The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 81

“I promise,” Ellie 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.”

Terry thought. “That’s really your daughter?”

“It is.”

Terry 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,” Ellie said. “No… I mean, just take him back to his family…”

Terry seemed confused, and Ellie was confused too.

“Why,” Ellie said. “What did you think…”

Terry shrugged.

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

Terry was looking suspicious again, looking like he thought Ellie was trying to trick him. Ellie didn’t understand. Terry 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.

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

“Why would I arrest him?” she said, 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 surprised. “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?” Ellie said.

“You didn’t know?” Terry 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 staticy carpet, so staticy 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 that make sense. 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 the kid 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 the kid 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 in 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 Ellie 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.