed it to the operations centre. The video wasn’t useful. The kid was just making a speech about injustice and suffering. He wasn’t actually saying anything about what he planned to do. The ops centre could go over it, and analyze it for hidden sounds and voice stress and room echoes and all the rest, and then pick through everything else on the same server, too. They would do their analysis, and probably find something useful in the end, but sometimes it was easier just to ask what you needed to know.
“Was this made here?” she said.
Terry and the tech officer both nodded.
“Actually here? In this compound?”
“Yes,” Terry said.
“And it is what I think it is?” Ellie said. “He’s going to do something dramatic? To make some kind of point?”
Terry nodded again.
“But I suppose you don’t know what?” she said.
Terry seemed relieved. “No.”
“Even if I have you interrogated? Interrogated properly, I mean, by specialists, for weeks?”
“We still wouldn’t, no.”
“Because you have good operational security,” Ellie said, wearily. “Of course.”
It wasn’t really a question, but Terry nodded anyway.
Ellie sighed. It had been a mistake to let movies become too specific and detailed, she thought, because it just gave people ideas. Now everyone knew about compartmentalization and information leakage. Now everyone could run an insurgent cell out of their bedroom.
She thought for a moment. “Who does know?” she said. “About the operation?”
“Our group in Los Angeles. The one we sent the boy to.”
“So you’re just a meeting point? A conduit? That’s all?”
Terry nodded. “We do our part as we’re needed.”
The Debt Collectors War Page 23
