The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 1

Ellie was somewhere in Central Asia when she heard her daughter had been murdered. Died was what the email said, but it was murdered as far as she could see.

It was a cold dusty day and the wind was coming down icy and hard from mountains that may have been the Hindu Kush. She was on the roof of the old stone fort, watching the local hajjis resent her, and resisting the temptation to shoot a few just to stop them staring. She was dirty and cold and tired, and she hadn’t slept properly in a week, and if she never saw a beard or a hajib again in her life it wouldn’t be too soon.

The hajjis watched, like they always watched, standing and squatting and dusty. Ellie glanced at them now and then, so they knew she was watching, because they’d kill you if you turned your back. She ignored them otherwise, as best as she could. She looked at the mountains, at the snow and stones and the barren cluttered rockeries that passed for fields in this part of the world. She looked at goats and dogs. She’d always thought hajjis hated dogs but there seemed to be a lot around.

She was trying to connect a tablet through a satellite phone to the world. A signal was only possible on the roof, so she was checking her email while she was up here watching the hajjis. It was something to do while she waited for trouble to begin.

The fort was small, a few rooms inside, really a house with no windows and very thick walls. It was cold in winter and stuffy in summer and dark all day through. A dingy little outpost of the world on the borders of anything that mattered. It sat away from the village, up a slight hill, overlooking the only road in or out. There had probably been a fortress up here for three or four thousand years, Ellie thought, and people like her had probably sat up there all that time, staring down at the locals.

Ellie’s company had been running this base for twenty years, and it had been government military special ops before that, back when the military had special ops, before governments went bankrupt, before wars were all outsourced to people like Ellie.

They were supposed to be hunting high-value targets. Targets fleeing major conventional ops further north. High-value targets didn’t come this way, though, up dead-end valleys into lawless tribal areas. So Ellie’s team sat, and waited for rumors, and went and dragged men out of family homes who always turned out to be the cousin of the person everyone wanted. It was pointless activity, in a pointless war, but this had been going on so long hardly anyone noticed any more.

The phone finally beeped and warbled and said it was connected. Ellie looked down, tapped the tablet’s screen, and told it to check for new messages.

Usually there was nothing. More pointless orders that no-one was going to follow or pointless intelligence updates about people who didn’t exist doing outrageous things in villages that had been bombed into the stone age twenty years before.

Today it was a message from their corporate head office in the Shanghai Trade Zone. The server was in Shanghai, and the registered address probably was too, but the staff were, like Ellie, lost somewhere in the vastness of an unforgiving world.

The message was from William, the manager who thought he was Ellie’s supervisor. He said he was sorry.

She looked at the message, not understanding.

Word had come in from Australia, William said. The company had been asked to pass this on to Ellie.

She kept reading. The message from Australia said her daughter was dead of a drug overdose and the funeral was in three days.

Ellie looked at the screen and didn’t know what to think.

The kid was dead. The kid she hadn’t seen in five or six years, in long enough she had to stop and think exactly how long it had been. The kid she’d left with her parents pretty much as soon as it was born, and ignored for the rest of its life. The kid she’d cut out of her life, because a few years in her world had taught her to think that way.