The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 30

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 armoured, 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 be 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 licence-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.